The budget of an online shop
What costs money in a shop is almost never what people expect. Theme and layout are cheap. What you pay for is the catalogue, the rules that leave standard behaviour, logistics, taking over what exists — and the following year, which nobody writes into the initial budget.
The real ranking of quote lines
Across the projects I price, the order of items is remarkably stable. At the top: everything touching the catalogue — modelling, file preparation, import, variant checking, image processing. Then the rules that leave standard behaviour: an unusual price calculation, a pack size constraint, a shipping rule the platform cannot express. Then the connections to management software, a till or a marketplace, whose price depends entirely on the quality of the interface at the other end.
Much further down: the theme, the layout, the content pages. These are the lines clients dread, and they are rarely the heaviest. A bought theme adapted to your identity costs a fraction of a gateway into a business system.
And right at the bottom, often missing: year two. Security updates, version steps, fixes, monitored backups. A shop you stop maintaining does not stop the next day; it stops eighteen months later, all at once, and repair then costs more than the maintenance you saved.
What costs less than people expect
- The theme. A market theme adapted to your identity costs a fraction of a built one, and the difference a buyer notices is small.
- Multiple languages, when the platform carries them natively. What costs is translating content, not the function.
- Hosting. Even well sized, it is a modest monthly line against the cost of one day down on a busy trading day.
- Common payment methods. Most gateways ship a free official module; the cost is in the commission, not the integration.
- Post-launch fixes, if the code is clean. A targeted improvement on a healthy base is priced in hours.
- Carrying over existing editorial content in a rebuild, when the copy is recoverable: that is transfer, not production.
The five price multipliers
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The number of rules that do not exist as standard
Every exception — a price depending on customer and quantity, shipping calculated on volume rather than weight, a conditional discount — is code to write, test and maintain. It is the leading factor, far ahead of appearance.
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The quality of what exists, in a takeover
A clean site is taken over quickly. A site whose core was edited without trace, without a test environment and without a source repository first demands archaeology that produces nothing visible and is billed all the same.
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The number of parties to coordinate
A designer, a communications agency, a software integrator, a freight forwarder: each additional party adds rounds of back and forth, and back and forth is billed time on both sides.
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How much data must be carried over
Migrating the catalogue is one thing; migrating order history, customer accounts, credit notes and loyalty points is another. Every object carried over is a mapping to establish and verify.
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Urgency
A project that must ship on an imposed date costs more, because it forbids pooling waiting time and forces parallel rather than sequential work.
Related pages
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Rates
How I bill in practice, fixed price or day rate.
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What sets a module’s price
The same reasoning applied to one isolated piece of development.
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Buy a module or have one built
The trade-off between annual licence and development, with figures.
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Maintenance and managed service
The year-two line, the one initial budgets forget.
Frequently asked questions
Why do quotes vary so much between suppliers?
Fixed price or day rate?
What budget for year two?
Can the project be spread out to smooth the cost?
Does the budget change with the platform?
Describe your need in one minute
A few targeted questions so I can reply with an estimate rather than another questionnaire.