Having a webshop built costs most brands between 1,500 and 7,500 euros for a custom store in 2026, depending on the number of products, the integrations you need and how unique the design has to be. A simple store on a standard platform can cost less, a complex webshop with stock and point of sale links runs higher. But price is not the most important thing. The question that counts is whether your webshop actually sells.
Many online stores look fine and still do almost nothing. They load slowly, never get found in Google and send visitors nowhere. At Viralistic we build webshops for brands that want to grow: fast, findable and built to convert. This guide explains what a webshop costs, how the process works and what to look for.
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What does having a webshop built cost?
The price depends on the platform, the design and the integrations you need. These are the going rates in the market:
| Type of store | Best for | Indicative price (one off) |
|---|---|---|
| Standard platform or template | Starters, small range | 500 to 1,500 euros |
| Custom webshop | Growing brands, own identity | 1,500 to 7,500 euros |
| Complex webshop | Stock, point of sale and ERP links | 7,500 euros and up |
On top of that come fixed costs such as hosting, a payment provider and website maintenance. Want a full breakdown of how website costs are built up? Read what a website costs in 2026 (in Dutch).
Watch the cheap few hundred euro store
A 699 euro webshop sounds attractive, but often delivers a slow, generic store that never gets found and barely sells. You pay twice: first for the store, then for the rebuild. A good webshop is an investment that pays for itself through revenue.
Start a webshop yourself, or have one built?
Many people who want to start a webshop are not looking for an agency at all. They want to know whether they can do it themselves. That is a fair question, and the answer is yes more often than an agency will tell you.
Doing it yourself is the sensible route while you are still finding out whether your product sells. With Shopify or WooCommerce you are online within a few weeks, against a monthly fee rather than an investment up front. You get to know your own store, you discover what customers actually ask, and you can adjust without having to call someone every time. For a first webshop with a manageable range, that is nearly always the right order to do things in.
The calculation changes once your webshop becomes your main sales channel. Then it stops being about being online and starts being about how much gets sold. One percent more conversion is real money at that point, and you rarely get that percent out of a theme.
When it tips
A workable rule of thumb: as long as your time is cheaper than the revenue you are missing, do it yourself. Once your revenue depends on the store, or you notice you spend more time on adjustments than on selling, outsourcing becomes cheaper than pushing on.
In practice there are three moments where it tips. You hit the limits of your theme and every change takes days. Your store has slowed down under accumulated apps and plugins, and that is costing you visitors. Or you simply are not being found, because a standard store is rarely built with findability as a starting point.
If you are not there yet, our honest advice is to start yourself. Pick a platform via Shopify or WooCommerce, go live, and come back when your store is worth investing in properly. We would rather build for someone who knows what their customers want than for someone still finding out.
Why a custom webshop that sells?
A beautiful webshop is not the goal. Selling is the goal. Thoughtful UI/UX design is the common thread, and that is why we build every store around three pillars.
We build technically clean, lightning fast stores with findability in Google and AI baked in from the first sketch. A slow store costs you revenue and rankings directly.
A logical route from product page to checkout, without distraction. Every screen moves the visitor one step closer to the purchase.
Links to your stock, bookkeeping and payment provider, plus smart automation of orders and follow up. Less manual work, more sales.
Ecommerce web design: what actually moves the numbers
Ecommerce design gets judged on how it looks and paid for on how it sells, and those two are less related than most people expect. A store can win a design award and still leak buyers at the same three points every competent shop knows to check.
The product page carries the sale
More buying decisions get made on the product page than anywhere else, so it is worth being specific about what belongs there.
| Element | Why it decides the sale |
|---|---|
| Images that survive zoom | The single biggest substitute for handling the product. Thin galleries lose buyers silently |
| Price and delivery cost together | Shipping revealed late at checkout is the most common reason a cart is abandoned |
| Stock and delivery date | ”In stock, tomorrow” converts better than a lower price with no date |
| Reviews near the button | Proof works where the decision happens, not on a separate page |
| Returns, stated plainly | The bigger the purchase, the more the return policy is doing the selling |
| Variant selection that cannot confuse | Size and colour pickers that hide out-of-stock combinations, rather than failing after the click |
The pattern underneath these: every one removes a reason to hesitate. Design work on an ecommerce site is mostly the removal of doubt, in the order the buyer encounters it.
Checkout is where the money leaks
Checkout is the least glamorous screen in the store and the one with the clearest link to revenue. The rules are well established and widely ignored.
Allow guest checkout. Forcing account creation before purchase costs sales from exactly the first-time buyers you paid to acquire. Show the full cost early, including shipping and tax, because a total that grows at the last step reads as a trick. Ask for as little as you can invoice and ship with. Show progress, so the buyer knows how much is left. And offer the payment methods your market actually uses, which in the Netherlands means iDEAL before anything else.
Design for the phone first, honestly
Most stores now take the majority of their traffic on mobile and a minority of their revenue, and the gap between those two numbers is a design problem rather than a fact of nature. Check your own split before anything else: if mobile traffic is high and mobile conversion is low, the phone experience is where your money is, no matter how good the desktop store looks.
Speed is a design decision
Ecommerce design fails most expensively through weight. Large hero images, carousels, review widgets, chat popups, tracking scripts and an analytics stack all arrive as design and marketing choices and leave as load time. Every one of them is defensible on its own, and collectively they are why a store takes six seconds on a phone.
That matters more here than on a brochure site, because a slow store costs you twice: once in the ranking, and once in the buyer who leaves before seeing the product. See Core Web Vitals for how to measure it and why speed matters for what it does to visibility.
Design and findability are one job
The most common expensive mistake is treating design and SEO as two phases with a handover between them. A store designed first and optimised afterwards ends up with category pages that have nowhere to put text, product pages with no room for the questions buyers actually ask, and a URL structure that has to be rebuilt.
Built together, those are not compromises. Category pages get a place for real content, product pages answer the questions that otherwise become support emails, and the structure makes sense to both a buyer and a crawler. That is also what makes a store quotable in AI answers, which increasingly decide which shops a buyer even considers.
How does the process work?
We work in phased sprints under one strategic direction. You approve each phase before the next begins, so the store ships fast with barely any rework.
An online meeting where we test your goal, your range and your readiness. If a custom webshop is not right for you, we say so honestly.
We lock the style, the product structure and the project plan. Here we decide together how the journey to the purchase runs.
We design and build the store, connect your payment provider and stock, and test everything thoroughly before we go live.
The store goes live, findable and ready to sell. After that we optimize based on real numbers and expand the automation.
Practical things to arrange in advance
Register your business with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce (KVK), choose a payment provider such as Mollie or Adyen so customers can pay with iDEAL, and think about shipping and returns. We handle the technical links, so this runs smoothly from day one.
What makes Viralistic different?
We reject templates and generic text. Google rewards genuine, expert content. Legitimate copy on a technically strong store is why you keep ranking high.
From Amsterdam we build for local brands and internationally facing companies. With SilverDrive we grew a brand into an internationally operating service running on organic findability.
“Since Viralistic manages our SEO and online stores, we have seen a strong rise in revenue. Contact runs smoothly and in emergencies we can count on fast, professional help.” Kalyan Bryokbohun
Frequently asked questions about ecommerce websites
What does it cost to have a webshop built?
According to webshop builder Viralistic, a custom webshop usually costs between 1,500 and 7,500 euros one off. Simple stores on a standard platform are cheaper, complex stores with stock and point of sale links run above 7,500 euros. We set the exact price in the project plan.
How expensive is a webshop per month?
Expect fixed costs for hosting, a payment provider and maintenance. A simple setup starts around a few tens of euros per month, a professional store with more links and maintenance is higher. You also pay a small fee per transaction to your payment provider.
Is a Chamber of Commerce registration required for a webshop?
Yes. In the Netherlands you register your business with the Chamber of Commerce (KVK) before you sell. The KVK passes your details to the Tax Administration, so a separate registration there is usually not needed.
How fast is my webshop online?
That depends on the size and the number of integrations. Thanks to our phased approach, with a mandatory sign off per phase, a webshop ships faster than at agencies that tackle everything at once without structure. We set the timeline together in the planning phase.
Ready for a webshop that sells?
Book a free orientation call. In one online meeting we show how your webshop becomes fast, findable and built to convert, and what it returns.
