How Much Does an Ecommerce Website Cost in 2026? A Line-by-Line Breakdown

Most answers to the question of ecommerce website cost in 2026 give you a range so wide it can't help you plan anything. So here's ours, broken into the pieces we actually build, with the four plan prices we publish sitting next to them. This post is about online stores with a cart and a checkout. If you only need a site that explains your business, our guide to custom website costs covers that.

The short answer

We hand-code every store in Next.js, React and TypeScript. There's no WordPress, no Shopify, no page builder, and so no platform fee. These are the four plans:

• ₹25,000 ($750) is Starter. Up to 25 products, kept in a catalogue file we edit for you, with no admin panel. Razorpay or Stripe Checkout, basic AI search, 30 days of support.
• ₹75,000 ($2,250) buys Growth, a storefront designed around your brand with a lightweight admin, room for 250 products, AI recommendations, abandoned-cart recovery, both Razorpay and Stripe, an A/B testing setup and 60 days of support.
• Pro AI is ₹1,99,999 ($6,000). You get a full admin dashboard, up to 2,500 products, an AI personalization engine, marketing automation, an analytics dashboard and 90 days of support, with multi-vendor available if you need it.
• Enterprise starts at ₹7,50,000 ($22,500) and is scoped one project at a time: headless architecture, custom AI/ML, multi-currency and multi-region selling, unlimited products.

If your catalogue is past 2,500 products, or you need to sell in more than one currency, you're in Enterprise territory and none of the fixed plans will fit cleanly.

What actually drives the cost

Catalogue size is the first thing we ask about, because it decides how products get managed. Twenty-five products can live in a structured file. A developer changes a price in a minute and redeploys. At 250 products that gets painful, and you want a screen where your own team can do it.

Which leads to admin needs. A lightweight admin lets one or two people add products, edit stock and see orders. A full dashboard is a bigger build, with an analytics view and marketing automation sitting next to the product and order screens. The jump from Growth to Pro AI is mostly this.

One payment gateway through a hosted checkout page is quick to wire up. Two gateways in parallel (Razorpay for Indian cards and UPI, Stripe for international ones) roughly doubles the webhook handling and the failure cases to test, which is why Starter gives you one and Growth gives you both.

Say you already run a warehouse system and want stock levels to sync with the store, or you want orders pushed into your accounting package. Each integration has its own API and its own quirks, and it's the line item most likely to surprise someone. We quote these individually once we've seen the docs.

AI features scale in steps. Basic AI search on Starter understands what a shopper means as well as the words they typed. Recommendations on Growth need product embeddings and a vector index (we use OpenAI or open-source embeddings with Pinecone). Personalization on Pro AI goes further and adjusts what each shopper sees based on their own behaviour.

And design? It's the hardest one to put a number on. A clean, simple storefront takes days. A brand-specific design with custom product pages, filters and a few interactive touches takes weeks.

A line-by-line breakdown

We don't bill these lines separately. The plan price covers all of them, and what changes between plans is how much work sits inside each line. Here's what each one involves.

Design

Wireframes for the home page, a category page, a product page, the cart and checkout, then the visual design on top. On Starter the layout is deliberately plain so the money goes into checkout working properly. Growth and up get a storefront designed from scratch for your brand.

Storefront

This is the code shoppers touch: pages, navigation, filters, the cart, account pages if you want logins. It's built in Next.js so pages are rendered fast and indexable, and it has to work on a mid-range phone on a patchy connection, since that's where a lot of orders come from.

Catalogue and admin

• On Starter the products sit in a typed file and a developer changes them
• Growth adds a lightweight admin where your team edits products and stock and sees orders
• Pro AI has the full dashboard, with analytics, marketing automation and multi-vendor if you need it
• Enterprise gets whatever the operation needs, often a headless setup where several front ends share one backend

Behind all of these is a PostgreSQL database that sits in your account.

Checkout and payments

The part we test hardest. A checkout has to handle a card declined halfway, a shopper who closes the tab after paying, a UPI payment that confirms thirty seconds late. Each of those needs code that listens for the gateway's webhook and updates the order correctly. Abandoned-cart recovery, from Growth upward, adds the emails that go out when someone leaves without paying.

Search and recommendations

Keyword search breaks on typos and synonyms. Ours turns products and queries into embeddings so "cotton kurta for office" still finds the right items even when no product description uses that phrase. Recommendations reuse the same index. There's a small running cost here, covered further down.

SEO and performance

Google reads a product page differently from a shopper, so each one gets structured data, a clean URL and its own metadata, and the whole store gets a sitemap. Every build is made to pass Google's Core Web Vitals and follows WCAG accessibility guidelines, which mostly means real work on image sizes, font loading and keyboard navigation.

Launch

Short line, but it has a lot in it. We point your domain, deploy to hosting in your own account (Vercel or AWS, usually), switch payments from test to live, place real orders, then hand over the private GitHub or GitLab repository and the documentation. All of it is in your name from day one. Then the support window starts.

One-off costs and the ones that keep coming

The plan price is paid once. After launch, these are the bills you'll actually see:

• A domain, about ₹800 a year
• Hosting, ₹0 to ₹500 a month for most builds, since Vercel's and Netlify's free tiers cover a lot of stores
• Paid APIs for the AI features, such as an OpenAI key, typically ₹500 to ₹3,000 a month at low traffic
• The payment gateway's own per-transaction fee, set by Razorpay or Stripe

There's no platform subscription. Nobody charges you a monthly fee to keep the store switched on.

To put numbers on it: a Growth store running its recommendations on an OpenAI key costs ₹75,000 for the build, plus somewhere between ₹6,800 and ₹42,800 in the first year for the domain, hosting and API. So year one lands between ₹81,800 and ₹1,17,800 before gateway fees. Year two is just the running costs.

Retainers are optional. Some clients want ongoing work after the support window, usually new features or a set number of hours each month, and those run ₹5,000 to ₹50,000 a month depending on hours. Plenty of stores never take one.

Ecommerce website cost calculator

Use the calculator below to work out a rough custom ecommerce website cost for your own store. Choose the options closest to what you're planning and it'll give you a rough figure. Treat the result as a starting point for a conversation; the written estimate is the number you can rely on.

Timelines by plan

Starter ships in 14 to 21 days. The spread depends mostly on how quickly product photos and copy arrive.

Growth takes 30 days and Pro AI takes 60, because the admin and the AI pieces need building and then testing against real product data. Enterprise has no fixed timeline; we write one into the scope once we know what's in it. Whichever plan you're on, you see a demo or a progress report every week, and every change goes through a pull request in your repository with automated tests running on it, so you can watch the work happen.

What delays a launch is rarely the code. Usually it's final prices that keep changing, or a gateway account still under review. Razorpay and Stripe both verify the business before they switch live payments on, so start that paperwork the week you sign.

What a written quote should include

Whoever you hire, ask for the quote in writing before you pay anything. A useful one has:

1. The exact scope: product count, which admin screens, which gateways, which integrations
2. The price, and whether it's fixed or hourly
3. A delivery date or week-by-week timeline
4. Every running cost you'll pay after launch, with rough monthly figures
5. Who owns the code, the database and the hosting account
6. How long post-launch support lasts and what it covers
7. How changes to scope get priced

If item five is missing, ask. A store you can't move away from is a cost too, even if it never shows up on an invoice. We start with a free 30-minute discovery call and send a written timeline and estimate before any payment.

Questions people ask

What's the ecommerce website development cost in India for 1,000 products?

With us, ₹1,99,999 on Pro AI. Growth tops out at 250 products, and a catalogue of 1,000 also needs the full admin dashboard to stay manageable.

Do I pay EcomWeb anything every month after launch?

No. A retainer is available if you want one, but nothing is required. Your monthly costs go to your domain registrar, your host and any paid API.

Are there transaction fees on top of the gateway's?

Only the gateway's own fee applies. We don't add a percentage on sales. Our post on custom ecommerce vs Shopify goes into how that compares with a hosted platform.

Why is custom ecommerce website cost higher than a template store on day one?

Because someone writes the checkout, the admin and the search for your store specifically. You pay that once, and there's no subscription afterwards.

Who owns the store when it's finished?

You do. The code is in a private GitHub or GitLab repository under your account, and the database and hosting are in your name too.

How do I get a quote?

Send us a message through the contact form with your product count and what you sell. We'll book the discovery call from there.