What does building a webshop cost: Shopify, headless or custom

The question "what does a webshop cost" has no answer without context, because the difference between a themed Shopify shop and a headless build with Next.js is a factor of four in price. At NedDev we build both, and which one you need depends on where you stand. Here is the honest breakdown.

Three kinds of webshops and what they cost

Roughly there are three routes, each with its own price tag and use case:

• Standard Shopify (€4,500 to €9,000): a customized theme, your own brand style, standard payment and shipping integrations. Live fast, limited customization.
• Headless Shopify (€18,000 plus): Shopify as the backend for products and checkout, a Next.js frontend for maximum speed and SEO control. The best of solid commerce infrastructure with a blazing-fast, fully self-designed storefront.
• Fully custom (€30,000 plus): your own commerce platform on Laravel, for when your business logic is so specific that no platform fits.

Our Moonay case is a headless Shopify rebuild: the rug webshop ran on a slower standard Shopify and moved to Next.js 16 with the Shopify Storefront API, with SEO, AEO and GEO as the starting point. The reason for that move was concrete: the standard shop was leaving ranking and conversion on the table due to load time and limited control over page structure. With a headless frontend you can decide every millisecond of load time and every piece of markup yourself.

None of these three routes is objectively the best, they serve different stages and ambitions. An entrepreneur just starting out who wants to sell fast is live faster and cheaper with a standard Shopify shop. A brand already running volume that wants to compete on speed and findability earns the headless investment back through higher conversion and better positions. A company with genuinely unusual logic, such as subscriptions or complex price tiers, is ultimately cheaper off with a custom platform than fighting endlessly against the limits of a standard solution.

What really sets the price

The platform is just one factor. The price climbs mainly because of:

• Product catalog: 20 products or 20,000 makes a difference for data import, filtering and search.
• Custom configurators: products the customer assembles themselves (as with The Articase, custom phone cases) require serious development.
• Integrations: connections to an ERP, PIM, inventory system or accounting add up fast.
• Payment and shipping logic: multiple currencies, VAT rules per country, complex shipping rates.

A shop with 50 simple products and iDEAL payment is a very different thing from an international shop with dynamic pricing and an ERP connection. Always ask an agency to break the price down per component, otherwise you are comparing quotes about different things.

A product configurator is the biggest hidden cost here. At The Articase the customer can assemble their own phone case, which requires a connection to a print API and a real-time preview. Such a configurator is effectively a small software product inside the shop, and the price reflects that. Do not underestimate this kind of customization when setting your budget.

When do you choose headless?

Headless is not a default choice, it is a targeted one. You choose it when:

• Speed makes a measurable difference to your conversion and SEO ranking.
• You want a unique, brand-specific storefront that does not look like every other Shopify theme.
• You want to combine content and commerce, for example a blog with direct product links.

The flip side: headless costs more to build and maintain. You have two layers that have to talk to each other, the Shopify backend and the Next.js frontend, and that takes more developer attention than an off-the-shelf theme. For a starting shop with 30 products, standard Shopify is often the wiser choice. We only recommend headless once the revenue or the SEO ambition justifies it. Honest advice saves you tens of thousands of euros, because a headless build you do not need yet is expensively parked capital.

Maintenance and ongoing costs

A webshop is not a one-off purchase. Budget for:

• Shopify subscription: from roughly €30 to €350 per month depending on plan and transaction volume.
• Headless frontend hosting: with us on Hetzner with Cloudflare, from €495 per month including management and monitoring.
• Ongoing development: new features, seasonal campaigns, A/B tests.

Factor those costs into your business case. A cheap shop you have to rebuild every year is more expensive than a well-built shop that grows with you. Total cost of ownership over three years is a better measure than the build price alone.

With a headless build you pay extra attention to the split between platform costs and hosting. Shopify charges a subscription plus transaction fees for the commerce layer, and you pay separately to host and manage the Next.js frontend. That seems like double counting, but you get full control over speed and SEO in return, exactly the reasons you chose headless. Whoever calculates that cost structure up front faces no surprises afterward.

Conclusion

If you are just starting out or have a manageable catalog, standard Shopify (€4,500 to €9,000) is the pragmatic choice. If you run serious volume and speed and SEO are decisive, headless (€18,000 plus) pays for itself in conversion. See our webshop services for a tailored breakdown.