How much does a website cost in 2026 for a business with stock to show?

If you sell things, your website is not a brochure. It is a stock list that has to be right at nine at night, a search box that has to work on a phone in a yard, and an enquiry form that has to reach the right person with the right item attached. That is a different product from a five-page site for a café, and it is priced differently for good reasons. Here is what the numbers actually mean.

The three price points, and what each one buys

From €5,000 you get a Presence site: six to ten pages, your words rewritten so they read well and rank, enquiry and quote forms that reach you, Google Business Profile set up, analytics, and a speed score of 100 on Google's own test. There is no live stock on it. It suits a trade or professional firm that needs to be found, trusted and rung, and it takes about three weeks.

From €10,000 you get a Growth site, which is the one most businesses with stock need: everything above, plus your stock or listings fed from the system you already keep, search and filters that match how your buyers actually look, an enquiry captured against every item with alerts to you, sector pages written in your customers' words, and the structured data that gets each item into Google. Six weeks.

From €20,000 you get a Platform: the operation runs through the site. Customer accounts, saved searches and alerts, payments and deposits, an admin dashboard with the numbers you run on, integrations with your accounts package, automated feeds, and monitoring that emails before a customer notices. Ten to fourteen weeks. The proof of what that tier looks like is ukcarimports.ie, which runs 130,000 items with real payments on exactly this engineering.

What the €1,500 quote leaves out

You will get quotes at a fifth of these prices, from Ireland, the UK, India and from AI site builders, and some of them will be perfectly good brochure sites. What they do not include is the part that makes a stock site work: the feed from your system, the item pages, the filters, the enquiry routing. Those are added later at an hourly rate, or never.

The other things to look for in the small print: support that ends on day 7, 15 or 30; templates and stock photography; licences, hosting after year one and revision overages billed separately; and no guarantee of anything. None of that is dishonest. It is just a different product, and it is worth knowing which one you are buying.

The number that matters is at year five

Most agencies price low and earn on the retainer. A €9,000 build on a €300-a-month retainer is €27,000 over five years, and at the end you own nothing: leave, and the site goes dark. A €15,000 build with hosting you pay directly at about €50 a month is roughly €18,000 over the same five years, and it is yours from the first commit.

That is why our prices look higher at the first invoice and lower everywhere after it. We would rather say so than compete on a number that is not the real one. Your own quote shows your own five-year total the same way.

What changes the price on a stock site

Three things, in order. First, where the stock comes from: a clean export from a dealer system is quick; a spreadsheet someone updates by hand is fine; a system with no export at all means building one, which adds time. Second, how many kinds of thing you sell: an equipment dealer with one category is simpler than a merchant with 20,000 lines in a hundred categories. Third, what happens after the enquiry: a form to an inbox is included; routing by branch, an account portal, online payment or a marketplace push are Platform features.

Nothing else on the usual quote form changes the price much. Page count does not matter when pages are generated from stock. Design does not cost extra because there is one design, done properly, rather than three mock-ups to choose between.

How to check any quote, including ours

Ask five questions: where is the work actually done; who can see my enquiry data and under what agreement; what happens on day 31; who owns the code, the hosting and the domain; and what does Google's own speed test say about a site you have built. The answers are on our pricing page, and a quote that cannot answer them is telling you the price is not the whole price.

Then run the free audit on the site you have now. It names the faults on your homepage and what each one is costing you, which is the honest starting point for deciding whether you need a fix, a rebuild or nothing at all.