Pay monthly online shops are priced by how many products you list, not by how many pages you have. That is the first thing to understand, because it is the opposite of how brochure sites are sold and it changes which questions you need to ask.
The second thing is that no monthly fee anywhere covers the whole cost of selling online. Card processing, postage, packaging and photography sit outside it, at every provider, on every platform. A shop that looks cheap on the website page can still be expensive to run, so this post puts the whole picture in one place.
Why is a shop more expensive than a brochure site?
Because it never really finishes. A five page brochure site is built, approved and then it sits there working. A shop has stock going in and out, prices changing, orders arriving, customers emailing about a delivery, a card payment failing on a Sunday, and tax settings that have to be right.
The build is bigger too. A shop needs product pages that can be added to, a basket, a checkout, a payment connection, delivery rules, order emails, a returns page and somewhere for you to see what has sold. That is a lot more moving parts than a contact form, and every one of them has to keep working.
So the monthly figure on a shop is buying more ongoing work than the equivalent brochure site, and the pricing reflects that everywhere you look, not just here. If you find a shop offered at brochure site money, read very carefully what happens after launch.
How many products do you actually have?
This trips up nearly everybody, because the answer is usually bigger than the one in your head. Most platforms and most packages count a variant as a product or come close to it.
If you sell a t shirt in four sizes and three colours, that is one thing in your head and twelve lines in a shop. If you sell timber in eight lengths, that is eight. Before you look at any pricing page, open a spreadsheet and write out every buyable combination. Then add the ones you are planning for Christmas.
Our tiers are up to twenty five products at £99 a month, up to a hundred at £139 and up to two hundred and fifty at £179, all excluding VAT, with anything larger quoted individually. Other providers band it differently but they all band it, so do the count first and you will not be surprised by which tier you land in.
What is normally included in a pay monthly shop?
- The design and build of the shop to the product count in your tier.
- Hosting and the SSL certificate, which is not optional on a site taking payments.
- The payment connection, usually to a provider like Stripe or PayPal. The connection is included. Their fees are not.
- Product pages, basket and checkout, and the order emails that go out automatically.
- Delivery rules, meaning postage bands, free delivery thresholds, collection options.
- Business email on your own domain, which matters more on a shop because customers reply to order emails.
- Updates, backups and someone to ring when something stops working.
With us that also includes the gallery, FAQ section, reviews, a free .co.uk domain with the package and a redesign every year, with one design revision included in the build and content changes unlimited and free. Adding and editing products is content, so that is on us, not on your evening.
What sits outside the monthly fee, wherever you buy?
- Card processing. Your payment provider charges a percentage of each sale plus a small fixed amount per transaction. Their rates are published on their own sites and they are the same whoever built your shop. Budget for them properly, because on low value items they are a real chunk of the margin.
- Photography. The single biggest thing that decides whether a small shop sells. Plain, well lit photographs on a clean background, shot consistently, matter more than the design of the site. Compress them before they go up, or the shop will crawl on a phone, which is explained in why a slow website costs you work.
- Product descriptions. Someone has to write them, and the manufacturer's blurb that every other retailer also pasted in is close to worthless for search.
- Postage and packaging. Boxes, tape, labels, a printer, the trip to the post office, and the time. Work out your true cost per parcel before you set a delivery price.
- Marketing. A shop with no visitors sells nothing, and unlike a local trade you cannot rely on the phone ringing. This is the cost people forget entirely.
Should you rent a shop or use a platform?
An honest comparison, because for some businesses the answer is not us.
A hosted platform like Shopify charges a monthly subscription plus transaction costs, and you build and run it yourself. It is powerful and it is genuinely good. You are paying in time: setting it up, choosing a theme, loading products, and dealing with it when something needs changing. If you enjoy that and you have the hours, it is hard to beat.
A marketplace like Etsy, eBay or Amazon brings its own buyers, which is the thing your own website cannot do on day one. You pay for that in fees and in never owning the customer relationship. For a maker starting out, a marketplace plus a simple one page site is often the sensible first year.
A rented shop suits somebody who wants their own shop on their own domain without building or maintaining it, and would rather send an email than learn a platform. The trade off is that you are working within the shape of the package rather than installing whatever plugin you fancy.
A built shop that you own outright makes sense when the shop is the business, when you need it to do something unusual, and when you have the budget to maintain it properly afterwards.
What does a small shop cost to run in a year?
Take a maker selling twenty five products at ten to forty pounds each, posting a couple of hundred orders a year from home. The realistic shape of the year, in the order the money leaves.
- The site itself. On a rented shop at the smallest tier, £99 a month excluding VAT, which covers the build, hosting, SSL, email and the maintenance in one line.
- Card processing. A few pence in the pound on every order, plus a small fixed charge per transaction, taken by the payment provider. On low value orders this is the cost that stings.
- Postage. Whatever the courier or Royal Mail charges, which you will partly recover from the customer and partly absorb.
- Packaging. Boxes, tape, labels, tissue, a thermal label printer if you get past a handful of orders a week. Not enormous, but not nothing.
- Photography. A one off if you do it yourself with a window and a sheet of white card, a few hundred pounds if you pay someone for a product day.
- Your time. The largest cost and the one that never appears on a spreadsheet. Picking, packing, answering emails, chasing a lost parcel.
The point of writing it out is not to put you off. It is that the website fee is rarely the biggest number on that list, so choosing a shop purely on the monthly price is optimising the wrong line.
How long does it take to get a shop live?
The build is the quick bit. Two to four weeks is normal for a small rented shop once everything is supplied, and a custom build considerably longer. What takes the time is your side of it, and it is always the same three things: the product photographs, the descriptions, and deciding your delivery rules.
Delivery in particular catches people out. You need to decide, before launch, what you charge for postage and how it is worked out, whether there is a free delivery threshold, whether you post overseas, how quickly you dispatch, and what happens with returns. None of that is technical. All of it needs an answer before the checkout can be finished.
Who should not rent an online shop?
Worth saying plainly. Do not rent one if:
- You are not sure you will sell anything yet. Test with a marketplace or a single product page first. A shop with no orders is an expensive way to find out.
- Your stock changes constantly and lives in another system. If your stock control is the source of truth, you need an integration, and integrations are a build job rather than a package.
- You sell mainly to trade accounts with their own pricing. That is a different sort of site again.
- You want to install your own extensions. Rented shops are managed, which is the point, and that means you are not going to be adding arbitrary plugins yourself.
What to check before you sign up for any shop
- How products are counted, and whether variants count separately.
- What happens when you outgrow the tier. Is it a simple step up or a rebuild.
- Who adds the products, you or them, and what that costs either way.
- Which payment providers are supported, and whether you can use the one you already have.
- Whether you can export your orders and customers, and in what format.
- Who owns the domain. Same answer as always: you should.
- What the buyout costs if you rent and later want to own it. Ours is twelve times the monthly, as a separate one off payment that is not reduced by the rent already paid.
Start smaller than you think
The most common mistake with a first online shop is launching with two hundred products, half of them badly photographed, and no plan for getting anybody to the site. The shops that work usually start with the twenty things that actually sell, photographed properly, described in the seller's own words, and with somewhere the traffic is genuinely coming from.
You can always move up a tier when the orders justify it. Moving down after you have loaded two hundred products is the awkward direction.
The same goes for the shop itself. Launch with the delivery rules simple, one or two postage bands and a clear dispatch time, and complicate them later once you know what people actually order. Every extra rule at launch is another thing to test, another thing to explain, and another thing to get wrong in front of your first customer.
If you want to see the numbers for your own product count, the builder prices up a shop as you go. If you are still deciding whether a shop is the right shape at all, the general picture is in pay monthly websites and how they actually work, and the package comparison method is in what is in a pay monthly website package.
