Qolca Team · 2026-10-06 · 9 min read
What it really costs to open an online store or booking site in Peru in 2026: the store itself, Yape, Plin and card payments, electronic receipts, ads, and the monthly work that keeps it selling. Honest ranges in soles, and the costs most quotes leave out.
How much does it cost to open an online store in Peru? Most owners ask the question as if the answer were the price of a website. It is not. A store that sells needs five things working together: a place to show and take orders (a store or a booking page), a way to get paid, an electronic receipt for every sale, a steady flow of people who find you, and someone answering messages and following up. The page is the cheapest of the five. This guide walks through each cost in soles, using 2026 market ranges, so you can budget the whole thing and not only the part that is easy to quote.
This is the piece everyone quotes first, and the price spread is huge. A freelancer can set up a basic store for around S/1,500, and some Lima studios publish one-off store packages roughly between S/950 and S/3,000. On the platform side, a Shopify plan is billed in dollars every month, and because Shopify Payments is not available in Peru, Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top of the external payment gateway you connect. Open-source options like WooCommerce have no license fee but need hosting and someone to maintain them.
If you sell services (a clinic, an academy, a gym), the equivalent of the store is a booking page with a calendar and a deposit. The cost logic is the same: cheap to build, and only valuable if people actually reach it and book.
In Peru, wallets like Yape and Plin already account for a large share of online payments, so your store has to accept them from day one. Card and wallet gateways charge a percentage per sale plus IGV. As a planning reference for 2026:
Rates change and depend on your volume and contract, so treat these as a starting point for your spreadsheet, not a quote. The practical rule: budget between 2% and 5% of sales for payments, depending on how your customers pay.
Every sale needs a boleta or factura electrónica issued through SUNAT. You can do it by hand in the SUNAT portal while volumes are tiny, but it does not scale and it is easy to forget. Electronic invoicing providers start at around S/70 a month for a few hundred documents, and tools that combine point of sale, inventory and invoicing usually run between S/100 and S/250 a month. Connecting the receipt to the order, so it is issued automatically when a payment lands, is what saves you the evening spent catching up.
A new store has no traffic. Someone has to pay for the first visitors, and in Peru that usually means Meta (Instagram, Facebook and click to WhatsApp) and Google. For a test, a budget of S/800 to S/1,200 over three weeks is usually enough to learn what one inquiry costs you. Once you know the number, a running budget for a small business typically sits between S/1,500 and a few thousand soles a month. That money should go from your card directly to Meta and Google, under your own ad accounts, so you always see exactly what was spent.
This is where most launches stall. Somebody has to publish content every week, adjust the ads, answer WhatsApp at night and on Sundays, follow up on people who asked for a price and went quiet, upload new products, and tell you at the end of the month how many orders came in. If that work has no owner, the store sits there. You can split it among a community manager, an ads freelancer and a developer on call, or hire one team that runs the whole selling side and reports one number.
We publish our prices because the honest comparison is the whole selling side, not the page. It starts with a Validation of S/2,200 over three weeks: a temporary page and real ads (paid by you) to measure what one inquiry costs before building anything. The amount is credited toward the setup. The setup takes about eight weeks and costs between S/4,500 and S/8,500: brand, store or booking, WhatsApp with an AI assistant, ads, Google Maps, electronic receipts and a dashboard. Then we operate it every month for S/3,900, S/5,900 or S/7,900 plus IGV, with a six month minimum, and send you the agreed number on the 5th of each month: orders, appointments or quotes. The domain, the accounts and the customers are in your name from day one.
Nobody serious can promise you sales, and we do not. What we commit to is the work, the dates and the report. If you are about to open a store and want to know whether it makes sense to validate first, book a free 30 minute call at https://calendly.com/qolca-info/consultoria-inicial-gratuita, or message us on WhatsApp at https://wa.me/51991376769.