Website design for e-commerce: what the build costs, and what the store costs after

What does e-commerce website design cost?

An e-commerce website is built around four core pages, whatever the platform: a product listing or gallery, individual product detail pages, a cart, and a checkout flow that takes payment, laid out responsively by default so it works the same on a phone as a desktop. WebFX puts the average cost of an ecommerce build with 100 to 1,000 products at $2,000 to $25,000, with ecommerce functionality alone running $2,000 to $25,000 and responsive design $3,000 to $25,000, per its published pricing page linked above.

Most people pricing a build start by gathering visual references, and the search results for e-commerce design are largely galleries: Dribbble, Awwwards, Land-book, Behance, ecomm.design, CSS Design Awards, and Figma Community, usually filtered by product vertical (fashion, electronics, furniture, home decor, beauty, food) or by the platform the build sits on (Shopify, BigCommerce, Webflow, Framer, Wix). That is useful for style. It says nothing about what the store costs to run.

Here's the pivot: the design quote is a one-time number. Everything below it starts billing the day the store goes live, and most of it scales with how well the store sells, not with what it cost to build.

Why your processing rate is not the rate you were quoted

WooPayments publishes a US domestic card rate of 2.90% plus $0.30 a transaction, with a caveat worth stating plainly: this is one published US rate, used here for the arithmetic, and the reader's own processor may charge something different. What that fixed $0.30 does, and what no cost guide walks through, is move the effective rate depending on how big the average order is.

A store selling $15 items pays roughly 60% more of its revenue to its processor than one selling $150 items, on the identical published rate. That's not a reason to raise prices. It's a reason to put basket size in the brief. Bundles, quantity or set options, a visible free-shipping threshold, and what the cart page shows before checkout are all levers a designer can build for, and they're worth raising explicitly when you scope the site. None of them is a guaranteed lift in average order value: no source publishes that number, so none is claimed here. They're a brief requirement, not a promise.

What the platform actually bills you

BigCommerce's published pricing shows why "platform cost" is not a flat line. Core runs $39 a month, or $29 a month billed annually, for "Up to $30K TTM GMV; plan auto-upgrades to Growth." Growth runs $105 a month, or $79 annually, for "Up to $100K TTM GMV; plan auto-upgrades to Scale." Scale runs $399 a month, or $299 annually, capped at "$33,333/month GMV; (0.9% on GMV above cap)." Performance is custom pricing, from $1,499 a month billed annually. The plan moves itself as sales grow. You don't choose the upgrade; the trailing twelve months of sales does.

The same page publishes a second cost most cost guides skip: which payment gateway you plug in changes what you pay, permanently. BigCommerce's Open Payment Provider fees run 2.0%, 1.0%, and 0.6% by tier, dropping to 0.0% with a contract, while its embedded payment providers carry a $0 fee. Shopify's pricing page publishes the same structure from the other direction: a third-party payment provider surcharge of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, and 0.2% on Plus, charged on top of whatever that third-party provider itself charges. It's a checkbox decided in a build meeting, usually by whoever already has a merchant account, and it never appears on a design quote.

Most cost guides we've read, including agency service pages and platform blogs, print the platform fee as a single flat monthly number in a "running costs" section. That's not how the bill works once a store is actually growing: it steps up on its own, on a schedule the vendor sets, not the merchant.

What three years really costs

Set BigCommerce's own tiers and the WooPayments reference rate against a three-year horizon, at a $50 average order value.

Set against WebFX's $2,000 to $25,000 design range: at the smallest tier, three years of recurring cost beats a cheap design build but not an expensive one. By the time a store is doing $400,000 a year in sales, the recurring stack is more than double the top of that entire design range, and that's before apps, hosting, maintenance, or SEO. At the reference rate and a $50 basket, three years of card processing alone passes the $25,000 top of the design range at roughly 400 orders a month, about $240,000 a year in sales. This is arithmetic from the vendors' own published figures, not a published statistic, and it leaves out apps, hosting, maintenance, and SEO, which run to WebFX's separate ranges above.

Do you need a full store yet?

Not every business pricing "an e-commerce website" needs the build this article has been costing out. Run a plain test. If the range is a handful of products, or most orders arrive by message, invoice, or in person, a storefront with a single checkout or buy link carries it, and the platform and processing stack above barely registers. If there's a real catalogue, product variants, stock to track, or shipping rules, that's a store, and it should be built and budgeted as one.

Disclosure: Press, which publishes this guide, is a web design studio, and this is the one place in this article it's named. Press's standard build shows you the finished design first, free, and you pay a one-time keep price of $299 only if you keep it. That build can carry a single checkout or buy link at the storefront tier. It is not a full multi-product catalogue-and-cart build; that's larger scope, quoted separately. See Press's boutique and storefront builds for what's actually included at that tier. If you're weighing what happens to the site itself once it's built, that's a separate question from what it costs to run; see do I own my website for that angle.

What to put in the brief

• —Bundle, quantity or set options, a free-shipping threshold, and cart-page display, sized to your actual average order value, not a guess.
• —A named decision-owner for which payment gateway to use. It's a small checkbox with a permanent percentage cost attached.
• —A platform tier expectation matched to a realistic first-year sales projection, so the plan you budget for isn't the plan you outgrow in month four.

If the question you're actually asking is what a designer or agency charges to build the site, rather than what the store costs to run afterward, that's a separate question with its own answer; see how much web designers charge.

Questions