What does it cost to have a webshop built in Belgium?

"What does a webshop cost?" is one of the first questions entrepreneurs ask, and at the same time one of the hardest to answer honestly. The short answer: it depends. But that doesn't get you anywhere, so below we make it concrete — with realistic ranges and the factors that make the difference.

What's a realistic price?

In Belgium you'll roughly see these orders of magnitude for a webshop:

• A simple starter on a template (Shopify or WooCommerce), via a freelancer: roughly €1,500 to €4,000.
• A professional webshop with its own design, correct payments and SEO foundations: roughly €4,000 to €10,000.
• An extensive shop with custom work, links to accounting or inventory, and a solid strategy: €10,000 and up.

Most small businesses and SMEs sit in the middle category. Not an off-the-shelf template, but not an enterprise-wide platform either — a shop that looks polished, pays reliably and gets found.

What determines the price?

A handful of factors weigh most heavily:

• The platform. A hosted solution like Shopify has lower start-up costs and less technical maintenance, but a fixed monthly fee. An open-source platform like WooCommerce gives more freedom, but asks for more build and maintenance work.
• The amount of custom work. Setting up an existing theme neatly is faster — and cheaper — than a fully custom-designed shop.
• The number of products and the complexity. Ten products with one variant is something else than five hundred products with sizes, colours and stock per location.
• Integrations. Shipping software, accounting, a point-of-sale system or a PIM: every integration adds value, but also work.
• What you supply yourself. Clear copy, good product photos and a clear overview of your range push the price down. If all of that still has to be made, it adds up.

Don't forget the recurring costs

Besides the one-off build price, there are recurring costs. Count on hosting or a platform subscription (easily €10 to €50 per month, a fixed monthly rate with Shopify), a domain name (€10 to €20 per year) and possibly maintenance. A webshop isn't a one-off project but something that keeps living: products change, payment methods evolve, and now and then an update is needed.

How do we work at Kattenberg 118?

Kattenberg 118 is a small web studio in Borgerhout. Big, hands-on projects — think a migration, hardware or a point-of-sale — deliberately get our full focus, one at a time; ordinary websites run smoothly alongside each other. And we start not with a quote but with a conversation: what do you sell, to whom, and what do you really need to get started?

Often we end up with Shopify, because for most entrepreneurs it's the fastest, most worry-free path to a reliable shop. For Our House we built a full Shopify webshop in four days that way — from domain and payments to international shipping to eleven countries. But not every project calls for a webshop: for Treen.nu a fast, maintenance-free one-pager was exactly enough.

We don't put a fixed price on a web page, precisely because it depends so heavily on your situation. We do give an honest estimate after a short conversation, with a scope that fits your budget rather than the other way around. Want to test your idea? Get in touch — and we'll look at what's realistic together.