The short answer
Roughly $500 to $2,500 for a freelancer to set up a ready-made theme, and $10,000 or more for an agency's custom build. Here's what moves the price.
A Shopify store has two kinds of cost. There's what you pay Shopify every month to keep the shop running, which we cover in how much a Shopify store really costs. And there's the one-off cost of getting the shop built and set up, which depends on who you hire. This article is about the second one: what people charge, what changes the price, and how to tell a fair quote from a risky one.
The ranges below are typical market prices in US dollars, drawn from published 2026 pricing guides. They're a guide for budgeting, not a quote. Rates in the UK and elsewhere follow the same pattern, with plenty of variation between providers.
Typical prices at a glance
- Doing it yourself: your time, plus $0 for a free theme or roughly $150 to $400 for a premium one.
- A freelancer setting up a ready-made theme, with fewer than about a hundred products: roughly $500 to $2,500.
- A freelancer on a bigger job, with heavy theme changes, hundreds of products or several apps to connect: roughly $2,500 to $10,000.
- A small agency building a custom theme: roughly $10,000 to $25,000.
- A large agency on a fully custom build with complex integrations: $25,000 and up.
Most small businesses selling a modest range of products sit in the second bracket. The jump to the higher ones usually comes from custom design, large catalogues or connecting the shop to other business systems.
Hourly rate or fixed price?
Freelance Shopify experts commonly charge somewhere around $50 to $150 an hour, with senior specialists and agencies charging more. Hourly billing makes sense for small, open-ended jobs, like fixing a few things on an existing shop. For a new store, ask for a fixed price with a written list of what's included. You know what you'll pay, and the person doing the work has a reason to finish on time.
What changes the price
- How many products and variations you have. Twenty products with one size each is a different job from two hundred with five sizes and four colours.
- Ready-made theme or custom design. Setting up a good theme is quicker than designing and building one from scratch.
- Whether your photos and descriptions are ready. If someone has to write product copy or edit photos, that's extra work.
- Features beyond a standard shop: subscriptions, wholesale pricing, product personalisation, booking, or several languages and currencies.
- Connections to other systems, like your accounting software, a warehouse or a marketplace.
- Moving from another platform. Bringing products across from Etsy, WooCommerce or Wix takes time to do properly.
What a proper setup should include
Whatever you pay, a finished store should leave you able to take orders the day it launches. Check that the quote covers:
- Theme setup in your colours, fonts and logo, checked on phones as well as computers.
- Products added with photos, prices, variations and collections.
- Payments, shipping rates and taxes switched on and tested.
- Order emails, like confirmations and shipping updates, rewritten in your voice.
- Refund, shipping and privacy policy pages.
- Your domain connected, and basic search settings like page titles and descriptions filled in.
- At least one real test order, placed and refunded.
- A handover: a short training session or video, so you can add products and process orders yourself.
What's usually extra
- Product photography and copywriting.
- Logo and brand design, if you don't have them yet.
- Paid apps and premium themes, which you pay to their makers.
- Marketing after launch: ads, email campaigns and social media.
- Changes after the agreed support period ends.
Where to find someone
Shopify runs a Partner Directory listing freelancers and agencies who work on Shopify stores, with reviews from past clients. Freelance marketplaces have thousands more, at every price. Small studios sit in between. One of the best routes is a shop you already like: scroll to its footer, where many stores credit whoever built them, and ask.
Questions to ask before you pay anything
- Will the Shopify account be in my name, with my email address and my card on the plan? (The answer should be yes.)
- Is the price fixed, and what exactly does it include?
- How many rounds of changes are included?
- How long will it take, and what do you need from me, by when?
- What will I pay every month once it's live, including apps?
- What happens after launch if something breaks or I need a change?
- Can I see two or three live shops you've set up?
Red flags
- They want to open the store under their own account and transfer it "later".
- No written scope, just a price and a promise.
- A long list of paid apps before they've asked what you sell.
- A price that's far below everyone else's with no explanation. Cheap setups often mean a theme installed with demo content left in.
- No live examples, or only screenshots.
Is it worth paying someone?
Shopify is built so that owners can set up their own shops, and many do. Doing it yourself makes sense if you have a small range, some patience and more time than money. Paying someone makes sense when your time is worth more spent on products and customers, or when you want the shop to look finished from the first day. What you're buying is fewer mistakes and a shorter road to your first sale.
How we price a Shopify store
We don't publish prices because every shop is different. After a free 15-minute call, we send one fixed price in writing, along with every monthly cost you'll pay to Shopify and app makers. A store on a ready-made theme takes about two weeks, and a custom theme four to six weeks. Both include three rounds of changes and 30 days of free small fixes after launch, and you pay Shopify directly, so the plan is always yours. See our Shopify store setup and custom Shopify theme services for what's included.
