An online store quote can run from €2,500 to €25,000 for what looks, from the outside, like the same website. The gap is not about the provider’s skill. It comes down to one question almost nobody asks before signing: do your catalogue and your stock have to talk to another system?
Key takeaways. A store with fewer than fifty products runs €2,500 to €5,000 with a French freelancer in 2026. As soon as a large catalogue has to be imported or stock synced with a till, you move up a bracket and the budget doubles. And after three years, transaction fees usually cost more than the build itself.
The three brackets of the French market
Custom e-commerce in France splits into three brackets, and the line between them is not the design. It is the data.
| Bracket | Scope | Price | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | Under 50 products, payment, orders | €2,500 to €5,000 | 4 to 6 weeks |
| Pro | 50 to 500 products, variants, stock or ERP sync | €5,000 to €12,000 | 6 to 10 weeks |
| Custom | Over 1,000 products, multi-vendor, business modules | €10,000 to €25,000 | 3 to 4 months |
With an agency, multiply those ranges by 1.5 to 2. You are paying for a full team, a project manager and overheads. On a simple project the gap is hard to justify; on a multi-discipline project it is not.
If you are still comparing types of website, the 2026 website pricing guide covers the other formats.
The number of products is not what sets the price
This is the counter-intuitive part, and the most useful one to understand before asking for a quote. Eight hundred products imported from a clean file is a few hours of work. Sixty products with variants whose stock must stay in sync with a shop till is several days.
Three things actually move a project from one bracket to the next:
- Bulk import. A catalogue rarely arrives in a usable shape. Cleaning, structuring and importing several hundred records with their variants is a project in itself, and often the most profitable investment of the build.
- Two-way synchronisation. As soon as stock exists in two places, in store and online, someone has to decide which side wins, how often, and what happens on conflict. That is business logic, not configuration.
- Variants. A size and a colour multiply references, images and stock rules. A catalogue of 200 models with four variants each is 800 lines to manage.
So the right question to ask a provider is not “how much for a hundred products”. It is: where does the data come from, and where does it have to go back to?
The costs the quote does not show
The build price is the visible part. Over three years, four recurring items usually weigh more, and they almost never appear on the initial quote.
Transaction fees
They are proportional to revenue, so they grow with your success. Public rates for the three gateways most used in France, for a European Economic Area card:
| Gateway | Fee per transaction |
|---|---|
| Stripe | 1.5% + €0.25 |
| Mollie | 1.8% + €0.25 |
| PayPal | 2.9% + €0.35 |
On €100,000 of revenue with an €80 average basket, that is 1,250 transactions: Stripe costs about €1,800 a year, PayPal about €3,300. Over three years the gap between the two gateways exceeds the build price of a Starter store. The exact rate is on Stripe’s pricing page.
Hosting, plugins and maintenance
Entry-level shared hosting suits a blog, not a store that writes to the database on every order and has to absorb a traffic spike on promotion day. Budget €30 to €100 a month for serious hosting, €800 to €1,500 a year in paid plugins on a WordPress stack, and €80 to €250 a month for maintenance depending on the service level.
That last item is not optional on a store. A brochure site down for four hours is an inconvenience; a store down for four hours is lost revenue, and a flaw in a payment module is a personal data incident.
Shopify or custom: the honest maths
Shopify charges a subscription and, if you do not use Shopify Payments, a cut of every sale. Public French rates, taken from the official page:
- Basic: €36 a month billed monthly, €27 a month billed annually, plus 2% third-party transaction fees.
- Grow: €105 a month, €79 annually, plus 1%.
- Advanced: €384 a month, €289 annually, plus 0.6%.
That 2% on the Basic plan is the number that decides. It stacks on top of the gateway fee and it scales with revenue: at €200,000 in sales it is €4,000 a year, every year, on top of the subscription. The crossover with a custom store sits around €50,000 of annual revenue. Below that, Shopify is cheaper and spares you the technical load. Above it, the commission ends up paying for the build several times over.
One note, checked while writing this article: several French 2026 guides still quote Shopify Basic at €24 or €25 a month with 1.5% third-party fees. Both figures are wrong. The rates above come from Shopify France’s own page, not from another article.
Real cost is measured over three years
It is the only honest way to compare two quotes. The build price is rarely half of what the store will have cost you after three years.
Take a Starter store at €3,500 to build. Add €60 a month of hosting, €1,200 a year of plugins, €150 a month of maintenance and €1,800 a year of Stripe fees on €100,000 of sales. The three-year total passes €21,000, of which the initial quote was only 17%.
The practical consequence: at equal quotes, always prefer the offer that includes hosting and maintenance over the one that bills them afterwards. Not because it is cheaper at signature, but because its cost is known in advance.
What I charge, for reference
I publish my prices, so they may as well sit next to the ranges above rather than leaving you to guess.
- Store: €2,900 setup then €149 a month. Up to 200 products imported from a file, payment, order management, with no synchronisation to an external system.
- Pro tier: €5,900 then €199 a month. Larger catalogue, variants, bulk import, stock synchronisation with a till or an ERP, multi-currency.
The monthly plan covers hosting, the domain name, the certificate, daily backups, security updates and ninety minutes of changes per month. No commission on your sales, whatever your revenue. Full details on the e-commerce page.
The setup fee of the first plan sits below the market floor, and that is deliberate: the model recovers on the subscription, not on the quote. In exchange the commitment runs twelve months.
Frequently asked questions
What is the minimum budget to sell online seriously?
Around €3,000 to build and €200 a month all in, hosting, maintenance and transaction fees included, for a store under fifty products. Below that you are not buying a cheaper store, you are buying a store without maintenance, and the bill arrives later.
Do I have to pay a commission on sales?
To your payment gateway, yes, that one is unavoidable. To your provider or your platform, no. It is worth checking explicitly: a 2% commission on a store that works costs more every year than the build did.
How long does it take to launch a store?
Four to six weeks for a Starter store, six to ten for a store with stock synchronisation, counted from receipt of your content and your catalogue. The catalogue is almost always what delays a launch, never the development.
Can you migrate my existing store?
Yes. Products, customers, order history and existing rankings all carry over, with a redirect plan so you do not lose your positions. The migration runs alongside the old store, with no interruption to sales.
In short
A store under fifty products sits between €2,500 and €5,000. Moving up a bracket is not triggered by product count but by bulk import and synchronisation with an external system. Transaction fees and maintenance weigh more than the build over three years, and those are the numbers to compare between two quotes.
If you are still choosing between a brochure site and a store, the showcase website article asks the question from the other side. And if your project is scoped, thirty minutes on a call is enough to know which bracket it falls into.
