How much does an office dealer webstore cost in the UK?

An office dealer webstore can cost £19 a month or up to £120,000 before it takes an order. The spread is not random: it depends on who builds it, where the product data comes from and how much of your trade business it has to carry. This page puts dated numbers on each route, then on the lines that rarely appear in a quote. Every outside price was read on its source page on 29 October 2026; where a vendor does not publish prices, we say so rather than guess.

Disclosure: we build Orbit Commerce, one of the platforms priced here, so we have a stake in this. Our prices sit alongside everyone else’s, ex VAT, with the conditions that apply.

How much does an office dealer webstore cost in the UK?

There are five routes. Here they are from most to least expensive up front:

Build figures are from Kolonell’s London price grid (kolonell.com, published 15 October 2026, checked 29 October 2026). Shopify’s Plus price is from shopify.com/uk/pricing (checked 29 October 2026). The SaaS range runs from the cheapest plan billed yearly on either platform to Orbit’s Enterprise plan billed monthly. Each route is broken down below.

What does an agency or custom build cost?

The most detailed public figures we found come from Kolonell, a remote web studio, which published a London price grid for a B2B office supplies distributor on 15 October 2026. Its example business has 45 staff, 1,800 business customers and 12,000 SKUs, and the figures exclude existing ERP licences:

• Shopify Plus B2B plus apps: £15,000 to £35,000 up front, then about US$2,300 a month plus apps. Two to three months.
• Open source (Sylius, Magento): £55,000 to £85,000, then £8,000 to £15,000 a year. Four to five months.
• Custom Next.js and API build: £80,000 to £120,000, then £10,000 to £18,000 a year. Five to six months.
• ERP connector (Sage, NetSuite, Odoo): £7,000 to £18,000, then £1,500 to £4,000 a year.
• Importing and enriching 12,000 SKUs: £6,000 to £12,000, one-off, over four to eight weeks.

Its FAQ adds that on Shopify Plus B2B, once you need three or more price lists or multi-level approval, the apps add £2,500 to £7,000 a year (kolonell.com, checked 29 October 2026).

Two cautions. These are one studio’s estimates, not a survey, and the page’s own summary gives the custom range as £60,000 to £120,000 while its table says £80,000 to £120,000. And the scope is a distributor’s: ERP-linked prices, approvals, e-invoicing. A dealer selling chairs and stationery from supplier catalogues may not need half of it. What the figures do show is where agency money goes: the build, the ERP link and the catalogue.

What do dealer software vendors charge?

A few UK vendors build webstores specifically for office dealers, usually tied to their own back-office or ERP software. None of the three below publishes a price, and each asks you to book a demo (all checked 29 October 2026):

• ECI EvolutionX. ECI describes it as an ecommerce platform designed for B2B dealers, “trusted by hundreds of dealers across the UK and Ireland”, and aims it at business supplies dealers and users of its Horizon ERP (ecisolutions.com).
• Prima GO. A B2B ecommerce platform from Prima, which makes software for office supplies businesses. Prima’s site says it has joined forces with ECI, and that the site is owned and operated by ECI Software Solutions (primasoftware.co.uk).
• Heart Systems PulseStore. The webstore in Heart’s Pulse system for dealers, which also covers back office, quotations and purchase orders, with supplier product feeds imported automatically. Heart sets up the back office, the data feeds and a custom-designed store (heartsystems.co.uk).

Product content is often a separate line. ECI’s FusionPlus service says it feeds over 1,000 dealer webstores from a database of more than 2 million SKUs, and it does not publish prices either (ecisolutions.com, checked 29 October 2026).

Since none of these publish prices, the fair advice is what to ask in the demo: the setup fee; the licence and what it scales with (users, branches, orders or SKUs); the content feed charge; card processing; the contract term and notice period; and how you get your products, customers and orders out if you leave. If your business already runs on one of these vendors’ ERPs, their own webstore is the natural first quote to get.

What do SaaS ecommerce platforms charge?

SaaS platforms publish prices, so you can compare them directly. Shopify’s UK plans, as listed on shopify.com/uk/pricing on 29 October 2026:

Orbit’s plans, ex VAT, with UK card rates on Orbit Payments:

Every Orbit plan has a 14-day free trial and includes supplier catalogue sync, pricing rules and drop-ship purchase orders to suppliers connected on Orbit. B2B (company accounts with several users and permissions, trade sign-up with approval, a price catalogue per company and a spending limit per buyer) is on Enterprise only. Plan details are on pricing and every card band is on payments. For the full Shopify bill, including apps, see the real cost of Shopify in the UK.

What are the hidden costs of a dealer webstore?

Product data and feeds

For a dealer, the catalogue is the biggest hidden line. Kolonell prices importing and enriching 12,000 SKUs at £6,000 to £12,000, and that is before keeping it current as suppliers change prices, drop lines and add new ones. Ask every vendor who maintains the data after launch, and what that costs.

On Orbit, on every plan, a dealer connects to suppliers on Orbit and imports their products with images, variants and specs, priced by the dealer’s own rules; stock keeps syncing after that. For a wholesaler that is not on Orbit, the Import/Export plugin (free plan, or £14.99 a month) runs scheduled product and stock imports from a file or feed, with the selling prices already in the file. The options are compared in getting supplier catalogues onto your website.

Card fees

If your trade buyers pay on company cards, the business card band matters more than the headline rate. On Orbit’s Team plan, a UK personal card costs 1.7% + 25p and a UK business card 3% + 25p. With assumed figures, £20,000 a month taken on business cards across 80 orders costs £620 a month; on personal cards it would be £360. That £260 a month gap is £3,120 a year, about four times Team’s yearly subscription. Whatever platform you choose, ask for the business card rate, and offer bank transfer to account customers who prefer it.

Apps and plugins

Add up every monthly add-on before comparing subscriptions. On Orbit, the two most dealers will want are the Google Shopping feed (free tier, or £3.99 a month) and Xero or QuickBooks (£9.99 a month each). On a Shopify Plus B2B build, Kolonell’s £2,500 to £7,000 a year for apps is the figure to test against.

Themes and design

An agency’s build price includes custom design. On SaaS you buy a theme and adapt it. Orbit’s office themes are one-off purchases: Apex, Canopy, Depot, Index and Quorum at £120 each, and Conduit, a trade theme with a VAT toggle in the header, at £179. Either way, budget time to add your logo, photography and category structure.

Migration

Moving an existing site costs time even when the software is cheap. Orbit imports Shopify and WooCommerce product CSVs as they are and other platforms’ exports through a column mapper, with separate importers for customers, orders and redirects, and you can book a free migration call. Redirects matter most: every old product address must point to its new one, or you lose the search traffic you have.

Staff time

The line nobody prices. Someone has to review supplier price changes, answer web enquiries, fix the product that went live without an image and process orders. As an assumption, budget half a day a week for a small catalogue and a day or more for a large one. On Orbit, supplier cost and content changes queue in one Updates inbox, or can be set to be accepted automatically.

What might three example set-ups cost?

These are illustrations, not quotes. Each uses Orbit’s published prices on yearly billing (the year’s total) and assumptions we have made up, so swap in your own. Card fees assume every card sale is on a UK business card, the expensive case.

Three things stand out. First, card fees outweigh the software in every column, so the payment rate deserves as much attention as the subscription. Second, the dealer group is on Enterprise because it needs B2B; the others are not. Third, the mid-size dealer is on Team rather than Pro on purpose: Pro’s business card rate is 0.2 points lower, but on yearly billing Pro costs £1,476 more, so it only pays for itself above roughly £61,500 a month of card sales (about £82,000 on monthly billing). Staff numbers can decide it sooner, since Team covers 10 staff accounts and Pro 40.

Set the group’s £29,948 against Kolonell’s Shopify Plus B2B route: £15,000 to £35,000 up front, about US$27,600 a year, plus apps and card fees. That is not like for like, because Kolonell’s scope includes an ERP connector and approvals, but it shows how much of an agency budget goes on the build rather than the selling.

If you are a smaller shop rather than a dealer, our line-by-line UK shop budget starts lower. Dealers can see how Orbit fits the office trade on Orbit for the office industry, with furniture specifics on Orbit for office furniture dealers.