eCommerce Platforms
What an eCommerce build actually costs
Most of the effort in an online store sits behind the checkout, in the operations work nobody demos, and that is where a quote moves most.
Get a scoped estimateWhy two quotes for the same store look nothing alike
The word covers a forty-item brand store and a distributor with a different price list for every customer, and those two builds share little beyond a cart. Storefronts are the visible half, and usually the cheaper one. The quote moves on what happens after somebody presses pay.
So the question that changes the answer most is this: once an order exists, how many systems and people touch it before it ships? A store where the answer is a warehouse app and nothing else is a different project from one where a person retypes the order into an accounts package every evening.
Cost drivers
What actually moves the number
None of these are exotic. Each is a decision you can make differently, and most quotes swing on three or four of them at once.
How your products are configured
A t-shirt in five sizes is trivial. A made-to-order sofa priced by fabric and leg finish needs a configurator, which is a build of its own.
Payment methods
Cards are one integration. Adding UPI, wallets, buy-now-pay-later and saved cards means separate checkout flows, separate refund handling and separate reconciliation for finance.
Tax, invoicing and compliance
Selling into one country is a rate in a settings screen. Selling across the EU adds registration, per-country rates and a compliant invoice attached to every order.
Stock and ERP sync
The moment stock really lives in Tally, SAP or a warehouse system rather than the store, you are building two-way sync and deciding which side wins a conflict.
Shipping and returns
Live carrier rates at checkout, label printing, and a returns flow that restocks the item and triggers the refund. Returns is the half that gets cut and rebuilt later.
B2B trading rules
Customer-specific price lists, minimum order quantities, quote-to-order, payment on account. Any one of these rules out most off-the-shelf checkouts on its own.
Migrating an existing store
Product URLs, customer accounts, saved payment tokens and order history all have to move behind redirects, or launch day costs you the search rankings you already paid for.
Search and merchandising
Filtering a small catalogue is a database query. A large one needs a search service with synonyms, typo tolerance and rules that push the stock you want cleared.
The admin your team lives in
Bulk price edits, order search, partial refunds and a stock-adjustment log are real screens with real edge cases. They get scoped last and used most.
Scope tiers
Four honest shapes a store can take
Read these smallest to largest and stop at the first one that covers how you actually trade. Most teams stop earlier than they expect to.
- TIER 1 — PLATFORM STOREFRONT
- Configured store, custom theme. Ships in 4–6 weeks.
- ₹2L – ₹3L$2.3k – $3.4k
- Catalogue setup, a custom theme, one payment provider, standard shipping and tax, and analytics. Right for a brand selling a manageable catalogue direct to consumers. Does not include ERP sync, custom checkout logic or B2B pricing.
- TIER 2 — CUSTOM STORE WITH INTEGRATIONS
- Custom storefront plus core integrations. Ships in 10–16 weeks.
- ₹8L – ₹12L$9k – $14k
- A custom storefront and admin, several payment methods, live shipping rates, a working returns flow, and two-way sync with one back-office system. Suits teams whose operations have outgrown a template. Does not include multi-region tax, contract pricing or a mobile app.
- TIER 3 — MULTI-REGION OR B2B PLATFORM
- Regions, contract pricing, ops tooling. Ships in 4–7 months.
- ₹18L – ₹35L$20k – $40k
- Adds multi-currency, per-country tax and invoicing, customer price lists, quote-to-order, warehouse routing and role-based admin access. Suits distributors and brands trading in several markets. Does not include native apps or in-house fulfilment software.
- TIER 4 — MARKETPLACE OR COMMERCE PLATFORM
- Multi-seller platform and apps. Ships in 8–14 months.
- From ₹55LFrom $62k
- Seller onboarding, split payouts, per-seller catalogues, settlement reporting, native apps and reporting pipelines. Suits businesses whose product is the platform itself. Does not include the sellers or the demand you will need to fill it.
Indicative ranges for scoping conversations, not quotes. They reflect what work of this shape has cost us to deliver — your figure comes out of a paid discovery, against a written scope, and is fixed before any code is written. Gas, licences, cloud and third-party audit fees sit outside these numbers.
How we work
How a store gets scoped and shipped
Timelines below are typical for a first build. If discovery says the platform you are already on will carry you another year, we would rather say that in week two.
Discovery
1–2 weeksWe map the order lifecycle from cart to invoice to return, and mark every point where somebody currently retypes something into a second system.
Proof on your real catalogue
2–3 weeksYour actual products loaded, one real order pushed end to end. This is the step that shrinks scope, and sometimes it shows a platform would have done.
Build and integrate
6–14 weeksStorefront, checkout, payments, admin screens and integrations, ordered by what blocks a launch. Everything that can wait until after launch waits.
Migrate, launch and settle
2–4 weeks, then ongoingRedirects in place, a soft launch on real traffic, then reading the first weeks of orders for whatever your operations team is quietly fixing by hand.
Is now the right time to build?
Worth reading before you ask anyone for a quote. It saves a call, and occasionally it saves a build.
Worth budgeting for now if…
- Your team retypes orders into another system every single day
- The platform you are on cannot express how you price
- You sell across countries with different tax and payment habits
- You have a catalogue and customers already, and both keep growing
Wait, if…
- You have never sold the product anywhere — validate on a platform first
- The real problem is traffic, not the store you already have
- Your catalogue fits a template with only minor compromises
- Nobody yet owns stock accuracy — a new store will not fix that
Frequently Asked
Questions
Common questions about scoping a store, cutting scope, and what it takes to run one afterwards.
Five things, in roughly this order. How your products are configured, because variants are easy and made-to-order configurators are not. How many payment methods you accept, since each carries its own refund and reconciliation path. Whether stock and orders have to stay in step with an ERP or warehouse system. How many countries you sell into, because tax and invoicing rules follow the map. And whether you are migrating a live store with customers and search rankings to protect.
Start with the returns portal, the mobile app, and anything described to you as a dashboard. Returns can run on email and a manual refund for a first season. An app rarely earns its place before the mobile web store is busy. Loyalty schemes, wishlists, reviews and subscriptions are all additions a live store will tell you whether it needs. What you cannot cut is checkout reliability, stock accuracy, and the admin screens your own staff use daily.
The admin, the migration and the content. Teams scope a beautiful storefront and forget that their own staff will spend the whole day inside an order screen nobody designed. Migration is real work: URLs need redirects, customer accounts need password resets handled gracefully, and order history has to arrive intact. Then somebody has to write and photograph every product. That last one is not our work, but it has delayed more launches than any integration we have built.
Three buckets. Hosting and services, which stay modest until traffic is genuinely large. Your payment provider's cut of each transaction, which moves with revenue rather than arriving as a fixed bill, and is worth renegotiating once volume is real. Then maintenance: dependency and platform updates, new payment methods, tax rule changes, and the small operational features your team asks for once they live in the system. Retainers are sized to the store, with no lock-in.
Phase it, nearly always. Launch the narrowest store that can take a real order and fulfil it properly, then let real orders decide what gets built next. Teams that build everything up front tend to ship features nobody uses and delay the launch that would have told them so. The exception is a deadline you do not control, such as a platform being retired, where the first release has to match what you already have.
Have a project in mind?
Fixed price after a paid discovery — no hourly billing. A real engineer reads every enquiry, and we reply within 24 hours.