Ask Google how much does an online shop cost in the UK and the top results mostly say £3,000–£15,000. Look at who wrote them: web agencies. They quote build prices because they sell builds. If you’re a small business opening your first shop, the honest answer is very different — and it fits on one page, line by line, with prices we checked on 7 August 2026.
Short version: you can launch for about £150 if you’re careful, about £530 if you’re sensible, and about £2,000 if you’re well funded and want to launch properly. Here’s where every pound goes.
How much does an online shop cost in the UK? The short answer
Three numbers matter, and agencies tend to blur them together:
- Launch costs — what you spend before your first sale: domain, first stock, packaging, photos.
- Running costs — the platform subscription and insurance, roughly £25–£40 a month at the entry level.
- Per-sale costs — card fees, postage, returns. These scale with revenue, so they never appear in a quote and they’re the ones that bite later.
A realistic first-year total for a small UK shop is £500–£900 including a year’s subscription — not £3,000, and certainly not £15,000. Let’s itemise.
The line-by-line costs every UK online shop pays
A domain name: £4–£16 a year
A .co.uk is often near-free in year one — 123 Reg was listing .co.uk at £3.99 for the first year (ex VAT) when we checked on 7 August 2026, with .com teasers as low as 1p. The catch is renewal: UK registrars typically renew .co.uk domains at £10–£16 a year. Budget £15 a year and treat anything cheaper as a bonus. Buy the domain yourself, in your own account — never let a freelancer or agency register it for you.
The platform subscription: £12–£25 a month
This is the biggest recurring cost, and the one with the most confusing pricing. Here’s the entry point for the platforms UK small businesses actually shortlist — the cheapest plan on each that can genuinely take payments:
| Platform | Cheapest plan that sells | Monthly billing | Billed yearly (per month) | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Basic | £25 | £19 | Prices shown before VAT; card fee 2% + 25p on Basic |
| Wix | Core | £19 | £16 | The £9 Light plan cannot take payments — Core is the real entry price |
| Squarespace | Basic | £16 | £12 | Prices include VAT, but Basic adds a 2% Squarespace fee on every sale; Core (£17/mo yearly) drops it to 0% |
| Orbit | Solo | £25 | £19 | We build Orbit, so read this row knowing that; unlimited products, card fee 2% + 25p, free Amazon/eBay/Etsy plugins |
Checked 7 August 2026 against each platform’s UK pricing page; Wix and Squarespace figures cross-checked against current UK pricing guides because both sites hide GBP pricing behind region detection. Full Orbit plans are on our pricing page. Two traps to notice: monthly billing costs 20–30% more than yearly on every platform, and Shopify’s prices exclude VAT — so Basic is really £30 a month inc VAT unless you’re VAT-registered and can reclaim it.
Card processing fees: a percentage, not a line item
Nobody escapes these, and no agency quote mentions them. Stripe’s standard UK rate is 1.5% + 20p per transaction on UK cards (2.5% + 20p for EU cards, checked 7 August 2026). Platform-integrated payments run slightly higher at entry level — Shopify Basic and Orbit Solo both charge 2% + 25p on UK online cards.
Worked example: 400 orders at £25 each (£10,000 of sales) costs £230 in fees on Stripe’s standard rate, or £300 at 2% + 25p. That’s 2.3–3% of revenue — price your products knowing it exists.
Business insurance: from about £7 a month
Not legally required just to sell online, but cheap enough that going without is a false economy. Simply Business quotes online retailer policies from £7.18 a month for £2m of public liability cover, and standalone product liability from £5.40 a month (both checked 7 August 2026 — their own disclosure says 10% of online retailers paid £86.12 a year or less). Budget £70–£100 a year. If you employ anyone, employers’ liability insurance stops being optional — it’s a legal requirement.
Stock, packaging and photography
Your first stock order is the one genuinely variable line. £75–£150 buys a small test batch in most product categories; resist ordering deep until something sells. Packaging is £20–£30 for a starter supply of mailing bags and tissue. Photography can legitimately cost £0: a phone, a window, a sheet of white card. A £25 lightbox is the single best upgrade under £50. None of this needs an agency.
One cost that’s £0 at this stage: registering the business itself. Sole trader registration with HMRC is free — our guide to registering a business to sell online in the UK walks through it, and sole trader vs limited company covers which structure to pick.
Three realistic budgets, line by line
Every number below comes from the verified prices above. Pick the column that matches your appetite:
| Line item | Shoestring | Sensible | Well-funded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain (.co.uk) | £4 (first-year offer) | £10 | £20 (.co.uk + .com) |
| Platform | £25 (build on the free trial, pay for month one) | £228 (£19/mo billed yearly) | £228 (£19/mo billed yearly) |
| Insurance | £7 (first month, paid monthly) | £86 (year, public + product liability) | £120 (year, with stock cover) |
| First stock | £90 | £150 | £1,000 |
| Packaging | £20 | £30 | £150 (branded) |
| Photography | £0 (phone + daylight) | £25 (lightbox) | £250 (pro half-day shoot) |
| Logo and branding | £0 (DIY) | £0 (DIY) | £100 (freelancer) |
| Launch ads test | £0 | £0 | £150 |
| Total | £146 | £529 | £2,018 |
Shoestring (~£150) proves the idea before committing to a year of anything. Build the shop during a free trial, pay for one month, and see if strangers buy. If they don’t, you’ve lost £150 and learned something an agency would have charged £5,000 to teach you. The genuinely cheapest way to sell online in the UK is arguably to skip the shop entirely for month one and list on eBay or Etsy — no subscription, fees only when you sell. That’s a fine test, and it doesn’t lock you out of a proper shop later: Orbit’s free Amazon, eBay and Etsy plugins sync listings and stock so marketplace orders land in the same place as your own.
Sensible (~£530) is the budget we’d suggest to most people: yearly billing (saving £70+ over monthly), a proper insurance policy, and enough stock to look like a real shop.
Well-funded (~£2,000) spends the extra where it compounds — stock depth, professional photos, a small paid-ads test — not on the website itself. Note the platform line is identical to the sensible budget. Past £19–£25 a month, extra website spend buys polish, not sales.
The costs people forget
- Card fees scale with revenue. They look like pennies on day one and become your third-biggest cost by year two. At £50,000 of sales, the gap between 1.5% and 2% is £250 a year — worth checking what rate your plan actually gives you.
- VAT on the subscription. Shopify’s UK prices exclude VAT; Squarespace’s include it; always check which game a pricing page is playing before comparing. If you’re not VAT-registered, the ex-VAT price is 20% below what you’ll pay. (Selling means VAT questions eventually — our UK VAT guide for online sellers covers the £90,000 threshold question.)
- Returns postage. UK consumers can return most online purchases within 14 days, and many shops pay return postage to stay competitive. Royal Mail Tracked 48 is £3.55 for a small parcel up to 2kg (online price, checked 7 August 2026) — so a 5% return rate on 400 orders is £70+ of postage going both ways. See Royal Mail vs couriers for keeping the outbound side down too.
- Domain renewal shock. That 1p .com renews at £12–£16. Diarise the renewal date.
- The monthly-billing premium. Paying monthly on every major platform costs 20–30% more per year. Fine while testing; switch to yearly the month you decide you’re serious.
When a £3,000 agency build is actually worth it
We’ve been rude about agency quotes, so here’s the fair version — there are cases where £3,000–£15,000 is money well spent:
- Trade and B2B selling. Customer-specific price lists, credit accounts and quote workflows genuinely need building or configuring by someone who’s done it before.
- System integration. If orders must flow into an existing ERP, EPOS or warehouse system, a botched DIY integration costs more than any agency.
- Replatforming a large catalogue. Moving thousands of products with SEO rankings at stake is skilled work; a bad migration can halve your traffic overnight.
- Your time is the scarce resource. If evenings spent on a website are evenings not spent on the product, paying someone is rational.
What a £3,000 build is not worth it for: a first shop with 30 products and no revenue yet. Launch cheap, learn what sells, and spend the £3,000 on stock and marketing once you know.
Questions people ask us about online shop costs
How much does it cost to set up an online shop in the UK?
About £150 at minimum (domain, one month’s platform subscription, insurance, a small stock order and packaging), around £530 for a sensible first year including a yearly platform plan, and about £2,000 if you’re funding stock depth, professional photography and a launch ads budget. The £3,000–£15,000 figures quoted online are agency build prices, which a first shop rarely needs.
What is the cheapest way to sell online in the UK?
Listing on marketplaces like eBay or Etsy, where there’s no subscription and you pay fees only when something sells. It’s a good way to test demand, but you’re building on rented land — no email list, no brand, fees on every sale forever. Most sellers who get traction add their own shop, which starts at £12–£19 a month billed yearly across the major UK platforms.
Do I need business insurance to sell online in the UK?
There’s no general legal requirement to hold insurance just to sell online, but public and product liability cover is cheap — from around £5–£8 a month from UK insurers as of August 2026 — and protects you if a product you sold injures someone or damages property. The one legal must: if you employ staff, employers’ liability insurance is required by law.
How much should a small business budget for an ecommerce website in the UK?
Budget £250–£350 a year for the website itself: a domain at £10–£16 a year plus a platform plan at £12–£19 a month billed yearly, which includes hosting, security, checkout and support. Everything above that — stock, packaging, photography, ads — is shop cost, not website cost, and scales with your ambition rather than with what an agency quotes.