A store is a website plus a checkout, and nearly all of the extra cost sits in the checkout: payments, shipping rules, tax, stock, and everything that has to happen the moment an order lands.
The build price is also the smaller half of the question. What determines whether a store makes money is the fee structure underneath it, and that depends almost entirely on how much you sell.
What each route costs to build
- A hosted platform, set up yourself. Shopify from $29 a month on a yearly plan. The subscription is the small part: a paid theme is $100 to $500 once, most of them around $300, and the design work is what Shopify leaves to you.
- Shopify with the theme done properly. The subscription plus a build on top. The normal route for a real catalogue, and a service here.
- A store built into your own site. Sits at the top of a normal build, and above it for a large catalogue or complicated stock. The pricing page carries the range.
- WooCommerce on WordPress. Cheap to start, with the cost arriving later as plugin subscriptions and maintenance. What that runs to is its own question.
The fees that never stop
This is the part that determines whether the store makes money.
- Payment processing. Roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction whoever you use. Unavoidable, and much the same on every route.
- Platform transaction fees. A cut of every sale on top of processing, charged by some platforms unless you use their own payments. Nothing on a store built into your own site.
- App subscriptions. Reviews, bundles, subscriptions, shipping rules, email. $10 to $50 a month each, and they accumulate.
- The subscription itself, which you pay in a month where you sell nothing at all.
At low volume the fixed monthly costs dominate and the percentages barely register. Past a few thousand dollars a month it flips, and the cut of every sale becomes the number worth working on. Find out which side of that you're on before you choose a platform.
What makes a store cost more to build
- How many products, and how many variants. Forty products in one size is a different job from twelve in five sizes and four colours with stock tracked per combination.
- Shipping rules. A flat rate is an afternoon. Rates by weight and zone, free over a threshold, local pickup and a courier integration is a project.
- Tax. One province is straightforward. Selling across Canada, or into the United States, adds real work.
- What it connects to. Inventory you already run, accounting, a till in the shop, a fulfilment service.
- Photography. The biggest single lever on whether the store sells anything, and the one most people leave until last.
Photography determines more of this than the platform does
On a brochure site a weak photograph costs you some credibility. On a store it costs you the sale, because the photograph is doing the job the shop floor would do and nobody buys what they can't see properly.
A consistent set on a clean background, shot at the same angle and scale, is what makes a product grid look like a shop. Worth doing before the build rather than after. Photography is quoted with the build. There's more on that in do I need professional photos.
When Shopify is the right answer
Real order volume, a catalogue with a lot of variants, tax in several jurisdictions, or a warehouse and fulfilment setup you need to plug into. Shopify has solved those properly and rebuilding them would be a poor use of your money.
Shopify builds and migrations are a service here too.
When to build the store into your own site
A smaller catalogue, deposits and bookings instead of a shopping cart, or a business where the store is one part of the site instead of the whole of it. No platform fee, no cut of every sale, and a checkout that looks like the rest of the site. E-commerce and booking covers what that includes.
The test is arithmetic. Take your expected monthly sales, work out what a platform subscription plus its transaction fees would take over three years, and set that against the one-off difference in build cost. At low volume the built-in store pays for itself inside a year or two. At high volume it doesn't, and Shopify is the better buy.
