The short answer
Our online shops start from £3,000, fixed before we start. A straightforward shop sits near that figure: a sensible number of products, standard payments and delivery, everything set up and tested, and the product descriptions written for you.
Bigger or more unusual shops cost more. Not mysteriously more. More for reasons, and the reasons are worth knowing.
What pushes the price up
The size of your stock. A shop with forty products is a smaller job than a shop with four hundred. Every product needs a page, a photo in the right shape, and a description that sells. We provide starting descriptions for every product, and writing four hundred of them takes longer than writing forty.
Moving from another platform. If you’re already selling somewhere else, your products, categories and customers need carrying across carefully, and your old web addresses need redirecting so your Google rankings survive the journey. Done properly, this is meticulous work. Done badly, it’s how shops lose their traffic overnight.
Bespoke ways of trading. Trade and retail prices side by side. Delivery rules with zones and surcharges. Click and collect. Deposits, refills, exchanges. If your business trades in an unusual way, the shop must be built to match, and made-to-measure costs more than off the peg. It’s also precisely why you’d own a shop rather than rent one.
What about the monthly platforms?
The adverts make renting sound cheap, so let’s do the sum they don’t do.
A rented shop platform charges monthly, roughly £25 to over £100 depending on the tier, before the extras. Then most take a transaction fee from every sale unless you use their own payment system. Then the app store: features that come built into a WooCommerce shop are often monthly add-ons on a rented one.
Run a modest rented shop for five years and you’ll spend £2,000 to £6,000, own nothing at the end, and still be paying in year six. A £3,000 shop you own is paid for once.
The honest running costs of owning
Owning isn’t free either, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. A shop you own needs hosting, software updates, security and backups. Our care plans handle all of it from £40 a month, which over the same five years is a fraction of the platform arithmetic, with no transaction fees skimmed off a single sale. And card processors charge their percentage everywhere, rented or owned; nobody escapes that one, so ignore any comparison that pretends otherwise.
So what will yours cost?
Tell us what you sell, roughly how many products, and where you’re selling now if anywhere. You’ll get a fixed price, in plain English, with the reasons attached. If the honest answer is that a £3,000 shop covers you, that’s the answer you’ll get.
