Stores, Portals
and Membership Areas.
When a brochure site is not enough. You need to take payment, gate something, list something, or give clients a login.
$1,500 to $5,000+ on top of your build, quoted at kickoff and never discovered halfway through. Built in WordPress, on hosting you can move, with no platform that can reprice you.
Next available build start date is Sept. 28, 2026
Most people asking for a store need something smaller
Somebody calls and says “I need e-commerce.” Nine times out of ten they want to sell eight t-shirts and a gift card.
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“I need e-commerce.”
Usually: sell eight t-shirts and a gift card. Which is a checkout, not a store, and about a third of the price.
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“I need a client portal.”
Usually: let customers download two PDFs without emailing for them. Which is a gated page, not accounts and permissions.
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“I want recurring revenue from members.”
Sometimes exactly that, and sometimes an email list you have not built yet. We will tell you which on the call, before anyone quotes anything.
The gap is thousands of dollars and months of your attention.
A full store with variants, inventory, shipping zones, tax rules, abandoned cart and returns is a different animal from a checkout with eight products in it. So is a real portal with accounts and permissions, versus a password-protected page.
The most valuable thing on this page is the section that tells you to buy the cheaper one. It is the next one.
Which one do you actually need?
Find what you said on the phone. The answer is usually one step down from what you asked for.
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“I want to sell some stuff on my site.” Simple checkout, $1,500
Up to 15 products, no variants. One price, one button, money in your account. Merch, gift cards, deposits, a book, a course, tickets.
Buy this ifYour products do not come in sizes and colors, you are not tracking inventory, and shipping is a flat rate or nothing. That covers most service businesses and almost every band.
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“I need a real online store.” Full store, from $5,000
Variants, inventory that decrements, shipping zones and live rates, tax by jurisdiction, abandoned cart, discount rules, returns.
Under $2,000 a month in sales, start with the simple checkout and upgrade when the volume justifies it. You can, and we will not charge you twice for the build.
Buy this ifYou carry actual stock, sizes and colors, and shipping cost varies by weight or destination.
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“Clients need to log in and get their files.” Simple gated area, $1,500
Login, member-only pages, downloads. No payments, no accounts to administer beyond adding a user.
Honestly: if it is fewer than ten clients and a handful of documents, a shared Drive folder does this for free and we will tell you so.
Buy this ifThe goal is that these people see this, and everyone else does not.
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“I need a client portal.” Client portal, from $3,500
Real accounts, per-client documents, forms, invoices and payments. Each client sees only their own.
Buy this ifYou have dozens of clients, each with their own records, and the alternative is you emailing files all day. Below that volume, the portal costs more than the problem.
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“I want a directory of members or vendors.” Directory, from $3,500
Searchable, filterable listings with their own pages, submissions and optional paid placement.
If it is fifteen partner logos, that is a page, not a directory, and it costs $600 as a custom section.
Buy this ifThe directory is the product, or a genuine draw in its own right.
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“I want recurring revenue from members.” Membership site, from $5,000
Tiers, recurring billing, drip content, cancellation and dunning.
If you do not have the audience yet, build the email list first. A membership site with eleven members is a very expensive newsletter, and we have watched people learn that the hard way.
Buy this ifYou already have an audience that has told you it will pay.
Not sure which line you are on?
Say what you want to happen in plain words on the call. Customers pick a size and pay. Clients see their own invoices. We will tell you which one that is, including when the answer is the cheap one.
WooCommerce, Shopify or SureCart
Everyone answering this question sells one of them. Here is the version where we tell you when to buy the one we do not build.
| Best at | The catch | |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Real retail. Inventory, shipping, POS, apps for everything, and it does not break. If selling products is your business, this is the honest answer. | $39–$399 a month forever, plus app subscriptions that add up fast, plus transaction fees if you do not use Shopify Payments. Your store lives on their platform. You can export products, not the store. |
| WooCommerce | A store attached to a content site. You own it outright, it moves with your hosting, and it does whatever WordPress does, which is most things. | More moving parts. Extensions cost money and need maintaining. It rewards being looked after, which is what the monthly is for. |
| SureCart | Selling a handful of things without running a store. Fast, light, does not slow the site down, handles subscriptions and checkout properly. | Not built for inventory-heavy retail. If you need warehouse behavior, it is the wrong tool. |
What we would actually tell you
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Products are the business
Buy Shopify. You carry stock, you ship daily, you might add retail. Pay the monthly, use their ecosystem, and hire us for the site around it if you want one. We are not going to build you a worse Shopify to keep the invoice.
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A few things alongside a service business
SureCart on your own site, $1,500. Merch, deposits, a course, gift cards. No platform fee, and it stays yours.
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A store that is genuinely part of the site
WooCommerce, and budget for the care. Content, SEO, memberships and products all in one place you own.
The bias we do have, stated plainly.
We build on WordPress because you own it and can move it, and we build against anything that rents you your own website. Shopify is a genuine exception where the tradeoff is worth it, and we will say so rather than pretend otherwise.
What a store actually costs to run
The build is the part everyone quotes. These are the parts nobody mentions until you are three months in, and they matter more than the build fee for deciding whether to do this at all.
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Payment processing, about 2.9% + 30 cents
Stripe, PayPal and Square all land near it. On $10,000 a month that is about $320 gone before anything else. Not avoidable, just worth being in the maths when you price your products.
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Sales tax, now a real obligation
Since Wayfair, states can require you to collect based on sales volume into that state, not on where you sit. Thresholds vary and change. TaxJar or Avalara automate it for $20 to $100 a month. Ask your accountant before you launch, not after.
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Shipping is a job, not a setting
Boxes, labels, pickup, packing time, and the customer who wants to know where it is. Budget real hours a week or a fulfillment partner. This is the single most common reason a small store gets abandoned. Not sales. Logistics.
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Returns, chargebacks and support
Every store gets them. A chargeback costs you the sale plus a $15 to $25 fee, and you have to respond within a deadline. Decide your return policy before launch and publish it.
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Product photography
Usually the biggest hidden line. Consistent, well-lit photos of every product and variant is a real day of work or a real invoice, and it is the thing that most decides whether the store converts. Nothing we build compensates for bad product photos.
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Ongoing care, plus $50 to $150 a month
A store has more to break than a brochure site: gateway updates, extension updates, PCI posture, checkout testing after every change. That is why a store’s monthly is higher than a website’s.
None of that is on the quote, and all of it is on you. Which is why we would rather talk you into the smaller build and let you find out cheaply whether selling online is a business you want.
How we build them
Six things every store and portal ships with, whichever of the six you buy.
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WordPress, on hosting you can move
No proprietary platform, no per-seat license, nothing that can reprice you or shut down.
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Real access control
Roles and permissions done properly, so a client sees their records and nobody else’s. This is the part cheap portals get wrong, and the part that matters legally.
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Checkout tested like a form
Every payment path run end to end before launch, on a phone, on cell data, with a real card.
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Wired into the lead system
A purchase is a conversion with a source attached, same as a form or a call, so it lands in the same monthly report.
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Hardened
A store holds customer data and takes money, so backups, monitoring and update discipline stop being nice-to-haves.
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Yours
Products, customers, orders, the lot. Exportable whenever you ask.
What it costs
These sit on top of a build. Presence, Foundation or Growth, and change the timeline as well as the price. Both numbers are quoted at kickoff.
Simple checkout
Up to 15 products, no variants.
$1,500plus $50 a month
Full store
Variants, inventory, shipping zones, tax.
from $5,000plus $150 a month
Simple gated area
Login, member pages, no payments.
$1,500plus $50 a month
Client portal
Accounts, documents, forms, payments.
from $3,500plus $150 a month
Directory
Searchable listings with their own pages.
from $3,500plus $100 a month
Membership site
Tiers, recurring billing, drip.
from $5,000plus $150 a month
Custom section
Designed, one page.
$600no added care
Custom section + content type
Repeatable, own layout.
$1,500no added care
What we will not do
Six things other shops will sell you. Every one of them costs you more than it saves.
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Build you a worse version of Shopify to keep the invoice
If products are the business, we will tell you to buy Shopify.
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Sell you a portal for eleven clients
Or a membership site for an audience that does not exist yet. The cheaper answer is usually the right one and we would rather say it now.
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Quote a store without the running costs
Processing, tax software, shipping, care. A build fee on its own is not the decision you are making.
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Put you on a rented platform
WordPress on hosting you can move. Shopify is the one exception, chosen deliberately, with the tradeoff said out loud.
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Give you tax advice
We build the plumbing and integrate the software. Your accountant tells you what you owe and where.
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Launch a checkout we have not put a real card through
Every path, on a phone, on cell data, before it goes live.
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None of those? Then a store is the right build.
Products people already want, and somewhere for the money to land.
Straight answers
Can I add a store later instead of now?
Yes, and often you should. Launch the site, prove people want the thing, then add checkout. Adding it later costs the same as adding it now. There is no penalty for waiting, and there is a real cost to building a store nobody uses.
Why is the simple checkout only $1,500 when your e-commerce build was $5,000?
Because a simple checkout genuinely is not a $5,000 job, and we corrected that. Fifteen products with no variants is a different piece of work from inventory, shipping zones and tax jurisdictions. Charging the same for both was us pricing the category rather than the work.
Can you migrate my existing Shopify or Etsy store?
Products, images, descriptions and customers, yes. Order history and reviews are usually partial, platforms make export awkward on purpose. We will tell you exactly what will and will not come across before you commit, not after.
Do I need a portal or would a shared folder do?
A shared folder does it for free, and for under about ten clients that is our honest recommendation. A portal earns its money when you have dozens of clients with their own records, or when files, forms and payments need to live in the same place under your brand.
Who handles payment failures and chargebacks?
You do. They arrive in your Stripe or PayPal account and there are response deadlines. We set the notifications up so you know immediately, and we will walk you through the first one. But it is your money and your relationship with the processor, which is how it should be.
Is my store PCI compliant?
Card details never touch your server. Stripe and PayPal handle them in a hosted field, which is what keeps your obligations small. You still have a self-assessment questionnaire to complete; we will point you at the right one for your setup.
What if the store needs to be down for maintenance?
It should not be. Updates get tested on staging first and checkout gets re-verified after anything significant. That discipline is a chunk of what the added monthly pays for, a broken checkout nobody noticed for four days is the expensive failure here.
Can I run a directory and take listing payments?
Yes. Paid placement, featured listings, recurring listing fees, submissions with approval. It is a directory plus a membership layer, and it gets quoted as one build rather than two.
Tell us what should happen, not what to build
Describe it in plain words, “a customer picks a size and pays,” “clients see their own invoices,” “members get a new video every week”, and we will tell you which of these it is and what it costs.
Including when the answer is the $1,500 one, or a shared folder, or Shopify.
+1-248-205-6977 · Mon–Sun, 9am–9pm ET · Waterford, Michigan. We build out of state too
- Published pricing
- Month to month, no minimum term
- You own everything
