Websites & Ecommerce
How much does a Shopify build or migration cost in the UK?
The short answer
A UK Shopify build typically costs £6,000 to £20,000 for a well-executed custom theme on a clean catalogue, and £20,000 to £45,000 for a migration from another platform, a multi-market international setup or a subscription launch. Shopify's own plan is £25 to £289 a month, plus apps — commonly £100 to £500 a month — which is the cost most projects underestimate. Most builds take six to fourteen weeks.
Indicative price ranges
Custom theme build
£6,000 – £20,000
Bespoke design on a clean catalogue, conversion-focused product and collection templates, payments, shipping rules and analytics.
Migration or replatform
£20,000 – £35,000
Data migration from WooCommerce, Magento or a bespoke store, URL and redirect strategy, SEO preservation, app rationalisation and staff training.
International or subscription
£30,000 – £45,000+
Markets, currencies, localised content and tax, or a subscription programme with retention flows, dunning and lifecycle automation.
These are indicative UK ranges based on projects we have actually delivered. Scope drives the number, not the sales conversation — we quote a fixed price after a scoping session, and we will tell you if an off-the-shelf tool is the cheaper answer.
Typical timescales
- 1–2 weeks
Audit and data plan
Catalogue, customers, orders, URLs and the app stack you are actually paying for versus the one you need.
- 2–4 weeks
Design and templates
Conversion-led product, collection and checkout journeys designed mobile-first.
- 3–8 weeks
Build and migration
Theme development, data import with validation, integrations, redirect map and staging QA.
- 1–2 weeks
Launch and stabilisation
DNS, redirects verified at scale, tracking confirmed, then two weeks of close monitoring on rankings and conversion.
Who this suits
- Retailers whose current platform costs more in maintenance and downtime than the replatform would.
- Brands selling into several countries who need proper markets, currencies and localisation.
- Businesses launching subscriptions or moving off a subscription app that is throttling them.
- Teams who want to merchandise and publish without a developer in the loop.
Who it does not suit
- Highly bespoke B2B pricing, quoting and approval workflows — that is usually a custom build, not Shopify.
- Catalogues with deeply unusual configuration logic that fights the product model.
- Anyone replatforming purely because the current site looks dated. A theme refresh is far cheaper.
- Businesses unwilling to invest in the redirect and SEO work a migration demands.
What actually drives the cost
Catalogue complexity
Variants, bundles, configurators and per-market pricing drive far more work than product count alone.
Data quality
Clean exports import in days. Fifteen years of inconsistent SKUs, duplicate customers and orphaned images take weeks to reconcile.
SEO preservation
A migration without a tested redirect map is how retailers lose a third of their organic traffic. This work is not optional.
App stack
Every app is a monthly cost, a performance hit and a dependency. Rationalising is usually the cheapest win in the project.
Integrations
ERP, 3PL, accounting and marketing platforms each need mapping, error handling and reconciliation.
The cost most people miss
The build is a one-off. The app stack is forever. A store paying for a subscription app, a reviews app, a bundling app, a search app and a loyalty app can quietly spend £400 a month before a single order — £4,800 a year against a build that might have absorbed two of those functions natively.
Before agreeing a scope, list every app, its monthly cost and what it actually does. In most audits we run, at least two are duplicating something the theme or Shopify itself now handles.
Migration is an SEO project wearing an ecommerce hat
The technical build is the easy half. The half that determines whether revenue holds is:
- A complete inventory of existing URLs, including old collection filters and legacy blog posts.
- A one-to-one redirect map, tested at scale before DNS changes.
- Structured data, metadata and internal links preserved rather than regenerated from defaults.
- Tracking verified against real orders on day one, not assumed.
Handled properly, traffic dips for a week or two and recovers. Handled carelessly, it does not recover.
Client examples
LOQI and Vuba Surfaces are both Shopify programmes where the interesting work sat in international selling and merchandising rather than the theme. Vaas & Zo launched a subscription experience against a fixed national campaign deadline.
If you want the productised versions of this work — support retainers, international expansion and subscription launches — they are set out on our Shopify offers pages. If you are still deciding on the platform itself, read bespoke website vs WordPress, Shopify and Squarespace.
Proof
Where we have done this
How we worked these numbers out
The price bands and timescales on this page are first-party figures taken from projects The Digital Hub has quoted and delivered for UK clients since 2020, not from third-party survey data. Ranges are rounded and exclude VAT. They are reviewed at least every six months and updated when our own delivered costs move. Where a figure depends on a third-party licence or hosting cost, that cost is named in the text so you can check it yourself.
Written by
Tom Beachell
Founder & Technical Director, The Digital Hub
Tom leads scoping and delivery at The Digital Hub, quoting and shipping bespoke websites, CRM platforms and private AI systems for UK businesses. The price bands and timescales on this page come from projects he has personally scoped.
Published 2026-08-26 · Last reviewed August 2026 · About The Digital Hub
Common questions
Will we lose search rankings when we migrate?
Not if the redirect map is complete and tested before launch. Expect a short dip while Google reprocesses, then recovery. Losses that persist are almost always missing redirects or lost metadata.
Shopify or Shopify Plus?
Plus earns its cost at higher order volumes, or when you need checkout customisation, multiple expansion stores or B2B features. Below that, standard Shopify with a good build is usually the better commercial decision.
How long does a migration take?
Typically eight to fourteen weeks. Data quality and content readiness move that date far more than development speed does.
Can you reduce our monthly app spend?
Usually. An app audit is part of our scoping and it frequently pays for a meaningful share of the project in the first year.
Do we own the work?
Yes. The theme code and all custom development are yours, in your repository and your Shopify account.
Next step
Get a fixed price for your own version of this
A 30-minute scoping call, then a written fixed price and delivery date. If an off-the-shelf tool is the cheaper answer for you, we will say so on the call.
- 1You tell us the process and the tools you pay for today.
- 2We map the scope and flag anything that will move the number.
- 3You get a fixed price, a schedule and an honest recommendation in writing.
Reply within 24 hours · No obligation · Full code ownership on every build