How much does a web shop cost in 2026?

With a presentation site you can roughly guess the scope of the work from the number of pages. With a web shop that does not work. Two shops with the same number of products can differ several times over in scope, depending on whether the catalogue has to sync with something, how shipping is calculated and who ends up typing the products in. Below we break down where that difference really comes from.

A web shop is not a website plus a cart

A presentation site has one job: to explain, and to get the visitor to make contact. A web shop has five jobs that all have to line up at the same time: show the product, work out the shipping, take the money, tell the warehouse and issue an invoice. Each one has its own rules and each one can fail on its own.

That is why comparing by page count is meaningless. A shop with twenty products that has to sync stock with the till in the shop is a bigger job than a shop with two hundred products that someone enters by hand and that never go out of stock.

Five things that really set the scope

When we put an estimate together, almost the entire difference between two quotes sits in these five points. The number of products comes sixth in importance, not first.

If you run a small trade with twenty or so products, no variants, a flat shipping rate and payment by bank transfer, that is a relatively small project. If you have a shop with three thousand items that change every day, that is a system, not a website.

Syncing is the most expensive word in a quote

The moment the price jumps is almost always the same one: when stock in the web shop has to match what is on the shelf in the shop. As long as you enter products by hand, everything is simple. The moment the catalogue has to update itself from the till or the ERP, you are into an integration, and an integration means someone has to learn somebody else's system, handle its errors and make sure nothing is lost when the connection drops.

For Zov Divljine that meant 3,283 items reconciled with a Micronic KIS till every fifteen minutes. A customer who picks up the last piece in the shop cannot order that same piece online fifteen minutes later. It is the sort of functionality that does not show up in a screenshot, and it is the difference between a shop that works and a shop that rings a customer every week to apologise.

Card payment is a project of its own

Plenty of people expect card payment to be a switch you flip. It is not. It takes a contract with the provider, a check on the company, a test environment, 3-D Secure authentication and testing of every scenario: a successful payment, a declined card, an abandoned transaction, a refund.

Which provider you pick depends on where your customers are. For mostly Croatian customers and a Croatian bank it is usually WSPay or CorvusPay, the two local card gateways. For international customers and for subscriptions, Stripe is simpler to build in and has better documentation, though it is not always the cheapest per transaction. For Gospoja Mendula payment runs through Stripe because the shop sells outside Croatia as well; for Zov Divljine it runs through WSPay because the customers are domestic.

Either way, the fee per transaction is your ongoing cost, not ours. Work it into your margin before you set your prices.

The costs nobody mentions in a quote

The build price is one number. These are the rest, and on most projects they add up to an amount nobody enjoys hearing about only at the end.

• Product entry. Three hundred items with a description, a price, a weight and three photographs is not an afternoon's work. Someone has to do it: you, us or a third party, but someone does.
• Photography. A bad photograph kills conversion faster than a bad design. If you have no product shots on a white background, that is a line item.
• Descriptions. A description copied from the supplier's site does not rank on Google, because fifty other shops have the same one.
• Fees. Card payment, and often the courier as well, take their percentage of every order.
• Maintenance. A shop that takes money has to stay up to date and secure. That is not a one-off job.

How to cut the cost without wrecking the project

The best way to make a web shop cheaper is not to ask for a discount, it is to narrow the first version. Start with the part of the catalogue that sells best, one shipping method and one payment method. Once the shop is live and you can see how customers behave, expanding it is cheaper, because by then you know what is actually needed.

What is not worth saving on is the foundation: speed, a correct structure for search engines and secure payment. Those cannot be “added” afterwards without redoing a good part of the work. Everything else (filters, discounts, loyalty schemes, more languages) can wait for phase two. Why that foundation is hard to get on an off-the-shelf platform we set out in WordPress or custom code.

If you are not sure what the right scope is for you, describe what you sell and how you keep track of stock today. An estimate follows from that far better than from a product count. More on how we build shops on the web shop page, and the legal side, from fiscalisation to terms of business, we went through in what you need for an online shop in Croatia.