Ecommerce website development that starts with what an order earns
Most ecommerce website development is sold on design and traffic. The thing that decides whether the store makes money is the arithmetic on a single order — processing, platform fees, shipping and returns. We build around that number, and we show you it first.
And then one in five of these comes back. The median brand ends the year on about 3% net profit. That is the whole game, and it is why we start ecommerce website development with the order maths.
The ecommerce website development cost nobody quotes:
a fee for choosing your own payment processor
Shopify and BigCommerce both charge a percentage of every sale if you use anyone but their own payment product. It is not a fee for a service. It is a fee for not doing what they would prefer. On $500,000 of revenue, on the entry plan, it is $10,000 a year.
Shopify Basic
$29 billed yearly
2.9% + 30¢
2.0% of every sale
Shopify Grow
$79 billed yearly
2.7% + 30¢
1.0% of every sale
Shopify Advanced
$299 billed yearly
2.5% + 30¢
0.6% of every sale
BigCommerce Core
$29 billed yearly
from 2.89% + 29¢
2.0%, plus revenue caps that force upgrades
WooCommerce
Free software, you pay for hosting
2.7% + 30¢ typical
None. No platform fee, no revenue share
Rates taken directly from shopify.com/pricing, bigcommerce.com pricing and woocommerce.com pricing, checked August 2026. Card rates are the platform’s own payment product; Stripe and PayPal publish 2.9% + 30¢ and 3.49% + 49¢ respectively.
That is what a store doing $500,000 a year hands over on the Shopify Basic plan purely for using Stripe instead of Shopify Payments. It buys nothing, and no ecommerce website development quote will show it to you. It is the single most expensive decision most store owners make without realising they made it.
Three good ecommerce website development answers,
and one of them is probably yours
WooCommerce runs more stores than anything else on the web. But among sites that actually get traffic — the top million — Shopify is ahead, roughly two to one. Both facts are true and both matter to your ecommerce website development, depending which one you are trying to become.
Shopify
The default ecommerce website development route for a product brand that wants to sell rather than administer. Hosting, security and updates are somebody else’s problem.
- You sell physical products with a normal catalogue
- You want somebody else to run the infrastructure
- You are happy on their payment product
Watch out: the penalty for using your own processor, and a forced URL structure that makes leaving expensive.
WooCommerce
You own the database and the server after ecommerce website development. No platform fee, no revenue share, no cap on what you can earn before the price changes.
- You already have a WordPress site and audience
- You need unusual logic without paying app fees
- You want the lowest lock-in available
Watch out: it is genuinely yours, which also means the updates, backups and security are genuinely yours.
Custom or headless
Worth the extra ecommerce website development effort when the store has to talk to an ERP, a PIM or a configurator, or the catalogue is large enough to break normal tools.
- Complex integrations decide the project
- Very large or highly variable catalogues
- B2B pricing rules a platform cannot express
Watch out: no vendor lock-in, but maximum dependence on whoever built it. Insist on documentation.
Market share from HTTP Archive and Chrome UX Report data, May 2026 crawl of roughly 8.9 million origins. Running costs modelled on $500,000 revenue at a $50 average order, using each platform’s published pricing.
The average checkout asks for 11 things. Eight will do.
Baymard Institute measured 344 of the largest ecommerce sites: the average checkout runs 5.1 steps and 11.3 form fields, when most stores only need eight. Seventy percent of carts are abandoned, and the top reasons are not design problems — they are ecommerce website development decisions made when the store was built.
Shipping and tax shown on the product page and in the cart. If you can afford a free-shipping threshold, it goes above the fold, not in a banner people scroll past.
Real delivery estimates by postcode on the product page, not a vague range at the last step.
Recognised payment marks, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and a checkout that looks like the rest of the store instead of a third-party redirect.
Guest checkout on by default. The account gets offered after the order is placed, when it is a convenience rather than a toll.
Eight fields. Address autocomplete. One page. Everything else removed unless it earns its place.
Reasons from Baymard Institute’s cart abandonment research, a meta-analysis of 50 studies. Field counts from their 2024 benchmark of 344 large ecommerce sites.
of online orders were returned in 2025
Nearly one order in five. The National Retail Federation puts total US returns at $849.9 billion, and reckons about 9% of them are fraudulent. Every one of those costs you the outbound shipping, the return shipping, the handling, and often the product — which is why returns belong in the ecommerce website development brief.
- Size guides and fit notes written for your actual products
- Enough photography that nobody is guessing
- Reviews that mention fit, colour and scale
- A returns portal customers use themselves instead of emailing you
- Return reasons captured, so you can fix the product page causing them
Return rate and totals from the National Retail Federation, 2025 Retail Returns Landscape.
Replatforming costs you traffic. The question is how much.
Shopify publishes its own estimate, which is unusually honest for a vendor: expect a 2.1% to 4.2% revenue decline after a migration, and one to six months to recover. Anyone who quotes ecommerce website development as a risk-free replatform has not done many.
Platforms force their own structure. Every old address needs a mapped redirect, and those redirects stay in place for at least a year.
Optimised titles, headings and descriptions fall back to theme defaults unless they are exported and reapplied deliberately.
Third-party review data has to be exported by hand. It is usually the most valuable and least backed-up thing on the store.
Passwords are stored hashed and are not portable. Every customer has to reset, so it needs an email plan or launch day looks like a breach.
Recurring billing tokens are tied to the old processor. Moving subscribers means re-tokenising, never a spreadsheet export. We price it separately, always.
What ecommerce website development costs,
and what the store costs to run
Two ecommerce website development numbers matter and most agencies only quote the first. Here are both. You get a fixed price in writing before anything starts.
A good theme configured around your products, your shipping rules and your tax. Fastest route to selling if your catalogue is straightforward.
- Products, variants and collections set up
- Shipping zones and tax configured
- Checkout trimmed to the fields you need
- Payment methods your customers expect
- Live in four to six weeks
Custom storefront design, real product pages, and the operational detail that decides whether the store makes money. The usual shape of a serious build.
- Everything in the first tier
- Custom design, not a theme skin
- Wholesale and retail pricing
- Connected to your inventory or accounts
- Returns flow customers can use themselves
Moving an established store without losing the traffic, or building something a platform cannot express on its own.
- Full URL and redirect mapping
- Order and customer history migrated
- Subscriptions re-tokenised separately
- ERP, PIM or configurator integrations
- 404 monitoring for a year after launch
Placeholder ranges — replace with your real numbers before launch.
Running costs are the platform’s, not ours, and come straight from their published pricing. They sit outside the ecommerce website development price. Card processing adds roughly 2.5% to 2.9% plus 30 cents an order, depending on plan and provider.
Ecommerce website development questions
people search before they commit
More than the headline rate. On Basic it is 2.9% plus 30 cents through Shopify Payments, falling to 2.7% on Grow and 2.5% on Advanced. But if you use any other processor, Shopify adds a further 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. On $500,000 of revenue on the Basic plan that extra fee alone is $10,000 a year, and it buys you nothing. Also watch the fixed 30 cents: on a $25 order that is more than 1% on its own.
WooCommerce powers more stores than anything else on the web, but among sites that actually get traffic the order reverses and Shopify is ahead roughly two to one. At $500,000 of revenue the total cost lands in a similar place either way, around $18,000 to $22,000 a year. The real difference is what you are buying. Shopify sells you not having to think about infrastructure, and charges you for leaving. WooCommerce gives you the database and the server, and hands you responsibility for keeping it patched. If you already have a WordPress audience, WooCommerce. If you want to sell rather than administer, Shopify.
A good theme configured properly around your products, tax and shipping runs $3,000 to $9,000. A custom-designed store built around your catalogue is usually $10,000 to $25,000. Migrations and genuinely custom builds start around $25,000. On top of that the platform charges $29 to $299 a month depending on plan, and card processing takes roughly 2.5% to 2.9% plus 30 cents per order.
Around 70% of carts are abandoned, and the reasons are consistent. Extra costs appearing late is the biggest at 40%. Delivery taking too long is 20%. Not trusting the site with a card is 19%. Being forced to create an account is 18%. A checkout that is too long is 17%. The average large store asks for 11.3 form fields across 5.1 steps when eight fields would do. Almost every one of those is fixed at build time, not by a plugin afterwards.
Some, yes. Shopify itself estimates a 2.1% to 4.2% revenue decline after a typical migration, with recovery taking one to six months. It is manageable if it is planned: every old URL mapped to a new one, redirects held for at least a year, page titles and descriptions exported and reapplied rather than left to theme defaults, and 404s monitored daily after launch. It goes badly when somebody treats the export button as a migration plan.
Send us your average order value
That and your rough monthly volume is enough for us to run the ecommerce website development numbers properly — what each platform would actually cost you, what a build would cost, and whether the maths works. Thirty minutes, no charge, and you keep the figures either way.
If the numbers say do not build it yet, that is what we will tell you.