"What an online store really costs in its first year: a full decomposition"

"What does an online store cost" is a question whose honest answer sounds like "somewhere between four hundred dollars and twenty thousand". The spread is not down to greedy contractors but to people counting different things: some count only the subscription, some the subscription plus the build, some everything including advertising.

Let us go line by line, so you can assemble your own budget.

1. The platform subscription

This is the one line you cannot avoid. Rough shape of the market:

Option	Per month	Notes
Shopify Basic	$29 annual / $39 monthly	Hosting, security and updates included
Shopify Grow	~$79	Worth it mainly for lower card rates at volume
WooCommerce + shared hosting	from ~$10	Platform free; you own updates and backups
WooCommerce + managed WordPress	$25–50	Someone else handles updates and backups
A local platform	$10–90	Local payments, carriers and receipts built in

Annual billing is typically around 20% cheaper. Most platforms give a free trial — enough to load 20 products and work out whether the logic suits you.

What to pick. A store under a thousand products is fine on the entry plan, and that is not a crippled tier — design and base functionality are in all of them. You move up when the catalog grows or you need more complex filtering. Paying for the top tier before you have the volume to justify it changes nothing about your sales.

2. Build and setup

This is where the spread is widest, because here you are paying for someone else's time.

Yourself: $0

Every platform ships free themes. If you have 30–50 products, you are patient and prepared to spend a week of evenings, you can do it without anyone. That is real and it is fine.

A freelancer: $150–400

They will load the products, configure the theme, connect payments and shipping. The standard risk: the catalog structure gets built "so that it exists" rather than around demand — and in a year you will be redoing it along with every page URL.

An agency: $550–1,800

Published packages tend to look like this: a basic launch with no code work around $550; with widgets and marketing blocks around $700; with CSS/JS customisation and CRM integrations around $1,000. A fully custom build with B2B features and a performance stack runs to roughly $1,800.

Timelines in both cases: 10–20 working days, if the content is ready on your side.

3. Payments

The gateway integration itself is usually included in the platform — what you pay for is transactions. The market benchmark is 1.5–2.9% of turnover depending on provider and volume.

Work this out in advance: at $10,000 a month in turnover, the fee is $150–290 every month — more than any platform subscription. And check whether your platform charges an extra percentage for using a third-party gateway in your country; Shopify does where Shopify Payments is unavailable.

4. Receipts and tax compliance

If you take card payments, most jurisdictions require you to issue a receipt and report it. Some countries provide free official software; commercial options with better interfaces and integrations cost a few tens of dollars a month. You pay either for the setup or with your own time understanding it.

This is the line most often deferred "until later" — and the one people most often get burned on. Penalties for operating without it are far more expensive than the setup. More on this separately.

5. Shipping

Carrier integrations are built in almost everywhere. The costs are the shipments themselves and, if you offer cash on delivery, the money-transfer fee plus the return leg for parcels nobody collects. That last one never appears in a budget, and it eats margin systematically.

6. Small items that add up

• Domain — $10–30 a year
• Content — product photos and text. Either your time, or $2–6 per product outsourced
• Analytics — GA4, GTM and Merchant Center are free; you pay for the setup
• Email on your domain — $0 to $7 a month

Four scenarios for the first year

Scenario	Up front	Monthly	Year one
Do it yourself, free theme, entry plan	$0	$29	≈ $380
Freelancer + entry plan	$250	$29	≈ $620
Agency mid package + entry plan	$700	$39	≈ $1,200
Full custom + higher tier and apps	$1,800	$150	≈ $3,600

Advertising is not included — that is a separate budget, and it is usually larger than everything listed here combined.

What is genuinely not worth economising on

Not the design — the ready-made themes are good. And not the subscription tier — the difference between entry and mid will not change your sales.

What is not worth economising on is the catalog structure. It is the one launch decision that is most expensive to redo later: along with page URLs, redirects, and the loss of rankings you had already earned. Categories have to be built around what people actually search for, not around how it is convenient for you to arrange stock in the warehouse. On that, separately.

And do not economise on analytics at launch. A store without correct ecommerce events is a store where, six months in, you will not be able to say what worked.