Short answer: a basic headless WooCommerce build starts at around USD 25,000 in labour, and shops with loyalty, referrals, gamification or B2B features regularly pass USD 100,000. The framework is not what sets the price. Checkout, customer accounts, search, integrations and the size of the migration are, and each of them can be decided before anyone writes an estimate.
Most published answers to this question say “it depends” and stop. This article explains what it depends on, so you can read a quote, compare two quotes, and know which decisions will move your number.
What a basic build includes
When we say basic, we mean a complete shop that a customer can use end to end, not a prototype:
- Home, category and product pages, designed for your brand and rendered by the storefront
- Cart and checkout with one payment provider and your existing shipping rules
- Customer account with orders, addresses and password reset
- Content pages and the blog editable in WordPress, with titles, descriptions and schema from your SEO plugin
- Transactional emails pointing at the storefront, not at WordPress
- Redirects for every existing URL, and a launch that swaps the domain without downtime
- Caching that updates a page within seconds of an edit in WordPress
Everything above comes with the headless approach itself. None of it is optional if the shop is going to take real orders.
What moves the price up
| Decision | Why it adds cost |
|---|---|
| Custom one-page checkout | The payment provider’s elements are embedded in the storefront, and WooCommerce only receives a pending order that a webhook marks as paid. More states to design and test. |
| Subscriptions | Renewals, failed payments, pausing and plan changes each need a screen and an API contract. |
| B2B accounts and pricing | Company accounts, price lists, tax exemptions, quotes and invoice payment are a second shop inside the first. |
| Loyalty, referrals, gamification | Points, rewards and referral tracking live in WordPress as their own modules, with their own screens in the storefront. |
| Large catalogue search | Beyond a few hundred products, filtering needs a search index that is kept in sync with WooCommerce. |
| Several markets | Currencies, languages and tax regions multiply templates, content and testing. |
| Integrations | ERP, warehouse, courier, invoicing and marketplace feeds each add a sync to build and monitor. |
| Migration size | Thousands of products, customers and orders, or years of blog posts, take mapping, cleaning and redirect work. |
| Design depth | A design system with 3D product views, motion and custom interactions costs more than a clean template-based layout. |
What does not move it much
Some things buyers worry about barely register in the estimate. The number of products, by itself, costs little if they share one template. The number of blog posts costs little when they come from WordPress through the same query. Adding one more page type that reuses existing components is days, not weeks. And the choice between GraphQL and WooCommerce’s Store API changes how the work is done more than how much of it there is.
Why two quotes for the same shop can differ by five times
Because they describe different projects. The low quote often means a starter template, the WooCommerce checkout page kept as it is, no email work, and no migration plan. The high quote often includes things you did not ask for. The only way to compare is to put both against the same list of decisions.
We publish that list: twelve decisions to make before anyone estimates the build. Send it to every agency you talk to and ask each one to answer it in writing. The quotes will start to agree, and the ones that cannot answer it tell you something too.
What it costs to run afterwards
A headless shop is two applications, WordPress and the storefront, and both need updates, monitoring and someone who knows the code. Plan a maintenance budget from the start and name who owns the storefront after launch. The most common rescue we are asked to do is a headless shop that launched well and was then left without anyone responsible for the front end.
Hosting is a smaller line than most people expect, but it depends on traffic and on where your team already hosts. We advise on it per project rather than quoting a generic figure.
When the price is worth it
Headless costs more than a well-built WooCommerce theme, and for many shops the theme is the right answer. It is worth paying for when the theme has become the ceiling: design changes that cannot ship, mobile speed that caching no longer fixes, a checkout you cannot shape, or a catalogue that has to feed more than one channel. Our guide to headless WooCommerce covers how to tell which side of that line you are on.
How to get a number you can rely on
- Answer the twelve decisions, even roughly.
- List the plugins you use and mark which ones only produce something on the page.
- Export your URL list from the sitemap and Search Console, so migration size is known.
- Book a call. We go through the answers with you and send a written offer with scope, price and what is out of scope.
You can see what the finished product looks like on Pewes Energy, our live headless WooCommerce reference, and read how we run these projects on the headless WooCommerce service page. When you are ready, get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
A basic headless WooCommerce build starts at around USD 25,000 in labour. Shops with loyalty programmes, referrals, gamification or B2B accounts can exceed USD 100,000. Scope decisions such as checkout, accounts, search and integrations set the final figure.
Yes. The storefront is a separate application built from scratch, and every part a theme gives you for free, from the product page to the password reset screen, is designed and built. In exchange there is no theme limiting design or speed.
Because the same word covers very different projects. A fair price comes from the answers to a list of scope decisions, such as the checkout, accounts and integrations, and it should arrive as a written offer.
Yes, and it is often the better plan. A basic build with a clean API makes later features, such as subscriptions or a loyalty programme, additions rather than rebuilds.
Maintenance for two applications, WordPress and the storefront, plus hosting for both. Plan a maintenance agreement before launch and name who owns the storefront code.
