Ask ten agencies what a Shopify build costs and you'll get ten versions of "it depends." It's a frustrating answer, and it's usually a way of avoiding a number until they've worked out what you're willing to spend.
So here is the straight version, including our own pricing, so you can work out roughly where your project sits before you speak to anyone.
The short answer
For a UK business, a Shopify website build in 2026 typically falls into one of four bands.
| Approach | Typical cost | Right for |
|---|---|---|
| DIY on a paid theme | £0–£1,500 | Pre-revenue, testing an idea, very simple catalogue |
| Freelancer or small studio | £1,500–£5,000 | Early-stage brands, straightforward requirements |
| Specialist agency build | £8,000–£25,000 | Established brands doing £400k+ where the site drives real revenue |
| Shopify Plus / enterprise | £30,000–£150,000+ | Complex operations, multi-market, custom integrations |
Most established DTC brands we speak to land in the third band. That's the one we'll spend most of this article on, because it's the one where the difference between a good and bad decision costs the most.
Tier one: doing it yourself, £0 to £1,500
Buy a premium theme for £150–£350, spend a few weekends on it, launch.
There is nothing wrong with this. If you're pre-revenue or testing whether a product sells at all, spending £10,000 on a website before you know that is a bad use of money. Plenty of brands doing seven figures today started on a £200 theme.
The limits show up later. Themes are built to suit everyone, which means they're optimised for no one. You'll hit a point where the layout is fighting you, you've installed nine apps to patch gaps, and the site is slow because of it. That's usually the moment brands start looking for help.
Tier two: freelancers, £1,500 to £5,000
A good freelance Shopify developer can produce genuinely excellent work, often at a fraction of agency rates, because they have almost no overhead.
The trade-offs are worth knowing before you commit. You're buying one person's availability, so illness, holidays and their other clients all affect your timeline. You typically get development but not strategy, so you'll need to arrive with a clear brief and know what you want the site to do. And when something breaks eighteen months later, that freelancer may have taken a full-time job.
If your requirements are clear and your catalogue is simple, this is often the most sensible money in the market.
Tier three: specialist agency builds, £8,000 to £25,000
This is where most brands doing £400k and up end up, and it's where the pricing gets least transparent.
You're paying for several people rather than one, usually design, development, project management and some strategic input, plus a defined process with checkpoints, accountability if it goes wrong, and support after launch.
The honest reason it costs more than a freelancer isn't that the code is better. It's that the work is scoped around a commercial outcome rather than a design brief. A £10,000 build should involve someone asking what your average order value is, where you're losing people in the funnel, and what your email programme currently contributes to revenue - before anyone opens a design tool.
Our own pricing, for reference: our Shopify Growth Build starts at £9,500 and typically runs to £12,000 depending on scope. That covers a conversion-focused rebuild, UX and theme customisation, Klaviyo integration, basic SEO, analytics setup, QA and 30 days of post-launch support. Payment is staged across kick-off, design sign-off and completion. Timeline is seven to ten weeks.
We publish that number because it saves everyone time. If £9,500 is well beyond where you're at, you'll know within thirty seconds rather than three meetings.
Tier four: Shopify Plus, £30,000 upwards
Once you're dealing with multiple markets, ERP integrations, custom checkout logic or wholesale alongside DTC, build costs move into the tens of thousands and the agencies working at that level are structured differently.
Shopify Plus itself starts at roughly £1,800 per month. If you're not sure whether you need it, you almost certainly don't.
What actually moves the price
Two quotes for "a Shopify website" can differ by £15,000 and both be reasonable. These are the variables that explain the gap.
Number of products and how clean the data is. Eighty SKUs with tidy variants is a different job from 4,000 with inconsistent naming and no images.
Migration. Moving from WooCommerce, Magento or a bespoke platform is consistently the thing that blows timelines. Preserving URLs, redirecting properly and moving customer and order history takes real work, and getting it wrong costs you search rankings you spent years building.
Design from scratch versus theme customisation. A heavily customised premium theme gets most brands ninety per cent of the way there for a fraction of the cost of bespoke design. Fully custom is defensible when your brand is genuinely the differentiator.
Integrations. Every connection to a warehouse system, ERP, subscription tool or accounting package adds scope. Some are a plug-in. Some are a fortnight.
Whether content is ready. Photography, product copy and brand assets. If the agency is producing these, it's a separate cost. If you're producing them, they're usually the thing that delays launch.
Who does the thinking. A build where you supply the strategy is cheaper than one where the agency is responsible for the commercial outcome.
The costs that don't appear in the quote
The build price is one line in a bigger budget. Plan for the rest.
Shopify's own subscription
UK plans in 2026 run from £5 a month for Starter, £19–£25 for Basic, £49–£65 for Grow, and £259–£344 for Advanced, with annual billing discounted. Plus starts around £1,800. Most established DTC brands sit on Grow or Advanced.
Transaction fees
Using Shopify Payments, expect roughly 2% + 25p on Basic, 1.7% + 25p on Grow and 1.5% + 25p on Advanced. Third-party gateways attract an additional Shopify fee, which catches people out.
Apps
This is the one that surprises people. A typical DTC store spends somewhere between £150 and £600 a month on apps — reviews, email, subscriptions, loyalty, search, bundling. Every one is a small monthly amount and collectively they're often more than the Shopify subscription.
Ongoing support
Sites drift. Apps conflict, themes need updating, and conversion work never really finishes. Retainers for this typically run £250–£600 a month for maintenance and light optimisation.
Email marketing
Klaviyo management sits around £1,500–£3,000 a month with an agency, and for most established brands it returns more than any other channel. Email should be contributing 25–40% of revenue. If yours is at 5%, that gap is usually worth more than a new website.
Why the cheapest build is rarely the cheapest option
Not an argument for spending more than you need to. It's an argument for understanding what you're buying.
We're regularly asked to look at stores built eighteen months earlier for £2,500. The pattern is consistent: the site launched, the person who built it moved on, nobody has touched it since, and it's now costing the brand more in lost conversion every month than the original build cost in total.
Common findings on those audits include page titles left as default placeholder text, free shipping thresholds that contradict each other across the homepage, no abandoned cart flow running at all, and mobile load times over four seconds on stores where eighty per cent of traffic is mobile.
None of that is exotic. It's the difference between a site that was delivered and a site that's being run.
What to ask before you sign anything
Whoever you're speaking to, these questions will tell you more than any portfolio:
- What exactly is included, and what is explicitly out of scope?
- What happens if we need something that isn't in scope - how is that priced?
- What's the payment schedule tied to?
- Who actually does the work, and will I speak to them?
- What happens on day 31 after launch?
- Can you show me a build where you know the conversion rate before and after?
- What do you need from us, and by when, for the timeline to hold?
That last one matters more than people expect. Most projects that run late run late because content and access didn't arrive, not because the developer was slow.
Working out what you should spend
A rough rule: if your website is your primary sales channel, an investment of somewhere between three and five per cent of annual revenue on a rebuild is defensible, provided you also budget for what happens afterwards.
A brand doing £750,000 a year spending £10,000 on a build needs a conversion rate improvement of well under one percentage point to pay for it. That's a realistic target with proper CRO work. A brand doing £150,000 a year spending the same amount is making a much riskier bet, and would usually get a better return fixing their email programme first.
Not sure whether a rebuild is what you actually need?
We run a structured Shopify Growth Audit for £500. You get a written assessment of where your store is leaking revenue, what to fix in what order, and an honest view on whether a rebuild is justified — including when it isn't. It's a standalone piece of work with no obligation to go further.
Book a call or email hello@528digital.co.uk.
