Ecommerce Website Development for Microbusinesses: Build It, or Just Use Shopify

Most stores this size should rent the cart, and here is the bill

We build online stores, and we will start by talking most people out of one. A hosted cart gives a one-person seller checkout, tax settings, inventory and a theme, all kept running by someone else, for less per month than a tank of gas. For a small seller, that is a remarkable deal. Anyone who tells you otherwise probably has a build to sell. The comparison of Shopify and custom stores goes through the choice at length.

Read the last column closely, because it trips people up. Shopify says its fees are separate from your payment provider's own fees, and that they do not apply to POS orders or manual methods such as cash on delivery, bank transfers and checks. Wix also has a Free plan and paid tiers, and says its prices vary by location, so check yours. Our cost of a small online store adds shipping and the rest.

What a single $60 order pays before it reaches you

Monthly fees get the attention, but card fees come out of every order, and they are what small sellers feel. So take a made-up $60 order, paid by a domestic card, and work out what each route charges at the published rates as of November 2026. This is our own arithmetic. Shipping, tax and returns are left out.

Notice what custom does not get you: a better card rate. It ties with Shopify Payments on Basic and with Square's paid plans. Using another provider on Shopify Basic costs $1.20 more per order, or $120 a month at 100 orders, by our arithmetic. The smaller the order, the more the fixed cents hurt. On a $15 item, 30 cents is 2% by itself. If you sell cheap things in small quantities, this table is your whole business plan.

What from $2,500 buys, and the five-year sum that keeps us honest

Our online stores start at $2,500, built on code you own, with no platform's transaction fee and no theme shared with other sellers. Hosting and maintenance starts at $55 a month. Against Shopify Basic, that is plainly more rent, not less, and the table below shows it. If someone tells you a custom store saves money on monthly fees, ask them to do this sum in front of you.

So a custom store costs about as much as Shopify Grow over five years, and far more than Basic. That table leaves out the paid apps a hosted store tends to pick up, since those depend on what you sell. Add yours. Custom does not win on price, then, unless you would otherwise be on a higher plan or paying for many apps. It wins when the store does what a template cannot.

Reasons a custom store can be worth it

• Your price depends on something. Priced by size, material or quantity, so that each order needs a calculation. See the pages on selling made-to-order.
• You take deposits, not full payment. Service businesses and custom makers often need this, and accepting deposits online is its own subject.
• You deliver locally on your own truck. Zones, delivery windows and your own route do not map well to shipping rates.
• You sell through a login. Wholesale accounts, repeat customers or members who see their own prices or products.
• The store has to talk to something odd. A shop system, a QuickBooks setup or a tool with an API and no plugin.

Already have a site? You may need a button, not a store.

A surprising number of small sellers have only a few things to sell. A photographer's prints, a mechanic's gift card, a baker's Thanksgiving pies. Those owners can skip the store entirely. A hosted checkout page and one Stripe payment integration, added to the site you have, could be all you need, starting from $575, depending on complexity. NFIB's 2025 technology survey, as reported by ASBN on June 25, 2025, found only 19% of businesses with websites accept online payments, so even that places you ahead of most.

Service businesses should think this way too. If you sell labor, you may not want a cart at all, but a deposit on a booked appointment. If you sell by the month, the question becomes subscriptions: Stripe Billing is 0.7% of Billing volume on pay-as-you-go, with no recurring fee, as of November 2026. A restaurant has its own problem, with online ordering set against the delivery apps. Before you build anything, read your last statement to see what you are actually paying now.

Card data, and the paperwork that stays yours either way

Small sellers often assume card rules are for bigger companies. They are not. The PCI Security Standards Council says PCI DSS applies to all entities that store, process or transmit cardholder data, regardless of size or transaction volume, though small merchants' simpler setups can reduce the effort. The way to keep your effort small is to never touch a card number. Do not take them by email. Do not write them down. And do not let a developer build a checkout form that stores them.

Hosted checkout solves most of this. Stripe says a business handling sensitive card data directly might have to meet more than 300 PCI DSS security controls, while low-risk integrations send payment data directly to Stripe. It also says Checkout and Elements qualify for SAQ A, the shorter self-assessment, because card inputs sit in an iframe served from its domain. That does not end the duty: Stripe says a business must still accept payments compliantly and attest to that annually. Insist on hosted payment fields from anyone who builds your store, us included.

• Disputes cost money. Stripe charges $15.00 per dispute received, as of November 2026. So describe products honestly and ship with tracking.
• Sales tax is your job. Stripe Tax Basic is 0.5% per transaction on no-code integrations, or 50 cents per transaction on API integrations, where you are registered to collect, as of November 2026. Ask your accountant where you need to register.
• International adds up. Stripe adds 1.5% for international cards and 1% when currency conversion is required, as of November 2026.

Running the shop from the kitchen table

What does a store look like when one person has to run it on a Tuesday? An order comes in during lunch. Somebody has to pack it, print a label, update the count, answer the where-is-my-order email, and put it in the books. The best store you can buy is the one that takes the most of those off your list. Our page on ecommerce automation goes through them one by one. Test your setup by walking one order through it, end to end.

1. 1

   Place a real order yourself

   Use your own card, and note every place you had to think. Refund it afterward so you learn that part as well.

2. 2

   Time the packing and paperwork

   Count minutes per order. If you pay yourself nothing for those, you do not know whether this product makes money.

3. 3

   Automate the receipts, labels and counts

   Most hosted carts do this already. On custom stores, each is a piece of the build, so ask about each one.

4. 4

   Write down the three emails you answer most

   Where is my order, can I change it, can I return it. Answer them on the site, and put them in the order confirmation.

5. 5

   Decide what happens when you are away

   A vacation setting, a shipping delay notice, or someone with a login. One person's store needs an answer for the week that person has the flu.

The Shopify verdict, written down so you can hold us to it

Whichever way you go, find out first whether people want what you sell. Our guide to Shopify and custom sites has the general comparison. If you are on Shopify and hoping to be found, the fix for stores not showing in Google may help, and so may ecommerce SEO. And if you plan to outgrow a hosted store, the web design packages are the place to compare costs, starting at $1,500 for a site with no store at all.