At TechGents a webshop starts at €1,750 (excl. VAT). For that you get a complete shop with up to 50 products, with iDEAL and other payment methods, shipping settings and an admin area where you manage products and orders yourself. The number of products makes the biggest difference: between 50 and 500 products adds €1,000, over 500 products €2,500, because categories, filters and loading products become much more work.
On top of that you choose what you need. A fully unique design costs €750 extra, an accounting or inventory integration €600, a multilingual shop €450 and separate prices and invoices for business customers €800. Our price calculator adds this up in a minute. Below you can read why these parts make the difference.
The three biggest price drivers
First, the platform: a webshop on a proven platform like Shopify or WooCommerce is considerably cheaper than fully custom, and for most business owners the wisest choice. Second, the number of products and whether they are entered manually or loaded via a feed. Third, integrations: connecting inventory management, accounting software and carriers takes time, but saves you duplicate work every day.
When custom is worth it
As soon as your ordering process differs from the standard, for example with subscriptions, custom quotes or unusual stock logic, you hit the limits of a standard platform. Custom is then more expensive to build, but cheaper in the long run because you are not constantly fighting a system that was not built for your situation.
Shopify, WooCommerce or custom: price differences in practice
Shopify works with a monthly subscription on top of the build costs, and is strong in ease of use, reliability and a large app store for extra functionality. WooCommerce runs on WordPress, has no mandatory platform subscription, but needs more of your own hosting and update management. Both are cheaper to build than custom, because much of the basics, such as the cart, checkout and product management, is ready-made.
Custom costs more because those basics are built from the ground up, exactly tailored to your processes. The difference in build price is largest for simple shops and smallest for complex ones, because a complex shop on a standard platform often still needs expensive custom plugins and adjustments to do what you want.
Transaction fees and payment providers
A cost that is often skipped in first quote comparisons: every payment via iDEAL, credit card or PayPal costs a small percentage in transaction fees at your payment provider. Logical and unavoidable, but worth including in your margin calculation, especially with high order volumes and a low average order value.
Some platforms also charge their own transaction fee on top of the payment provider’s, unless you use their own payment solution. That is worth checking upfront, as it can make the difference between two platforms that look similar in build price.
Inventory and logistics integrations
As soon as you sell stock through several channels at once, for example your webshop and a physical store, you do not want to track stock levels by hand. An inventory integration prevents overselling, but takes time to set up well: every inventory system delivers data in its own way, and that has to connect to your webshop reliably and without errors.
The same goes for shipping integrations: automatically generating labels and passing tracking information to customers saves manual work every day, but it is a one-off investment that only pays off above a certain order volume. With a few orders a week, shipping manually is often still the pragmatic choice.
Ongoing costs of a webshop
Besides the build price, expect platform fees (with Shopify), hosting (with WooCommerce or custom), and maintenance to keep the shop secure and current. A webshop often adds costs for plugins or apps that provide extra functionality, and periodic testing that all integrations still work after updates to external systems. We include this in our maintenance plans so you do not have to monitor whether everything still works together.
Conversion: where the money is really made
A webshop that costs a lot to build but converts poorly is a worse investment than a simpler shop that sells well. What influences conversion most: a checkout with as few steps as possible, clear shipping costs that do not appear only at the last step, trust elements such as reviews and a clear returns policy, and fast loading, because every second of delay demonstrably costs revenue. These are not aesthetic choices; they have a direct, measurable effect on revenue.
That is why, when preparing a quote, we look not only at "how many products do you have", but also at what the purchasing process looks like and where visitors actually drop off. A small budget focused on the checkout often delivers more than a large budget spread evenly across the whole shop.
Selling internationally: a separate cost item
Want to sell outside the Netherlands too? Then extra considerations come in: multiple currencies, different VAT rules per country, translated product information, and sometimes local payment methods that are more common abroad than iDEAL. It is worth discussing this early, because a webshop set up for international sales from the start needs far fewer changes than one that has to be made international afterwards.
A realistic growth path for a new webshop
For business owners starting a webshop for the first time, we often advise a compact setup on a proven platform, with the most important integrations (payments, shipping) working well, and only expanding once there is real sales volume to justify the extra investment. Building an extensive webshop before demand is proven is one of the most common ways to spend budget on features that are barely used.
Design and photography: an underestimated cost
In a webshop, product photography is at least as decisive for conversion as the technology behind it. Poorly lit, inconsistent product photos undermine trust, however well the rest of the shop is built. Budget for it separately if you do not have good product photos yet: it pays for itself very quickly because it directly affects the conversion rate, while technical improvements to the shop itself often have a more marginal impact.
How we build a webshop project
We start every webshop project with a short call about your range, expected order volume and desired integrations, after which we advise on the platform: Shopify, WooCommerce or custom, depending on what fits. Then we design the key pages (home, category, product page, checkout), followed by the build and connecting payment methods and any inventory or shipping integrations. As with websites we work with fixed prices, set after the first call, so you know where you stand upfront.
What successful webshops have in common
Regardless of platform or budget, well-performing webshops share the same foundation: a clear, fast product page with good photos and an honest description, a checkout of a few steps at most, and transparency about shipping costs and delivery time before a customer enters payment details. Webshops that score poorly on these three points consistently lose more customers in the ordering process than technically less advanced shops that get the basics right.
When starting over beats renovating
For owners of an existing, outdated webshop the question is not only "what does a new webshop cost", but also "is renovating still sensible". A webshop built on an outdated platform, with years of piled-up adjustments, is sometimes more expensive to repair than to rebuild with today’s knowledge. We give that advice honestly in a first call: if a thorough renovation costs about as much as a fresh start, you are better off with a clean, modern foundation than a patched-up old structure.