Ecommerce website: platform or custom build

Short answer: under a few hundred products and one warehouse, a hosted platform wins on every axis that matters. Past that, or with unusual rules about pricing and stock, self-hosted software starts paying for itself. And if every sale involves a conversation anyway, you may not need a checkout at all. Here is how the four options compare in 2026.

First: does the sale actually happen online?

Made-to-order furniture, industrial equipment, wholesale, anything with variable dimensions or negotiated volume pricing — the customer is going to message you regardless. Building a cart, a payment gateway and an order pipeline for that traffic is buying machinery nobody switches on.

The alternative is a catalogue: the same product pages with photos, specs and prices, but the button says "request a quote" instead of "add to cart". It costs roughly half a store, needs no payment provider or tax setup, and stops being a maintenance liability the moment it launches.

Simple test: look at your last twenty sales. If fifteen involved a conversation before money changed hands, a cart changes nothing except your invoice.

Four ways to build a store

Hosted platform — Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix

You rent the whole machine. Shopify runs about $39, $105 and $399 a month across its main tiers; BigCommerce and Wix start near $29–39. Updates, security patches and uptime are their problem, not yours.

Watch the payment terms rather than the sticker price. Shopify charges no extra transaction fee on its own payment product but adds roughly 2%, 1% and 0.5% by tier if you use an outside gateway. BigCommerce introduced a 2% fee on non-embedded gateways in 2026, so its old zero-fee advantage now depends on how you take money.

Self-hosted software — WooCommerce and friends

The software is free, the bill is elsewhere: hosting at $25–100 a month for a real store, plus paid extensions, plus someone to keep it updated. Realistic total is $1,000–3,000 a year before anyone touches the design. In exchange: no platform cut of your revenue, any field you want on a product, any integration you can pay for.

Marketplace only — no store at all

Amazon, Etsy, regional marketplaces. They bring buyers, take 8–20% depending on category, own the customer relationship and can change the rules whenever they like. A reasonable place to start, a dangerous place to stay: you are renting demand and cannot take it with you.

Custom build

Justified when the selling itself is unusual — price calculated from a formula, configurators, tied to production scheduling, complex account permissions. For "sell 300 products", it is paying to rebuild what a platform already does better.

What a store costs beyond the store

The platform fee is the smallest line in the budget. The rest is the part that gets discovered late.

• Product content. Photos, descriptions and specifications for every item. On a 200-product catalogue this is usually the longest task in the project and it never appears in a quote.
• Payments and tax. A gateway, plus whatever your country requires in receipts, VAT or sales tax handling.
• The documents a shop cannot open without: terms of sale, refund and shipping policies, and a privacy policy that matches the tools you actually run.
• Shipping: live rates, labels, tracking, and a returns process that exists before the first return.
• Inventory. A spreadsheet is fine at thirty products; at three hundred you will sell something you do not have.
• Support. Someone answers "where is my order" within a day, or the reviews say so instead.

How much does a website cost, honestly

Product pages are where stores are won

Traffic lands on product pages far more often than on the homepage, and they are the pages most likely to be thin. What consistently earns its space:

• Photographs from several angles, plus one showing scale or the product in use.
• The specifications people actually filter by: size, material, compatibility, weight.
• Stock status and a real delivery estimate, not "usually ships soon".
• Total price including shipping, as early as possible. Surprise costs at checkout are the most reliable way to lose a sale that was already made.
• Return terms in one plain sentence, on the page, not three clicks away.
• Structured data so search engines can read price and availability directly.

Structured data: telling search engines what your page is

Migration is the cost you cannot see yet

Every platform is easy to enter and expensive to leave. Products usually export cleanly; what does not are your URLs, reviews, customer accounts and whatever custom fields you added. Two practical hedges: keep the domain in your own name, and export your product data and customer list on a schedule, not the week you decide to move.

How to choose in an afternoon

1. Count products, variants and how often stock changes. That is the input for every other decision.
2. Decide whether you need a checkout or a catalogue with enquiries.
3. Pick payments first and platform second. Payment availability and fees in your country rule out more options than features do.
4. Price the whole year: subscription plus gateway percentage plus hosting plus extensions, at your expected volume.
5. Launch with twenty products, watch where people stall, then load the rest of the catalogue.