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 maths doesn't work. Two shops with the same number of products can differ in scope several times over. It all depends on whether the catalogue has to sync with something, how shipping is worked out and who ends up typing the products in. Let's take it one piece at a time.

A web shop is not a website plus a cart

A presentation site has one job. It has to explain what you do and get the visitor to contact you. A web shop has five jobs at once, and they all have to line up. It has to show the product, work out the shipping, take the money, tell the warehouse and issue an invoice. Each of those steps has its own rules, and each can fail on its own.

That's why comparing by page count makes no sense here. A shop with twenty products whose stock has to match the till in the physical shop is a bigger job than a shop with two hundred products that someone enters by hand and that never run out.

Six things that really set the scope

When we put an estimate together, almost the entire difference between two quotes sits in these six things. The number of products only comes seventh in importance.

Say you run a small business with twenty or so products, no variants, a flat shipping rate and payment by bank transfer. That's a relatively small project. A shop with three thousand items that change every day, on the other hand, isn't a website any more. It's a system.

Syncing is the most expensive word in a quote

The price almost always jumps at the same moment, the one where stock in the web shop has to match what's on the shelf. 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're into an integration. And an integration means someone has to learn somebody else's system, cope with its errors and make sure nothing gets lost when the connection drops.

For Zov Divljine that meant 3,283 items reconciled with a Micronic KIS till every fifteen minutes. When someone in the shop takes the last piece, fifteen minutes later nobody can order that piece online. You won't see that in a screenshot. But it's the difference between a shop that works and a shop that rings some customer every week to apologise.

Card payment is a project of its own

Plenty of people expect card payment to be a switch you just flip. Sadly, it isn't. You need to sign a contract with the provider, go through a check on the company, and set up a test environment and 3-D Secure authentication. Then every scenario gets tested, from a successful payment and a declined card to an abandoned transaction and a refund.

Which provider to pick depends on where your customers are. If they're mostly in Croatia and you bank locally, it's usually WSPay or CorvusPay, the two local card gateways. For customers abroad and for subscriptions, Stripe is simpler to build in and has better documentation, though it isn't 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.

Whichever you choose, the fee per transaction is your ongoing cost, not ours. So work it into your margin before you set your prices.

The costs nobody mentions in a quote

The build price is just one number. The others are below, 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 photos is not an afternoon's work. You can do it, we can, or a third party can, but someone has to.
• Photography. A bad photo kills sales faster than a bad design. If you don't have product shots on a white background, count that as a line item too.
• Descriptions. A description copied from the supplier's site won't rank well on Google, because fifty other shops have the same text.
• Fees. Card payment, and often the courier too, take their percentage of every order.
• Maintenance. A shop that takes money has to stay up to date and secure all the time, and that's not something you do once and forget.

How to cut the cost without wrecking the project

The best way to make a web shop cheaper is to narrow down the first version, rather than to ask for a discount. 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 costs less, because by then you know what you actually need.

But the foundation is not the place to save. By that we mean speed, a correct structure for search engines and secure payment. You can't simply “add” those later without redoing a good part of the work. Everything else, like filters, discounts, loyalty schemes and more languages, can wait for phase two. Why that foundation is hard to get on an off-the-shelf platform, we explained in WordPress or custom code.

If you're not sure what the right scope is for you, describe what you sell and how you keep track of stock today. We can put together a far more accurate estimate from that than from a product count. You can read how we build shops on the web shop page. And the legal side, from fiscalisation to terms of business, we covered in what you need for an online shop in Croatia.