Ask how much an ecommerce website costs and you'll get a real answer with a wide range attached. A mid complexity build on Shopify or WooCommerce runs ten to fifty thousand dollars. Go custom, or wire it into a pile of existing systems, and it's a hundred to five hundred thousand, sometimes more. The average project on record lands around fifty two thousand dollars over roughly nine months. None of that spread comes from picking a theme. It comes from what happens after the theme is installed, and a quote that only prices a website plus a cart is pricing the easy ten percent of the job.
The theme was never the expensive part. What separates a ten thousand dollar build from a hundred thousand dollar one is payment processing, security work, catalogue and inventory structure, and whatever the store has to talk to on the back end: a CRM, a fulfilment system, an ERP. Developer rates barely move the number. Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce and BigCommerce all cluster around twenty five to fifty dollars an hour, climbing to a hundred or so for a US, Canadian or Australian team. Two stores can run the identical theme, one costing twelve thousand dollars and the other eighty thousand, and the gap between them is entirely in what each one had to connect to.
Here's the tension the website plus a cart framing hides: checkout is the actual product, and most builds get it wrong. A benchmark of over three hundred leading ecommerce sites found sixty five percent have mediocre or worse checkout usability. Only two percent rate as good. The average site is carrying thirty two distinct checkout problems, and fixing them is worth as much as a thirty five percent lift in conversion, none of which arrives free with a cart plugin. Cart abandonment has sat near seventy percent for well over a decade. The single largest cause, at thirty nine percent, is an unexpected charge showing up late in the process, not a broken button. Forced account creation and a checkout that simply drags on account for most of what's left. Skip checkout testing on a build, and you've skipped the part of the job most likely to cost the sale.
The build price isn't the whole bill either. Maintenance and optimisation after launch typically run three to fifteen thousand dollars a month, with hourly support in the seventy five to two hundred dollar range once the store is live. Walk away from checkout after launch day and that thirty two problem gap just sits there, unfixed, indefinitely.
So ask what a quote actually itemises before comparing numbers: payment and integration scope, a real plan for catalogue and inventory, an explicit line for checkout usability review, not just cart included. That's the part a template genuinely can't do, and it's where a studio earns the fee a theme install never will. Before you compare platforms, ask what the number in front of you does about checkout abandonment.