Turnkey Online Store Price: What the Estimate Covers

A turnkey online store is not one price, it is a stack of decisions. The base — catalog, product cards, cart, checkout, one payment provider, an admin panel where you edit everything yourself — is the cheapest part. What moves the number is integrations: warehouse, CRM, delivery, accounting, and how messy your product data is. At our studio an online store starts from 499,000 AMD, and the exact figure only exists after a 30-minute brief, because a store selling 40 handmade items and a store selling 12,000 SKUs with sizes and stock levels are different products.

What "turnkey" should mean

Turnkey means you can sell the day after launch without calling anyone. Concretely that is: a working catalog with filters and search, product cards with photos and variants, a cart, a checkout that does not lose people, at least one payment method, order notifications to you and to the customer, an admin panel where you add products and change prices yourself, and a mobile layout that is not an afterthought.

If a quote does not list those, it is not turnkey. It is a design plus a promise.

The line items in a real estimate

Structure and content model. How many categories, how many product attributes, whether products have variants (size, color, weight), whether prices differ by customer group. This is an hour of thinking that saves twenty hours later.

Design. A template adapted to your brand is cheap. A custom design with unique category pages and a custom product card costs more and is worth it when your product is visual — furniture, clothing, food, jewellery.

Catalog and filters. Cost grows with the number of attributes, not the number of products. Ten thousand identical bolts are easier than three hundred garments with sizes, colors and per-variant stock.

Cart and checkout. One-step checkout, guest orders, delivery options, pickup points, promo codes. Every extra rule here is real work.

Payments. One provider is a standard task. Card payment plus installments plus cash on delivery plus invoices for legal entities is three or four separate flows.

Delivery. Fixed rates are simple. Live rate calculation from a courier service, address validation, pickup point maps on checkout — each is a separate integration.

Warehouse and stock. The question is where the truth lives. If stock lives in 1C or in your accounting system, the site has to sync with it — one way or two way, by schedule or in real time. This is usually the single largest line in a store estimate.

CRM. Orders landing in your CRM with source, cart contents and customer history, so managers work in one window instead of an inbox.

Notifications. Email, Telegram or WhatsApp for order confirmation, status changes, abandoned carts.

Content migration. Loading products, writing or cleaning descriptions, cropping photos. Clients regularly underestimate this. If you have 2,000 products in a spreadsheet with inconsistent naming, someone has to fix that, and it is either your team or billed hours.

Analytics and testing. Ecommerce events, order tracking, then a week of fixing what real orders reveal.

Support after launch. Hosting, updates, small changes. Our plans start from 9,900 AMD per month. A store without support quietly degrades.

When a catalog without a cart is cheaper and honest

A lot of businesses pay for a cart they do not use. Consider a catalog site with an inquiry button instead — that is a website project, from 149,000 AMD — if any of these are true:

• Your average order needs negotiation: quantity discounts, specifications, delivery terms. B2B suppliers, equipment, construction materials.
• You have under 20 products and most orders already arrive on WhatsApp or Instagram. A clean catalog plus a direct message button converts as well as checkout and costs a fraction.
• Prices change daily — produce, currency-linked goods. Publishing them in a cart creates disputes.
• Your stock is one-of-a-kind items sold by phone anyway.
• You do not yet have someone to pack and ship orders every day. A store creates operational work. If nobody owns it, orders go unanswered and the site damages you.

The practical path: launch the catalog, watch which products get inquiries, add cart and payments in the second phase when volume justifies it. Building on a structured catalog later is normal work, not a rewrite, as long as the data model was designed with that in mind.

What to prepare before asking for a quote

• A product export in any format, even a rough spreadsheet, with attributes you actually filter by.
• The real number of SKUs including variants.
• Where stock is stored today and whether that system has an API.
• Which payment methods you need on day one, not day one hundred.
• Delivery rules: zones, prices, couriers, pickup.
• Who will manage the store daily after launch.
• Whether you already have a CRM, and if yes, which one.

With those seven answers a competent studio can give a firm price. Without them, any number is a guess.

How to compare quotes

Compare scope, not totals. Ask each contractor to price the same list of integrations. A quote that is half the price usually excludes stock sync, content migration or post-launch fixes — the three things that hurt later.

Ask who owns the code and the hosting account. Ask what happens in the first month after launch and whether it is billed. Ask to see a store they built with a similar catalog size, and ask what broke in it. Anyone who says nothing ever broke has not launched much.

Be careful with fixed "ready-made store" packages. They are fine when your business fits the template exactly. They become expensive the moment you need your own stock logic or a non-standard payment flow, because you pay to fight the template.

Frequently asked questions

Why do quotes for the same store vary so much? Because "online store" describes a shopfront, not a system. One quote covers a catalog and a cart; another includes 1C sync, CRM, delivery rates and data migration. Put both on the same scope list and the gap usually shrinks.

Can I start cheap and add integrations later? Yes, if the data model and admin panel are built for it from the start. Adding stock sync to a well-structured store is a normal project. Adding it to a store where products were typed in by hand with no article numbers means cleaning data first.

How much should I budget beyond development? Hosting, domain, payment provider fees, and ongoing support. Also content: photos and descriptions are a real cost and they are yours to own, whoever writes them.