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How much an online shop costs: 2026 prices and the budget you actually need
"How much does an online shop cost?" is a question with three answers, not one. And whoever asks it is usually after a single one: the build quote.
The trouble is that it's the least decisive of the three. An online shop costs money to build, costs money to keep open, and costs money to make it sell — and in most cases it's the third item that decides whether the project stands up at all.
Here are all three, with figures you can check and the date I checked them. Where a number doesn't exist, I say so rather than inventing it.
1. What it costs to build
On the Italian market an online shop with a simple catalogue costs €3,000 – €7,000, a structured one €7,000 – €20,000. Those are the bands Italian agencies publish, and they're strikingly consistent with each other: anyone offering three tiers uses almost the same scheme.
With me the online shop is on a monthly fee: €990 – €1,490 a month on a catalogue of around 30 products, no setup cost but the first three months paid up front, twelve-month minimum. Each extra language is €200 a month. Domain, hosting, certificate, backups and updates are included, and every month there are four to eight hours to change the shop. After the first twelve instalments the shop is yours, and the fee carries on for as long as you need it.
I don't sell the online shop as a one-off payment, and it's fair to explain why. A static site is a legitimate choice: if it's a business card and you have someone keeping it current, it works. A static shop isn't — it simply stops selling. Products change, prices change, payment methods change.
The full reasoning on the two routes is in how much a website costs, and the terms are on the service page.
2. What it costs to keep open
These items aren't in the build quote because the builder doesn't invoice them: they're paid to different suppliers, each with its own contract. The figures below come from official price lists, checked on 25 July 2026.
The platform
| List price | |
|---|---|
| Shopify Basic | €19/month billed annually, €27/month otherwise |
| Shopify Grow | €56/month annually, €74/month otherwise |
| PrestaShop hosted | €24/month + VAT with annual commitment |
| Squarespace Core | €18/month annually, €24/month otherwise |
| WooCommerce | free software |
On WooCommerce the software really is free, but the shop isn't: you need hosting, a domain and extensions. Managed WooCommerce hosting in Italy starts at around €249 + VAT a year, an .it domain at around €12 + VAT, and official extensions run between €70 and €250 a year each — the ones for subscriptions or configurable products sit at the top of that range.
Payment fees
| Provider | Standard European cards |
|---|---|
| Nexi XPay Link | 1.35% + €0.40, no monthly fee |
| Stripe | 1.5% + €0.25 |
| PayPal (commercial, Italy) | 3.40% + €0.35 |
| Satispay e-commerce | 1.50% + €0.20 above €10 |
One item that often slips by: on Shopify, if you don't use Shopify Payments, a transaction fee is added, from 2% on Basic down to 0.2% on Plus. It doesn't replace the gateway's fee — it stacks on top. It's written on the price list, but it's the kind of line you read after choosing.
3. The compulsory items no quote contains
This is the part that's almost always missing, and not out of bad faith: they're taxes and contributions, not services, so they don't appear in any supplier's quote. You pay them all the same.
| Item | Amount | When |
|---|---|---|
| Opening a VAT number | €0 | — |
| Business Register, sole trader | €35.50 | one-off |
| Annual chamber of commerce fee | from €44 | yearly |
| INPS retailers' contribution | €4,611.64 | yearly, fixed quota |
The last row is the one that matters. The fixed contributions for retailers in 2026 are €4,611.64 a year, owed even if you sell nothing: they aren't proportional to turnover, they're a fixed quota that starts with the business. That's an order of magnitude above all the other compulsory items combined, and it's why "open your online shop for €500" describes the software, not the business.
Two honest caveats. The chamber of commerce fee has no single national figure: some chambers apply a surcharge, which takes it to €53. And the notification filed with your local council carries processing fees set council by council — from zero to a few tens of euros: you only know yours by looking it up.
Opening a VAT number, on the other hand, costs nothing: the form is filed free of charge. The figures that circulate ("€50 to €300") are an accountant's fee, which is a reasonable choice but a different item.
4. What it costs to make it sell — the item that decides
Now the part that changes the sum. Today, in most cases, launching an online shop requires an advertising budget.
That isn't a revelation: plenty of people write it by now, and some write it well. The difference is elsewhere, and worth stating plainly: almost everyone puts advertising in the list of costs, next to hosting and the theme. Almost nobody puts it in the equation, among the constraints that decide whether the project can start at all.
The reason it's needed is simple. A new shop has no search ranking, and building one takes months — months in which the shop is online and not selling. Physical shop windows have passing trade; an online shop has to buy its passing trade, at least until it builds its own.
The allocation rule, which is the most useful advice in this whole article: if you have a total budget, don't spend all of it on the build. A beautiful shop with nobody visiting it turns over nothing, and at that point you've no margin left to bring anyone in. The right question isn't "how much can I spend on the site", it's "how much will I have left to make it seen once the site is ready".
The real constraint isn't the monthly figure, it's the duration. Two official facts are worth knowing before signing anything:
- Meta states that an ad set leaves the learning phase "after roughly 50 results in the week following the last significant edit". For shop ads it takes at least 17 purchases on the website and 5 through Meta.
- Google states that calibrating an automated bidding strategy can take "up to 3 weeks or 1-2 conversion cycles".
In plain terms: there's an initial period where you're paying and the system is still learning. It has to be budgeted and funded before you start, because that's exactly the moment when it's easiest to conclude "advertising doesn't work" and switch everything off halfway through the learning.
On how much budget you need, I'll be straight: a reliable figure for Italy doesn't exist. I looked for public cost-per-click or cost-per-acquisition benchmarks for Italian e-commerce and found none with a primary source, a stated sample and a stated methodology. Google sets no minimum budget; Meta writes that "minimum budgets can vary by country and objective". The figures circulating in blogs are almost all without origin, and repeating them here would hand you a false number wearing the clothes of a true one. The right number for you comes out of your margin per order and your sector, not out of an average.
With me, campaign management is €690 – €990 a month, and the ad budget is separate: you pay Google or Meta directly. They're two distinct lines in two distinct contracts, and they have to be added up by hand — because neither quote contains the other. Terms are on the Google campaigns and Facebook campaigns pages.
5. When advertising can wait
The exceptions are real, and it's fair to list them rather than imply it's always needed.
- You already have an audience. A customer list, a physical shop with regulars, a social profile with real people following you: that's your first traffic, and it only costs telling them.
- You sell something people search for by name. If demand for what you do already exists, the job is being found, not creating desire: there, organic ranking pays better than campaigns, on longer timescales.
- You start from marketplaces. Selling first where the customers already are is a legitimate way to validate the product without buying traffic. Your own shop comes later, once you know what sells.
The common thread: in all three cases you haven't removed the cost of acquisition, you've paid it in another currency — time, marketplace commission, work done in previous years. Free traffic doesn't exist; traffic already paid for does.
6. When it's better not to open one
I'd rather say it up front. An online shop makes little sense if the margin per order is too thin to absorb fees, shipping and acquisition cost together; if the product is identical to what's already available everywhere for less; or if nobody in the business will have time to look after it every week.
In those cases the honest thing is to tell you the problem won't be solved by a better quote.
Where to start
Do the sum in full and monthly, with the name of whoever invoices each line beside it: build, platform, payments, contributions, campaigns, ad budget. It's a higher number than you expect, but it's the only one you can actually decide on.
If you'd like me to do that sum on your case, there's the digital check-up: it costs €1,250, and 50% comes off the quote if we go ahead with the work. Otherwise write to me and tell me what you sell, at what margin and to whom: it becomes clear quite quickly whether the sum adds up — and if it doesn't, I'll say so.