In 2026 an ecommerce website in the UK costs anywhere from about £230 a year to run yourself on Shopify’s cheapest plan, to tens of thousands of pounds for an agency build with a large catalogue and custom integrations. The platform is the small part. The build, the payment fees and the running costs are where the money goes, and this guide puts a number on each.
What does an ecommerce website actually cost?
Four separate bills. Most quotes only mention one of them.
- Platform. The monthly fee for Shopify, or the hosting bill for WooCommerce. Tens of pounds a month.
- Payments. A percentage plus pence on every order. Invisible on the quote, and the biggest cost once you are selling.
- Build. Design, theme, product set-up, migration, integrations. From nothing if you do it yourself, to the largest line on the invoice if an agency does.
- Running. Apps, plugins, maintenance, content, and the fixes nobody budgeted for.
Ask for all four before you compare two quotes. A low build price with twelve paid apps underneath it is not the cheap option.
How much does Shopify cost per month in the UK?
Shopify publishes UK prices in pounds. These are the figures on its UK pricing page on 11 October 2026.
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed yearly | Online card rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | £25 a month | £19 a month | 2% + 25p |
| Grow | £65 a month | £49 a month | 1.7% + 25p |
| Advanced | £344 a month | £259 a month | 1.5% + 25p |
| Plus | From £1,800 a month | Three-year term | 1.3% + 25p |
Source: Shopify UK pricing, checked 11 October 2026. Shopify also offers three days free, then £1 a month for three months.
So a one-person store on Basic, paid yearly, costs £228 a year before a single sale. Most UK brands we work with sit on Grow. Advanced only pays for itself when the lower card rate saves more than the £210 a month difference, which needs roughly £100,000 a month in card sales.
How much does a WooCommerce website cost?
The WooCommerce plugin is free. Its own pricing page says so: “free, open-source ecommerce platform for WordPress”, with “no monthly subscription” and “0% revenue share”. Everything around it costs money.
- Hosting. WooCommerce’s page puts it at “$25 to $350 a month for most stores”. WP Engine, which hosts this site, lists its Essential plan from $28 a month (US dollars, no UK price shown on its plans page).
- Extensions. “$29 to $299 a year per extension”, again from WooCommerce’s own page. A UK store usually needs a few: shipping rules, VAT handling, a better checkout.
- Theme. Free themes exist. A paid theme is a one-off purchase, typically under £100.
- Payments. WooPayments quotes roughly 2.5% to 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. Stripe in the UK charges 1.5% plus 20p on a standard UK card.
Our estimate for a small UK WooCommerce store, run yourself on managed hosting with three or four paid extensions, is £400 to £900 a year before payment fees, at today’s exchange rate. The number that matters more is the one below.
What do payment fees add?
Payment fees are the cost most store owners never put in the spreadsheet, and they scale with every order. On £20,000 of UK card sales a month:
| Processor | Published UK rate | Cost on £20,000 (400 orders of £50) |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify Payments, Basic plan | 2% + 25p | £500 |
| Shopify Payments, Grow plan | 1.7% + 25p | £440 |
| Stripe, standard UK card | 1.5% + 20p | £380 |
Sources: Shopify UK pricing and Stripe UK pricing, 11 October 2026. Stripe charges more for premium, EEA and international cards.
At that volume, payments cost more each month than the platform does in a year. Which is why the platform fee is the wrong thing to argue about.
How much does an agency charge to build an ecommerce website?
There is no standard price, because there is no standard build. One published UK benchmark, from Birmingham agency Opace in August 2026, prices a base ecommerce site of up to 250 products at £15,000 to £43,900 with a freelancer, £22,500 to £70,400 with a specialist agency and £29,000 to £92,500 with a larger agency, all excluding VAT and assuming 34 to 87 person-days of work. Those figures exclude design, content, migration and integrations.
That is the top of the market. A store with a standard theme, under a hundred products and no integrations needs a fraction of those days, and the price should fall with it. What actually moves an ecommerce build quote:
- Catalogue size and complexity. Fifty products with three variants each is a week. Five thousand with bundles is a project.
- Integrations. Stock systems, accounting, a warehouse, a marketplace feed. Each one is days, not hours.
- Custom checkout or pricing logic. Trade accounts, tiered pricing, subscriptions.
- Migration. Moving products, customers, orders and, crucially, old URLs so Google rankings survive.
- Content. Who writes the product pages and shoots the photos. If the answer is “the agency”, budget for it.
- Tracking. Whether anyone tests that a real order reaches Google and Meta as one sale, not three. Often left out, and the first thing we fix.
Whatever the number, get it fixed in writing with the four bills from the top of this page listed separately. If a quote cannot be split that way, the agency has not scoped the job.
The sales case first, then the design. Our Shopify builds start by mapping what people ask before they buy, pulled from reviews, recordings and your inbox, and the design follows that argument. On WooCommerce we remove before we improve: every plugin justified in writing, checkout trimmed, tracking tested against a real order.
Is Shopify or WooCommerce cheaper?
Shopify is cheaper to start and simpler to run. WooCommerce is cheaper per month at scale if you are comfortable managing hosting and plugins, and more expensive if you are not.
| Cost line | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Platform fee | £19 to £259 a month (yearly billing) | Free plugin |
| Hosting | Included | $25 to $350 a month (WooCommerce’s own range) |
| Card fees | 1.3% to 2% + 25p with Shopify Payments | 1.5% + 20p with Stripe on UK cards |
| Apps and extensions | Monthly app subscriptions | $29 to $299 a year each |
| Maintenance | Shopify’s problem | Yours, or your agency’s |
| Who it suits | Brands that want to sell, not run servers | Brands on WordPress already, or needing custom logic |
Sources: Shopify, WooCommerce, Stripe, 11 October 2026.
We build on both. The platform decision is rarely the one that decides whether the store makes money. The product page, the checkout and the tracking are.
How long does it take to build an ecommerce website?
Do it yourself on a Shopify theme and you can take orders in a weekend. An agency build with a proper scoping phase takes four to twelve weeks. Ours run to a fixed timetable agreed in writing before work starts, with the scoping weeks shown separately from the build. Anything quoted in days is a template with your logo on it.
The Kimchi Company. Good product, steady traffic, almost no online sales. We fixed the checkout and product pages before pointing ads at them, and took them from almost zero orders to 20+ a day. No redesign needed. Read the case study.
How do you keep the cost of an ecommerce website down?
- Keep the theme. A redesign is the most expensive way to fix a conversion problem, and usually not the fix. Rebuild the pages the revenue data points to.
- Count the plugins. On WooCommerce, every plugin loads on every page, checkout included. Thirty-eight of them is a speed problem and a monthly bill. Remove before you add.
- Pay yearly on Shopify. Basic drops from £25 to £19 a month, Grow from £65 to £49.
- Write your own product pages. Nobody knows the objections better than the person answering the customer emails.
- Test tracking before ads. A purchase event that fires twice, or not at all, wastes more than any plugin costs. Place one real order and check it lands once in Google and once in Meta.
- Separate the quote. Platform, payments, build, running. Compare like with like.
Frequently asked questions
How much does an ecommerce website cost per month in the UK?
Shopify runs from £19 a month on Basic (yearly billing) to £259 on Advanced, plus card fees. A self-managed WooCommerce store costs the hosting bill, typically $25 to $350 a month by WooCommerce’s own estimate, plus a few extensions. Payment fees come on top of both and grow with sales.
Can I build an ecommerce website myself?
Yes. Shopify and WooCommerce both ship with themes that take orders out of the box. The cost of doing it yourself is time and the mistakes you cannot see: a product page that never answers the price objection, a checkout that asks too much, tracking that double counts. Those are what agencies are paid to find.
Is Shopify cheaper than WooCommerce?
To start, yes. Over time it depends on your sales volume and how much you pay someone to manage WordPress. Shopify’s higher plans buy a lower card rate; WooCommerce with Stripe is already at 1.5% + 20p on UK cards.
How much does a Shopify website cost with an agency?
It depends on catalogue size, integrations, migration and content. Ask for the build price with those four things listed separately, and ask for a fixed timeline.
What does Yomp Media charge?
We quote fixed prices after a call, because no two stores need the same work. The one published price is our £999 objection map: we read your reviews, recordings and inbox, and if you then hand us the ads, that £999 comes off your first three months.
Get a fixed price for your store
A short call, then a written quote split into platform, payments, build and running costs.
Sources
- Shopify, UK pricing page, checked 11 October 2026.
- Stripe, UK pricing page, checked 11 October 2026.
- WooCommerce, pricing page, checked 11 October 2026.
- WP Engine, plans page, checked 11 October 2026.
- Opace, eCommerce website cost UK, updated 26 August 2026.