Most stores that go shopping for an ecommerce development company don’t need a custom build. They need someone to configure Shopify correctly, wire up the integrations, and get out of the way. Shopify’s Basic plan is $39 a month and it runs the overwhelming majority of catalogs on the planet without a developer touching the core. So the first honest answer is uncomfortable: a lot of the time, the right ecommerce development company is no ecommerce development company.
You hire one when the platform stops bending to your business. Custom checkout logic a theme can’t express. A tight coupling to an ERP that has to stay in sync to the minute. A B2B workflow with negotiated pricing, net terms, and approval chains. A headless storefront. A replatform off an aging Magento install that’s about to lose support. Those are real reasons, and they’re expensive to get wrong. That’s the slice worth talking about.
We’re gmware, a software development firm headquartered at 5900 Balcones Drive in Austin, TX, with engineering centers in Bangalore and Mohali, India. We build custom software and integrations for mid-market companies, and ecommerce is one of the places we see the most money wasted on builds that didn’t need to happen. This guide is the decision we wish more buyers ran before signing an SOW: when a platform is enough, when it isn’t, what each path actually costs in 2026, and how to pick a partner who’ll tell you the truth about which one you’re in.
Three paths, three price floors
When Shopify out of the box is the right answer
Start here, because it’s where most businesses belong and almost no agency will say so. Shopify isn’t the safe-but-limited option anymore. Among the top one million ecommerce sites, Shopify is the leading platform at roughly 28.8% share, and it powers about 4.8 million active storefronts globally. That scale buys you a hardened checkout, a payment stack, fraud tooling, and an app ecosystem you’d otherwise build and maintain yourself.
The pricing is public, which already puts it ahead of the enterprise platforms. Basic is $39 a month, the Grow plan is $105, and Advanced is $399, each cheaper if you pay annually ($29, $79, and $299 respectively). There’s a $5 Starter plan for selling through social and links. Online card processing runs 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic, down to 2.5% plus 30 cents on Advanced. Bring your own payment gateway and Shopify adds a platform fee on top: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. That last detail matters more than the sticker price for high-volume sellers, and it’s the kind of thing a good partner flags before you sign.
There’s a simple test for this. If your catalog is standard products with variants, your pricing is the same for everyone, your checkout is a normal checkout, and your integrations are common ones (an accounting tool, an email platform, a shipping app), Shopify configured well will serve you for years. Paying a development firm to build that from scratch is lighting money on fire. We’ll say it plainly: if this is you, we’d rather point you at a good theme and a half-day of setup than write you a six-figure quote.
Shopify Plus, and where the price jumps
There’s a tier above the standard plans, and it’s where the “just use Shopify” advice starts to cost real money. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a three-year term, with a one-year term running higher, and the third-party payment fee drops to 0.2%. Plus buys you higher limits, more staff accounts, expansion stores, and the customization hooks (Shopify Functions, checkout extensibility, B2B features) that the standard plans don’t expose.
Plus is the honest middle of the market. It’s where a brand doing real volume gets enterprise capability without an enterprise license negotiation. But the subscription is the small number. A custom Plus implementation typically needs $20K to $80K in development on top of the monthly fee, and a full replatform onto it runs higher (more on that below). If a quote treats the $2,300 as the whole cost, the quote is wrong.
The platform-decision matrix
This is the artifact to keep. It maps the trait of your business to the path that fits, and it’s the conversation we have on most ecommerce scoping calls before anyone talks budget. Read across your row; the path on the right is your default, not your destiny, but you should have a clear reason to override it.
| Your situation | Shopify (standard) | Shopify Plus | Custom / headless | Replatform |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard catalog, normal checkout, common integrations | Default fit | Overkill | Overkill | n/a |
| High volume, expansion stores, some custom checkout logic | Outgrowing it | Default fit | Only if Plus can’t | n/a |
| Negotiated B2B pricing, net terms, approval chains | Doesn’t fit | Often fits (B2B) | If B2B native isn’t enough | n/a |
| Tight, real-time ERP / inventory coupling | Risky | Workable with integration | Default if coupling is the product | n/a |
| Unusual pricing, bundling, or merchandising logic | Doesn’t fit | Functions may cover it | Default fit | n/a |
| Storefront performance / design beyond theme limits | Theme ceiling | Headless on Plus | Default fit (headless) | n/a |
| Old Magento / aging custom stack, support ending | n/a | Target for migration | Target for migration | Default fit |
A note on how to use it. The single biggest mistake we see is reading the matrix backward: deciding you want a custom build, then reverse-engineering a justification. Run it the other way. Find your row, take the default, and only move right when you can name the specific thing the cheaper path can’t do. “We want it to be ours” is not that thing. “Our pricing engine has 40 rules Shopify Functions can’t express” is.
How the decision actually goes
What a custom or headless build actually costs
When the platform genuinely doesn’t fit, this is the range. A fully custom ecommerce build runs roughly $40K to $150K and up, and mid-market to enterprise projects with deep integrations span $25K to $250K and beyond. The spread is enormous because the word “custom” covers a custom theme on a hosted platform all the way to a headless storefront talking to a bespoke backend. They are not the same project and shouldn’t carry the same quote.
The money is in the parts that don’t show up in a demo. A storefront looks done long before the integrations work. Payment and tax, the ERP sync, the inventory feed, single sign-on for B2B buyers, the data migration with redirects intact: those are most of the bill, and they’re exactly the line items that get hand-waved in a cheap proposal. We’ve written before about why the integration and custom-logic layer is where software budgets actually go, and ecommerce is a textbook case. If a build quote is mostly “design and front-end” with integration as an afterthought, the afterthought is going to eat your timeline.
Headless deserves a specific caution. It’s powerful and it’s trendy, which is a dangerous combination. A headless frontend (Hydrogen, Next.js) buys you performance and design freedom, and it also buys you a second codebase to maintain forever. We think headless is right for a real minority of stores: the ones where storefront performance or a content-heavy experience is a measurable competitive edge. For everyone else it’s complexity you’ll pay for every quarter. Don’t go headless because a deck said it was the future. Go headless because you can point at the page-speed or design constraint it solves.
When to replatform, and what it runs
Replatforming is the path with the clearest trigger, so it should have the clearest math. You replatform when the current platform costs you sales or money you can measure: a checkout you can’t fix, a version going out of support, integrations that break monthly, hosting bills that dwarf a modern subscription. The number is the justification. “It feels old” is not a number.
The costs scale with how tangled your current stack is. A simple move (say, a small WooCommerce store to Shopify Plus) runs around $50K, while a complex Magento Commerce replatform with B2B and ERP can reach $500K and up; mid-sized projects typically land $3K to $50K. For brands doing $10M to $100M a year, an enterprise Shopify Plus replatform with ERP and B2B integrations commonly runs $80K to $250K and up, driven by catalog size, custom checkout, third-party APIs, and getting your 301 redirects right so you don’t torch your search rankings on launch day.
That last one is where replatforms quietly fail. A migration that loses your URL structure can wipe out years of organic traffic in a week. The redirect map and the SEO preservation work aren’t optional polish; they’re load-bearing, and any partner who treats them as a footnote is one to walk away from.
What replatforming costs in 2026
The Magento (Adobe Commerce) question
If you’re on Magento, the decision has gotten sharper, and it’s worth being blunt. Adobe Commerce has no public price, which is itself a tell. In practice it commonly runs $40K to $190K a year in cloud licensing alone, scaling with your sales volume, before development, hosting, and extensions, which routinely add another 2x to 3x. Magento Open Source is free to license but realistically costs $5K to $90K and up per year to run.
The support picture is the part that forces a decision. Adobe’s own lifecycle policy limits extended support to paying Adobe Commerce customers and does not cover Magento Open Source. Extended support for version 2.4.4 ends April 14, 2026, and 2.4.5 ends August 12, 2026, with a security-only transitional window after that. The current release, 2.4.9, shipped May 12, 2026 and is supported through May 2029. Translation: an aging Magento install on an unsupported version is a clock, not a platform.
Here’s where Magento still wins, because honesty cuts both ways. For very large, integration-dense B2B catalogs, run by a team that knows the platform, Adobe Commerce remains genuinely capable, and ripping it out can cost more than maintaining it. The trap is the mid-market brand limping along on an old Open Source version with no one to call when it breaks. If that’s you, replatforming to a supported platform usually wins on a spreadsheet, not just on principle. Different rankings tell slightly different stories depending on method: by one usage-share measure across all stores, Magento sits around 8.5%, Shopify around 23.5%, and WooCommerce around 4.9%, which is a different cut than the top-1M figure above but points the same direction.
Why the build doesn’t matter if checkout leaks
Before you spend a dollar on a platform, internalize the number that should scare you: the average documented online cart-abandonment rate is 70.22%, across 50 studies. For every ten carts, seven leave. The platform choice is upstream of this, but it’s not where the money is found. Baymard documents that a large ecommerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion from better checkout design alone, no replatform required.
The reasons are unglamorous and fixable. 39% of shoppers abandon because extra costs (shipping, tax, fees) came in higher than expected, and 19% leave because the site forced them to create an account. Neither is a platform limitation. Both are decisions. Buyers routinely propose a six-figure replatform to fix a conversion problem that a transparent shipping display and a guest-checkout toggle would solve for a fraction of the cost. The most expensive ecommerce project is the one that solves the wrong problem beautifully.
Checkout, in three numbers (Baymard)
How to pick the company (and the tells to walk away from)
The vetting is the same discipline we’d apply to choosing any software development partner, with a few ecommerce-specific tells. The single best signal is whether they’ll talk you out of work. A firm that recommends a configured Shopify store when that’s the right call, instead of a custom build, is a firm optimizing for your outcome over their invoice. They are rarer than they should be, because configuration bills less than code.
Then check the quote’s shape. A real ecommerce proposal scopes integrations, data migration, redirect strategy, and post-launch maintenance as named line items, not as “and we’ll handle the rest.” Ask who owns the redirect map. Ask whether they audit your current data before quoting (the catalog is always messier than anyone admits, and discovering that mid-migration is how a three-month plan becomes a nine-month one). Ask for references from a build like yours. And be wary of the agency whose every answer is “headless” or “go custom,” regardless of your question. The right answer is sometimes the cheap one, and a partner who can’t say that is selling you their preferred margin, not your best path.
How gmware approaches ecommerce builds
We start by trying to disqualify the build. If Shopify configured well solves your problem, we’ll tell you that and you’ll save the six figures, because a custom project that didn’t need to exist is the worst outcome for both of us. When the platform genuinely doesn’t fit, our custom product development practice runs delivery from Austin with engineering in Bangalore and Mohali, which keeps senior oversight on US hours without US-only burn rates, and we scope the integration and migration work (the parts that actually carry risk) into the quote up front rather than discovering them later.
We run production data systems ourselves: our Shield Suite product handles retail intelligence across 60,000+ beverage-alcohol storefronts, so the parts of an ecommerce build that are really data problems (catalog sync, inventory accuracy, getting a migration to reconcile) aren’t theory to us. And if your real problem is a leaking checkout or an aging stack rather than a missing feature, a digital transformation engagement that fixes the operational layer often pays back faster than a rebuild. For the broader category, our retail and ecommerce work covers the integrations and analytics that separate a store that runs from a store that sells.
Tell us what platform you’re on and what’s actually blocking you, and we’ll give you a straight answer on whether you need a build, a replatform, or just better configuration, scope and cost included, within 48 hours.