Let's make a bold statement right at the start: technically speaking, you can launch a webshop for an annual platform cost of just a few tens of thousands of forints. Building a viable e-commerce business, however, is an entirely different question. Beyond the webshop engine, you need to account for a whole range of costs: transaction fees, logistics, legal compliance, marketing and inventory financing. The question itself leads you astray from the outset, because the real question is not “how much does a webshop cost?” but rather how much capital it takes to get from your first order to a sustainably functioning sales system.
Before you dismiss this as theoretical hair-splitting, let's ground it in reality. One entrepreneur can put together a working webshop over a single weekend, while another company spends millions of forints on seemingly the same results and features. Will they be in the same place come Sunday evening? Hardly. What's more, entering the market today is far harder than it was a few years ago, so the actual costs are even less easy to sum up in a few short sentences.
In a HUF 2,000 billion market, simply “being online” is no longer enough
At first glance, the size of Hungarian e-commerce is extremely attractive. According to PwC, the market was barely HUF 200 billion in 2015, but by 2025 it had reached a size of roughly HUF 2,100 billion. In ten years, it has grown roughly tenfold. This does not mean, however, that selling has automatically become easier for a new webshop – quite the opposite. Today's consumer no longer compares one fledgling Hungarian webshop with another; on the same screen, they see offers from Alza, international retailers like Amazon, Temu, regional webshops, marketplaces and domestic specialist retailers.
In the past, a usable interface, a few payment methods and a courier service might have been enough. Today, speed, mobile usability, product data quality, search, ease of payment, parcel locker pickup, order tracking and the returns process are all part of what the customer perceives as “the webshop”.
Rented system, WooCommerce or custom development?
When it comes to technology costs, there are three basic directions today;
the first is the software-as-a-service model, the so-called SaaS or rented webshop,
the second is a solution running on your own hosting, built on an open system such as WooCommerce or Opencart,
and the third is partially or fully custom development.
The price difference can be enormous.
Based on publicly available offers from Hungarian developers in 2026, quotes for building a WooCommerce-based webshop range from a few hundred thousand forints to well over HUF 1–1.5 million. For more complex B2C projects, an investment of HUF 2–3 million is not unusual, and for B2B or heavily integrated systems, several million forints is common. These are not official market averages but publicly published 2026 service provider price ranges, so they are primarily useful for conveying the order of magnitude.
The rented webshop model follows a completely different economic logic. In this case, you do not pay upfront for the development of an entire webshop engine; instead, you buy access to an already-built infrastructure. Here, the subscription takes the place of a technology investment.
Sellvio's pricing illustrates the difference well. The point is not that one solution is “cheap” and the other “expensive”. They finance the same problem in different ways. With custom development, a significant share of the costs arises upfront, whereas with a rented system, thanks to the standardization of the technology, the cost of many features is spread across the entire user base – costs that a single merchant would otherwise have to bear alone with their own system.
The webshop engine is only the first line in your budget
This is where new merchants make one of the most common planning mistakes. They look at the webshop subscription fee or the development quote and treat that as the cost of launching a webshop. But getting the system up and running is not the same as entering the market.
You need a domain, branding, a proper product structure, categorization, images, product descriptions, payment and shipping processes, invoicing, analytics, legal documentation and the marketing needed to win your first customers... If the entrepreneur does all of this themselves, the financial cost may seem smaller, but the time spent is still a very real economic cost.
With a catalog of 500 products, for example, it matters a great deal whether your supplier provides a structured database or every product has to be uploaded manually. If each product takes just five minutes of admin work, 500 products add up to more than 41 working hours. At ten minutes per product, that is already 83 hours. And on top of that come photography, product page copywriting, search engine optimization and building the category structure. This is where the problems start piling up – they can be handled with plenty of initial enthusiasm, but they set off the alarm bells: in the long run, this simply will not work.
When developing Sellvio, we were well aware that it is not enough for our system to function as a “site builder”; it has to be an “operating system” designed for webshops. Bulk import, AI-based content creation, inventory synchronization, automatic invoicing and courier integration are, without exception, business features that replace hours of manual work.
How much does it cost when the customer pays?
Online payment is typically not a one-off development cost but a turnover-based item. This is an important distinction, because as the webshop grows, this cost grows with it.
Let's look at an example to illustrate the costs hidden in the details. Barion's public pricing effective from April 22, 2026, for instance, lists a 1.49 percent card acceptance fee in the Starter Fix plan for average monthly turnover below HUF 5 million, while the same fee in the Advanced Fix plan is 1.19 percent. At higher turnover, the percentage fee can decrease. At first glance this looks like a tiny amount, but it is worth thinking at the company level. On HUF 10 million of card turnover, every one percent of payment cost means HUF 100,000. On HUF 100 million of turnover, it is already a million.
A merchant needs to examine the total payment cost, including fixed fees, chargebacks, the cost of any refunds, settlement time, and also how an easier-to-use payment method affects the conversion rate. The latter is easy to underestimate. The cheaper payment provider is not necessarily cheaper if more customers abandon the checkout because of it.
Shipping is now part of the product
We run into further problems if we try to derive logistics costs from carriers' published price lists. Public retail or one-off shipping rates give a sense of the order of magnitude, but a webshop's contracted price can differ significantly. In GLS's 2026 one-off pricing, for example, domestic delivery to a parcel locker starts at HUF 2,140 and delivery to a pickup point at HUF 2,640 for certain package sizes. The contracted terms of larger webshops can of course differ from this – sometimes considerably. The true logistics cost, meanwhile, also includes the box, filler material, tape, labels, packing labor, cash-on-delivery handling, failed deliveries and returns.
Sellvio takes a platform-level approach to this problem. Sellvio Express brings together multiple shipping providers under a single integration and a single contracting process. Thanks to the combined parcel volume of its merchants, the resulting terms can typically be 10–30 percent more favorable than an individual contract.
A cheap webshop and a webshop that is cheap to operate are not the same thing
When comparing investments, it is worth introducing the concept of total cost of ownership, or TCO. A system's TCO is not just the first invoice. You have to add hosting, licenses, development work, updates, bug fixes, integrations, support, security work and the internal working hours the business spends on maintaining the system.
For this reason, a free webshop engine does not necessarily mean a free webshop. Likewise, a subscription-based platform is not necessarily expensive if the monthly fee replaces several separate services and development tasks.
The other important metric is the cost of change. How much does it cost to connect a new payment method? How long does it take to launch a second country? What does adding a new warehouse involve? Do you need a developer for a promotion? Is there an API? Can the data be exported? These questions say far more about a platform's long-term cost than the monthly subscription alone.
These are the questions and answers that clearly tip the scales toward the rented model – and toward Sellvio.
Don't try to solve, as cheaply as possible, how to get a shopping cart onto the internet. Plan instead how your first visitor becomes a customer, how your first customer becomes a returning client, how manual order handling becomes an automated process, and how your fledgling webshop becomes a scalable commerce business.