- ecommerce
- startup costs
- europe
- online store
- vat
Starting an online shop no longer means a five-figure cheque up front — but the "just €30 a month" figure you see on platform ads is not the real number either. The honest answer is a range, and where you land depends on whether you hold stock, how much you spend on ads, and how seriously you take VAT from day one. Here is what each piece actually costs in Europe in 2026, plus a lean and a comfortable budget to plan against.
The build: platform and store setup
Your storefront is usually the smallest line on the list. A hosted platform like Shopify keeps things simple: the Basic plan lists at $39/month, or $29/month on annual billing, billed in your local currency [Shopify]. WooCommerce, the WordPress plugin, is free — but you pay for hosting (roughly €5–€25/month), a theme, and any premium extensions, so the "free" route still lands in a similar place once it is live.
Across the industry, software and platform fees usually come to less than 15% of your real first-year cost [BigCommerce]. In other words, the platform is rarely what makes or breaks the budget. What you spend depends far more on how the store is built: a template you configure yourself is close to free in cash but costs your time; a designer-built store on Shopify or WooCommerce runs into the low thousands; and a fully custom build is a different category again. We break the build side down in detail in our guide to what an ecommerce website costs, and compare the routes in Shopify vs WooCommerce vs custom. If you want a quick figure for your own case, run it through our ecommerce cost estimator.
Inventory or dropshipping
This is where budgets diverge sharply.
- Holding stock: a typical first order runs €1,000–€5,000 or more, depending on what you sell and your minimum order quantities [Shopify]. Add storage, packaging and a few sample orders (€30–€100 to check quality before you commit) on top.
- Dropshipping or print-on-demand: near-zero stock cost, because you only pay the supplier once a customer has paid you. The trade-off is thinner margins and less control over shipping times and quality.
- Digital products or services: no inventory at all — your main costs shift to the build and marketing.
If cash is tight, starting with a narrow range or a dropshipping model lets you validate demand before you tie money up in stock.
Payments: the fee that follows every sale
Every card sale carries a processing fee, and it is a permanent cost of doing business, not a one-off. European rates are lower than the US "2.9% + 30¢" figure you often see quoted:
- Stripe charges 1.5% + €0.25 for standard European cards (1.5% + £0.20 in the UK). Cards issued outside Europe add roughly 1.5%, and if you settle in a different currency there is a further ~1% conversion fee [Stripe].
- Mollie, popular for local European methods, charges €0.29 flat for iDEAL, and around €0.25 + interchange (~1.8%) for European cards, with no monthly fee [Mollie].
- Shopify Payments on the Basic plan is 2.9% + 30¢ per online transaction — and using an external gateway instead adds a Shopify transaction fee on top [Shopify].
At scale these decimals matter: on €50,000 of card sales, the gap between a 1.5% and a 2.9% blended rate is €700. Model your own mix of methods with the payment fee calculator before you commit to a processor.
Shipping and fulfilment
Shipping is usually passed to the customer, but you still fund the supplies and the software. Budget for packaging (a modest €20–€50 to start), labels, and a carrier or fulfilment integration. The bigger strategic decision is whether you offer "free" shipping — which means building the cost into your prices — or charge it at checkout, where a surprise fee is one of the most common reasons carts are abandoned. Decide early, because it shapes your pricing.
Marketing and ads
This is the line most likely to blow past your estimate. Paid ads on Google and social platforms run on a pay-per-click model, and cost per click ranges from under €1 to €10 or more depending on your industry and competition [Rovela]. A realistic test budget to learn whether paid acquisition works for you is a few hundred euros a month, minimum, before you have enough data to judge.
Cheaper channels — SEO, email, organic social, content — cost time rather than cash, and tend to compound. Most durable stores lean on those and treat paid ads as an accelerant, not the whole engine. Either way, plan for product photography (€0–€300 if you shoot it yourself) since good images do more for conversion than almost anything else.
Legal and VAT setup
Registering a business in the EU is often low-cost, and in several countries you can start as a sole trader for little or nothing — the best country to start an ecommerce business in Europe varies a lot on exactly this. The number to know is the EU-wide €10,000 threshold for cross-border distance selling: below it, you charge your home country's VAT; once your total sales to other EU countries pass €10,000 in a year, you must charge VAT at the customer's local rate and account for it, usually through the One Stop Shop (OSS) — a single quarterly return instead of registering in every country [European Commission]. Registering for OSS is a prerequisite before you cross the threshold, so it is worth setting up early rather than scrambling later. Budget a small amount for accounting software (€0–€30/month) from the start.
Lean vs comfortable: two budgets
- Lean solo launch: roughly €500–€5,000 in the first 90 days — a self-built store, a narrow product range or dropshipping, a small ad test, and DIY photography [Rovela].
- Comfortable brand launch: €10,000–€50,000 — professional design, real inventory, a proper ad budget, and branding [Rovela]. A designer-built UK store alone commonly runs £2,000–£50,000+ before stock and ads [DesignBox].
The lean route is entirely viable; the difference is mostly speed and polish, not whether the shop can work. Whichever you choose, the platform is the cheap part — inventory and ads are what you scale spending on. For the wider picture of what any website should cost, see our pillar guide on how much a website costs in 2026.
Where to go from here
The fastest way to avoid overspending is to get the build right the first time — a clean, fast store that converts, without paying for features you will not use. If you would like a hand scoping that, see our web development service, or book a free consultation and we will help you shape a realistic budget for your product and market.