The right comparison: total cost over three years
Almost everyone compares the starting price — €0 for Shopify against €2500 for a custom store — and stops there. That is the mistake. Platforms take their money monthly and as a percentage, and the percentage grows exactly when the business is doing well.
Shopify, realistically: the base plan starts around $39 a month, the apps you end up needing (advanced filters, local invoicing, subscriptions, reviews) typically add €40–€150 a month, and if you do not use Shopify Payments there is a further 0.5–2% on every transaction. A store turning over €20,000 a month can easily reach €250–€500 a month all in.
WooCommerce: no transaction fee and no platform subscription, but you pay for good hosting (€30–€120 a month, because WooCommerce is heavy), premium plugins, and maintenance is not optional — an un-updated WooCommerce is a security problem, not just a speed one.
Custom: from €2500 once, plus €20–€80 a month hosting. No commission, no app subscriptions, no surprise when you grow.
Over three years, for a small store, the ready-made platform almost certainly wins. For a growing one, the difference reverses somewhere between year two and three — and widens every month after that.
When the ready-made platform is the right answer
We do not sell custom development to someone who does not need it. If you are in the situation below, take Shopify or WooCommerce and put the difference into ads and good product photography — you will sell more than with a custom store and an empty marketing budget.
A platform is the right choice when: you have under about 300 products without complicated variants; delivery and pricing follow standard rules; you have no inventory or accounting system that must talk to the store automatically; you want to be live in 3–4 weeks; and, importantly, you have not yet validated that it sells.
That last point is the most important and the most ignored. If you have not sold online yet, you do not know what you need. A custom store built on assumptions is the most expensive way to find out the assumptions were wrong. Start on a platform, sell for six months, find out where it hurts — then build.
The four walls a platform runs into
1. Syncing with real stock. If goods live in an inventory program or a spreadsheet and the store holds its own quantities, the two will diverge, guaranteed. Sync apps exist for popular systems, but if your program is local or old with no API, there is nothing to work with. This is where growth stops most often.
2. Pricing logic that is not standard. Different prices per B2B customer, volume discounts with thresholds, a price calculated per square metre or per configuration, different VAT by category. These can be forced through apps, but you end up with five apps arguing with each other and a slow store.
3. Local delivery and invoicing. Integration with couriers in Moldova and Romania and with local invoicing systems is never as clean as the demos. Often someone copies orders by hand, which cancels half the reason you took the platform.
4. Speed under the weight of apps. Every app adds scripts. A store with twelve apps loads in 5–6 seconds on mobile, and that shows up directly in sales and in Google rankings.
What custom gives you, and what it does not
What it solves: real two-way sync with your inventory or accounting; any pricing and delivery logic, because it is written rather than configured; sub-2-second load times because you are not carrying weight you never use; correct structured data for Google from day one; and no transaction fee however large you grow.
What it does NOT solve: it does not bring you customers. A custom store with no traffic sells as little as a Shopify store with no traffic. If your total budget is €3000, it is almost certainly better to put €600 into the store and €2400 into ads and content than the other way round.
Realistic timeline: 6–10 weeks for a complete custom store with payments, delivery and basic integrations. With sync to an old internal system, 10–14 weeks, because half the work is making two systems understand each other.
The decision rule, in three questions
1. Have you already sold online? If not — platform. No exceptions. Validate first.
2. Does the store have to talk automatically to another system of yours? If yes, and that system has no public API — custom, because no app will solve it.
3. What are you paying monthly right now in subscriptions, apps and fees? Over €250 a month and a custom store pays for itself in under two years, and after that it is clean saving.
At ARTYONIX, a complete online store starts at €2500, one with ERP or 1C integration at €4500, and a marketplace at €8000. All with payments (Stripe, PayPal, MAIB, Victoriabank), integrated delivery, e-commerce SEO and the source code handed over. If you already have a store on a platform and are not sure it is worth moving, we will tell you honestly — often the answer is not yet.
What to remember
- Compare total cost over three years, not the starting price — fees grow exactly when business is good.
- Under about 300 products and with standard processes, the ready-made platform is the right choice.
- If you have not sold online yet, do not build custom: validate on a platform first.
- The most common wall is syncing with an inventory system that has no API.
- Above about €250 a month in subscriptions and fees, a custom store pays for itself in under two years.
- No store, however good, brings customers: split the budget with marketing.