Building an online store: platforms, costs and where to start

Most online stores get built twice: once by someone who over-spent on a custom platform they didn't need, and once by someone who out-grew a cheap builder six months in. Both are avoidable. This guide walks through the realistic platform options for a European store, what each actually costs, and a sane order of steps from idea to launch.

Start with the question, not the platform

Before you compare tools, answer three things: how many products you'll sell, whether you need anything unusual (subscriptions, complex shipping, B2B pricing, multi-country tax), and who will maintain the store after launch. A shop selling 20 candles has almost nothing in common with a 5,000-SKU catalogue, and the right platform for one is the wrong one for the other.

If you're not sure which bucket you fall into, our ecommerce platform quiz walks you through these questions and points you at a category. It's a five-minute sanity check before you commit money or time.

The three platform families

Nearly every option falls into one of three groups.

Hosted store builders (SaaS). You pay a monthly fee and the company handles hosting, security and updates. Shopify is the best-known; Wix and Squarespace also sell ecommerce plans. You trade flexibility for not having to think about servers.

Self-hosted / open-source. WooCommerce (a plugin for WordPress) is the dominant example. The software is free, but you rent hosting, buy a theme and some plugins, and you (or someone) keep it running. More control, more responsibility.

Custom or headless builds. A developer builds the store on a framework, or bolts a custom frontend onto a commerce backend. This is the most flexible and by far the most expensive — only worth it when an off-the-shelf platform genuinely can't do what your business needs.

For a deeper head-to-head on the first three, see Shopify vs WooCommerce vs custom.

What each option costs

Prices below are current as of July 2026. Treat them as starting points — everyone adds apps, themes and payment fees on top.

Hosted builders

Shopify's European pricing (billed in EUR) currently runs:

• Basic — €27/month (or €19/month billed yearly)
• Grow — €74/month (€56 yearly)
• Advanced — €384/month (€289 yearly)
• Plus — from around €2,100/month

New stores get a short free trial plus an introductory €1/month period for the first three months. (Source: Shopify pricing page.)

Wix and Squarespace ecommerce plans sit in a similar entry range — roughly €25–30/month for a basic commerce tier, rising for advanced features. (Sources: Tooltester, Website Builder Expert.)

The headline figure is only part of the story. On a hosted builder you'll usually add a paid theme (one-off) and a handful of apps (recurring), and you pay card-processing fees on every sale.

WooCommerce (self-hosted)

The WooCommerce plugin itself is free, but a working store isn't. Realistic annual costs for a small, professional store land around €350 in year one at the very lean end, and €1,800–3,000+ once you factor in decent managed hosting, a premium theme and a few paid extensions. Typical components:

• Hosting — from roughly €5/month shared, up to €30+/month managed
• Domain — €10–20/year
• Theme — free options exist; a good commerce theme is €55–90
• Plugins — free for the basics; paid extensions add up if you need many

(Source: Swell, Elementor, SupportHost cost breakdowns.) The trade-off is clear: WooCommerce is cheap to start and flexible, but the modular pricing means you have to budget carefully and someone has to own maintenance.

Custom builds

There's no menu price here — cost tracks scope. A bespoke or headless build typically starts in the low thousands of euros and climbs quickly. It only pays off when a platform limitation is genuinely blocking revenue, not when you simply want something to look bespoke.

To turn these ranges into a number for your specific case, run our ecommerce cost estimator — it factors in your product count, platform choice and the extras that quietly inflate a budget. For the wider context of what any website costs to build and run, our pillar guide on how much a website costs in 2026 sets the baseline, and what an ecommerce website costs drills into store-specific line items.

Don't forget payment fees

Whatever platform you choose, you pay to take money. In the European Economic Area, standard Stripe fees for domestic EEA cards are around 1.5% + €0.25 per transaction, with higher rates for commercial or non-EEA cards. (Source: Stripe pricing.) Shopify Payments offers competitive EEA rates on its plans; using a third-party gateway on Shopify adds an extra per-transaction fee on top. These percentages feel small until you multiply them by a year of orders — model them in your projections, not as an afterthought.

The steps from idea to launch

A store doesn't need to be complicated to be finished. A workable order:

1. Validate the products. Confirm people will pay before you build. A landing page or a handful of pre-orders beats a full store no one visits.
2. Pick the platform using the buckets above — match it to catalogue size and how technical your team is.
3. Sort the essentials: domain, a clean theme, and a payment provider you can actually get approved for in your country.
4. Load real product data — good photos, honest descriptions, accurate stock and shipping rules. This is where most launches stall, so start it early.
5. Set up tax and shipping for the countries you'll actually sell to. Cross-border EU VAT is manageable but needs configuring, not ignoring.
6. Test a full checkout with a real card, then launch small and improve from live orders.

How to avoid over-building

The single most common mistake is buying capability you won't use for two years. A few guardrails:

• Start on the lowest plan that fits. You can almost always upgrade. Downgrading a bloated custom build is far harder.
• Resist the app pile-up. Every plugin or app is a recurring cost and a maintenance liability. Add them when a real problem appears, not pre-emptively.
• Only go custom for a genuine constraint. If Shopify or WooCommerce can do 95% of what you need, the missing 5% rarely justifies the cost jump.
• Budget for the running store, not just the build. Hosting, apps, payment fees and someone's time to maintain it are the real total cost of ownership.

Where to go from here

If you'd rather not weigh platforms alone, see our web development service — we build stores on the platform that fits your catalogue and budget, not the one with the biggest margin for us. And if you just want a second opinion on your plan before you spend anything, book a free consultation and we'll talk it through.

Sources: Shopify pricing page; Stripe pricing; Swell, Elementor and SupportHost WooCommerce cost breakdowns; Tooltester and Website Builder Expert builder comparisons.