, Retail
A homeware shop in Shrewsbury put its first 200 products online in a fortnight. The owner picked the platform because a friend used it, the theme looked like the shop, and the trial was free. Three years later she is selling about a third of her stock online, she is paying a monthly subscription, an extra percentage on every order because she never switched to the platform's own card processing, and two app subscriptions she cannot cancel because the stock sync depends on them.
She has priced a move. The quote was more than she paid for her first year of trading online. She has stayed where she is, which is the outcome the pricing was designed to produce.
Hosted means renting a shop you cannot take with you
The first decision is hosted or self-hosted, and it is less about features than about who is responsible when something breaks at 11pm.
A hosted platform gives you the software, the servers, the security patches, the uptime and the payment integration for a monthly fee. You do not think about PCI DSS compliance, TLS certificates or a WordPress update that takes the checkout down. You also cannot leave with the thing you built. Your theme, your apps and your customisations exist inside that platform and nowhere else.
Self-hosted means you own the installation. Usually that is WooCommerce on WordPress, sometimes PrestaShop or one of the open source editions of the larger systems. There is no monthly licence, which is the part people notice. There is hosting, backups, a maintenance contract or your own evenings, and responsibility for the security of a checkout that handles other people's card details. The cheapest self-hosted shop is not cheap, it is deferred.
For a retailer turning over less than a few hundred thousand pounds online, with nobody technical on the payroll, hosted is usually the correct answer even though it costs more on paper. The exception is a shop with genuinely unusual mechanics: trade pricing tiers, made-to-order configuration, complicated shipping rules. Those are the cases where the hosted platform's limits become a daily tax on your time.
The fee you notice is rarely the fee that costs most
Platform pricing has three layers and only the first is advertised.
The subscription is the headline. It is the smallest number.
Card processing is the second layer, and it is a real cost of any retail business, online or not. Expect an interchange-plus or blended rate on every transaction, plus a fixed fee per order that hurts disproportionately on low-value baskets.
The third layer is the one that catches people. Several hosted platforms charge an additional transaction fee if you use a payment provider other than their own. It is usually a fraction of a percent, which sounds trivial until you multiply it by your annual online turnover. That fee is not for a service. It exists to make switching payment providers unattractive.
Then there are apps. Reviews, subscriptions, loyalty, advanced shipping rules, stock sync, accounting integration. Each is a few pounds a month. A shop with eight apps is paying more for apps than for the platform, and every one of them is a dependency.
Add the layers before you compare platforms, using your own order volume and average basket. A platform that is cheaper at 40 orders a month can be the expensive one at 400.
Moving later costs more than moving now
Migration is the thing to price before you commit, because the cost is mostly invisible at the start.
Product data moves reasonably well. Images move. Orders and customer records move with effort. Customer passwords do not move at all, because they are stored hashed, which means every returning customer has to reset their password on your new site and a proportion of them simply will not. Product reviews often cannot be exported in a usable form, and reviews are an asset you spent years accumulating.
The part that does real damage is URLs. If your product and category addresses change and you do not map every old one to its replacement with a permanent redirect, you lose the search rankings you built. This is recoverable and it takes months. Plan the redirect map before the new site goes live, not after traffic falls.
Assume a migration will take a quarter of your attention for six weeks and that sales will dip while it settles. That is not an argument against moving. It is an argument for choosing the platform you can live with for five years, and for keeping a clean export of your product data and customer list from the first week.
The till and the website have to agree about stock
The moment you sell the same item in a shop and online, you have an inventory problem. One unit, two channels, and a customer in each.
The clean solution is one system of record. Either the EPOS holds stock and pushes it to the website, or the website holds stock and the till reads from it. What you must not have is two systems each keeping their own count and a member of staff reconciling them on a Sunday.
Before you choose a platform, check what it does with the till you already own. Not whether an integration exists, but how often it syncs, whether it handles a partial refund, and what happens to the count when a customer collects an online order in store. Ask a retailer already using that exact pairing. The integration that exists on a feature list and the integration that works are frequently different things.
There are legal edges here too. Prices shown to consumers must include VAT, under the Price Marking Order 2004, so your online display price and your shelf price should match unless you have a deliberate reason. If you trade as a limited company, the Companies Act 2006 requires your company name, registered number, place of registration and registered office address to appear on your website. Your cancellation and returns information has to be given before the order under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, which is why the platform's default checkout wording is worth reading rather than accepting. Cookie banners fall under PECR and the UK GDPR, and the ICO has published what it expects a compliant banner to do.
Plugins are the part that breaks in December
Every online retailer has a version of this story. The shipping calculator stops returning rates on the second weekend of December. The developer who wrote the plugin has not updated it for a year. The platform pushed a change and the plugin did not follow.
Two habits reduce the damage. Keep the number of apps that touch checkout as close to zero as you can manage, because a broken product-review widget is embarrassing and a broken checkout is lost revenue. And freeze changes from the last week of November. No theme edits, no new apps, no platform migrations, no clever ideas. Make the changes in September and let them fail in October when it costs you less.
Keep a written note of every app, what it does, what it costs and who supports it. Review it once a year. Most shops are paying for at least one thing they stopped using.
Where this shows up in the game
E-commerce is one of the five business types in Business Baron's free game, so you can run an online shop without paying anything, and high street shops are part of the full game. Every trade is simulated as that trade, and a cost that grows with every order is one the monthly figures will show you. The monthly fee is rarely the number that matters.