Ecommerce build: The questions

The import is a one-off task. Maintenance is daily, forever, and it is almost never in the offer.

Ask them to load ten of your real products before you sign. You will see how long one takes and can multiply it yourself.

Every courier or payment integration is separate work, a separate contract and sometimes a separate fee. A missing popular method is a real loss of orders.

Place one real order with a real card after launch, then refund it. If refunds do not work, you will find out from a customer.

This is the most expensive mistake on this entire site. A shop migrated without redirects loses its accumulated traffic overnight, and recovery takes months.

Save ten URLs of your popular products before the migration. After launch, open each one. Every one should land on the same product.

Without it you cannot judge advertising, SEO or social. You will pay for channels without knowing which ones work.

Place a test order and check it appears with its value. Compare the order count in analytics with the admin panel over one week. A gap over 10% means broken tracking.

Category structure is set at the start and is the hardest thing to change later. A shop built for 200 items falls apart at 2 000.

Ask them to show what navigation looks like if you add two new categories. If the answer is "we will redo the menu", the structure is flat.

For an online shop these texts are a legal obligation with specific requirements and fines, not a formality.

Read the returns page in three of their shops. Identical text everywhere means nobody wrote it for the specific business.

Every order creates a document, and without a connection someone will type invoices by hand every day, probably you.

Ask your accountant what they need from the shop and bring the list to the meeting. The provider’s reaction says a lot.

Descriptions copied from the manufacturer sit on fifty other shops, and the search engine has no reason to show yours.

Copy a sentence from one of your product descriptions and search it in quotes. The number of results is the answer.

Every extra step and every mandatory field sends part of your customers to a competitor with a shorter checkout.

Place a test order and count: how many screens, how many fields, and how many of them are truly needed for a parcel to reach you.

Couriers change their tariffs, and a shop with frozen delivery prices quietly loses on every order or repels customers with high ones.

Ask what happens to the shop’s prices when the courier raises its tariff. You are looking for a name, not a shrug.

Between the bank, the payment provider and the platform, every sale carries a percentage of costs that nobody collects in one place in the offer.

Calculate the fees on your average order and multiply by the expected monthly volume. That number must enter your pricing.

A twice-sold item means a cancelled order, an angry customer and a bad review, and it happens most often exactly during a promotion.

Ask what customer number two receives: a message at checkout, or an apology email the next day.

Confirmation, shipped, refunded: these messages are half of your communication with the customer, and by default they sound like a machine.

Place a test order and read the email you receive. Every one of your customers reads that.

Exactly when you have paid for traffic, a slow or crashed shop turns the ad budget into a loss.

Ask: if I run ads and five hundred people arrive at once, what happens. The answer should contain a number, not reassurance.

The shop holds money and personal data, and losing them is a commercial and a legal problem at the same time.

Ask to be shown a test version restored from yesterday’s backup. An hour of work that tells the truth.

Most orders come from phones, and a checkout built on a large screen breaks exactly there.

Order something from your own shop from your phone, one-handed, on the move. Every place you stop and squint is a place a customer gives up.