Free calculator · Website and Cost
E-commerce Store Cost Calculator.
Online stores price differently from a brochure site. Enter catalogue size, payment gateway, inventory sync and multi-currency needs for a build cost that reflects that.
Sets the recommended prices below to this market's rates.
Pick your sector to start from the scope a brief like yours usually needs. Every input stays editable.
Estimated build cost
AED 7,059 - AED 10,797
One-off build in AED. Every price feeding this range was editable above.
An estimate, not a quote, reviewed August 2026. Payment gateway and marketplace fees are charged by the provider directly and are never part of a build price.
Estimate done
Want the real number for your project?
An estimate works from typical scope. A quotation works from yours. Send this breakdown over and you get a fixed price back, from the person who would do the work, within one business day.
What this tool measures
Online stores price differently from brochure sites, and the difference is not the cart. It is that a store has to stay correct: stock levels, prices, tax rates, shipping rules and order states all have to agree with reality at every moment, and each place they can disagree is work someone has to do.
That is why this asks about catalogue size, gateways, inventory sync and multi-currency rather than about pages. A store with eight products and three sales channels is a harder build than a store with four hundred products sold only on the website, and pricing them by page count gets that exactly backwards.
How to use it
Catalogue size is about variants, not products. One shirt in five sizes and four colours is twenty stock keeping units, and every one of them needs a price, a stock level and a photo. Count that way and the estimate will be much closer.
Payment gateways are worth being honest about. One card gateway is straightforward. Card plus a local wallet plus cash on delivery is three different flows, three reconciliation processes and three sets of failure cases, and in this region that combination is the norm rather than the exception.
Inventory or point-of-sale sync is the item that most often turns a modest project into a large one. If stock is also sold in a physical shop or on a marketplace, the website is no longer the source of truth, and keeping several systems agreeing is a genuine engineering problem rather than a setting.
How to read the result
The build figure covers the store working correctly on launch day with your real catalogue in it. It does not cover the catalogue itself: product photography, descriptions and specifications are usually the largest single cost of an e-commerce project, and they are almost never in the build quote.
The monthly figure is higher than for a brochure site for a reason. A store that is down is a shop with the shutters closed, so hosting, monitoring and someone available to fix things are not optional extras here in the way they arguably are elsewhere.
Transaction costs sit outside this entirely. Gateway fees, marketplace commission and fulfilment are ongoing percentages of revenue, and they usually dwarf both the build and the hosting within the first year.
What to do next
Decide where stock lives before you decide what the store looks like. Every difficult decision in an e-commerce build resolves back to that question, and answering it late is what causes rebuilds.
Then price the content. Take your stock keeping unit count, multiply by what a photograph and a description cost, and put that number next to the build figure. If the total is a shock, reduce the catalogue for launch rather than reducing the build.
Questions people ask
Is Shopify cheaper than a custom build?
Usually for the first year and often not by year three, because the trade is a lower build cost against a monthly platform fee, per-transaction charges and app subscriptions that accumulate. The real question is whether your requirements fit the platform's assumptions. When they do, fighting it is expensive; when they do not, the platform is the cheapest thing you will buy.
Why does multi-currency cost so much?
Because it is rarely only currency. It is prices per market, tax rules per market, shipping rules per market and usually content per market, plus a rounding policy so a converted price does not display as an odd number. The conversion itself is the easy part.
Do I need ERP sync from day one?
Only if the accounting or fulfilment system is already the source of truth and someone would otherwise be retyping orders into it. If that person exists, the integration pays for itself quickly. If they do not, this is a phase two item.
What about marketplace listings?
Selling on Amazon, Noon or Instagram Shop alongside your own store means feeds, and feeds mean the stock problem again. It is priced here as a separate line because it genuinely is separate work, not a checkbox on the store.
Where to go from here
- Website Cost Calculator — for the non-store parts of the same site, priced on their own terms.
- Downtime Cost Calculator — a store loses nearly all of its revenue when it is offline. This is what that hour costs.
- Hosting and Maintenance Plan Builder — stores need a higher hosting tier than brochure sites. This prices the difference.
- Stripe Connect vs CyberSource: payment gateway integration for UAE and GCC businesses — which payment gateway actually fits a UAE or GCC store, and what each one demands of you.
Built by GoDesign FZE, who build and support online stores.
Get in touch
Want someone to just do this part?
The tool is free and stays free. If you would rather hand the work over, tell us what you are dealing with and you get a straight answer on scope, cost and timeline.
- You own everythingRepository, hosting and domain credentials sit in your name from day one, not handed over at the end.
- A written timelineMilestone dates are agreed in writing before work starts, so you always know what ships next.
- One business dayEvery enquiry gets a reply from the person who would scope the work, not a sales sequence.
Media City, Dubai, UAE · DHA Phase 2, Islamabad, Pakistan
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