How much does a website cost in the UK?

A small business website in the UK ranges from about £50 hiring an offshore developer directly to several thousand pounds through a local agency. The spread is mostly labour cost by location and how many people sit between you and the person building it, not quality by definition.

How long does an e-commerce site take to build?

About seven days from signed scope for a standard catalogue store, provided your product content exists on day one. Larger catalogues, custom pricing logic or third-party integrations add time — and a supplier should tell you that before you commit rather than in week two.

Should I use Shopify or a custom build?

Use Shopify if your catalogue is conventional and you want to be trading next week. Choose a custom build when the catalogue does not fit a product grid or the checkout carries business logic. Any other basis for the decision is preference dressed as advice.

Pricing

How much does an e-commerce website cost?

A functioning online store with real checkout starts from about $150 hiring direct and runs to $10,000 or more through an agency. What moves the number most is not product count — it is how far your catalogue sits from a standard product grid.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 203 words 3 sections

Why catalogue shape matters more than catalogue size

A t-shirt has two variant axes: size and colour. A proxy plan has four, each combination with its own price and stock. A made-to-measure curtain has a price that is a formula of two continuous dimensions. Those are three different data models, and the platform that handles the first gracefully will fight you on the third.

What is included at the low end and what is not

Included: catalogue, cart, checkout, order emails, admin area, SEO baseline
Usually extra: product data entry at volume, photography, third-party integrations
Always extra: migration from an existing store with a redirect map
Never included anywhere: your hosting, domain and payment provider fees

The question that separates suppliers

Ask what happens when a customer closes the browser tab immediately after paying. A developer who has shipped real checkouts answers instantly — the webhook creates the order regardless. One who has not says something reassuring and vague.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, How much an e-commerce website actually costs, and what changes the number covers it in about 4 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.