Commonly $30–$300+ a month on platforms, a few thousand for custom setups — and there's a lighter path most small sellers never hear about. Here's the honest math for each.
Shopify and friends commonly run $30–$300+ monthly plus transaction fees, apps, and a theme. It's the right call for real product catalogs: inventory, shipping, taxes handled. The costs creep through apps — $10 here, $30 there — so audit the app bill quarterly.
Marketplace-first (Etsy, Amazon) costs listing and commission fees instead of monthly rent — legitimate for testing demand before building anything.
A custom store commonly starts at several thousand dollars and climbs. It earns its cost at scale or with unusual needs; for a small catalog it's usually paying for flexibility you won't use.
If you sell a handful of products or services, you may not need a store at all: a fast static site with payment links (Stripe or similar) handles checkout for a tiny per-transaction fee and near-zero hosting. No monthly platform rent, no app stack, nothing to hack. That's the same lean architecture this site runs on — and for many small sellers it's strictly cheaper until the catalog genuinely outgrows it.
Payment links on a simple fast site — you pay only per-transaction processing, no monthly platform fee. It scales fine up to a modest catalog. Move to a full platform when inventory, shipping rules, or volume genuinely demand it, not before.
Apps. The base plan is the visible cost; the app stack is the creeping one — reviews, email, bundles, each a monthly fee. Audit quarterly and delete what you don't use; many app jobs can be done once, natively, for free.
Product pages rank when they carry real product schema and unique descriptions — not the manufacturer's copy-paste, which thousands of stores share. That duplicated text is the single most common reason small store pages never rank.
Marketplaces bring traffic and take commission plus the customer relationship; your own site keeps both but must earn its traffic. Testing demand: marketplace. Building a brand: your site. Many healthy small businesses run both deliberately.
Related: Website Development · Website maintenance cost · Wix vs custom