If you run a wholesale or distribution business, pricing up a new website is frustrating for one reason: nobody will give you a straight number. Quotes swing from a few hundred pounds to the price of a delivery van, and the proposals rarely explain why.
This guide fixes that. We work almost exclusively with merchants and distributors, so we'll break down what actually moves the price, what's realistic in 2026, and where the money genuinely needs to go versus where it's being wasted.
The three things that decide your price
Forget page counts and "number of revisions." For a merchant, the cost is driven by three questions.
1. Do customers need to order online, or just find you? This is the biggest single lever. A site that showcases your branches, ranges and trade credentials is one project. A site where a customer logs in, sees their pricing, checks live stock and places an order against their account is a fundamentally different and far larger build. The first is design and content. The second is a piece of trading software.
2. Where does your catalogue currently live? Most merchants don't have one tidy product database. It's spread across systems: an industry catalogue here, a supplier feed there, a separate interactive PDF nobody can search. We see electrical wholesalers, for example, juggling LuckinsLive, EELine and a standalone catalogue with no ordering layer connecting any of them. Pulling that into one searchable, orderable place is valuable work, and it's where a lot of the budget goes. The more fragmented your data, the more this costs.
3. How customised are your trade relationships? Account-specific pricing, credit terms, multi-branch collection, approved-buyer lists, bespoke quoting: these are the things that make wholesale wholesale. Every rule you need the website to respect is a rule that has to be built and tested. This is exactly why off-the-shelf retail platforms struggle with trade.
Why our prices come in well below the usual ranges
Here's the part most agencies won't tell you: a big chunk of those numbers is overhead and inefficiency, not the actual work. Plush offices, layers of account managers, and rebuilding the same foundations from scratch on every single project. You end up paying for all of it.
We do it differently, and it's why merchants consistently pay us considerably less for the same result:
We build on one reusable foundation. Every merchant site and CRM we build starts from a proven core we've already engineered, rather than a blank page. We're not reinventing logins, ordering logic or catalogue handling each time, so you're not paying for it each time.
AI runs through our whole delivery process. It accelerates the heavy lifting (data work, build, testing), which compresses timelines. Faster delivery means lower cost, and we pass that on rather than padding the quote.
We're lean, with low overheads. We're a small, focused team without the bloated cost base of a traditional agency. There's no expensive middle layer for you to subsidise, just the people actually doing the work.
What the wider market charges, for reference
These are honest market bands for what most agencies quote, so you can see the gap.
Custom marketing or brochure site. A properly designed, mobile-first site with your branches, ranges, trade-account sign-up, lead capture and solid SEO foundations. No live ordering. For many merchants whose customers still phone or email orders, this is the right first step. Typical agency price: £6,000 to £15,000.
Site with online ordering or a trade portal. Customer logins, account-specific pricing, live stock, secure payments and, usually, integration with the systems your catalogue and accounts already live in. Typical agency price: £15,000 to £40,000 or more.
Custom CRM or order-management system. When the goal is to run the business online (quotes, accounts, reordering, branch operations), not just sell through a website. This is a software project, priced as one. Typical agency price: £20,000 to £60,000 or more.
Ongoing costs. Hosting, security, updates and support, commonly £100 to £500 per month elsewhere, scaling with whether you run ordering and integrations. Be wary of anyone quoting a build with no ongoing plan; a merchant site that takes orders can't be left untouched.
Why "just use Shopify" usually doesn't work for merchants
It's the most common advice, and for a lot of distributors it's wrong. Shopify and WooCommerce are built for retail: one price, one customer type, ship-it-and-forget-it. Wholesale breaks most of those assumptions.
Per-customer pricing, credit accounts, minimum order quantities, pack and break-pack units, multi-branch stock, approval workflows, large and fragmented catalogues: every one of these is a fight on a retail platform, solved with plugins that pile up cost and fragility. A build designed around trade rules from the start is usually both cheaper to run and far less painful than bending a retail tool into a shape it resists.
Where merchants waste money, and where they should spend it
Wasted: elaborate animations and visual gimmicks, enormous page counts that no trade customer reads, and "we'll figure out the catalogue later", which always costs more later.
Worth it: clean, searchable product data; a frictionless trade-account sign-up; fast mobile performance (your customers are on a van or a site, not a desk); and proper analytics so you can see what's actually generating enquiries. Spend on the things that turn a visitor into a trade account. Skip the things that just look impressive in a pitch.
So what should you budget?
The honest answer: less than the figures above suggest, if you choose an agency built for efficiency rather than overhead. Either way, the number should come after a conversation about how your business actually trades, not from a template price list. If a quote arrives without anyone asking how your accounts and catalogue work, it's a guess.
