How much does a Shopify replatform cost in South Africa?

A R20,000 to R60,000 Shopify build is a fair price for a new brand with a small catalogue and nothing to connect it to. It covers a theme, branding, a payment gateway and a set number of products.

An established retailer has things a new brand does not. There are years of product, customer and order data on the old platform. Search rankings depend on URLs that will change.

Stock and orders have to flow to an ERP or accounting system, and somebody has to know when that flow breaks. A theme-only quote leaves all of this out. The work still has to be done, usually after launch, when it costs more and the store is already taking orders.

A cheap Shopify quote for an established retailer usually means the integrations, the migration and the SEO protection have been left for later.

Every replatform starts with discovery: workshops with the client's team, an audit of the current platform and data, mapping of each integration, and a written specification with a fixed build quote attached.

Discovery costs R40,000 to R80,000, depending on how many systems are involved. The client owns the specification and can take it to any agency, including one that is not us.

We price it this way because a quote of R350,000 or more should rest on a specification both sides have read. A quote written after a single sales call is a guess, and the client pays for the guess through change requests.

All ranges exclude VAT, are correct as at October 2026 and are a guide, not a quote. A fixed price comes only from discovery.

The R350,000 to R750,000 range is the sum of the core build and whichever integrations, data migration and B2B work a retailer needs. Discovery is quoted on top.

Core build, R180,000 to R350,000: UX, a customised or bespoke theme, store set-up, QA, migration SEO and 30 days of hypercare, the post-launch period of defect fixes and integration monitoring.

Each integration, R60,000 to R150,000: a two-way sync with an ERP, accounting, warehouse or POS system, with error handling and a reconciliation check.

Data migration, R30,000 to R90,000: products, customers and order history, a 301 redirect map, and a signed-off reconciliation report.

B2B or wholesale (optional), R60,000 to R150,000: customer-specific price lists, trade accounts, net terms and quick order.

Integrations move a quote more than anything else. An ERP integration needs more than a connector app. Products, prices, stock levels and orders each need mapping between two systems with different rules. Someone has to decide what happens when an order fails to sync at 2am on a sale weekend. A connector that works in testing and fails quietly in production can cost more in lost orders than the integration cost to build.

Migration is priced by volume. The low end of the range suits a catalogue under about 1,000 products with no order history. The high end covers tens of thousands of SKUs, customer accounts and full order history. Every migration ends with a reconciliation report the client signs off, so nobody has to assume the numbers match.

Migration SEO is in the core build. That covers the redirect map, carrying over metadata and structured data, and a ranking check 30 days after launch. Losing organic traffic is the risk replatforming retailers raise most often with us. The full approach is in our guide to replatforming to Shopify without losing your rankings. Ongoing SEO is a separate service.

Timeline: 3 to 4 weeks of discovery, 10 to 14 weeks of build and integration, then about 2 weeks of user acceptance testing and launch. That is 15 to 20 weeks in total.

Payment: 30% on signature, 30% at design sign-off, 30% at user acceptance testing and 10% at launch.

Change requests: we estimate anything outside the agreed specification, the client approves it in writing, and it joins the project before work starts.

Hypercare: the first 30 days after launch are included. That covers defect fixes, integration monitoring and the reconciliation issues that only show up with live orders.

Ownership: the Shopify store, domain, payment gateway accounts, theme licence, custom code and data are in the client's name from day one.

The ownership point matters most to retailers whose previous agency held the hosting account or the code.

Every account, licence and line of custom code on a Realm build is in the client's name from the first day of the project.

Support moves to a monthly retainer of R25,000 to R40,000 once hypercare ends. The retainer covers maintenance, integration monitoring and small changes. Part of the hours go to a monthly cycle of conversion rate optimisation (CRO), where we read the analytics, test a change and keep what works.

Retailers who want to go further can take a separate three-month CRO programme at R30,000 to R50,000 a month. It includes an analytics audit, a testing roadmap, two to four tests a month and a results report.

Apps are a separate budget line. Discovery names each app the store needs and what it costs each month. The client pays the app vendors directly and owns the subscriptions.

This example is a typical retailer in the range we work in: R5 million a year online (about R417,000 a month), one ERP integration, about 10,000 SKUs to migrate, on Shopify Grow with Peach Payments. This is an illustration, not a quote. Your figures will differ. All figures exclude VAT. Shopify plan prices are the annual-billing rates on Shopify's pricing page, converted at R16.50 to the US dollar.

One-off costs: discovery R60,000 (mid-range), core build R250,000 (mid-range), ERP integration R100,000 (mid-range) and data migration R60,000 (about 10,000 SKUs with customer accounts). One-off total: R470,000.

Running costs for the first 12 months live: Shopify Grow at US$49 (about R810) a month billed annually, R9,700. Shopify's third-party gateway fee at 1% of R5 million, R50,000. Peach Payments at 2.95% + R1.50 per order (the published Growth plan rate) on about 520 orders a month at an R800 average, R157,000. Apps at about R5,000 a month, R60,000. The retainer at R30,000 a month for the 11 months after hypercare, R330,000. Running costs total: about R607,000.

First-year total: about R1,077,000.

The Peach Payments line, about R157,000, applies on any platform that takes card payments, and a retailer at this volume may be able to negotiate a lower rate. Without it, the first-year cost of the replatform and its support is about R920,000, or 18% of a year's online sales. In the second year the one-off costs fall away and running costs settle at about 13% of online sales, most of it the retainer and gateway fees.

Shopify Advanced would cut the transaction fee from 1% to 0.6%, saving about R20,000 a year at this turnover. On annual billing the plan costs US$250 (about R4,100) a month more, about R49,500 a year, so Grow is the cheaper plan until online sales pass about R12 million a year.

Shopify Plus starts at about US$2,300 (about R38,000) a month. We recommend it when a retailer needs something only Plus provides: full checkout customisation, several storefronts, or B2B pricing beyond three catalogues. Since April 2026 the other plans include core B2B with up to three catalogues, which covers many wholesale set-ups without Plus.

Plus rarely pays for itself through lower transaction fees at South African mid-market turnover. Against Grow, the fee saving only covers the plan cost at around R55 million a year in online sales. Most retailers in the R3 million to R10 million range do not need Plus, and we will say so in discovery.

Below about R3 million a year in online sales, a replatform at these prices is hard to justify. The one-off cost alone would take a large share of a year's online revenue. A well-built theme store, plus one integration if the business cannot run without it, is usually the better investment until sales grow. We will tell you that on the first call.

A first call takes 45 minutes and costs nothing. We will ask what you sell, what platform you sell on today, which systems it has to connect to, and what is not working. From that we can tell you whether a replatform makes sense, which part of the R350,000 to R750,000 range you are likely to land in, and what discovery would cover.

If you are weighing up a move to Shopify and want a quote that reflects your business, book a call with us.