How much does an e-commerce store cost?

Creating an online store is not necessary to start selling online - many entrepreneurs use platforms such as Allegro, Empik or OLX. Using someone else's website is a great solution to start with, because it is simply cheaper and provides us with potential customers from the very beginning, but as the scale of the business increases, selling on marketplaces becomes less and less profitable. For this reason, we are primarily asked to create an online store by medium-sized companies that want to reduce their costs and scale their business better. One of the first questions we receive is, of course, "how much does it cost to create an online store?", to which we generally answer briefly - it depends.

Throughout this article, we will try to estimate how much money you need to spend on a good online store and what affects the price of its implementation.

What influences the price of creating an online store?

There are many factors, but the price of creating e-commerce depends primarily on:

• Technology selection– free solutions are available, such as Woocommerce, and paid solutions, e.g. Shopify;
• Product quantities– the more products you want to add, the more work you have to spend on writing their descriptions, pasting photos and adding dimensions to shipments. Even if you have a product feed from a wholesaler, adding more products will generally be more expensive;
• Expectations about appearance– ready-made templates are much cheaper than those designed to order;
• Quality of product descriptions– depending on the store's promotion strategy, product and category descriptions can be written to order or imported, for example from the wholesaler's website;
• Type of products sold– an online store selling multi-variant products that are difficult to describe will be more expensive because at the stage of creating the website, yourSEO agencywill have to spend more time configuring all the attributes.

Is it possible to create an online store for PLN 1,000?

Of course it is, but you shouldn't expect much from it. For PLN 1,000 you can create the so-called a single-product store that will work well as a tool for selling an e-book, event tickets or a unique product promoted, for example, on TikTok.

However, creating an online store with a large number of products for PLN 1,000 will not be wise - even if you find a freelancer who will do it, you will most likely receive a job that you will not be satisfied with.

How much will it cost to create an online store in 2025?

First of all, let us point out that the amounts given in this part of the article are the average of the rates offered by freelancers and agencies, for example on Facebook groups. However, we do not rule out that you will be able to find a much cheaper or much more expensive offer.

Online store based on a ready-made template, with about 200 products imported from the product file

This is basically the most common store specification ordered by Polish entrepreneurs. Taking into account the costs of tools for integrating the website with the wholesaler, the low labor cost and the repeatability of the entire process,Creating an online store with 200 products costs from PLN 2,500 to PLN 3,500 net if you decide to choose Woocommerce and about PLN 2,000-3,000 net if you choose Shopify. The price may increase if you decide to implement additional functionalities, such as remarketing pop-ups or extensive category descriptions.

Online store based on a ready-made template, with about 50 products added manually

Shops selling handmade products are chosen by companies that produce them themselves - these may be, for example, handicraft producers. In such a case, the labor cost of entering the assortment increases dramatically because it is not possible to copy dimensions, descriptions, photos or names. It is therefore safe to assume thatpreparing such a store costs from PLN 4,000 to even PLN 7,000,000, regardless of the choice of technology.

Remember that you can reduce the cost of work when creating an e-commerce store if you prepare good quality photos of your products. We also encourage our customers to note down the most important features of the goods they sell. Thanks to this, building the store takes faster and is cheaper.

Online store based on a template created from scratch, with 200 products added manually

Such projects are the most interesting for us, but unfortunately also the most expensive for the client. Preparing an extensive online store, which requires creating its entire graphic design and adding hundreds of products and their variants, is a task that may last several weeks and usually requires the participation of several people. In extreme cases,preparing a large online store can cost PLN 20,000 or even PLN 30,000. Such projects are usually priced individually, and the agency's fee is negotiable.

Is it worth saving money on creating an online store?

Most SEO agency workers will tell you no.Creating websites to orderis an expensive process that requires knowledge and time, so if someone makes you an offer significantly below market prices, you should consider where this is coming from. Usually,cheap online stores are created by people without experience and skills, in an inaccurate and incorrect manner, or their subsequent maintenance is expensive.

In our opinion, ordering an online store below market rates is a mistake, because it usually necessitates later corrections or makes it difficult towebsite positioning. In this case, the proverb "the cunning lose twice" comes true like nowhere else.

How to lower the price of an online store?

However, there are reasonable ways to reduce the cost of creating a store -you can add products yourself or write descriptions for them. The same applies to categories - designing and describing them will save you several hundred zlotys, because an SEO specialist won't have to do it. Remember, however, that if you perform these activities yourself, you must take into account the possibility of obtaining worse results in terms of positioning.

The solution is alsoreducing the number of products and categories. According to the pareto principle, 20% of the product range generates approximately 80% of revenues. If you know which products generate the best sales, it's worth adding them first. You can add the remaining goods later, so you can spread the costs over time.

How much does it cost to maintain an online store?

This is another question with multiple answers. The costs of running an online store will vary significantly depending on the size of your company, the number of products sold, the number of orders,used WordPress pluginsor Shopify subscription or even the average shopping cart value.

In the vast majority of cases, excluding the costs of Google Ads campaigns, social media support, positioning and payment operator commissions, our clients spend from PLN 60 to PLN 200 per month on maintaining their online stores. However, for the store to make money, you need to remember about advertising expenditure, which is usually at least PLN 1,500 per month.

In practice, creating an online store to order begins to pay off when the monthly sales revenue exceeds approximately PLN 20,000 per month. This may be an unrealistic value for beginner entrepreneurs, but it quickly turns out that obtaining such income is very simple. The key is good advertising and high quality customer service!

Is a custom online store a good investment?

In our opinion, yes. 80% of the online stores we open pay off within the first three months of establishment. However, it is not worth giving up selling on Allegro or other marketplaces immediately - the best results occur when you run your business in several places, thus diversifying your revenues.

Are you planning to set up your own online store? Choose a company that will guide you through the entire process from start to finish. Don't waste your money and time on half-measures - Advicomp is the best business partner for your e-commerce!