What does a webshop cost? From Shopify licence to total cost

Ask for webshop quotes and you get amounts that are barely comparable, and almost every pricing page you find comes from a party that sells webshops itself. What is structurally missing is the sum: not just what the build costs, but what the shop keeps costing you per month and per sale once it is live. I lay out the full bill here, with the rates of 14 August 2026 attached and the items that rarely appear in quotes.

What makes up the price of a webshop?

Six items, of which most quotes show only one. The build price is the amount everyone talks about. On top of that you pay the platform subscription, a theme, apps, payment fees per sale and maintenance after going live. Anyone comparing on build price alone is comparing one sixth of the bill.

The balance between those items shifts over time. In the first year the build weighs heaviest. From year two onwards the subscription, apps and payment fees set the bill, and especially those last ones grow with your revenue. That is not a drawback, a cost that grows with sales is healthier than a fixed cost without sales, but you do need to know it in advance.

The terms in this article are also in our glossary.

What does the build cost at an agency?

That depends on what is in the scope, and that is exactly why the amounts vary so widely. Filling in a template with your house style is different work from a custom design with a migration of your existing shop, connections to your accounting or till, and guidance after going live. An amount without a scope says nothing.

The questions that make a quote comparable: is the theme included or does it come on top? Who transfers the products, you or the agency? Which connections are included? And how much support do you get after going live, and for how long?

At ClickForest a Shopify project for SMEs in Flanders starts from €3,995, all-in with three months of support included; a migration of an existing shop also starts at that amount, more complex migrations sit higher. I mention that amount not as advertising but as a benchmark: it tells you which scope level belongs with which price level. How to compare agencies, and where the price difference between partners comes from, is worked out in how to choose a Shopify partner.

What does Shopify itself cost per month?

Between €24 and €384 per month for the regular plans, depending on the plan and on how you pay. All amounts below come from Shopify’s Belgian pricing page, consulted on 14 August 2026, and exclude VAT. The difference between monthly and annual billing is bigger than most comparisons show: annual billing is a quarter cheaper.

Three things the pricing page itself mentions that you rarely see in budgets. There are no set-up fees for the subscriptions. New stores start with three days free and then three months at €1 per month, so the licence cost only really starts counting from month four. And anyone paying monthly on Basic pays €96 more per year than anyone paying annually; on Advanced that difference runs up to €1,140 per year. That calculation is my own arithmetic on the published rates.

For most Flemish SMEs, Basic is the starting point. How Shopify compares as a platform, and what those licences cost side by side, is fully covered in the platform comparison.

What do you pay per sale in payment fees?

On every sale you pay a percentage plus a fixed amount, and which payment provider you choose matters more than which subscription. Through Shopify Payments, a Bancontact payment in Belgium costs a flat €0.39, with no percentage. An online card payment costs 2% plus €0.25 on Basic. Those rates are on Shopify’s Belgian pricing page, consulted on 14 August 2026.

The point almost every cost comparison misses: choose an external payment provider instead of Shopify Payments and you pay twice. You pay that provider’s rate, plus an extra Shopify fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. Mollie, for instance, charges €0.39 for Bancontact in Belgium and 1.80% plus €0.25 for EEA consumer cards, with no monthly fee, likewise per its own pricing page on 14 August 2026.

My own worked example on those published rates, for a €100 order on a Basic plan: Bancontact through Shopify Payments costs €0.39, the same payment through Mollie costs €0.39 plus €2 in Shopify fees, €2.39 in total. A card payment through Shopify Payments costs €2.25; through Mollie it becomes €2.05 plus €2, €4.05 in total. Over a thousand orders a year, that difference is bigger than a year of licence fees. There can be good reasons to choose an external provider anyway, but run the numbers first.

How much do themes and apps cost?

A theme is a one-off, manageable cost; apps are the item that quietly grows. On 14 August 2026 the Shopify Theme Store lists twenty-four free themes and 1,206 paid ones, from $100 to $500. The Theme Store charges in dollars, including for Belgian stores. A paid theme is a one-time purchase without refunds; updates and support run through the theme’s maker.

For apps there is no reliable, independent average of what a webshop spends per month, and saying that is more honest than making up a number. What has been measured: an analysis of more than 340,000 live Shopify stores from March 2026 found an average of 2.5 detectable apps per store. That measurement only counts apps visible from the outside, so backend apps for stock or accounting stay out of view, and the publisher sells store data itself, so read it as direction rather than hard fact.

What is certain, from Shopify’s own documentation: apps charge monthly, one-off or per use, and the costs keep running until you actually remove an app, even with a paused store. Which apps are worth the investment is in the Shopify app guide; what AI apps change about that is covered in the overview of AI apps for Shopify.

Which costs come on top after going live?

Four kinds: technical maintenance, content work, marketing and logistics. They are the costs nobody discusses in advance, and according to the Flemish SME organisation itself costs that retailers often underestimate. UNIZO put it literally this way, when publishing its e-commerce report in March 2025:

“Your own webshop means more control over pricing, branding and customer relationships. But it naturally also brings extra costs and effort. Think of hosting, labour to get the texts and photos right, trust certificates and the handling and shipping of the goods. And then still making sure you are found online.”

— Chiel Sterckx, retail expert at UNIZO (translated from Dutch)

Concretely, four kinds of costs come on top. Technical maintenance: updates, apps that break, a theme that needs reworking after a Shopify change. Content work: products, photos and texts that must stay current. Marketing to be found, because a webshop without visitors is an expensive brochure; why a webshop does not convert covers what usually goes wrong there, and email flows are a fixture in it. And logistics: shipping, returns and the time they take.

For the technical part: budget a fixed monthly cost or your own hours, but budget something. ClickForest does maintenance and support for Shopify webshops of SMEs in Flanders from €295 per month, cancellable monthly. Here too the amount is a benchmark: whoever does your maintenance, a webshop without an owner fades, just like any automation.

How does this differ from the cost of a regular website?

A webshop carries four cost layers a regular website does not have: the platform subscription, payment fees per sale, apps and the logistics layer behind it. The build price can look similar, the total bill does not. If you only need a site to be found and to bring in enquiries, without online sales, you are better off reading what a website costs; this article is about selling.

The boundary is sharper than Google shows it, because search results mix both questions constantly. The rule of thumb: if you sell nothing online, you pay no licence, no payment fees and no apps, and the biggest part of this bill disappears. If you do sell, a “website with a little shop attached” is almost always more expensive than a platform built for it, because every sales function has to be bolted on.

Is a cheap webshop cheaper in the end?

Sometimes, but less often than the entry price suggests, and the Belgian figures urge sobriety. According to a UNIZO survey of 276 SME retailers in Flanders and Brussels, only four in ten merchants call e-commerce profitable, and 46% do not see it as a profit-making activity. For half of them, online stays at most 5% of total revenue. The same survey finds that the costs of logistics, marketing, returns and time are often higher than expected.

A cheap build does not change that bill, it shifts it. What stays out of the build comes back as your own hours, as apps that must add functions that were not in it, or as a rebuild. No reliable figures exist on that last one, so I am not going to invent any; what does exist is the observation that the competition leaves no room for a half-hearted shop:

“You often hear that e-commerce has become a mature market. That is true, but that statement actually does violence to the truth because the nuance gets lost.”

— Gino Van Ossel, professor at Vlerick Business School (translated from Dutch)

The article in which that statement appeared headlines his message as “e-commerce is not mature, it remains a battlefield”. Against Bol.com, Amazon and Temu, which 62% of the surveyed merchants name as their biggest threat, you do not win with the cheapest shop but with a shop that works technically and gets found.

If you want to build it yourself to save the build cost, that is a genuine option: the guide for setting up a Shopify webshop yourself exists precisely for that. The honest trade-off is that you swap the build price for your own hours and a steeper learning curve, not that the cost disappears.

Is a webshop in Belgium still worth it?

The market says yes, the profitability per store says: only with a plan. Belgians spent €17.4 billion online in 2024, a quarter of all spending and a record, as measured by the annual report of e-commerce federation Becom, carried out by GfK-NIQ. Belgium counted 63,867 webshops in the first half of 2024 according to the same federation. And according to the UNIZO survey, 64% of independent merchants now sell online.

“Belgians feel increasingly comfortable shopping online. They also spend more when they do. That increase cannot be attributed to inflation alone, which came to 4.3% over the past year. The figures confirm that e-commerce is anchoring itself ever deeper in the buying behaviour of the Belgian consumer.”

— Greet Dekocker, managing director of Becom (translated from Dutch)

So the buying power is there, and it is growing. Shopify president Harley Finkelstein said it this way on CNBC in August 2026, and weigh his words on their interest, because he is promoting his own platform with them:

“This is going to be the golden age of entrepreneurship, and Shopify is powering it.”

— Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify

The sober reading of the Belgian figures is double: there is more online buying power than ever, and half of the small webshops barely draw revenue from it. The difference rarely sits in the product and almost always in findability and execution; the Belgian e-commerce trends set out that context more broadly.

Conclusion: how do you budget a webshop realistically?

Count the first year in four items, and add them up before you sign. The build, one-off. The licence, twelve times the monthly amount that belongs with your plan. The payment fees, as a percentage of your expected revenue. And the maintenance, in money or in your own hours. Make that sum and quotes suddenly compare effortlessly, because you immediately see what a low build price does not include.

What struck me most while researching this: the rates of Shopify and the payment providers are public and exact for the regular plans, to the cent. The least transparent part of the whole bill is, of all things, the build quote. So do not ask “what does a webshop cost”, ask “what is in this amount”. ClickForest builds Shopify webshops for SMEs in Flanders and therefore puts its own entry price right in this article; read the rest of the bill with that same yardstick. And if you want to know who actually builds those webshops in Belgium: the overview of Belgian Shopify agencies puts seven agencies side by side on demonstrable client work.