Want a real number for your store? Brydan is a Shopify Partner in Las Vegas. Tell us what you sell and we will scope it honestly — see our e-commerce services.
You are paying for three different things
Most confusion about Shopify pricing comes from collapsing three separate costs into one question. They behave differently, they go to different places, and only one of them is what a developer quotes you.
The platform. Shopify charges a monthly subscription, billed by Shopify directly to you. There are several plan tiers, and the differences that matter to a small merchant are mostly transaction rates and the number of staff accounts. Check Shopify's current pricing rather than trusting any figure quoted in an article, including this one — the plans change. On top of the subscription there is a payment processing fee on every order, which is a cost of selling rather than a cost of building.
The build. This is the one-time project: design, development, product setup, and launch. It is what a developer quotes, and it is the number that varies most.
Keeping it running. Someone has to make changes after launch — new products, seasonal updates, a theme that breaks when Shopify ships a platform change, an app that stops syncing. Merchants routinely budget for the first two costs and not the third, then spend a year making changes themselves at 10pm.
What actually drives the build cost
Five things move a build quote more than anything else. If you know where you sit on each, you can predict roughly how a scoping conversation will go.
How custom the design is. A well-chosen theme customized to your branding is the least expensive path and the right one for most merchants. A fully custom theme built from scratch is a different order of work. The gap between them is large, and the honest answer is that most stores do not need custom — themes are professionally built and tested across devices in ways a bespoke build has to earn from zero.
How many products, and what state the data is in. Forty products with clean photography, written descriptions, and settled variants is a straightforward load. Four hundred products with inconsistent naming, missing images, and variant structures that were invented as you went is a data project before it is a store project. This is the single most common reason a build takes longer than the merchant expected, and the work usually has to happen regardless of who does it.
Whether you are migrating. Moving an existing store from another platform adds real work: mapping product and customer data, and building the redirect map that protects your search rankings. It is skippable only if you are willing to lose traffic. We cover the mechanics in moving from WooCommerce to Shopify.
How many systems it has to talk to. A store that stands alone is simpler than one that has to push orders into accounting, pull stock from an inventory system, and hand fulfilment to a shipping platform. Each integration is a moving part that has to be configured, tested, and monitored for silent failure.
How much of the content you are providing. Product photography, descriptions, and policy pages either come from you or get produced as part of the project. Neither is wrong, but they are different budgets, and this is worth settling early rather than discovering three weeks in that nobody wrote the shipping policy.
The costs merchants forget
These are the ones that show up after launch and are rarely in the original conversation.
- App subscriptions. Shopify's app ecosystem is genuinely useful, and it is also mostly monthly. Four modest apps become a real annual number. Worth reviewing what you have installed once or twice a year and removing what you no longer use.
- Payment processing. A percentage of every sale, which scales with your success rather than sitting still. Worth understanding on the plan you pick, because the rates differ by tier.
- Photography. Product images do more for conversion than almost anything a developer can build, and good ones cost money or time.
- Someone owning the store. Not a line item until something breaks on a Saturday.
What we ask before quoting
When a Las Vegas business calls us about a store, the scoping conversation is short and covers roughly this: What are you selling, and how many distinct products and variants? Do you have photography and descriptions ready? Are you starting fresh or moving from an existing store, and if so, does it have traffic and rankings worth protecting? Does the store need to talk to your accounting, inventory, or shipping systems? Are you also selling in person? And who is going to be running the store day to day once it is live?
That last question changes the recommendation more than people expect. A merchant with someone in-house who will genuinely own the store needs a different handover than one who wants to sell things and never open the admin panel.
Questions worth asking any developer
Whether or not you talk to us, these are the ones that separate a clear engagement from an expensive misunderstanding.
- Who owns the Shopify account and the theme code? It should be your business, in your name, with the domain registered to you. If leaving means rebuilding, that is not ownership.
- What happens after launch? Is support included, billed hourly, or simply not offered? A store nobody maintains degrades quietly.
- Who loads the product data? The most common source of a blown timeline.
- If migrating, who builds the redirect map? If the answer is vague, expect to lose search traffic.
- Who has admin access, and how is it secured? Ask whether multi-factor authentication will be enforced on every account with store access. Most agencies have not thought about it; it is where merchant breaches begin. We cover it in what merchants are actually responsible for.
Where to start
Before you gather quotes, do two things. Count your products and variants honestly, and look at the state of your photography and descriptions — that single exercise will tell you more about your timeline than any estimate. Then decide whether you need a store at all: if you are not taking payments online, a professional website is a smaller, cheaper, and entirely respectable answer.
Brydan builds and supports Shopify stores for Las Vegas businesses, and we are also the IT company for many of them — which means the store gets the same account security and support as everything else you run. If you want a real number, tell us what you sell and we will scope it plainly.
Talk to Brydan
Want an honest number for your store?
Tell us what you sell, how many products, and where you are today. We will scope it plainly and quote before we start — no percentage of revenue, no surprise change orders.