How Much Does It Cost to Start an Online Store in 2026?

The honest range for how much it costs to start an online store is about $40 on the bare-bones end to a little over $1,200 if you’re paying for a premium theme, real branding, and a proper first ad test from day one. Most people land somewhere between those two, and where you land has almost nothing to do with how “professional” your store ends up looking. It has to do with which corners you’re willing to cut in month one and which ones you’re not.

That’s a wider range than you probably wanted, and it’s wide on purpose – this article breaks it into three actual budget scenarios below, with the line-item math shown, rather than handing you one number and hoping it’s close enough. Every guide that gives you a single clean figure is either rounding aggressively or trying to sell you something.

Quick note on methodology before we get into it: every price below is either pulled directly from the provider’s own pricing page, calculated from those sourced prices with the assumptions stated, or flagged as a general market estimate where no single authoritative number exists. All prices were checked in August 2026. Software pricing drifts and app tiers change often, so if you’re reading this more than a couple months after it was published, double-check anything you’re about to commit to.

Quick Answer: Realistic Startup Cost Range

If you want the number without the breakdown: ~$40 covers a genuinely bare-bones launch (platform, domain, nothing else), ~$320 is a sensible first-month budget once you add a few apps, business email, and basic branding, and ~$1,280 is where you land building to scale – premium theme, a fuller app stack, hired-out branding, and a real first ad test. These three figures match the budget table further down exactly; nothing here is a separate estimate. None of it includes inventory, which is its own conversation entirely and varies by what you’re actually selling.

What’s Included in the Cost

Here’s where the money goes, roughly in the order you’ll spend it.

Ecommerce platform costs

This is usually the first real decision, and it sets the floor for everything else. Shopify’s Basic plan runs $39/month if you pay monthly, or $29/month if you commit to annual billing – you can see the full plan breakdown on Shopify’s pricing page directly. Paying annually instead of monthly works out to $348/year instead of $468/year, a difference worth knowing before you pick a billing cycle, even if it means committing upfront on a business that’s still unproven. There’s also a 3-day free trial, and after that Shopify’s been running a promo where it’s $1/month for the first three months before it jumps to full price – worth checking whether that’s still live when you sign up, since these things get adjusted. (The budget table below uses standard pricing, not the promotional rate, since a promo isn’t something you can count on as a baseline.)

WooCommerce is technically free, but “free” is doing a lot of work in that sentence – you’re paying for hosting instead. Bluehost’s WordPress hosting, as one example, renews around $9.99/month after its introductory period, which gives you a realistic floor for what “cheap but decent” hosting costs – plus whatever plugins you end up needing to replicate what Shopify gives you out of the box. Wix and Squarespace sit somewhere in between; check Wix’s current plans and Squarespace’s pricing directly, since both platforms restructure their tiers often enough that a number quoted here would risk being stale by the time you read it. Squarespace, notably, varies its online-store transaction fee by plan (0% to 2%) rather than charging a flat rate.

If you’re specifically weighing Shopify’s cost against these alternatives, the plan-by-plan breakdown with transaction fees included lives in a dedicated comparison – worth a read once you’re past the “how much roughly” stage and into “okay, which platform specifically.”

Domain name

Ten to twenty dollars a year for a standard .com, give or take. Namecheap, for instance, currently lists a .com at around $11 for the first year, renewing at roughly $18.48 after that. That gap between the intro price and the renewal price is normal across most registrars, not a Namecheap-specific thing – read the fine print before you buy so the second-year bill doesn’t catch you off guard.

Business email

Technically optional, but I’d put it in the “spend the money” category. A Gmail address with your store name in it looks amateur in a way customers notice even if they can’t articulate why. Google Workspace’s Business Starter plan runs around $6/month per user – it’s worth checking their pricing calculator directly, since Google adjusts these tiers more often than you’d expect. Some platforms bundle a free email forwarding option that’s good enough to start with – check what yours offers before paying separately.

Theme

Free themes get you further than people assume. Shopify’s free theme library, for instance, is genuinely decent now, and a lot of profitable stores never upgrade past one. If you want something with more built-in flexibility, premium themes on the Shopify Theme Store typically run $180–$420, one-time, not monthly. My honest take: skip this expense in month one. Launch on a free theme, see if the business has legs, upgrade later once you know what you actually need from a theme rather than guessing.

Apps and tools

This is where budgets get away from people, and it’s genuinely the hardest category to estimate because it depends entirely on what you’re selling and how. A few realistic bands:

• Reviews app: free tier usually covers a new store, paid tiers run $15–$40/month once you outgrow it
• Email and SMS marketing: most tools give you a free tier up to a limited contact list – Klaviyo’s pricing page has the current cutoffs, since providers tend to adjust free-tier limits more often than their paid pricing – then it’s roughly $20–$45/month once you’re past that
• Upsell or bundling apps: $0–$40/month, and honestly skippable at the very start
• Inventory or dropship connectors, if that’s your model: $0–$30/month depending on the supplier network

Add it up and a lean stack costs nothing extra in month one. As a worked example, not a universal rule: one reviews app at $20/month, one email tool just past its free tier at $25/month, and one upsell app at $30/month gets you to $75/month before you’ve sold a single item – and a store running a fuller stack across all four categories can land in the $100–$150/month range. That’s the number people don’t budget for, and it’s the one that quietly kills margins in the first quarter.

Payment processing

You’re not paying this separately, it’s baked into your platform’s transaction fees – but it’s real money leaving your account, so it belongs in this conversation. Per Shopify’s pricing page, card rates run from 2.9% + 30¢ on the Basic plan down to 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced. There’s also a separate penalty (2% down to 0.6%, depending on plan) if you use a payment gateway other than the platform’s own. At any real revenue volume, this adds up to more than the monthly subscription fee does – worth a closer look once you’re past the setup stage and into actually running the numbers on your specific sales volume.

Legal and business setup

General guidance below, not legal advice – requirements vary by state and by what you’re selling, and it’s worth a few minutes with your state’s Secretary of State site or an actual attorney before you rely on any of this.

Here’s something a lot of guides skip entirely: in most US states, you don’t need an LLC to make your first sale. You can start as a sole proprietor and formalize later once there’s actual revenue to protect – whether that’s actually the right call for your situation is worth its own explanation rather than a bullet point here. When you do register, filing fees vary wildly by state – Montana’s around $35, Massachusetts runs $500, and most states land somewhere in between. This state-by-state filing fee breakdown is worth bookmarking, though confirm the number on your own state’s site before you file, since these get updated on their own schedule.

A business license, separately, may or may not be required depending on what you’re selling and where – a genuinely confusing area that also deserves a fuller explanation than fits here.

Branding and photography

These two are the least standardized costs on this list – think of the figures below as general market ranges rather than fixed prices, since there’s no single “logo market rate” the way there’s a Shopify plan price. Logo: free if you’re comfortable in Canva, roughly $50–$300 if you’re hiring it out on a freelance marketplace like Fiverr. Product photography: free if you’re shooting on a phone against a white sheet (which, done well, looks better than people expect), roughly $200–$500 if you’re paying a photographer for a proper batch. Neither is required to launch. Both are the kind of thing worth revisiting once you have revenue to justify the upgrade.

Marketing budget

This is the one line item that’s genuinely optional in month one and genuinely necessary eventually, and it’s worth thinking about in two tiers rather than one number. A small first test – enough to see whether paid traffic converts at all – runs around $150, which is what the “sensible start” budget below assumes. A fuller test, one that actually gives you enough data to trust the results, runs closer to $300-$500, which is what the “built to scale” tier assumes instead. A lot of new store owners skip paid ads entirely at first and lean on organic content, Pinterest, or their existing audience instead – which costs time rather than money, and that’s a reasonable way to start if cash is tight.

Three Startup Budget Scenarios

Here’s how those pieces stack up depending on how you want to run at this. This is a month-one cash outlay – the domain line is the actual first-year price you’d pay at signup, not a monthly-equivalent, since that’s what actually leaves your account in month one.

	Bare-bones	Sensible start	Built to scale
Platform	$29 (Shopify, annual billing)	$39 (Shopify, monthly billing)	$105 (Shopify Grow)
Domain (first year)	$11	$11	$11
Theme	Free	Free	$280 one-time
Apps	$0	$40	$120
Business email	Free forwarding	$6	$12
Branding	DIY, $0	$75	$250
First-month marketing	$0	$150	$500
Month-one total	~$40	~$321	~$1,278

How the middle figures were built, so this isn’t just an assertion: “Sensible start” apps ($40) assumes one paid tool past its free tier, roughly in line with the low end of the app bands above. “Built to scale” apps ($120) assumes a fuller stack across three or four categories. Branding figures sit at the low-to-mid end of the Fiverr and DIY ranges cited above, not the high end. None of these three totals include inventory or product cost, which is a completely separate budget line and depends entirely on what you’re selling – a print-on-demand store and a handmade jewelry store have almost nothing in common cost-wise, even running on identical platforms.

Where People Overspend When They’re Starting Out

The premium theme, usually. It’s tempting to buy the polished-looking one because it feels like progress, but a theme doesn’t sell products, and $280 spent on a theme in week one is $280 not spent testing whether anyone wants to buy what you’re selling.

Apps are the second trap, and it’s a sneaky one because each individual app feels cheap. Fifteen dollars here, twenty there. Then you check your card statement in month two and realize you’re paying $140/month for a store that’s barely selling anything yet. Install apps when you have a specific problem to solve, not because a “best Shopify apps” listicle told you to.

Where It’s Actually Worth Spending More

Photography, once you’ve validated the product is selling – product photos are widely considered one of the bigger levers on conversion rate in ecommerce, even though the exact effect is hard to pin to a single number and varies by category. Email marketing tools, past the free tier, tend to be worth the cost if you’re actually using them; automated flows like abandoned-cart reminders are a standard feature specifically because they’re one of the higher-leverage things a small store can set up. And if you’re on WooCommerce, decent hosting isn’t the place to go cheap – a slow site loses sales quietly, in a way you’ll never see in your analytics because the visitor just leaves.

What This Doesn’t Include

Worth being upfront about this: nothing above covers inventory, shipping supplies, sample orders, or the cost of your actual product. Those numbers swing so widely by category that lumping them into a general “starting cost” figure would make the whole estimate meaningless. If you’re dropshipping or doing print-on-demand, your upfront product cost is close to zero. If you’re holding physical inventory, budget separately for that, and budget more than you think – first orders almost always run bigger than planned once you account for minimum order quantities.

This also doesn’t include your time, which is the actual biggest cost of starting a store and the one nobody puts a dollar figure on.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to start an online store? Based on the breakdown above, roughly $40 for a genuinely bare-bones launch, around $320 for a sensible first-month setup with a few apps and basic branding, and about $1,280 if you’re building toward scale with a premium theme, hired-out branding, and a real ad test. None of these figures include inventory or product cost, which vary too much by category to fold into a general estimate.

Can I start an online store for under $100? Yes, realistically. A domain, a free theme, and a platform’s free trial or promotional rate can get you live for well under $100 in the first month, based on the “bare-bones” figures above. You’ll add costs back in as the store grows, but nothing here requires a big upfront outlay.

Do I need $10,000 saved up to start an online store? No, and that figure gets thrown around a lot without much basis. Most of the real cost in ecommerce comes later, from inventory, marketing spend, and apps you add once you know what you actually need – not from the initial setup.

Is Shopify cheaper than WooCommerce? It depends on how you count it. Shopify’s sticker price is higher than WooCommerce’s “free” – but WooCommerce isn’t actually free once you add hosting (commonly $10 or so a month once an introductory rate ends) and the plugins needed to match what Shopify includes out of the box. At small scale the two often land closer together than the headline prices suggest; at larger scale, which one’s cheaper depends heavily on your specific app and plugin needs. Worth working out for your specific situation rather than assuming either platform wins outright.

What are the hidden costs of an online store? Apps are the biggest one – individually cheap, collectively able to add $100–$150/month to a lean store’s bill once you’re running a full stack. Third-party payment gateway penalties on some platforms are another. Domain renewal pricing, which is often several times higher than the first-year rate, catches people too.

Is it worth paying for a premium theme when I’m just starting out? Generally, no. Free themes have improved a lot and cover most of what a new store needs. Spend on a premium theme once you have a specific design limitation you’re running into, not before.

What’s the cheapest way to start an online store? Annual billing on your platform, a free theme, minimal apps, and DIY branding. That combination gets you close to the platform’s base monthly cost, sometimes less – see the “bare-bones” column above for the specific numbers.

How much should I budget for my first month, realistically? Somewhere around $300–$350 covers the platform, a domain, a few apps, business email, and basic branding without cutting so many corners that the store looks unfinished. Treat anything beyond that – premium themes, hired branding, paid ad tests – as optional until you’ve made your first few sales.