The build is not the slow part
Every ecommerce quote prices the design and the build. Those are the predictable
lines. What actually decides whether you launch in ten weeks or twenty-two is
work that mostly falls on you.
Product data. Three hundred products, each needing a title that reads well,
a description worth reading, variants, weights for freight, categories, and at
least one decent image. That is weeks of somebody's attention, and most quotes
assume you will do it.
Photography. Product images off a supplier's website look like a supplier's
website. Proper photography for a few hundred products is a real cost and it is
frequently discovered in week six.
Shipping rules. Rural delivery, overseas, oversized items, free shipping
thresholds, click and collect. Each is a decision only you can make, and every
one has to be encoded.
What happens after the order. Does it reach your accounting system, your
stock system, your dispatch process? Or does someone retype it?
Get your product spreadsheet, your images and your freight rules ready before
the project starts. Businesses that do routinely launch a month earlier than
those that do not.
Shopify or WooCommerce
Shopify is hosted. Security, updates, uptime and the payment plumbing are
somebody else's problem, and you pay a monthly fee plus card fees for that. For
most New Zealand businesses this is the right answer, and the reason is not
technical: it is that you probably do not have anyone to look after a server.
WooCommerce runs on WordPress that you host. More freedom, no per-transaction
platform cost, and you own the updates, the security and the consequences of
neglecting them. Right when you need unusual behaviour, when volume makes the
platform fee material, or when you already run WordPress and have somebody
maintaining it.
The honest deciding question is not which is more capable. It is whether anybody
in your business is responsible for keeping software patched. If the answer is
no, choose the hosted one — an unpatched store is a rescue job waiting to
happen, and it happens to stores that take card details.
What it costs to run
The build is one number. These recur:
- Platform: from around $50 a month on Shopify; hosting from $30 on
- Card processing: roughly 1.9% to 2.9% plus a fixed fee per transaction,
- Apps and plugins: $200 to $600 a month is common once you have reviews,
- Maintenance: essential on WooCommerce, still worthwhile on Shopify.
At a million dollars of revenue, a quarter of a percent on card fees is $2,500 a
year. Once you are processing real volume, rates are negotiable and most
businesses never ask.
Connect it to your accounting
This is the integration people leave until after launch and then wish they had
not. Every order that arrives has to become an invoice somewhere, and if it does
not happen automatically, somebody is retyping it while orders are coming in.
Marketplace connectors exist for Xero and MYOB and cover the standard case for a
few tens of dollars a month. Ask each developer whether one would work for you
before agreeing to custom integration — many will check, and the ones who
volunteer it are looking after your money.
Where it gets custom: unusual tax treatment, stock that lives in your own
system, or trade customers on account rather than paying at checkout.
If you are replacing an existing store
The build is not the risk. The URLs are.
A store with hundreds of product pages that launches without a complete redirect
map can lose most of its organic traffic overnight, and recovery takes months.
Insist that the redirect map is a named deliverable, signed off before launch,
with Search Console watched for a fortnight afterwards.
Also settle what comes across: products, customers, order history, reviews.
Reviews in particular are frequently forgotten and are worth real money.
The questions worth asking
- What have you assumed I will provide — product data, images, copy?
- How many products are in this price, and what if we have more?
- Are shipping rules in scope? Which ones?
- Is the accounting integration included, or an app subscription?
- Who owns the store, the domain and the hosting when we are done?
- What does support cost after launch, and what does it cover?
Getting five quotes
Say what you sell, roughly how many products, whether you ship rurally or
overseas, what you use for accounting, and whether you are replacing an existing
store. Up to five developers can respond, free, with no obligation.
The proposals that ask about your product data before they talk about design are
the ones written by people who have launched a store before.