What ecommerce development actually costs in 2026

Nobody publishes prices, so every store owner starts this process blind and finds out their budget was wrong after four discovery calls. Here are the bands agencies actually quote, and — more usefully — what moves a project between them.

The bands

Scope	Typical range	What you get
Theme setup and configuration	$2k – $8k	A premium theme, your branding, products loaded, payments and shipping live
Customised theme build	$8k – $25k	The above plus meaningful custom sections, a designed PDP and cart, basic integrations
Custom design and build	$40k – $120k	Original design from research, custom functionality, several integrations, staged QA
Headless / composable	$150k+	A decoupled front end, usually because of performance, internationalisation or a complex catalogue
Replatform (migration)	$15k – $80k	Data migration, URL mapping, parity build, cutover plan

Ongoing work is separate and usually runs $1.5k–$8k a month for a retainer that includes real development hours rather than just monitoring.

What actually moves the number

Integrations, not pages

The instinct is to price by page count. Agencies don’t. A twelve-page site that syncs to NetSuite, a 3PL, a subscription app and a tax engine is several times the work of a forty-page site that syncs to nothing. Every integration is an API to learn, an error state to design, and a thing that will break in eight months.

When you brief, list your systems before you list your pages.

Catalogue complexity

Five hundred simple products is easier than forty products with configurable options, volume pricing, and per-customer catalogues. B2B pricing rules in particular can cost more than the entire front end.

Whether the design exists

“We have a designer already” removes 25–40% of a build quote — but only if the design is delivered as a real system with states, breakpoints and components. A set of three desktop mockups is not a design; it’s a mood board that will generate change requests.

Content and data readiness

Product copy, photography and clean data are the most common reason projects slip. If the agency has to chase your catalogue, you pay for that time either in fees or in months.

What “cheap” usually means

A $3k quote for a custom build is not a bargain, it’s a different scope than you think. Usually it means a theme with the demo content swapped out, no QA process, and no one available when checkout breaks on Black Friday. That can be exactly right for a store doing $10k a month. It’s negligent for one doing $500k.

How to sanity-check a quote

Ask three questions:

1. What’s explicitly out of scope? A good proposal has a longer exclusions list than you expect. A proposal without one will generate change orders.
2. Who actually does the work, and where? Sales lead, delivery team, or a subcontractor you’ll never meet — all are workable, but the price should reflect which.
3. What happens after launch? Thirty days of bug fixes is standard. Anything less is a flag; the bugs you find in week three are the ones that matter.

A note on hourly rates

Published rates in this directory’s price fields range from $25/hr to $500/hr. That spread is real, and it is mostly geography plus seniority. A $40/hr developer who needs three times the hours and a rebuild in a year is not cheaper. But a $300/hr agency is not automatically better either — you’re often paying for a strategy layer a $50k project doesn’t need.

Match the rate to the risk. If the site failing costs you $5k, hire accordingly. If it costs you $500k, hire accordingly.

Ready to get concrete? Send us a brief and we’ll tell you which band your project is actually in.