A website for your op shop
An op shop website serves two people: the shopper hunting a bargain, and the donor deciding whose door gets the good stuff. This page is our honest offer to the people who run one, usually volunteers, usually flat out. A proper website, built for you, for a one-off price, owned by the shop outright, with nothing monthly behind it, ever.
Last updated July 2026
The front doorTwo audiences, and the donor is the one nobody builds for
Everyone thinks about the shoppers. They find you by walking past, and for them the shop window does most of the work. The donors are different. A donor sits at home with a garage full of things and a decision to make, and they start by searching: where can I donate a couch, who takes books, is the op shop open on Sunday. Whichever shop the search answers is the shop the good stuff goes to.
That search is the underserved one. Most op shops have a Facebook page, which is genuinely good for the people who already follow you, and nothing else. So the donor search returns a directory listing with the wrong hours, or a page behind a login wall, or nothing. A website holds your answers still, where Google and the new AI search tools can read them and a person deciding on a Saturday morning can read them in one minute.
It also reads properly to the people who fund and support you. A parish, a trust board, a grants committee looking you up finds a front door, not a feed.
And the honest other side: if your racks are emptying as fast as you fill them, your donations are good quality and your page is humming, you may not need us at all. We'd rather say that here than waste your evening.
What an op shop website actually needs
Not much, done well. Your hours, one glance from the top of the page, including the honest version: closed Mondays, open the first Saturday of the month, shut for the school holidays. Hours are the single most useful fact you publish, and they belong somewhere a search engine can read them rather than only on the sign in the window. Then where you are, where to park, and whether there are steps.
Then the page that earns its keep: what you take and what you can't, in your own words, with drop-off times and the back-door rules. Broken, damp and unsellable goods cost charity shops real money to get rid of, money that was meant for the work. A page your volunteers can point to, and that a thoughtful donor can find before they load the car, is worth more than any amount of design.
Then the one most op shops leave out. An op shop is a fundraiser wearing a shop's clothes, so the site should say plainly what the shopping funds: the hospice, the foodbank, the animal welfare work, the parish outreach. People shop differently when they know. And a link to your Facebook page, working exactly as it does now, plus a way to reach a real person.
What it doesn't need: an online store, a stock system, a login, a monthly platform plan, or anything the next set of volunteers will be afraid to touch. We build small, fast, plain sites on purpose. They cost nothing to keep online, which is why hosting is free.
The changeover problem, solved by ownership
Every volunteer-run shop knows the story: the website was set up years ago by a member's nephew, the login went with him, the billing sat on a card that's long since cancelled, and now nobody can change the Christmas hours. That isn't a technology failure. It's an ownership failure, and it's why so many op shops are stuck with a site nobody can touch.
Ours is built the other way. The domain is registered in the shop's or the charity's name, never ours. Hosting is free, so there's no subscription to lapse when the treasurer stands down. The whole site can be exported free at any time, so you're never locked to us either. Handover to the next lot is one line in the folder: “the website, changes by email to the studio, $20 a batch.”
Done on day one, and it grows for as long as you want it to
The site is finished when it goes live. Not a starting point, not a shell waiting for you to fill it: complete, true, and ready for the donor who searches tonight. If you never change a word of it, it will keep doing that job for years, free, and nobody will chase you for anything.
It can also grow, because we stay behind it. You email us what's new, we draft the change and show you, you say yes, and it goes up. A batch of edits is $20. And if something on the site is wrong, we fix it for nothing, because that is not a change, that is us not having got it right. No account to log into, no software to learn, and no one on your roster has to become the website person.
What that looks like over a few years, in shops like yours. A “where the money went” page that grows a line each time you fund something, until it's the most persuasive page you own. A seasonal appeal when the racks are bare and winter coats are what you actually need, up in a week, down when the need is met. Volunteer stories added one at a time, each one a reason for the next person to ask about the roster. New photographs when the shop gets its repaint or its refit, so the site looks like the room people walk into.
Every build can also include a site assistant: a small helper that answers a visitor's questions using only the words already on your site, so “what do you take?” and “when can I drop things off?” get answered at ten at night without anyone picking up the phone. It's included in the price and switched on only if you want it.
All of it stays yours. One price at the start, nothing monthly, and the whole site exportable free whenever you like. Growing it is your choice, never a subscription.
One flat price, and volunteer-run is what the community rate is for
Our standard price is $800, once. The community rate is $400, for organisations where $800 would genuinely be a stretch, and a volunteer-run op shop raising money for someone else is exactly the shape it was written for. Same site, same care, same ownership at either rate, by rule.
The only cost we don't carry: your domain name, about $65 a year, because it must be registered in the shop's name, not ours. That's the deed. Changes later are $20 for a batch of edits, whenever you actually want one, and a year where nothing changes costs nothing. Whether the community rate applies is a one-line email: how we make that call.
Asked and answered, plainly
The sums behind the price
What the whole market charges, honestly mapped: what a website really costs in New Zealand. Why owning beats renting for an organisation that plans to exist in ten years: owning vs renting your website. Whether the $400 rate applies to you: who qualifies for the community rate. The whole process from first email to handover: how it works.
Tell us about it in a sentence
Where you are, when you're open, and who the money goes to, even if all you have now is a Facebook page. We'll be straight about whether we can help and what it would cost.