E-commerce app development cost
A mobile storefront on top of an existing commerce backend starts around $75,000. A custom platform with its own catalogue, checkout, inventory and order management runs $180,000 to $350,000, and a multi-vendor marketplace with payouts runs higher still.
Cross-platform mobile, 30 screens, 3 user roles, with the compliance posture this vertical carries.
- Timeline
- 5.5 – 7.6 months
- Engineering hours
- 2,850 – 3,600
- Data sensitivity
- 3 of 5
- Default security posture
- Hardened
Compliance and security add $31,985 here
That is 7% of this build, measured rather than asserted: we priced the identical app with no named regime and a baseline security posture, and this is the difference. None of it produces a user-visible feature, and none of it can be retrofitted cheaply.
Regimes that apply in this vertical
- PCI DSSAnyone handling card data. Hosted fields keep card data off your servers and reduce this to a self-assessment rather than a full audit -- which is a large cost difference.
- $4K – $22K audit
- CCPA / CPRABusinesses over the revenue or data thresholds with California consumers. In practice, most US consumer products at any scale.
- $0 – $8K audit
- GDPRAnyone offering services to people in the EU or UK, wherever your company is. A US-only product with US-only users is generally outside it.
- $0 – $12K audit
- ADA / Section 508 accessibilityPublic sector procurement contractually, and in practice any consumer or education product large enough to attract a complaint.
- $6K – $20K audit
Systems you will likely integrate with
- StripePayments, subscriptions, payouts and hosted checkout.
- moderate
- PayPal / BraintreeA second checkout path with its own dispute handling.
- moderate
- ShopifyCatalogue, orders and inventory through Admin and Storefront APIs.
- moderate
- SendGrid / PostmarkTransactional email, templates, deliverability and DMARC setup.
- simple
- TwilioSMS, voice and WhatsApp, plus US 10DLC registration.
- simple
- Custom / in-house APIA system you own, but did not build for this product.
- moderate
What makes e-commerce & retail different
Peak traffic is the whole architecture
Retail load is not the average, it is Black Friday. Caching, queueing and read replicas sized for the peak are what stop a promotion from taking the store down, and they are a real line item.
Inventory truth across channels
Selling the same unit twice is worse than not selling it. Reservations, multi-location stock and channel sync are more backend work than the storefront itself.
Returns and support are product
Returns, refunds, partial cancellations and a support console are where retail apps get expensive after launch. Scoping them at launch is far cheaper than retrofitting.
Who uses software in this vertical
Each additional role brings its own screens plus a row in a permission matrix that grows faster than the role count — because every new role is a question about every role that already exists.
End customer
The public-facing app
Staff / operator
Day-to-day operational screens
Manager / supervisor
Approvals, oversight, reporting
Customer support
Look up a customer and fix their problem
Administrator
Configuration, users, permissions
Four standards of finish
The same app in e-commerce & retail, built to four different levels of depth.
| Level | Cost range | Timeline | Hours | Team |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MVP Prove it works | $260K – $360K | 4.6 – 6.5 months | 2,225 | 7 |
| Standard Production ready | $370K – $525K | 5.5 – 7.6 months | 3,175 | 7 |
| Advanced Built to grow | $480K – $675K | 6.5 – 8.8 months | 4,050 | 7 |
| Enterprise Audited and integrated | $625K – $875K | 7.4 – 9.9 months | 5,300 | 7 |
per month, cloud and vendors, at 45,000 monthly users
19% – 26% of build cost
Drives peak concurrency, and therefore the architecture.