What does an online store with Shopware cost?

Your own online store sounds manageable enough at first — until the quotes come in and range from a few thousand to six figures. Why is that? Let's shed some light on it.

The ballparks

Roughly speaking, Shopware projects fall into three categories:

• Starter store — from €5,900: a cleanly set up store with standard features, an adapted theme, payment methods and shipping.
• Built-out store — from €11,900: custom design, your own features and the first integrations.
• Custom store: deep ERP integration, custom plugins and special ordering processes — open-ended at the top, because your processes define the scope.

The add-ons that come up most often:

These ranges are guide values. What your store actually costs depends on your requirements — not on a price list. For a first, tangible ballpark for your project, use our interactive package configurator, where you put the main building blocks together yourself.

Three typical projects, costed out

A table only gets you so far. So here are three shapes we run into regularly — with what actually adds up in each.

The direct-to-consumer producer with 40 products. A farm shop that wants to sell online as well. Standard theme in their own colors, PayPal and invoice payment, DHL shipping, no integration with anything. That's the starter store from €5,900. They maintain the products themselves; we show them how once. Hosting and support run alongside — at this size, the smallest line item in the whole project.

The trade business selling spare parts. 2,000 items that already live in an inventory system and should stay there. Here the ERP integration from €2,900 joins the built-out store from €11,900, because stock levels and prices would otherwise have to be maintained twice. That single building block decides whether the store saves work day to day or creates it.

The B2B distributor with customer-specific pricing. Every customer sees their own terms, there are volume tiers, and ordering on account requires a credit check. That's no longer a package, it's a custom store. We've started projects like this with a tightly scoped first release and added the special logic step by step afterwards — it keeps the first invoice smaller and gets the store live sooner.

What determines the price

Design. An adapted standard theme is significantly cheaper than a fully custom design. Shopware ships with a solid standard theme that can be adapted a long way in colors, typography and structure — for most stores that's plenty. A custom theme from €2,900 pays off when your brand needs to be visually unmistakable, or when you need layouts the standard theme simply can't produce.

Features. Configurators, subscription models, B2B pricing or marketplace integrations noticeably increase the effort. The question is rarely "can it be done?" but "how many edge cases does it have?". A product configurator with three options is straightforward. One where options exclude each other and the price is calculated by surface area is a small project of its own.

Integrations. Connecting to ERP, shipping and accounting is usually the single biggest lever. The effort depends less on Shopware than on the other system: if it has a documented API, this stays manageable. If the exchange runs over CSV files on an FTP server, it gets more involved — not because of the technology, but because of all the failure cases you have to catch.

Data migration. Moving products, customers and orders over from an old store takes time, mostly for things nobody has on their list beforehand: variants that were modeled differently in the old system, images without clean assignments, customer accounts with passwords in a format Shopware doesn't recognize. If you're coming from Shopware 5, we've described the path to Shopware 6 in detail.

The costs that appear in no development quote

This is where budgets break — not on development, but on everything around it. These items don't show up in our quote because they don't go to us. You still have to plan for them.

Shopware license. The Community Edition is open source and free — the right choice for the vast majority of stores. The commercial editions cost money, and Shopware negotiates those prices individually. We'll tell you honestly if your project genuinely needs one; in practice that's rare.

Hosting. A store needs more than a €5-a-month web hosting package. Realistically, depending on provider and store size, you're looking at roughly €20 to €60 a month for small stores and several hundred for busy systems with large catalogs. Those are market prices, not ours — but they belong in the calculation.

Payment providers. PayPal, Stripe, Klarna and the rest take a percentage per transaction plus a fixed amount. Sounds small, but on low-value baskets it's a noticeable share of your margin. Compare terms before you commit — switching later is possible, but tedious.

Content. Product photography, descriptions, shipping terms, legal texts. A technically perfect store with bad product images doesn't sell. If you have 500 items and no usable photos, that's a budget line of its own — and often a bigger one than expected.

Don't forget the ongoing costs

A store isn't a one-off project, it's a living system. Budget for hosting, updates and maintenance. Depending on size, these ongoing costs range from modest amounts for small stores to monthly maintenance packages for larger systems.

Why this isn't an optional line item: Shopware ships security updates regularly. A store that hasn't had one in a year is a store with known holes in it — and customer data and payment flows live inside. On top of that, plugins occasionally need updating after major releases. Postpone that and you pay for it later in one lump, usually at an inconvenient moment.

The upside of ongoing support from €199/month: the store stays fast, secure and up to date, and you have someone who already knows the system when something does go wrong.

How long does it take?

This question comes up almost immediately after the price question, so here it is:

The honest footnote: these timelines start the moment your content and access credentials are available. The most common reason for delays isn't development — it's missing product data, unresolved shipping rules, or a payment provider whose contract review takes longer than planned.

Why quotes vary so wildly

If you collect three quotes and they range from €4,000 to €40,000, that's rarely down to different hourly rates. It's almost always because the quotes contain different things. These four questions make them comparable:

1. Is a custom theme included, or an adapted standard theme? Often the single biggest difference.
2. Which integrations are included — specifically? "ERP integration" can mean a nightly stock sync or bidirectional real-time synchronization.
3. Who enters the product data? At 2,000 items that's a substantial line item, included in some quotes and not in others.
4. What happens after launch? A quote without maintenance is cheaper and leaves you on your own afterwards.

Why Shopware — and not a website builder?

Builder systems are cheap and fast, but they hit their limits quickly as soon as you need something custom. Shopware is open source, "Made in Germany" and extremely flexible. You keep control over your data and can implement practically any requirement. That's exactly why Shopware is our recommendation whenever a store needs to do more than "product in, order out" — and the reason we've specialized in building Shopware stores.

But here's the honest other half: if you sell ten products, need no integrations, and monthly cost is your main criterion, a website builder is the more sensible choice. We'd rather say that upfront than build you a store you don't need.

Starting smart

The same applies here: you don't have to build everything at once. Start with a solid store that sells, then extend it deliberately with the features that actually bring in money. That keeps the investment predictable. For extra features, it's also worth checking whether your own plugin instead of a monthly subscription works out cheaper in the long run.

What we'd cut first on a tight budget

When the budget doesn't stretch to everything, the order matters more than the total. Our recommendation, in this sequence:

• Cut first: the custom theme. The adapted standard theme looks good and sells. You can add a custom design once the store is making money.
• Then: nice-to-have features. Wishlists, product comparisons, elaborate filters. Pleasant, but rarely the reason someone buys.
• Don't cut: the inventory system integration, if without it you'd be maintaining data twice. That effort comes back as daily manual work and costs more than the integration within a year.
• Never cut: maintenance and a clean checkout. The checkout is where visitors turn into customers. And an unmaintained store is a security problem with customer data in it.
• Also don't cut: basic SEO. A store nobody finds is an expensive catalog.

Thinking about having a store built, or moving from a website builder to Shopware? Tell us about your product range — we'll give you a frank assessment, even if it's that you don't need a custom store yet.

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