"How much does an online shop cost?" is the question I hear most often after "how much does a website cost" — and it's the one with the widest range of answers. One person is quoted €400, another €6,000, and both quotes can be honest. The difference is never the word "shop". It's what the shop has to do: how many products, how you get paid, how parcels leave your hands, and who keeps it running after launch. In this guide I'll break the price into the parts you'll actually pay for in 2026, using real numbers I checked this week, so you can read any quote and know what's behind it.
The short answer: three price brackets
Here's what Bulgarian studios publish on their own sites right now. These are indicative ranges from public price pages, not a fixed market rate, but they show the shape of the market well:
Starter shop
Up to a couple of hundred products, courier and cash-on-delivery integration, card payments, training. One Bulgarian studio lists this from €1,250; another starts its basic shop from €1,800.
Growing business
Custom branding, hundreds to thousands of products, filters and search, automated emails, invoicing, more languages. Published ranges sit around €2,500–5,000.
Complex or B2B
Individual price lists, live stock, ERP or warehouse integrations. Expect €4,500–9,000+, quoted only after a technical brief.
If someone quotes far below the first bracket, it usually means a narrower scope: a ready-made theme dropped in as-is, products you upload yourself, no courier integration. That can be perfectly fine — as long as you know it's what you're buying.
Rent or own: the platform decides your monthly bill
Before you compare build prices, decide where the shop will live. That choice shapes your costs for years.
Hosted platforms (you rent the shop)
You pay a monthly subscription and the platform handles hosting, security and updates. Two examples with prices I checked on their official pages today:
- Shopify lists Basic at $39 a month ($29 a month billed yearly), Grow at $105 ($79) and Advanced at $399 ($299) on its US pricing page. Billing currency depends on where your store is located — EUR is one of the options — so check the exact figure in your own admin. If you use a third-party payment provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. Cash on delivery and bank transfers are exempt.
- CloudCart, the Bulgarian platform, lists plans from 19 to 299 per month excluding VAT (14 to 249 on annual billing), with 0% commission on sales. The cheapest plan is limited to 100 products, the next one to 2,000.
Self-hosted WooCommerce (you own the shop)
WooCommerce itself is free, but you pay for hosting, any premium plugins, and someone to keep it updated. One Bulgarian studio estimates running costs for a WooCommerce shop at roughly €150–300 a year before maintenance and marketing, with €100–200 of that going to good hosting.
What you're really paying for in the build
When I quote a shop, the price is never "per page". It's the sum of decisions. These are the ones that move the number most:
- Product count and variants. Twenty handmade candles is a different job from 1,500 phone cases in 40 models and 6 colours. Variants, filters and imports take real hours.
- Payments. Cash on delivery is still common in Bulgaria, but most shops also want card payments. Each provider is an integration to set up and test.
- Delivery. Live courier offices, price calculation and automatic waybills (Econt, Speedy and the like) save you hours every week, but they are part of the build.
- Invoicing and stock. Connecting the shop to your accounting or warehouse software is often the single biggest line in a mid-size quote.
- Design. A good ready theme adapted to your brand costs less than a fully custom design. Both can sell well if the product pages are clear.
- Content. Product photos and descriptions. If they don't exist yet, someone has to make them — and that someone is often you.
- Legal pages and flows. Terms, privacy, cookies, the right of withdrawal. I covered these in detail in my online shop launch checklist.
A cheap shop and an expensive shop often look the same on day one. The difference shows up on the hundredth order.— what I see when shops come to me for a rebuild
The running costs most quotes leave out
The build is a one-off. These are the costs that keep coming, and they're where budgets most often go wrong:
- Platform or hosting — a monthly subscription, or yearly hosting for WooCommerce.
- Domain — a small yearly renewal.
- Payment fees — card operators typically take a percentage of every order; one Bulgarian source puts it at about 1–2.5%. On Shopify, add the platform's own fee if you use another provider.
- Paid apps and plugins — filters, reviews, invoicing connectors. Each one is small; ten of them are not.
- Maintenance — updates, backups and security checks. Skipping this is the most expensive saving you can make.
- Marketing — a shop nobody visits sells nothing. Budget for ads, email or SEO from the start.
A worked example: 150 products, cash on delivery and cards
Imagine a small cosmetics brand from Plovdiv with 150 products, selling only in Bulgaria, with cash on delivery and card payments. Here's how I'd think about it:
Low or no build cost if you set it up yourself, a predictable monthly subscription and less technical worry. But you pay every month forever, product limits can push you into a higher plan, and on some platforms each card order carries an extra fee. Moving away later is work.
A bigger one-off cost, low yearly hosting, no platform commission, and the shop is yours to move or extend. In exchange, you need someone to look after updates and backups — either a care plan or a reliable person in-house.
There's no universal winner. With very few products and a tight budget, renting is often the sensible start. Once you have hundreds of products, your own branding and plans to grow, owning usually pays off within a couple of years.
How to compare two shop quotes
Put both offers side by side and check each line. A quote that can't answer these questions isn't a quote yet:
- Which platform, and who owns the domain, the hosting account and the admin login?
- How many products are included in the price, and who uploads them?
- Which payment methods and which couriers are integrated and tested?
- Are the legal pages and the withdrawal flow included?
- What happens after launch — how many weeks of support, and what does care cost after that?
- Which paid apps or plugins will you need to renew every year?
- Is speed, mobile layout and basic accessibility part of the job?
What I charge, and how I work
My websites start from €890, go live in 2–5 weeks and come with 3 months of free care. A shop is always quoted after I've seen your products, payment methods and couriers, because those decide the scope — I'd rather give you one honest number than a low "from" price that grows later. Every shop I build is yours: your domain, your hosting, your logins.
If you already have a shop or a site and want to know whether it's worth rebuilding, run the free website check first — it shows speed, mobile and basic SEO issues in a minute. And if you're ready to plan a new one, have a look at how I design and build websites and shops and tell me about your products.