You have a shop. Maybe on Abbeygate Street, maybe a unit in the Arc, maybe a farm shop on the edge of town where the car park does most of the marketing. Somebody keeps telling you to sell online, and every quote is a different number attached to a different platform.
The honest answer is that an ecommerce website for a local shop is worth building for some shops and a waste of money for others, and the difference is not enthusiasm. It is margin, average order value, and whether there is a spare pair of hands to pack at four o'clock on a Friday. This post gives you the platform comparison, the real first year cost, the maths on whether one order is worth fulfilling, and the case for starting with click and collect.
For context, online sales were 27.4 per cent of all retail sales in Great Britain in July 2026, according to the Office for National Statistics. Most of that belongs to Amazon, the supermarkets and the big chains. Your share does not arrive because you built a shop. It arrives because you had something worth posting and a reason to buy it from you rather than them.
Key takeaways
- Click and collect is the fastest win for a shop in Bury town centre, because it removes postage, packaging and delivery risk in one move.
- Shopify starts at £19 a month on the Basic plan in the UK, plus card fees of roughly 2 per cent and 25p per online transaction.
- A custom Webflow ecommerce build from FutureProofs starts at £4,995, is owned outright, and carries no per sale platform commission.
- An online order is only worth fulfilling if the gross margin covers postage, packaging, card fees and fifteen minutes of somebody's time.
- Marketplaces such as Etsy and eBay buy you traffic and cost you the customer relationship, so they work best as a shop window, not the whole business.
Should your shop sell online at all?
Answer this before anybody shows you a template. Most of the disappointment we see comes from shops that built a good store for products that could never survive the post.
The maths of one online order
Take a typical basket of £35, about right for a gift shop, a deli or a small homeware boutique.
- £35 at a 45 per cent gross margin is £15.75 of gross profit.
- Postage on a small parcel is £3.99 on Royal Mail Tracked 48 at 2026 prices, or £3.89 second class without tracking.
- Packaging is 60p to £1 if you are sensible and £2.50 if you are romantic about it.
- Card fees take about 2 per cent plus 25p, roughly 95p.
- Fifteen minutes picking, packing and walking to the post office is £2.50 to £3 in wages, more if it is your own time.
That leaves around £7 on a £35 order, before you have spent a penny getting the visitor there. Now add returns, one wrong size, and a parcel a month that disappears.
That is not an argument against selling online. It is an argument for one of three things: a higher average order, a fatter margin, or an order the customer collects. Free local delivery over a £60 minimum beats free national postage on £35, and click and collect beats both.
The shops this works well for
- High margin, light, distinctive. Jewellery, candles, prints, ceramics.
- Anything with a repeat built in. Coffee, dog food, refills, spice blends. A subscription turns one sale into twelve.
- Anything you already sell out of. If it goes in the shop, it will go online. Proven demand beats a hopeful range.
- Anything with a story. Made here, cured here, grown here. That is the one thing a chain cannot copy off you.
It works badly for anything heavy, low margin, or fragile enough to cost more to pack than to make, and anything where the sale depends on the customer touching it. A furniture shop needs a beautiful website with a phone number on it, not a checkout.
Which platform should a small UK shop use?
People agonise over this and it matters less than they think. The differences are real, but mostly about who owns what at the end.
| Option | What it costs | Ongoing fees | Who it suits |
|---|
| Shopify | From £19 a month on Basic, £49 on Grow, plus setup | About 2 per cent and 25p per card sale, an extra platform fee if you use another gateway, plus app subscriptions | Shops with hundreds of lines, fast moving stock and no strong design requirement |
| WooCommerce | Free plugin, plus £15 to £40 a month hosting and a developer | Payment fees only, plus plugin licences and the cost of maintenance | Shops already running WordPress with somebody technical on hand |
| Custom Webflow build | From £4,995 one off, owned outright | Hosting and payment fees only, no platform commission | Shops with roughly 10 to 300 products where the brand is part of why people buy |
Shopify
The default, for good reasons. You can be taking money by the weekend, the stock management is good, and the apps cover almost anything. Where it bites is app creep: each is £10 or £15 a month, and five of them turn a £19 plan into a £100 plan without anybody deciding to spend £100. The other cost is sameness. If your shop's appeal is that it does not look like everywhere else, a stock theme throws that away at the door.
WooCommerce
Free is not free. Behind the plugin sit hosting, updates, security, conflicts and somebody to ring at eleven at night in December. Reasonable if you already run WordPress and have a developer you trust. Poor if the plan is to maintain it yourself between customers.
A custom build
The case for building your own is ownership and design freedom. Product pages, categories and checkout laid out the way your shop sells, no platform fee, no commission per sale, and an asset you keep. The case against is honest too: it is the wrong tool for two thousand lines with daily stock churn, and it costs more up front. Our custom ecommerce builds start at £4,995, and the businesses they suit are on the ecommerce sector page.
Our recommendation, and we build the custom option, so weigh it accordingly. More than about five hundred products, stock moving daily, no particular design ambition? Use Shopify and put the saved money into photography. Distinctive shop, defensible margin, manageable range? A custom build pays for itself in platform fees within a few years and you finish owning it. And if anybody tells you the platform is the important decision, they have never run a shop.
What an ecommerce website for a local shop costs in year one
Rough year one numbers for a shop doing around £30,000 online, a realistic first full year for a good independent that promotes it.
| Cost | Shopify route | Custom build route |
|---|
| Build or setup | £1,500 to £4,000 for an agency configured theme | From £4,995, owned outright |
| Platform and hosting | £228 to £588 a year | Hosting only |
| Apps or plugins | £300 to £1,200 a year | Usually none |
| Photography | From £545 | From £545 |
| Card fees on £30,000 | Around £850 | Around £850 |
The line that surprises people is not the build, it is photography, and it is the only one you cannot skip. A product shot dimly against a wooden counter will not sell online, whatever it does in the shop. Wider build costs sit in our guide to Webflow website costs, and if a brochure site on a monthly plan suits you better, the plan pricing is published.
Click and collect beats postage for a town centre shop
Take one thing from this post. For a shop in Bury, click and collect is the highest return feature you can switch on, and the cheapest.
The friction in town is not desire, it is parking and time. Somebody who has already paid finds twenty minutes and a space at Ram Meadow. Somebody who has not paid thinks about it on Saturday and then does not come.
- No postage, no packaging, no lost parcels. The whole cost stack above disappears.
- A second sale at the counter. People who come in to collect buy something else surprisingly often.
- It works for things you would never post. Cakes, flowers, plants, wine by the case, anything perishable.
- It takes deposits. Reserve and collect on higher value items ends the held item nobody ever comes back for.
Two rules keep it out of chaos. The confirmation email states when the order will be ready, not vaguely soon. And one named person checks orders twice a day, everything on a labelled shelf behind the counter. Food and drink gets the most from it, which is why we treat it as standard on sites for butchers, bakeries and farm shops. A farm shop taking Christmas orders for collection is doing more useful ecommerce than most people posting nationwide.
Marketplaces or your own site?
Etsy, eBay, Amazon and Faire all sell the same thing: traffic you did not earn. What they charge is a fee and, more importantly, the customer.
- Etsy suits makers and gives you buyers on day one, at the cost of fees and a shopfront like everybody else's.
- eBay is good for clearing end of season stock and poor for building a brand.
- Amazon works for volume products with no personality and punishes anything that needs explaining.
- Faire is worth a look if other shops could stock what you make, because wholesale is one pick, one parcel, one invoice.
Treat a marketplace as a car park, not a house. A sensible additional channel and a dangerous only channel, because the platform can change its fees overnight and you have no email list to fall back on. Every order should leave with a real reason to buy direct next time, not a card with a QR code on it.
Picking, packing and postage when there are two of you
This is the part nobody writes about, and where most small shops come unstuck in month three.
Set one cut off and defend it
Orders before 1pm go out the same day, everything else the next working day. Put it on the product page, in the confirmation email and in the footer. A cut off you meet beats a vague promise of fast despatch you sometimes miss, and it stops fulfilment interrupting the shop.
Stock is where you will get embarrassed
The last one sells over the counter at ten past ten. Somebody buys it online at half past. Three options: ring fence a fixed online allocation and never dip into it in the shop, run every sale through one system including the till, or accept the odd clash and apologise fast. For a few hundred lines and two staff, ring fencing is the least painful by a distance.
Your postage policy is a pricing decision
Free delivery over a threshold raises average order value more reliably than a discount code, because it changes what goes in the basket rather than what people pay. Set the threshold above your current average, not at it. Despatch itself can be automated further than most shops realise, as on the AV Cleans build with its Royal Mail send flow, so labels and tracking stop being a daily chore.
Getting found once the shop is online
A store with no traffic is a stockroom. The searches that convert for a local shop are narrower and cheaper than the ones the chains fight over.
- Name products the way people search. Not Aurora, but hand poured soy candle, sea salt and sage. Nobody types your product names.
- Build category pages for what you sell most of and write a paragraph on each. Category pages rank, product pages convert.
- Keep the local searches. People deliberately look for a Bury St Edmunds shop rather than a warehouse, and that search is far less contested.
- Put products on your Google Business Profile and link them to the store. Free, and almost nobody in town does it.
That local half is the same discipline as any other local search work in Bury St Edmunds, and it should run from launch rather than be added when sales disappoint.
Frequently asked questions
How much does an ecommerce website cost in the UK?
Expect £1,500 to £4,000 for an agency configured Shopify store and from £4,995 for a custom Webflow build you own outright. Budget from £545 for photography on top, plus around 2 per cent in card fees. The subscription is the small number. Photography and fulfilment time are the ones people underestimate.
Shopify or Webflow for a small shop?
Shopify if you have a large or fast moving range and want it live this month. A custom Webflow build if the shop's look is part of why people buy and you would rather own the site than rent it. Shopify's convenience costs a monthly fee and design sameness. A custom build costs more up front, nothing per sale.
Is click and collect worth setting up for a small shop?
Yes, and it is usually the first thing we switch on. It removes postage, packaging and delivery risk, it brings the customer into the shop where they often buy something else, and it works for products you would never post. For a town centre shop in Bury it is the highest return feature on the site.
Should I sell on Etsy instead of building my own site?
Sell on Etsy as well, not instead. It puts you in front of buyers you would never reach, but it keeps the customer relationship and takes a cut of everything. Use it to find people, then give them a reason to buy direct next time, usually something in the parcel that only works on your own site.
How many products do I need before it is worth going online?
About ten is enough if they are distinctive and photograph well. There is no minimum that matters in itself. What matters is whether the range gives somebody a reason to come back: eight products and nothing new will struggle where twenty and a seasonal change will not.
How long does an ecommerce build take?
Four to eight weeks for a custom build, a fortnight for a themed Shopify store. Most of that time is you, not the developer: product descriptions, photography and postage rules are the bottleneck on almost every project. Start photographing before you commission anything and you will halve it.
What we would do if this were your shop
Start smaller than you want to. Twenty products, the twenty that already sell, photographed properly with one lifestyle shot each. Click and collect on from day one. Local delivery inside a radius you could drive in an evening. National postage third, once you know what travels well.
Then run it a full season before judging it. Four orders in week one and thirty in week twelve is normal. Still four in week twelve is a product or photography problem, not a platform problem, and changing platform fixes neither.
And keep the shop the point of it. The best independent ecommerce sites in Suffolk read like the shop they came from, same handwriting, same opinions, same person answering the emails. That is the whole advantage, and the one thing the chains cannot buy.
Tell us what you sell and how many lines you carry, and we will say honestly whether a custom build or a Shopify store is the better spend: start with a quick conversation.
