How Much Does a B2B Export Website Cost in 2026? A Manufacturing Veteran Runs the Numbers

A friend in the hardware business asked me last year: "How much does an English website cost?" I told him: don't ask me yet — go look at quotes first. So he did some research and came back even more confused: one company quoted ¥680, another quoted ¥68,000, and a third quoted ¥200,000. Same thing, 300x price difference. Something's off.

I spent over a decade managing procurement in manufacturing. It's an occupational disease: I see everything as a cost breakdown waiting to happen. This post takes website building apart, line by line. After reading it, you'll know exactly where your money should go — and how to avoid getting overcharged.

1. First, understand: there are only three routes

A 300x price gap isn't a technology gap. It's a gap in whose costs you're paying for. Let's break each one down.

2. SaaS builders: cheap because you're renting, not buying

That ¥680/year option is essentially a rental: your site lives inside someone else's system, and you own nothing. Three traps to know upfront:

• The renewal trap: ¥680 the first year, ¥2,000+ to renew. Stop paying and your site goes offline — years of content, backlinks and search rankings gone overnight.
• The migration trap: Want to switch providers? Sorry, your data can't be exported. You'd be starting from zero.
• The SEO ceiling: Thousands of sites share the same system and underlying architecture. To Google, you all look identical — rankings are hard to build.

Who is SaaS for? People who want to test "do I even need an independent website?" It's fine as a probe. Not fine as a long-term asset.

3. Custom development: half of that ¥68,000 is meeting costs

A custom site quoted at ¥68,000 is roughly built like this:

• A project manager, a designer, a front-end developer and a back-end developer — four people sitting through 6 rounds of meetings with you;
• Visual design from scratch, with 3+ rounds of revisions;
• Office rent, sales commissions, management layers — all inside your quote.

Is the result good? Probably. But for an export factory, a big chunk of the money went to "the deluxe team that attends meetings with you." Same logic as spending ¥100,000 on a custom exhibition booth at a trade show when a ¥30,000 standard booth delivers about the same foot traffic.

4. Template sites: the value champion, with one condition

Why can a finished-template site cost just a few thousand yuan? Because the design cost is split across 10 clients. And don't worry about template quality — the 7 templates on our homepage are finished, live sites. Open them on your phone, tablet or desktop and see for yourself. That's a hundred times more reliable than looking at mockup images.

But there's one condition — and it's the reason 90% of template sites fail: a template is only the skeleton; content is the soul. When a buyer lands on your site, they decide within 3 seconds whether to stay. What do they look at? Capacity data. Certification numbers. Real factory photos. Lead times and MOQ. If the person building the site doesn't understand factories, these things will never be filled in correctly.

> My approach: templates keep costs down, but every page of copy is written around how an overseas buyer audits a factory — what they check first, what they check next, where the data goes, where the certifications go. AI drives the cost of 46 product images down to nearly zero; a human checks every sentence. That's how the full-package plan stays under ¥10,000 with source code delivered at signing.

5. The total bill: what a site should actually cost

Targeting "a B2B export site that receives inquiries normally, with the source code in your hands":

• Domain: ¥60–100/year, registered under your own name;
• Hosting: static site + CDN, ¥0–500/year;
• The build itself: template route, ¥3,000–¥10,000 one-time, source code delivered;
• Content maintenance: ¥0 if you can edit it yourself; pay-per-change otherwise.

Conclusion: ¥4,000–11,000 total in year one is the reasonable range. Anything above that isn't buying technology — it's buying a service entourage. If someone quotes far above this, ask them to itemize the cost line by line. Whatever they can't itemize is the markup.

6. Finally, some things that might offend people

In this industry, information asymmetry is the profit. You don't understand it, and they dare to quote ¥68,000. You understand a little, and the quote instantly drops to ¥9,800. So whoever you end up hiring, remember three things:

1. Ask for live case studies you can open on three devices — not mockup images;
2. Get clear on who owns the source code and what happens if you stop renewing — put it in the contract;
3. Accept delivery item by item against a written checklist — don't sign until every line checks out.

I didn't invent these three rules. I learned them from a decade of factory audits in manufacturing — buyers audit us; I audit website companies. Same principle.

Not sure about your options? Send me your website link and I'll record a free 3–5 minute diagnosis video — you'll see exactly what's wrong. Whether you hire me or not, the diagnosis is yours to keep.

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