"How much does an online store cost?" is the wrong first question, and I say that as someone who gets paid to build them.
The right first question is "do I actually need one?" Because roughly half the local business owners who ask us about ecommerce don't need a store. They need a booking flow, an invoicing setup, or a deposit button. Those are cheaper, faster, and they convert better for service businesses. We'll get to that. But first, for the businesses that genuinely sell products, here's where the money actually goes, including the parts no platform's pricing page puts in bold.
The four cost layers of every online store
Every ecommerce operation, from a candle maker to a parts distributor, pays in four layers: the platform, the payments, the content, and the operations. Most owners budget for the first one and get surprised by the other three.
Layer 1: The platform
This is the monthly software that runs the store: product pages, cart, checkout, inventory.
- Shopify is the default for a reason. Plans currently start around $39/month for the core tier, and you can confirm current numbers on Shopify's pricing page. What the headline price hides is the app store: most real Shopify stores end up running several paid apps for reviews, email, subscriptions, or shipping rates, and $50 to $150/month in app fees is normal once you're operating seriously.
- Square Online is the value play for businesses already using Square in person, like retail counters and food businesses. The free tier is genuinely usable, the sync between in-store and online inventory is the real selling point, and the design ceiling is lower than Shopify's. For a shop that sells mostly in person and wants online as a side door, it's hard to beat on cost.
- WooCommerce and other self-hosted options trade monthly platform fees for maintenance responsibility. The software is free; the hosting, updates, security, and the developer you call when checkout breaks on a Friday are not. For most small businesses, the total cost of ownership lands near Shopify's anyway, just less predictably.
Realistic platform budget: $0 to $40/month to start, $75 to $200/month once you're running a serious store with the apps a serious store needs.
Layer 2: Payments
Card processing is the toll booth on every sale, and it's remarkably consistent across providers: expect roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents per online transaction as the standard baseline. Stripe publishes its rates plainly, and Shopify Payments and Square land in the same neighborhood.
Two things owners miss:
- Processing is a margin line, not a fee. On $10,000/month in online sales, you're paying about $300/month to move money. That's fine, it's the cost of doing business, but it belongs in your product pricing math from day one.
- Platform penalty fees. Shopify charges an additional transaction fee if you use an outside payment processor instead of Shopify Payments. Read that fine print before you commit to a processor for other reasons.
Layer 3: Content, the budget killer nobody warns you about
Here's the line item that wrecks more ecommerce budgets than any software: every product needs photos and words, and the quantity scales with your catalog.
- Product photography. Customers can't touch the product, so the photos are the product. White-background shots, lifestyle shots, detail shots, ideally three to six images per product. You can DIY with a phone, a window, and patience for a small catalog. Past twenty or thirty products, a photographer batching products at $25 to $75 per product is usually money well spent. A 50-product catalog can easily mean $1,500 to $3,500 in photography alone, and that's not padding, that's the job.
- Product descriptions. Real descriptions that answer sizing, materials, compatibility, and care questions, written so search engines can find them. Budget your own hours or someone else's dollars.
- The store build itself. Setting up the theme, configuring shipping rules and tax collection, loading the catalog, testing checkout on phones. A professional build of a small store typically runs $1,500 to $5,000 on Shopify or Square, more for large catalogs or custom design. Loading 200 products with variants is data-entry labor, and labor is the bill.
Layer 4: Operations, the cost that never stops
The store is live. Now you're a fulfillment company.
- Shipping and packaging. Boxes, mailers, label printer, and the gap between what you charge for shipping and what it actually costs you. Most new store owners under-charge for shipping for their first six months.
- Fulfillment integrations. Shipping-label apps, inventory sync, accounting sync. Individually small, collectively another $30 to $100/month.
- Returns. Online stores get them. Decide your policy before launch and price the reality in: a returned item often costs you the outbound shipping, the return shipping, and a product you may not be able to resell.
- Your time. Picking, packing, customer emails, "where's my order" messages. For a side-catalog this is an hour a day. Owners who skip this line item discover it as burnout instead of a budget entry.
Honest totals
Pulling the layers together, for a small business launching a real store with 20 to 100 products:
- Lean DIY launch: $500 to $1,500 upfront (theme, basic photos, your own labor) plus $50 to $100/month, and a lot of your evenings.
- Professionally built store: $3,000 to $8,000 upfront including build and photography, plus $100 to $250/month in platform, apps, and tools.
- Either way: about 3% of revenue to payment processing, forever.
If those numbers feel heavy for what you'd actually sell online, good. That's the signal to read the next section carefully.
When a local business doesn't need ecommerce at all
Here's the conversation we have weekly. A service business owner, say a cleaning and restoration company or a landscaping outfit, wants "an online store" because they want customers to be able to pay online. But they don't sell products. They sell appointments, estimates, and jobs.
What they actually need is some combination of:
- A booking flow. Customer picks a service and a time, you get a calendar event and their contact info. This converts far better than a cart for services, because nobody adds "gutter cleaning" to a shopping cart.
- A deposit or payment link. A simple way to take a card for a deposit or an invoice. Stripe and Square both do this without a storefront.
- A quote-request funnel. For jobs that can't be priced without eyes on them, the website's job is capturing the lead fast and following up faster.
All of that costs a fraction of a store build, has no catalog to photograph, and no inventory to manage. The test is simple: if your "products" require a conversation, a site visit, or a custom price, you need a booking flow, not a cart. If a stranger in another city could buy your thing right now without talking to you, that's ecommerce.
There's a middle case worth naming: service businesses with a small product sideline, like a salon selling product or an HVAC company selling filter subscriptions. For those, a lightweight store bolted onto a lead-generation site, usually via Square or a simple Shopify Buy Button setup, gets you there without running a full ecommerce operation.
Three questions to answer before spending a dollar
If you're still deciding, these three questions do most of the sorting:
- Would twenty strangers a month actually buy this online today? Not "could they," but "would they," given that Amazon and established niche stores exist. If your honest answer is "my in-person customers might reorder online," that's a fine answer, and it points to a simple reorder setup, not a full storefront launch with a marketing budget.
- What's my margin after the toll booths? Take your product margin, subtract roughly 3% processing, real shipping costs, packaging, returns, and platform fees. Plenty of products that work at a farmers market stop working at $8.50 of margin per online order. Better to learn that on a spreadsheet than on a credit card statement.
- Who packs the orders on a Tuesday in February? If the answer is "me, after the day job," cap your catalog small enough that success doesn't break you.
Whichever you build, the store is not the marketing
A store nobody visits sells nothing, and "build it and they will come" fails harder in ecommerce than anywhere else because you're competing with the entire internet, not the three other plumbers in town. Search visibility, product page SEO, and a Google presence are part of the real budget. That's a separate post's worth of detail, but our website and SEO service page covers how we handle it, and the math on ads versus organic is in our blog if you want to go deeper.
Want a straight answer for your specific business?
We're Omnyra, a veteran-owned shop in Wilmington, NC. We've built 1,500+ small business sites in the last 90 days, done-with-you: built live on a call with you, first draft in 24 hours, live in 7 days guaranteed. If you need a store, we'll build a store. If you need a booking flow, we'll tell you that and save you a few thousand dollars. Tiers run from $500 Minimal, $2,000 plus $200/mo Standard with SEO and AI-search optimization, $3,500 plus $400/mo Max with a 24/7 AI receptionist, and from $6,000 for Super Max custom back-office builds. Pay-in-4 and Klarna available. Numbers at /pricing, or book a call and we'll start building while you're on it.