What does an ecommerce website actually cost?
Search this and you get eleven results quoting eleven ranges, two of which are forum threads. Here is a fixed number, what it covers, and — more useful than either — what you keep paying every month afterwards.
The short answer
An online store costs €690 with us. Fixed, agreed before the work starts, custom-designed, built in Next.js. There is no monthly platform fee afterwards because the store is code rather than a subscription — you pay Stripe its processing rate and that is the end of the recurring cost, unless you want maintenance at €39 a month.
What everyone else quotes
These are not our estimates. Each is quoted on a page ranking on Google’s first result page for this question, checked in August 2026, and attributed to it.
| Approach | Quoted cost | Source |
|---|---|---|
| DIY template store | $50–$500 | Easy Digital Downloads |
| Shopify and similar, per month | $30–$400 / mo | AI Overview summary |
| Freelancer or paid theme, semi-custom | $3,000–$10,000 | Fyresite |
| Mid-sized custom design | $10,000–$40,000 | Fyresite |
| Custom agency build | $5,000–$50,000+ | Shopify, Quora |
| Enterprise build | $40,000–$150,000+ | Easy Digital Downloads |
| Nanostar | €690 fixed | Published on our services page |
The number that matters more than the build price
A store you build once you then pay for every month, and the monthly cost is where a cheap build gets expensive. This is the part almost every quote leaves out.
| Recurring | With us | Typical elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| Platform fee | None | $30–$400 / month on hosted platforms |
| Apps and plugins | None | $0–$500+ / month |
| Payment processing | Stripe’s standard rate, paid to Stripe | 2.4%–3.5% + $0.30 per transaction |
| Hosting | $0 at typical traffic on Vercel | $10–$250+ / month |
| Maintenance | €39 / month, optional | 15%–25% of build cost per year |
The right-hand column is quoted from the pages currently ranking for this question. Add the platform fee and apps together and a hosted store can run $360 to $10,800 a year before a single order — which is worth knowing when comparing it against a one-off build price.
What €690 covers
- A product catalogue with categories, variants and stock levels you manage yourself.
- Stripe checkout by default, or the processor you already use — the account stays yours.
- A custom design, not a purchased theme, drawn for your products.
- Order emails, and an admin you can actually use without training.
- Technical SEO: product schema, titles, descriptions, sitemap, Search Console.
- Core Web Vitals measured before handover. Checkout speed is revenue, not vanity.
Not covered, and honestly so: product photography, product descriptions, and any integration with a warehouse or ERP system you already run. The first two are better from you. The third is real work and gets quoted separately, before it starts.
When you should not hire us
If you are selling ten products and want to be live this weekend, a Shopify trial will do it faster and you can move later. If you need multi-warehouse inventory, multi-currency tax handling and an ERP integration, you are in the $40,000+ tier the table above describes and you should be talking to someone who staffs for it.
The middle is where a fixed €690 makes sense: a real catalogue, a design that is yours, no monthly platform bill, and code you own outright.
Tell us what you sell
How many products, how you want to take payment, and anything it has to connect to. You get a price and a timeline, usually within a working day.