How to choose an online shop platform: what to ask before you sign

Three kinds of platform, and who each one suits

Most of the proposals you receive fall into one of three groups. The first is a ready-made platform you rent: you pay monthly, sign in to the admin panel and can have a working shop within days. The second is an open-source platform you install on your own hosting and extend with plugins. The software costs nothing, but updates, security and keeping the plugins working together are your job. The third is a shop that a studio builds and maintains: it is set up around the way you work, and someone answers when it breaks.

None of the three is best for everyone. The question is which one fits your turnover, the people you have, and how far your way of selling differs from a typical shop.

When renting a ready-made platform is the right call

If you are still finding out whether your goods sell online, have a few dozen products and sell only to consumers, a rented platform is usually the most sensible move. You start quickly, there is no large upfront cost, and the theme, payments and delivery are set up from menus. If online sales do not take off after a year, you have lost little. Do not pay for a custom shop before you know exactly what you need.

The difficulties come later. Some platforms move you to a more expensive plan as your turnover grows, or take a percentage of every sale. Wholesale prices, a link to your warehouse software and more involved discounts often come as separate apps, each with its own monthly fee, even though you would call them basic. And the design and the checkout can be changed only as far as the platform allows.

Open source with plugins: freedom at the price of upkeep

An open-source platform gives you the most freedom. The hosting is yours, the data sits in your own database and nearly everything can be changed. The price is upkeep. Every plugin has its own author and its own update schedule. Update one and another may stop working; skip an update and you risk a security hole.

It is a good choice if someone on your team understands this kind of work, or you have a developer you trust and pay regularly, not just when something breaks. Before you go down this route, count the plugins you will need — for couriers, payments, wholesale prices, the link to your warehouse — and ask who will maintain them a year from now.

A shop built and maintained by a studio

This option makes sense when the way you sell is not typical. You sell both retail and wholesale, your warehouse runs its own software, prices depend on the customer or the quantity. The shop is then set up around your process, instead of you bending to fit the platform. The risk is the reverse of renting: you depend on one supplier. So ask who maintains the shop if the person who built it leaves, whether there is a support contract with a clear response time, and where the data is kept.

An example of this model: SellM8 Shop is installed separately for each merchant, with its own database, and wholesale selling and the two-way link with SellM8 Warehouse are part of the platform itself, not add-on plugins.

What the full cost is made of

The monthly fee or the build price is only part of the bill. Compare proposals by their total cost over several years, not by the first invoice. Ask every supplier to list at least these items in writing, even when one of them is zero.

• Subscription, licence or build — and whether the price rises with turnover or with the number of orders.
• Paid apps or plugins for the features you cannot do without.
• Hosting, domain and backups.
• Card payment fees, and a percentage of sales if the platform takes one.
• The design, and changes to it after launch.
• Support and updates: what is included and what is charged separately.
• Moving products, customers and orders across from your current system.
• Your own time: who enters products, changes prices and keeps an eye on orders.

How you get out if you switch platforms one day

Fear of moving keeps many merchants on a platform that stopped serving them long ago. So talk about the way out on the way in. Ask whether you can export, yourself and at any time, your products with their variants, images and categories, your customers and your order history, to a file that opens without the platform.

Check what happens to your page addresses as well. If the new shop uses different addresses, the old ones must lead to the new ones, or you lose your search rankings and the links your customers have saved. Finally, ask what happens to the shop and the data on the day you stop paying.

What happens when the shop grows

Think not about today's shop but about the one you will have in a few years. What happens when you have many more products? When you hire a second person to handle orders, who should see the orders but not your margins? When you start selling to businesses at their own prices, or when your warehouse moves to proper software and stock has to come from there?

For each of these, ask three things: can the platform do it, what will it cost, and how long will it take. "We'll sort something out" is not an answer.