Every article with this title gives you a range, and every one of those ranges is either so wide it contains every store ever built or so specific it is wrong for yours. This one does not have a figure, and the reason is worth stating plainly: we have no verified price data to publish. What we have is our own project records, which describe what was built rather than what the market charges, and a range assembled from impressions of competitors is an invented number.
What follows is what a figure would have been standing in for, and it is more useful: what you are actually buying under the phrase, why the build quote is the smaller half of what the store costs you, and the recurring bill that almost never appears in a proposal.
Three different products share this name
The first reason quotes vary wildly is that the same three words describe jobs that are not versions of each other.
Configuration. A well-chosen commercial theme, set up properly, with your products loaded, your payments and shipping configured and your pages written. No custom code at all. For a conventional catalogue this is a genuinely complete answer and it is the cheapest thing on this list by a wide margin. Agencies are quiet about it because there is not much to invoice.
Custom sections on a theme. The middle, and where most real projects land. The theme handles the ordinary work and custom code handles the parts your merchandising does that no theme anticipates — a configurator, a room-based browse alongside a category one, bundles priced differently from their parts, a size guide that varies by brand. Each is a discrete piece of work and the count of them, more than anything else, is what moves a quote.
Bespoke front end or checkout work. The expensive end. A headless storefront, or checkout customisation, which on standard plans is not really possible — anyone promising it is describing something that breaks at the next platform update. Checkout work requires the enterprise tier, which is a recurring commercial conversation that dwarfs the build cost. If anything in your brief touches the checkout, establish that in the first call, because it decides which plan you are on for the life of the store.
Work out which of the three you are commissioning before you speak to anybody. It takes about twenty minutes and it is the difference between three comparable quotes and three incomparable ones.
The build is the smaller half
This is the part almost no cost article covers, and it is where stores actually get expensive.
The platform subscription is the obvious one and the one people do budget for. Transaction costs are the one they underestimate, particularly if they use a payment provider other than the platform's own, which attracts an additional cut on every order forever.
The app stack is the real story. Most stores accumulate somewhere between eight and twenty apps, each solving one problem, each billing monthly, and two or three of them usually overlapping. That bill compounds quietly and nobody re-reads it. It is entirely normal for a merchant's annual app spend to exceed what they paid for the build — and unlike the build, it recurs every year and grows. When you take quotes, ask each agency for the list of apps they intend to install with a monthly figure against each line. The agency that reaches for a paid app at every requirement is optimising for its own delivery speed and handing you the invoice.
Then the work nobody quotes for. Product photography. Writing the product copy. Migrating content properly. Someone maintaining the thing after launch. These are real costs that land on you whether or not they appear in a proposal, and the cheapest quote is very often the one that has quietly left all four with you.
What genuinely moves a build quote
In rough order of impact.
How much of your merchandising the theme already handles. The single biggest variable, and the one least often discussed at quoting stage. A standard catalogue needs no custom work. Cost enters at every point where your products do something the theme has no concept of.
Whether this is a migration, and how many addresses you have. A new store is a smaller job than a replatform, and the difference is not design — it is catalogue reconciliation and the redirect map. A shop with hundreds of products and years of content has thousands of URLs that each need mapping. Done properly it takes real time; done badly it costs you search traffic you spent years earning, which is the most expensive way this project fails.
How unusual your product data is. Simple products with a few variants are cheap. Expensive: more option combinations than the platform natively allows, subscriptions, customer-specific or calculated pricing, bundles. All of it is knowable from a catalogue export before anyone quotes.
How many systems it must talk to. A mainstream accounting package or courier is routine. A warehouse system with no API and a nightly export is a project of its own. Name every system in the brief, including the embarrassing one in the back office.
How to compare the quotes you get
Four questions, and they work regardless of where the agencies are.
Ask for the exclusions list, and treat a proposal without one as an opening position rather than a quote. Ask for the app list with monthly costs. Ask who owns the store, theme and accounts during and after the project — the right answer is you, from day one, with the agency working under access you can revoke. And ask to see a store the client has grown substantially since handover, which tests whether the build was maintainable and is very difficult to fake.
If you want the same question answered for a specific market, we have written the British version and a three-way comparison of Los Angeles, Austin and offshore pricing. Neither of those has a figure either, for the same reason this one does not.
And if what you actually want is a number for your store rather than a number for the category, that is a quote rather than an article. Ours starts with a free written teardown of what you already have, back inside 48 hours, and you keep it whether or not you go any further.
