Web Development
2026-10-05 · 10 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
The platform you choose, Shopify, WooCommerce, or a fully custom build, sets a baseline cost structure before anything else is decided. From there, the number of products, the complexity of custom features like inventory management or multi-vendor support, and how much design customization you want all add to the total.
Payment gateway integrations also factor in directly, each one, eSewa, Khalti, card processing, needs its own setup and testing, and the more of them you support, the more development time that takes.
The amount of content you already have ready, product descriptions, photos, pricing, also affects cost in a way that is easy to underestimate, a developer billing by the hour spends real time waiting on or chasing missing content, which can quietly extend a project's timeline and cost.
“The sticker price of an e-commerce site is rarely the real cost, the payment gateway fees, hosting that survives a Dashain sale, and ongoing maintenance are what actually determine whether the store is sustainable.”
A basic store, built on a template with Shopify or WooCommerce, a standard payment gateway, and under a hundred products, typically runs NPR 1,00,000 to 2,50,000. A mid-range store with custom design, inventory management, multiple local payment gateways, and several hundred products usually lands between NPR 2,50,000 and 5,00,000.
An advanced store, multi-vendor marketplace functionality, a custom backend, ERP integration, or infrastructure built to handle high traffic, can run NPR 5,00,000 or more depending on exactly what is being built.
These figures assume reasonably standard functionality, a store that needs custom shipping rules by region, complex discount logic, or a loyalty program on top of the basics should expect to sit toward the higher end of its tier, or move into the next one.
eSewa, Khalti, and card gateways each require their own merchant account setup and approval process, and each charges its own transaction fees, commonly in the rough range of two to three and a half percent per transaction, though exact rates depend on your agreement with each provider.
Cash on delivery remains common in Nepal and needs its own operational planning, someone has to manage returns, failed deliveries, and reconciliation, which is a logistics cost, not just a technical one.
It is worth testing the full payment flow yourself, as a customer would, before launch, failed or confusing payment steps are one of the most common reasons an otherwise well-built store underperforms, and they are often only caught by actually attempting a real transaction.
Hosting that can handle traffic spikes matters more than it sounds, a store that crashes during a Dashain or Tihar sale loses exactly the revenue it was built to capture. SSL, domain renewal, and ongoing maintenance are small individually but add up annually and are frequently left out of initial budgets entirely.
Product photography and a plan for order fulfillment and delivery logistics are also real costs that have nothing to do with the website itself but determine whether the store actually functions day to day.
Return and refund policies also need a real operational plan, not just a page of text, someone has to physically process returned items, verify their condition, and process refunds through whichever payment method was used, and this workflow should be settled before the store goes live, not improvised afterward.
Platform choice affects both the upfront build cost and what you pay every month afterward, Shopify carries a recurring subscription, WooCommerce typically does not but needs more hands-on maintenance. The detailed trade-offs, especially around payment gateway support in Nepal, are worth understanding fully before committing.
Neither platform is inherently better for every business, the right choice depends on how much ongoing technical maintenance you want to handle yourself versus pay someone else to manage, and how important native local payment gateway support is to your specific launch timeline.
Ask for a breakdown separating design, development, integration, and testing, rather than one lump figure. Ask explicitly what post-launch support window is included and what happens after it ends.
Most importantly, confirm who owns the store afterward, the platform account, the domain, and the codebase should belong to you, not be locked inside the agency's own infrastructure in a way that makes leaving difficult later.
Finally, ask how the quote changes if the project scope shifts partway through, added features, more products than originally planned, or extra integrations are common, and knowing the hourly or per-feature rate for additions upfront avoids disputes later.
Both can work well. WooCommerce tends to integrate more smoothly with local payment gateways like eSewa and Khalti, while Shopify offers lower maintenance overhead at the cost of a recurring subscription and some workarounds needed for local payments.
Beyond setup and approval, expect ongoing transaction fees roughly in the two to three and a half percent range per transaction, varying by provider and your specific merchant agreement.
Yes, with a pre-order or dropshipping-style model, but this needs to be built into the store's logic and communicated clearly to customers, since Nepal's delivery and returns expectations make unclear stock status a common source of complaints.