The Short Answer
An ecommerce website in the UK can cost anywhere from a modest monthly subscription on a templated Shopify store you run yourself, through a designed store built for you, up to a custom storefront with bespoke logic or integrations. Above that, a platform build with multiple sellers, warehouses or markets sits in its own bracket entirely.
The number most people get wrong is not the build. It is the running cost, because card processing fees and platform commission scale with your sales while the build price does not. A shop with genuinely high turnover can pay more in transaction fees over a year than the site cost to build in the first place.
This guide sets out how the main platforms are structured, the fees underneath them, and where a custom build genuinely earns its money.
What You Are Actually Buying
Every ecommerce quote is really four separate things, and cheap quotes tend to be cheap because one of them is missing.
The platform. Shopify, WooCommerce, or something custom. This decides your monthly fee, your transaction fees, and what you can change later without a developer.
The build. Theme setup and configuration at the simpler end, a bespoke design and custom functionality at the more involved end.
The catalogue. Somebody has to get products, variants, prices, stock levels and images into the system. For a small range this is a day. For a large catalogue with variants, it is a project in itself and needs a proper import, not typing.
The plumbing. Payments, shipping rules, tax, returns, accounting, and whatever warehouse or stock system you already run. This is where quotes diverge most, and where the difference between a shop that works and one that creates admin every day is decided.
Shopify: How the Pricing Actually Works
Shopify publishes its UK pricing openly on its own site, and it is worth checking there directly since plans and rates change. The structure is what matters for planning: a tiered monthly plan fee that rises with the features and reporting you need, plus a per-transaction card processing rate through Shopify Payments that falls as you move up plans.
There is a second fee worth understanding before you choose. If you use an external payment provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds an extra transaction fee on top of whatever your provider charges, and that fee shrinks the higher your plan. It is the single biggest reason a growing shop moves up a plan.
Then there are apps. Reviews, subscriptions, bundles, advanced shipping rules, loyalty. Each carries its own subscription, and a mature shop commonly runs several of them at once. Budget for this honestly; in our experience apps often cost more in aggregate than the plan itself.
WooCommerce: Free Plugin, Real Costs
WooCommerce states plainly on its own pricing page that the core plugin is free and open source with no revenue share. That is genuinely true and it is the strongest argument for the platform: no percentage of your turnover goes to the platform vendor.
The costs sit elsewhere, and WooCommerce publishes those too: hosting that scales with traffic, and paid extensions for anything beyond the basics. Check the vendor's own site for current figures, since WooCommerce quotes in US dollars and the sterling equivalent moves with the exchange rate.
What the published numbers do not capture is maintenance. WordPress core, WooCommerce, your theme and every extension update on their own schedules, and updates occasionally conflict. Somebody has to apply them, test that checkout still works, and fix it when it does not. If that somebody is you, WooCommerce looks very cheap. If it is an agency on a care plan, the gap to Shopify narrows considerably.
Payment Fees: The Cost Nobody Compares Properly
Whatever platform you pick, you pay to take money. Card processors such as Stripe publish tiered rates that vary by card type — standard UK cards cost less to process than premium or international cards, and currency conversion adds a further charge on top. These rates are published on the processor's own pricing page and worth checking directly, because at scale they dwarf everything else on the invoice.
Work through your own numbers before choosing a plan. On a meaningful volume of annual card turnover, even a small difference in the processing rate compounds into a material sum every year.
One more thing to plan for rather than discover: VAT. Gov.uk sets a VAT registration threshold based on rolling twelve-month taxable turnover, currently published on gov.uk, and a shop growing through that point needs its prices, invoices and accounting integration to handle VAT correctly. Retrofitting that mid-year is unpleasant, so build it into your accounting from the start if you are anywhere close.
The Real Comparison
| Shopify | WooCommerce | Custom build | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What moves the price | Plan tier, apps, card volume | Hosting tier, extensions, your time | Complexity, integrations, catalogue size |
| Hosting | Included | Vendor-hosted, scales with traffic | Depends on scale and architecture |
| Card processing | Falls as you move up plans, published rate card | Your own processor's published rate | Your own processor |
| Extra fee for outside gateway | Charged, shrinks by plan | None | None |
| Who maintains it | Shopify | You or your agency | You or your agency |
| Best for | Speed to launch, standard retail | Content-led shops, avoiding revenue share | Unusual logic, scale, tight integrations |
When a Custom Build Is Worth It
Most UK shops should use a platform. Custom is not a status symbol and it is not automatically better. It earns its money in four situations.
Your pricing logic does not fit a product grid. Trade pricing tiers, made-to-measure, quantity breaks that change by customer, quotes that turn into orders. Forcing these into a standard checkout usually means several apps fighting each other.
Integration is the actual product. If the shop must talk continuously to a warehouse system, an ERP or a supplier feed, the integration is the majority of the work and the storefront is the easy part.
Performance is your competitive edge. A headless storefront on a modern framework loads faster than a theme carrying a dozen apps, and speed shows up directly in conversion on mobile.
You need to be readable by AI shopping assistants. Buyers increasingly ask an assistant for a recommendation before they ever reach a search results page. Clean structured product data decides whether you are quoted or skipped. Our approach to that is at /ai-seo, and the mechanics are explained in /blog/how-to-get-your-business-recommended-by-chatgpt-uk.
Our own work in this space, priced individually after a discovery call, spans a marketing-led store, through a web application with real logic behind it, up to a full platform. See /services/web-app-development, and sector-specific detail for online retailers is at /industries/ecommerce.
Ongoing Costs to Budget For
Beyond platform and card fees, a working shop needs a yearly allowance for the things that do not appear in a build quote.
- •Domain renewal, a small annual sum for a .co.uk
- •SSL, normally included by modern hosting at no extra cost
- •Maintenance and updates, scaling with how busy and how plugin-heavy the site is
- •Product photography, which does more for conversion than most design decisions
- •Apps and extensions, the cost that grows quietly as you add features
- •Someone's time, which is a real cost even when it is your own
How to Compare Two Ecommerce Quotes
- 1. Ask which platform and why that one for your business specifically
- 2. Ask who does the catalogue import and how many products that quote assumes
- 3. Ask which integrations are included by name, not as a category
- 4. Ask what year two looks like once apps and extensions are added
- 5. Ask what happens when a plugin update breaks checkout, and who pays
- 6. Ask who owns the code and the design files after final payment
- 7. Ask for a live site they built that handles similar order volume
- 8. Ask how the site is tested on mobile before launch
- 9. Ask what analytics and conversion tracking is set up on day one
- 10. Ask what is explicitly not included
If a quote is materially cheaper than the others, one of these answers is why.
How BigBerri Prices Ecommerce Work
We give a fixed price after a free discovery call, not a day rate. On that call we look at your catalogue, your existing systems and your order volume, and we will tell you honestly when a Shopify theme does the job and a custom build would be wasting your money. Most of our ecommerce work is either a fast platform store done properly, or a custom storefront where the integration is the real problem to solve.
A general guide to website pricing across every type of site is at /blog/how-much-does-a-website-cost-uk.
Ready to get a real number for your shop? Book a free discovery call at /contact and we will scope it with you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Shopify or WooCommerce cheaper for a UK shop?
It depends on turnover and how much of your own time you count. WooCommerce has no platform fee and no revenue share, so it can be cheaper at low volume if you maintain it yourself. Shopify charges a plan fee but handles hosting, security and updates for you. Once you cost your own maintenance time honestly, the two converge for most growing shops. Book a free discovery call at /contact and we will help you work out which fits your business.
What will it actually cost me per month once it is live?
It depends on your plan, your apps and your card processing volume, all of which are published by the platform and processor you choose and worth checking directly for the current rate. Card fees are separate on both Shopify and WooCommerce and scale with sales, so the honest way to plan is to model your own expected volume rather than rely on a generic figure.
Do I own the site if you build it?
Yes. On completion and full payment you own the store, the theme or codebase, the domain and the accounts. We hand over admin access in your name, not ours, so you are never locked to us to make a change.
Can you migrate my existing shop without losing rankings?
Yes, and this is the part most migrations get wrong. Every old product and category URL needs a permanent redirect to its new address, and the sitemap needs resubmitting. Done properly, rankings recover quickly. Done carelessly, a migration can cost months of traffic.
How long does an ecommerce build take?
A platform store on a customised theme is typically a few weeks. A custom storefront with real logic or integrations takes longer. Catalogue size and how ready your product data is are usually what move the timeline, not the design.