How Much Does an Ecommerce Website Cost in Australia?
Build prices for an Australian online store, the running costs that never make it into a quote, and a worked monthly example for a store turning over $20,000 a month.
Most Australian ecommerce websites cost between $8,000 and $20,000 excluding GST to build. A simple catalogue store with a handful of products starts around $4,000, and a complex or high volume store runs $20,000 to $60,000 or more. Then budget roughly $700 to $1,500 a month once it is live for platform fees, payment processing, apps and maintenance.
That second number is the one that catches people out. A shop is not a brochure site with a checkout bolted on. It is a piece of software that takes money, calculates freight, tracks stock and talks to at least three other systems, and every one of those pieces has an ongoing cost attached to it. We have had clients sign off a $12,000 build happily and then get a fright at the first month’s bill for apps and processing fees, because nobody sat them down and added it up.
Here is the whole picture, build and run, in Australian dollars.
What are the build cost bands for an Australian online store?
Four bands cover almost everything we quote. The jumps between them are driven by product count, how many variants each product has, and how many external systems the store has to talk to. Design complexity matters less than people assume.
| Store type | Typical scope | Build cost (ex GST) | Timeframe |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simple catalogue store | Up to about 50 simple products, one shipping method, standard theme with brand styling, Stripe or PayPal checkout | $4,000 to $8,000 | 3 to 5 weeks |
| Standard store | 50 to 500 products with variants, custom design, live freight rates, discount rules, abandoned cart, accounting sync, basic reporting | $8,000 to $20,000 | 6 to 10 weeks |
| Complex or high volume | 500 to 5,000+ SKUs, multi warehouse stock, ERP or POS integration, custom product configurators, wholesale pricing tiers, migration from an old platform | $20,000 to $60,000 | 3 to 6 months |
| Marketplace or B2B portal | Multi vendor, customer specific price lists, credit accounts, quote to order workflow, punchout or EDI, custom application logic | $60,000 to $250,000+ | 4 to 12 months |
Two things push a quote up faster than anything else. Variants are the first: a clothing label with 40 styles in six sizes and four colours is not 40 products, it is 960 SKUs with their own stock levels and images. The second is integration. Pulling stock and pricing out of an existing point of sale or accounting system is where the hours go, and it is genuinely hard to estimate until someone has looked at the data. If you want a sense of how a build gets scoped and priced before you talk to anyone, our web design and development service page sets out the process we use.
What running costs never appear in the build quote?
Almost all of them. A build quote covers design and development. It rarely covers the stack the store needs to actually trade, and that stack is where the ongoing money goes.
- Platform subscription. Shopify sits at roughly $50 a month for the entry plan, around $130 for the mid plan, and about $500 for Advanced. WooCommerce has no licence fee but needs real hosting, which is $30 to $150 a month for a store rather than the $10 shared plan that will do for a brochure site.
- Payment gateway percentages. In Australia, Stripe is 1.7% plus 30c on domestic cards and 3.5% plus 30c international. Shopify Payments runs roughly 1.4% to 1.75% plus 30c depending on your plan. PayPal is closer to 2.6% plus 30c. Buy now pay later is the expensive one: Afterpay and Zip typically cost the merchant 4% to 6% plus a fixed fee, and it is worth checking what that does to your margin before you switch it on.
- Platform transaction fees on top of the gateway, if you use an external gateway on Shopify. That is an extra 2% on Basic, dropping as you move up plans. It is avoidable and a lot of stores pay it by accident.
- Apps and plugins. Reviews, email and SMS marketing, subscriptions, upsells, loyalty, search. Each one is $20 to $150 a month and they compound quietly. Most stores we audit are paying for at least two apps nobody uses.
- Shipping integrations. Starshipit, Shippit or a similar label and rates platform is $50 to $150 a month once you are doing decent volume, plus Australia Post or courier account costs.
- Product photography. Roughly $15 to $40 per product for clean studio shots on white, more for lifestyle imagery. For 200 products that is a real line item, not a rounding error.
- Inventory sync. Keeping stock accurate between a store, a warehouse and a point of sale usually means a middleware tool at $50 to $300 a month, or an inventory system like Cin7 or Unleashed which is more again.
Rule of thumb: if your total ecommerce running cost is above about 8 per cent of online revenue, something in the stack is wrong. Under 5 per cent and you are running lean. Work it out once a quarter, because app subscriptions have a habit of accumulating without anyone deciding to add them.
What does a store doing $20,000 a month actually pay to run?
Take a store turning over $20,000 a month across about 250 orders, so an average order value of $80. Mostly domestic customers, one warehouse. Here is what that costs on each platform, per month, excluding GST.
| Cost line | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Platform or hosting | $132 (mid plan) | $90 (managed WordPress hosting) |
| Payment processing | $395 (1.6% + 30c) | $415 (1.7% + 30c via Stripe) |
| Apps or plugin licences | $180 | $120 (annual licences spread monthly) |
| Email and SMS marketing | $110 | $110 |
| Shipping platform | $79 | $79 |
| Maintenance, updates, support | $150 | $300 |
| Domain, email, SSL, backups | $25 | $25 |
| Monthly total | $1,071 | $1,139 |
Call it 5 to 6 per cent of revenue either way, which is about right for a store that size. Notice what dominates: payment processing is the single biggest line by a wide margin, and it is the one nobody negotiates. If you are doing $20,000 a month, moving 0.3 per cent on your rate is worth $720 a year, which is more than most people save by arguing about hosting. Talk to your gateway once you have twelve months of volume behind you.
Note also that the maintenance line differs. A Shopify store genuinely does need less looking after. WooCommerce needs plugin updates tested before they go live, because a bad update on a store costs you sales the same afternoon, and that is skilled time rather than a subscription.
How much does product data entry really cost?
More than you think, and it is the most commonly under-quoted item in the whole project. A simple product with a title, description, price, one image and a category takes 5 to 10 minutes to load properly. A variable product with sizes, colours, individual SKUs, per variant stock, a size chart and specification fields takes 20 to 40 minutes.
Do the arithmetic on 500 products. At an average of 15 minutes each that is 125 hours, and at agency rates of $95 to $150 an hour excluding GST you are looking at $12,000 to $18,000 just to type things in. Often more than the build itself. That is why almost nobody does it that way.
The sensible options, roughly in order of what we recommend:
- Bulk CSV import. If your product data already lives somewhere structured (a point of sale, a spreadsheet, an old store’s export) then paying $1,000 to $3,000 for someone to map, clean and import it is the cheapest route by a mile. The catch is that most product data is messier than the owner believes.
- Supplier feeds. If you are reselling, many Australian wholesalers provide a product feed. Setting up an automated import and price sync is a few thousand dollars once and then it maintains itself.
- A trained assistant doing it manually at $25 to $50 an hour, with a documented template and a spot check on the first fifty products.
- You do it yourself. Perfectly reasonable for under 100 products, and you will write better descriptions than we will because you know the products. Budget a fortnight of evenings and be honest with yourself about whether that will happen.
Whichever way you go, agree it in writing before the build starts. Half the ecommerce projects that stall in Australia stall because the products never turned up, not because the site was not finished.
When does Shopify beat WooCommerce on cost, and when does it not?
Shopify wins below roughly $30,000 a month in revenue. WooCommerce starts winning above it, provided you have someone competent maintaining the site. The crossover is not about features, it is about which costs are fixed and which scale.
Shopify’s costs scale with you. The plan fee steps up, the payment rate is bundled, and plenty of apps price by order volume or contact count. That is brilliant when you are small: you are not paying a developer to keep the lights on, and you can trade for under $200 a month all in. It gets less attractive at $100,000 a month when your app bill alone is $900.
WooCommerce’s costs are mostly fixed. Annual plugin licences do not care how many orders you take. Hosting steps up in chunks, not percentages. The fixed cost you cannot avoid is competent maintenance, and that is the honest catch: an unmaintained WooCommerce store is a security and downtime problem, not a bargain. If you are turning over $8,000 a month and trying to save $150 by skipping maintenance, you have chosen the wrong platform.
Our rough guidance, and we will happily argue about it:
- Under $10,000 a month, or you are launching cold and do not know if it will work: Shopify. Get trading, prove demand, worry about efficiency later.
- $10,000 to $30,000 a month: either. Pick on whether you need custom logic Shopify will not let you have, and on who is going to look after it.
- Above $30,000 a month with content marketing or complex product logic in the mix: WooCommerce usually costs less over three years, and you own the whole thing.
- Wholesale pricing, customer specific catalogues or anything that behaves like a portal: WooCommerce or a purpose built application, most of the time.
There is a migration cost either way, usually $3,000 to $10,000 depending on product count and URL structure, so do not switch platforms over a $50 a month difference. Our costs and pricing guides cover the other pieces of the budget, and if you would rather talk it through against real numbers, the team that builds these stores will give you a straight answer on which way to go.
How do you keep an ecommerce budget under control?
Launch smaller than you want to. The single most effective cost control we know is cutting the first version back to what you need to take an order, then spending the money you saved on the things that turn out to matter once real customers arrive. Nobody predicts those correctly in advance, including us.
Beyond that: import your products rather than typing them, resist every app that solves a problem you do not yet have, get the photography done in one session instead of five, and do not pay for a custom design on a store with eleven products. Prices here are what we see in the Sydney market in 2026 and will vary with scope, so treat them as planning ranges. Anyone giving you a fixed ecommerce price before they have seen your product data is guessing.
Common questions
How long does it take to build an online store?
Three to five weeks for a simple catalogue store, six to ten weeks for a standard build, and three to six months for anything with ERP or point of sale integration. The development side is rarely the delay. What holds projects up is product data, photography and someone signing off on shipping rules, so start those in week one rather than waiting until the site is ready for them.
Is it cheaper to fix my existing store or start again?
If the platform is current and the problem is design or conversion, fixing is cheaper: expect $3,000 to $8,000 excluding GST for a redesign on existing foundations. If you are on an abandoned platform, running an unsupported version, or the checkout is broken in ways nobody can explain, rebuild. Patching a store with structural problems tends to cost more over two years than replacing it once.
What does it cost to add Afterpay or Zip to my store?
There is usually no setup fee and the plugin or app is free, but the merchant rate is the expensive part: typically 4 to 6 per cent plus a fixed fee per transaction, well above a card rate. On a $80 average order that is roughly $4 gone. Worth it if it lifts conversion and average order value enough to cover the gap, and you should measure that rather than assume it.
Can I build the store myself and save the build fee?
Yes, and for a small product range on Shopify it is a genuinely sensible option. You will spend 40 to 80 hours learning and building. The place DIY stores usually fall over is not the look, it is tax settings, shipping rules and the checkout, where a small mistake quietly costs you money on every order. Get someone to review it before you turn on advertising.
How much should I budget for SEO and ads on top of the store?
Separate budget entirely, and plan for it before you build. Most Australian stores doing $20,000 a month spend $1,500 to $5,000 a month on customer acquisition across Google Shopping, Meta and organic search. A store with no traffic plan is a very expensive catalogue. Nobody can guarantee rankings or a return figure, and you should be wary of anyone who offers one.
Do I need to pay for ecommerce hosting from day one?
If you are on Shopify, hosting is included in the plan. On WooCommerce, yes, and do not put a store on a $10 shared plan. A checkout that times out under load loses sales you never find out about. Budget $60 to $150 a month for managed WordPress hosting with daily backups, a staging site and support that answers the phone in Australian business hours.
Want a real number for your store?
Tell us your product count, where your data lives and how you want to ship, and we will give you a scoped price with the running costs spelled out. No lock-in contracts, no surprises in month two.