# 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.

- Source canonique : [https://allaux.fr/en/creation/budget-d-une-boutique](https://allaux.fr/en/creation/budget-d-une-boutique)
- Langue : EN
- Dernière mise à jour : 2026-09-30

## 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

1. **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.
2. **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.
3. **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.
4. **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.
5. **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.

## The share of budgets declared under a thousand euros

> A large share of the shop-building requests reaching me declare a budget under a thousand euros. That amount does not buy a developed shop: it buys a hosted off-the-shelf offer, a few hours of configuration, or one targeted job on an existing site. Saying so plainly avoids two symmetrical failures: a project delivered at a loss and rushed, or a client discovering the real price after three quotes.

## Related pages

- **Rates** — How I bill in practice, fixed price or day rate. ([/tarifs](/tarifs))
- **What sets a module’s price** — The same reasoning applied to one isolated piece of development. ([/modules/ce-qui-fait-le-prix-d-un-module](/modules/ce-qui-fait-le-prix-d-un-module))
- **Buy a module or have one built** — The trade-off between annual licence and development, with figures. ([/modules/acheter-ou-faire-developper](/modules/acheter-ou-faire-developper))
- **Maintenance and managed service** — The year-two line, the one initial budgets forget. ([/services/maintenance](/services/maintenance))

## FAQ

### Why do quotes vary so much between suppliers?

Because they do not describe the same project. A quote mentioning neither catalogue migration, nor the redirect plan, nor data migration, nor maintenance describes an installation, not a shop. Compare quotes line by line: the price gap usually disappears along with the content gap.

### Fixed price or day rate?

Fixed price suits a written, stable scope: a catalogue migration, a version step, a module whose behaviour is described. Day rate suits a scope discovered as you go, which covers every diagnosis and every takeover. Fixing a price on work whose extent nobody knows produces either a safety margin you pay for, or an overrun.

### What budget for year two?

There has to be a line, whatever its size. It covers security patches, version steps, incidents and verified backups. The amount depends on the number of modules, how critical the shop is and how fast a response you expect. What is certain is that zero is not a sustainable figure.

### Can the project be spread out to smooth the cost?

Yes, provided you split by function and not in halves. Opening with a reduced catalogue, one carrier and one payment method works very well. Opening with half a checkout does not. Each stage of the split must produce something that sells.

### Does the budget change with the platform?

It moves more than it changes. Shopify concentrates cost in regular monthly subscriptions, WooCommerce in plugin licences, PrestaShop in setup and hosting. Over three to five years the totals converge more than people imagine; what differs is the spread over time, and sometimes that is what decides.