01Why a store is a different build, not a bigger website
A five-page business site and an online store solve different problems, and the difference is not just page count. A brochure site has to say what you do clearly enough that someone calls or messages you. A store has to safely take money, calculate the right tax, tell a customer their order actually went through, and give you a way to fulfil it without checking six different places. Skipping any one of those in the name of speed does not save time, it just moves the missing piece to the week after launch, when a customer has already paid and something breaks.
- A store handles real payment, so a payment provider integration has to be correct, not just present.
- Tax and invoicing rules apply the moment money changes hands, unlike a lead-gen site.
- Order confirmation and fulfilment need to work together, or orders get lost between the sale and the shelf.
- An admin view the business actually uses during service is part of the build, not an afterthought.
02What actually determines a store's timeline
The single biggest variable is not the number of products, it is how many of the surrounding systems already exist versus need to be built from nothing. A business that already has a Stripe account, a defined tax rate, and product photos ready is buying integration work, which moves faster. A business starting from zero on all three is buying a small system, and pretending that fits a 48-hour box just because the website side of it could is where timelines quietly collapse. Naming the real dependencies up front is what keeps the schedule honest instead of optimistic.
- Existing payment account and tax setup speeds things up significantly.
- Product photography and copy already prepared removes the single slowest step.
- Pickup, delivery or shipping logistics need to be decided before checkout can be built, not after.
- A realistic quote names a page count for a store separately from a website, because they are different jobs.
03What we actually promise for a store
PROOF48's published band for a store is 2,500 to 4,500 EUR, and the honest answer on timing is that it gets its own schedule agreed before we start, not a promise borrowed from the website page. That range reflects real variation: a simple catalogue with ten products and one payment method sits at the low end, and a store with pickup slots, an admin dashboard and a confirmation email pipeline sits toward the top. What does not change is the mechanic underneath both: you still see the finished store before you pay for it, the same as a website.
- Published band: 2,500 to 4,500 EUR for a store, a real number, not a starting-from teaser.
- The timeline is agreed and named before work starts, separate from the 48-hour website claim.
- Pay after delivery still applies. You see the finished store before you owe anything.
- A landing page can still ship in 48 hours even if the store behind it cannot.
What a real store-scale build actually took
Rotiseria Baba Novac needed off the delivery aggregators entirely: a full menu, cart, Stripe checkout, pickup slots and a Resend-powered confirmation email on every order, plus an admin view the kitchen actually uses during service. That shipped inside a week, not 48 hours, because a working ordering system with real payment is simply a bigger job than a website, and we quoted it as one from the start.
See the build: Rotiseria Baba NovacQuestions, answered
Can any part of a store ship in 48 hours?
A landing page announcing the store's launch, or a waitlist page, can. The working checkout and catalog cannot, and saying otherwise would just move a problem to launch day.
What is the fastest a real store has shipped for PROOF48?
Rotiseria's full ordering system, described above, shipped inside a week. That is the fastest documented example we will point to, and it is still not 48 hours.
Where PROOF48 fits
A store is priced and scheduled as its own product, 2,500 to 4,500 EUR on a timeline agreed before work starts, and the 48-hour claim stays honest by staying attached only to what it was built for: a business website of up to about five pages.
Cosmin Tiu · Founder, PROOF48
Cosmin has worked in online marketing and software development since 2018, and has built with AI every day since January 2023. He still writes code from scratch daily, in Python, React, Rust and C#. PROOF48 ships business websites in 48 hours and invoices afterwards, so every opinion on this blog was paid for in real builds, not in theory.