How Much Does an Online Store Cost and What Drives the Price
Practice4 minInnovialabs editorial team
In short
The price of a store depends on the amount of logic, not the number of pages: catalog size and complexity, design approach, the number of integrations (1C, payments, delivery, CRM), custom features and the cost of ownership after launch; the most accurate budget starts from a feature list split into must-haves and later items.
The short answer
There is no single price for an online store: two sites that look alike can differ in effort many times over. The cost comes from five groups of factors:
- Catalog — how many products and how complex they are.
- Design — a template or a custom interface.
- Integrations — accounting system, payments, delivery, CRM, marketplaces.
- Custom features — anything beyond a standard store.
- Support and ownership — what you pay after launch.
To get a real estimate, describe these points instead of asking "how much is a store".
Catalog
The number of products matters less than their structure:
- Simple products with one price are easier than products with variants (size, color), each with its own SKU and stock level.
- Deep filtering on many attributes requires a well-designed data model and search.
- Separate retail and wholesale prices, personal discounts and multi-currency pricing all add logic.
- Catalog import: clean data means a script; messy data means manual cleanup.
Design
| Approach | What you get | What drives cost |
|---|---|---|
| Ready-made template | Fast start, standard look | Brand adaptation, template edits |
| Design on a UI kit | Your own style on proven components | Number of unique screens |
| Fully custom design | An interface built around your buying flow | Research, prototypes, animation, responsive layouts |
Every unique screen has to be not only designed but also built for phones, tablets and desktop.
Integrations
This is usually the most underestimated part of the budget. Each integration means data exchange, error handling and testing.
- 1C or another accounting system: exporting products, prices and stock, sending orders back. Complexity depends on the 1C configuration and the quality of the data in it.
- Payment providers: Payme, Click, Stripe. Each needs server-side handling of callbacks, cancellations and refunds.
- Delivery: shipping calculation, shipment creation, status tracking.
- CRM: passing orders and customers to AmoCRM, Bitrix24 or a custom system.
- Marketplaces: syncing catalog and stock with Uzum, Wildberries, Ozon.
The more systems exchange data, the more important it is to decide which one is the source of truth for each data type.
Custom features
Anything beyond "catalog, cart, payment" is estimated separately:
- loyalty program, bonuses, promo codes with complex rules;
- product configurator or calculator;
- B2B customer account with contract pricing;
- multiple languages and storefronts per country;
- a mobile app or Telegram bot on top of the same store.
Support and cost of ownership
Launch is not the last payment. Plan for:
- hosting, domain, SSL, backups;
- platform and paid plugin licenses, if any;
- payment provider and marketplace fees;
- security updates and bug fixes;
- improvements that inevitably come up after the first months of sales.
How to scope a budget
- Describe scenarios, not pages: how a customer finds a product, checks out, pays and receives it.
- Split features into launch must-haves and later items. This is the most effective way to cut the initial budget.
- List integrations, noting which systems already exist and who owns them.
- Ask for an itemized estimate by block, not one total. That shows what you pay for and what can be postponed.
- Calculate ownership for a year ahead, not just development.
Common mistakes
- Comparing proposals by total price without checking the scope.
- Forgetting content preparation: photos, descriptions, translation.
- Demanding every feature in the first release.
- Leaving no budget for post-launch support.