How much an online store costs in Estonia: prices, timelines and the bills that come after

Short answer first, because that is what you came for. In Estonia, building an online store typically costs €2,000–3,500 for a small shop of up to 100 products, €3,500–6,000 for a mid-sized store with integrations, and €6,000 and up for a large custom build. Those bands come from ProDesign's published breakdown, and other Estonian studios with open price lists sit inside them: Velsio quotes €3,490 for a 50-product store and €9,990 for an unlimited custom one. Launch timelines run from about three weeks to several months. Running costs afterwards are €400–1,500 per year before you pay a cent in payment commissions.

That is the honest range. The rest of this article explains why the same store gets quoted at €2,500 by one studio and €9,000 by another, what almost never appears in a quote, what Estonian payment rails actually charge per transaction, and — a section most studios skip — when you should not build a store at all.

The short answer: how much an online store costs in Estonia

Estonian studios that publish prices cluster into recognisable tiers. We checked the live price pages rather than repeating market folklore. The list below shows published prices for building an online store, checked directly on each provider's price page. VAT status varies by provider and is noted where stated.

• KAAROVEEB, PREMIUM package — €1,799 (from). WooCommerce store, up to 10 pages, payment providers (Montonio, Maksekeskus, Esto) and carriers (Omniva, Itella, DPD) configured, 3 months support. Domain and hosting not included. VAT status not stated on the page.
• Velsio, E-pood Start — €3,490, up to 50 products, roughly 3–4 weeks. E-pood Growth — €5,990, up to 200 products, 5–6 weeks. E-pood Custom — €9,990, unlimited products, 8–10 weeks. All WooCommerce, Estonian payment gateways and carriers included, 12 months support. Domain and server billed separately.
• ProDesign, published bands — small store up to 100 products €2,000–3,500; mid-sized with integrations €3,500–6,000; large custom build from €6,000.
• Veebihai, published guide — online store from €3,000; custom solutions €4,000–10,000 and above. Suggests budgeting roughly 10% of the build cost per year for upkeep.
• Marketing Sharks, upper segment — catalogue-based store from about €5,000; projects with integrations €8,000–20,000; complex builds with large catalogues or several markets above €20,000.
• Bluefour (Finland) — do-it-yourself on Shopify €500–1,500 plus 40–80 hours of your own work; outsourced standard build €3,500–8,000 over about 8 weeks; custom development from €10,000.
• Zoner (Finland) — custom development €5,000–30,000, and €50,000 and up for genuinely complex systems.

Two things stand out. First, the bands overlap heavily, which means a price alone tells you very little without knowing the scope behind it. Second, the spread within a single tier is roughly two-to-one. That gap is not mystery or margin. It is scope, and the next section takes it apart line by line.

What drives the price: the seven lines that belong in every quote

Ask three studios what moves the price most and you will get similar answers. Marketing Sharks puts it bluntly on their own page: integrations and catalogue preparation move the price more than design does. That is worth sitting with, because most buyers assume design is the expensive part.

1. Discovery and catalogue structure

Before anything is designed, someone has to decide how your products are organised: categories, filters, attributes, variants. A shop selling 40 books needs almost none of this. A shop selling clothing in five sizes and eight colours needs a variant model that will either serve you for years or fight you every week. This work is cheap to do early and expensive to redo later.

2. Design and UX

A configured theme costs a fraction of a custom design. Both can sell well. The difference shows up when you need something the theme was not built for — a size guide inside the product page, a bundled-product flow, a B2B price list behind a login.

3. Development and configuration

On WooCommerce or Shopify this is largely assembly and configuration rather than writing a store from scratch. On a headless build it genuinely is development, and the cost reflects that.

4. Product data entry and migration

The most underestimated line in the whole quote. Entering 30 products with one photo each is an afternoon. Entering 900 products with variants, dimensions, tax classes and cross-links is weeks of work, and it scales with your catalogue rather than with your design ambitions. If you are moving from an existing shop, migration also means preserving URLs so you do not lose the search rankings you already have.

5. Integrations

Warehouse systems, accounting, ERP, courier label printing, stock sync with a physical shop. Each integration is a small project with its own edge cases. This is the line that separates a €3,500 store from a €9,000 one more often than any other.

6. Payments and shipping setup

Configuration is usually modest. Getting your contracts approved with banks and providers, however, takes calendar time that no developer controls. Start it early.

7. SEO structure and testing

Category URL structure, metadata templates, structured data, and testing the checkout on real devices with real cards. Skipping this does not show up on launch day. It shows up in month four.

What the quote usually does not include

This is where budgets quietly break. ProDesign states plainly on their pricing page that their figures do not cover product photography, copywriting, or ongoing maintenance. They are not being evasive — that is standard across the market. It simply means the number you were quoted is not the number you will spend.

• Product photography. If you sell physical goods, this is a real cost and often a large one. Nobody can build it for you out of nothing.
• Copy: product descriptions, category text, shipping and returns pages, the About page. A 200-product catalogue needs 200 descriptions, and they are the single biggest content job in most launches.
• Translation. Estonian, Russian, English and Finnish are four versions of everything above, and every one of them needs maintaining forever after.
• Ongoing maintenance. Updates, backups, monitoring, the occasional broken plugin. KAAROVEEB publishes this openly at €50 per month, which is a fair benchmark for a small store.
• Domain and hosting. Velsio and KAAROVEEB both state these are billed separately. Assume every studio means the same unless told otherwise.
• Marketing. Bluefour, being unusually candid, budgets a minimum of €12,000 for first-year marketing in Finland alongside the build itself. Whatever your own figure is, it is not zero, and a store with no traffic sells nothing.

If two quotes for the same shop differ by a factor of two, the difference is almost always in catalogue entry, the number of integrations, and who is responsible for photos and text — not in the quality of the design.

Payments in Estonia: bank links, cards, and what they actually cost

Estonian shoppers expect bank links. This is genuinely different from most of Europe, and it changes your economics, because bank-link pricing is closer to flat than percentage-based. Three providers publish their rates openly. All figures below are excluding VAT, and Maksekeskus states this explicitly on its price page.

• Montonio — monthly plans Starter €11.99, Core €14.99, Core Flex €39.99. Bank links: €0.20 per transaction on Starter, €0.05 on Core and Core Flex. EU consumer cards: 1.49% + €0.25 on Starter, 1.29% + €0.20 on Core. Non-EU cards 2.99% + €0.20, business cards 2.39% + €0.20. Buy-now-pay-later 2.90% on Starter, 2.49% on Core. Setup free, refunds free, chargeback €20.
• Maksekeskus (MakeCommerce) — bank transfers across the Baltics and Finland 0.9% + €0.05. Card payments 1.35% + €0.15 with a €10 monthly fee. BNPL via Inbank/Liisi3 in Estonia 2.5% + €0.30. Chargeback €20, refunds and payment links free.
• Stripe (Estonia) — standard EEA cards 1.5% + €0.25, premium EEA cards 2.8% + €0.25, UK cards 2.5% + €0.25, international cards 3.15% + €0.25. Currency conversion adds 2%. SEPA Direct Debit €0.35. Disputes €20, refunded if you win. No setup or monthly fee. 3D Secure included.
• EveryPay — does not publish rates. Pricing is agreed individually with the merchant or through a partner bank (Swedbank, SEB, LHV, Coop, Luminor, Citadele). That is a legitimate model, but it means you cannot compare it without asking.

The practical conclusion is that your average order value matters more than the headline rate. A €0.05 bank-link fee on a €200 order is a rounding error; a 2.9% card fee on the same order is €5.80. Run the arithmetic on your own basket before choosing. And if you sell mostly to Estonian consumers, a provider without strong bank-link coverage will cost you conversions regardless of what its card rate says.

Shipping: parcel machines are the default expectation

Estonian buyers overwhelmingly expect parcel machine delivery — Omniva, Itella SmartPost, DPD. Practically every store platform and payment provider in the market integrates with them, and KAAROVEEB includes all three carriers even in its entry package. On current published tariffs we will be direct: we could not verify 2026 rates from the carriers' own live price pages, and DPD and Itella work largely on negotiated business contracts rather than public lists. Get quotes directly and budget from those, not from a blog post — including ours.

VAT and consumer law: the Estonian specifics nobody quotes you for

These are not development costs, but they are launch costs, and getting them wrong is more expensive than any build decision.

Estonia's standard VAT rate is 24%, in force since 1 July 2025 (it was 22% before that). Reduced rates are 13% for accommodation, 9% for press, books and medicines, and 0% for exports. Registration as a VAT payer becomes mandatory once taxable turnover exceeds €40,000 from the start of the calendar year, and the application must be filed within three working days of crossing the threshold. Voluntary registration before the threshold is possible. All figures are from the Estonian Tax and Customs Board.

On consumer rights, Estonian distance selling gives buyers 14 days to withdraw from a contract without giving a reason, counted from the day the goods are received. You must refund all payments — including the original delivery cost — within 14 days. There is one clause worth reading twice: if you did not inform the customer about the right of withdrawal, the period extends to twelve months. Exceptions exist for custom-made goods, perishables, opened audio, video or software, and opened hygiene and cosmetic products.

The Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority also specifies what must appear on the site itself: company name and address, email address and phone number, plus terms for returns, complaints and warranty, delivery times, what happens with defective goods, who pays return shipping, payment methods and any additional charges. Foreign sellers must also state which country's law applies. None of this is optional, and all of it is content someone has to write.

Platform choice: WooCommerce, Shopify or headless — and what it does to your three-year cost

Compare platforms by cost of ownership, not feature lists. The feature lists all look adequate; the cost curves diverge sharply.

WooCommerce core is free and open source, with no monthly platform fee and no revenue share. What you pay for instead is hosting and extensions: WooCommerce lists extensions at $29–299 per year each and hosting at $25–350 per month for most stores. Note those are US dollars on their own pricing page, not euros. Zoner puts a realistic first-year total for a modest WooCommerce shop at €400–1,500, with WordPress hosting plus domain from €15 per month and a fuller package at €30–60 per month.

Shopify charges a monthly platform fee in exchange for hosting, security and updates being someone else's problem. We have to be careful here: Shopify's own pricing page serves US dollars ($39, $105 and $399 per month on monthly billing; $29, $79 and $299 on annual), the Estonian localised pricing URLs return errors, and third-party sources contradict each other on the euro figure — we found Basic quoted variously at €24, €33 and €36. Zoner says roughly €33 per month. We will not print a euro figure we cannot verify. Check Shopify's pricing page from an Estonian connection, because it geolocates. Their payment processing rates for Estonia are similarly unpublished, so treat any blog quoting them as unverified.

Headless — a separate front end talking to a commerce backend via API — is the expensive option and is justified by specific conditions rather than by ambition: high traffic where page speed measurably moves revenue, a complex catalogue, or several markets and languages served from one system. If none of those apply to you, it is a cost with no return.

There is also a local option worth naming for very small catalogues. Voog, the Estonian site builder, runs €11 per month on Standard with e-commerce limited to three products, and €17 per month on Plus with unlimited pages and products. For a maker selling a handful of items, that is a completely reasonable place to start and a fraction of any build cost in this article.

How long building an online store takes

Published timelines from Estonian and Finnish providers, for calibration.

• Velsio — 3–4 weeks for a 50-product store, 5–6 weeks at 200 products, 8–10 weeks for an unlimited custom build.
• Marketing Sharks — 4–8 weeks for a straightforward store, 2–4 months for complex projects with integrations.
• Veebihai — 3–6 weeks for a normal website, 2–3 months for an online store or complex project.
• Bluefour (Finland) — about 8 weeks for a standard outsourced build, and the same 8 weeks for the do-it-yourself Shopify route, except those weeks are yours.

One caution about short timelines, including ours. A fast delivery date is bought by fixing scope: a known platform, a defined product count, a limited integration list. It is not bought by working faster. The moment a large catalogue migration or an ERP integration enters the picture, every published timeline in this article stops applying — including the ones that sound impressive. If a studio promises a three-week launch without first asking how many products you have and what systems they must talk to, that timeline is decoration.

Running costs after launch: what you pay every month and every year

This is where Estonian and Finnish content diverges, and the Finns are better at it. Their guides break down total cost of ownership month by month; Estonian ones mostly stop at the launch figure. Budget for three years, not for launch day. The recurring costs below are platform and infrastructure only — payment commissions and marketing are separate and usually larger.

• Hosting — €15–50 per month (ProDesign). Zoner puts WordPress hosting plus domain at €15 per month minimum, €30–60 for a fuller package, or €180–720 per year.
• Domain — €5–15 per year (ProDesign). Veebihai quotes an .ee domain at €10–20 per year. Note these sources disagree slightly; check with your registrar.
• Maintenance contract — €50 per month at KAAROVEEB, including updates, daily backups, monitoring and an hour of developer time. Veebihai quotes maintenance contracts at €360–1,800 per year.
• Plugin and theme licences — €50–400 per year (Veebihai), or €0–500 per year (Zoner).
• Payment provider monthly fees — from €11.99 to €39.99 at Montonio, €10 for cards at Maksekeskus, nothing at Stripe. In Finland, Paytrail's S package is €14.90 per month and M is €59.
• Transaction commissions — the line people forget entirely. At 1.35% + €0.15 on cards, €100,000 of annual card turnover across 500 orders costs about €1,425. That is larger than your hosting.

Zoner's realistic first-year total for a modest WooCommerce store is €400–1,500 excluding commissions. Bluefour's Finnish first-year estimate, including development, comes to roughly €8,600 before any inventory: €5,000 development, €2,400 platform and tools, €1,200 compliance and accounting. Veebihai's rule of thumb — budget about 10% of the build cost annually for upkeep — is a decent sanity check on any of these numbers.

Selling into Finland: what is different from Estonia

If Finland is your second market, three things change and one does not.

Payment rails change. Estonian bank links do not exist there; you need Finnish providers. Paytrail publishes its rates openly: package S at €14.90 per month plus €0.50 and 3.25% per transaction, package M at €59 per month plus €0.50 and 2–3.5% depending on payment method. Transaction fees carry 0% VAT, while the monthly fee attracts Finnish VAT at 25.5%. Note the structure — percentage-based with a monthly floor, unlike Estonia's near-flat bank links. On a low average order value that is materially more expensive.

Tax changes. Finland's general VAT rate is 25.5%, in force since 1 September 2024. From 1 January 2026 the reduced rate dropped from 14% to 13.5% for groceries, restaurants, books, medicines, accommodation and passenger transport; newspapers and magazines sit at 10%. The registration threshold is €20,000 of turnover per calendar year, raised from €15,000 on 1 January 2025, and it is assessed against both the current and the previous calendar year. All from the Finnish Tax Administration.

Expectations change. Delivery and payment-method expectations are Finnish, not Estonian, and copying your Estonian checkout across will cost you conversions in ways your analytics will not label clearly. What does not change much is development cost. Finnish build ranges sit close to Estonian ones — Bluefour's €3,500–8,000 standard build overlaps almost exactly with the Estonian mid-tier.

When you do not need an online store at all

This section costs us work, and it stays in anyway. There are four situations where commissioning a build is the wrong move, and they are common.

Your catalogue is under 20–30 items and demand is unproven. Start yourself on a hosted platform. Voog Plus at €17 per month gives you unlimited products for €204 a year. Shopify or another SaaS will do the same. Bluefour's own honest framing of the do-it-yourself route — €500–1,500 plus 40–80 hours of your time, producing something functional but generic — is accurate. Generic and selling beats bespoke and speculative. Come back when you know what sells.

You sell services, not goods. A cart, stock levels, shipping rules and returns policies are pure overhead. You need a clear site, a way to enquire or book, and honest pricing. That is a fundamentally cheaper object than a store.

Most of your sales come from a marketplace. If a marketplace is delivering your volume, an owned store is a second channel that needs its own traffic before it earns anything. It may well be worth building eventually — for margin and for customer relationships you actually control — but it is a growth project, not a launch project, and it should be funded as one.

Your photos and copy do not exist yet. This is the most common reason launches stall. The store gets built, then sits empty for three months waiting on photography and 200 product descriptions. Do that work first, or accept that your launch date is the date the content is ready, not the date the build finishes.

And the plainest version: if your budget is under €2,000, a custom-built store from any studio in this article's mid-tier is not for you, ours included. We would rather say that now than take the project and disappoint you.

Our prices, in the context of the market

Since this article argues that studios should publish figures, here are ours. Our standard store is €4,490, delivered in 14–21 working days on Shopify or WooCommerce. A headless build is €7,990–€14,900 over 28–42 working days. A redesign of an existing store is €2,990, an SEO audit is €490, and our SEO package starts at €690 per month. All prices are final amounts in euro — no VAT is added on top, as Vorantis OÜ is not VAT-registered.

Placed against the market above, €4,490 sits between Velsio's Start at €3,490 and Growth at €5,990, in the upper half of ProDesign's mid band, and below Marketing Sharks' entry point of about €5,000. We are not the cheap option and do not present ourselves as one. Our headless range overlaps with what both Marketing Sharks and Zoner quote for integration-heavy projects. On timeline we are faster than most published figures at a comparable price, for the reason given earlier: fixed scope, an established platform, a bounded integration list. Where a large catalogue migration or an ERP integration is involved, we would quote differently, and we would say so before you asked.

What to do next

No pressure and no call booking required. Three steps you can take on your own, in order.

• Count your products, including every variant. This single number moves your quote more than any design decision, and you cannot get a serious price without it.
• Work out your average order value, then price two or three payment providers against it using their published rates. The right provider for a €25 basket is not the right one for a €250 basket.
• Build a three-year budget, not a launch budget: build cost, plus roughly €400–1,500 a year in platform and hosting, plus maintenance, plus commissions on your projected turnover, plus whatever marketing figure you can defend. If the three-year total does not work, the launch price was never the real question.

Then ask any studio, us included, for a written scope that names the product count, the integration list, and who owns photography, copy and translation. If a quote does not settle those four things, it is not a quote — it is an opening position. Every figure in this article came from a published source we opened directly, and prices change; verify the ones that matter to your decision before you commit.

Sources

• Estonian Tax and Customs Board — VAT rates and registration threshold: emta.ee/en/business-client/taxes-and-payment/value-added-tax
• Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority — e-commerce obligations and 14-day withdrawal right: ttja.ee/e-kaubandus
• Finnish Tax Administration — VAT rates: vero.fi/en/businesses-and-corporations/taxes-and-charges/vat/rates-of-vat/ and the registration threshold press release on vero.fi
• Montonio pricing: montonio.com/detailed-pricing/
• Maksekeskus pricing: maksekeskus.ee/hinnad/
• Stripe Estonia pricing: stripe.com/ee/pricing
• Paytrail pricing: paytrail.com/hinnasto
• WooCommerce pricing: woocommerce.com/pricing/
• Shopify pricing (USD): shopify.com/pricing
• Voog pricing: voog.com/pricing
• Velsio: velsio.ee/e-poe-tegemine-hind/
• KAAROVEEB: kaaroveeb.ee/hinnakiri/
• ProDesign: prodesign.ee/blog/kui-palju-maksab-e-pood-eestis/
• Veebihai: veebihai.ee/kodulehe-hind-2026-aus-hinnakiri/
• Marketing Sharks: marketingsharks.ee/teenused/veebiarendus/e-poe-tegemine/
• Bluefour: bluefour.fi/blogi/verkkokauppa-perustaminen-hinta-ja-aikataulu
• Zoner: zoner.fi/verkkokaupan-perustaminen/paljonko-maksaa-perustaa-verkkokauppa-2026/