E-commerce
What an online shop really costs to run, per month
The build is the small number. Here is the monthly reality, itemised, for a small European store.
Shop budgets usually cover the build and stop. The build is a one-off; the running costs are forever, and they are the number that decides whether the shop is viable.
Hosting
A shop cannot live on €4 shared hosting. Sessions, carts and checkout are dynamic and cannot be fully cached. Realistically €25–80 a month for managed WooCommerce hosting or a properly configured VPS.
Payments
The cost that scales and the one people underestimate. European card rates run roughly 1.4–2.9% plus a fixed fee; PayPal is higher; SEPA direct debit is cheaper but carries chargeback risk. At €10,000 monthly revenue this is €150–300 a month, every month.
Plugins and apps
Subscriptions, bookings, advanced shipping, VAT compliance, a decent search. €30–150 a month once you have what a real shop needs. Annual licences that lapse quietly are a common source of unpatched code.
Maintenance
Updates on staging, backups, monitoring, and someone to call when checkout breaks. €120–300 a month for a small store. Skipping this is how you find out on a Saturday that payments have been failing since Thursday.
Order confirmations must arrive. Sending them from your web server means they land in spam. A transactional provider is €10–30 a month and it is not optional.
Accounting and tax
If you sell across the EU, OSS filing and a tax adviser who understands digital sales. Budget for the adviser; the fines for getting VAT wrong are considerably larger.
A realistic monthly total
A small European shop turning over €10,000 a month: roughly €400–900 before any advertising. That is the number to test against your margin before you commission a build.
The cost nobody lists
Time. Product photography, descriptions, stock, returns, customer emails. On a small shop this is regularly ten hours a week and it is the reason many shops quietly stop being updated six months after launch.
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