Ecommerce website services, compared on evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to buy an ecommerce build without regretting it

1. Choose the platform before you choose the agency. Platform decides your running costs, your hiring pool and how easily you can change provider later. Make it on your catalogue size, your integrations and your team's ability to run it, not on which platform your preferred agency happens to specialise in. Then shortlist agencies that work in that platform daily.
2. Scope the migration separately from the build. Moving products, customers, orders, reviews and URLs from an existing store is a distinct project with its own risk, and redirect mapping is the part most often skipped. A build quote that treats migration as a line item rather than a workstream is usually the one that produces a traffic collapse at launch.
3. Put performance and accessibility in the contract. Agree measurable targets rather than adjectives. Google's Web Vitals documentation defines the loading, interaction and layout stability metrics that describe real user experience, and they are checkable after launch. Accessibility should be specified the same way, as a standard the build must meet before sign off.
4. Agree who runs the store after launch. Builds end, stores do not. Decide before you sign whether the agency provides ongoing support, at what response time and cost, or whether you are hiring in house. The gap between launch day and a support arrangement is where most new stores lose their first months of trading.

What actually moves the price

Design is rarely the expensive part. The cost sits in integrations and in edge cases: connecting an inventory system that was not designed for online orders, handling tax across multiple states, supporting subscriptions or bundles or configurable products, and reconciling with an accounting package. Catalogue complexity matters more than catalogue size, because ten thousand simple products are easier than two hundred products with variant driven pricing and stock held in several places. When you compare quotes, compare the integration list first, since that is where a cheap proposal usually turns out to have assumed manual work you will end up doing.

The second driver is content. Product photography, descriptions, category copy and structured data for the catalogue are real work, and a build quote that excludes them leaves you with an empty shop. Ask explicitly who writes and who photographs. Google's documentation on structured data and search appearance explains how product markup lets a store present price and availability information in results, and getting it right at build time is far cheaper than retrofitting it across a live catalogue later.

Reading what providers publish

Our index records what each agency states on its own website, with the date we checked. In this category published pricing splits by platform. Agencies working on hosted platforms publish starting prices for a build reasonably often, because the scope of a standard implementation is genuinely predictable. Agencies doing custom or headless work publish nothing, because every engagement is a different system. Both patterns are honest, and the useful move for a buyer is to compare within a group rather than across them.

Named clients matter more here than anywhere else in the agency market, because a live store is checkable. Open the sites an agency claims, look at how quickly they load on a phone, search for a product and watch what the search does, and put something in the cart. Five minutes of that tells you more about a provider's real standard than any case study. Where a provider will not name a single client, ask why, and accept confidentiality as an answer only when the rest of their published evidence is strong.

Questions people actually ask

How long does an ecommerce build take?

A standard implementation on a hosted platform with a clean catalogue and few integrations is usually a matter of weeks. Anything involving migration, custom checkout logic or several system integrations runs to months. The schedule is driven by your content readiness as much as by the agency.

What is the biggest risk at launch?

Losing search visibility because URLs changed without redirects. Insist on a redirect map covering every indexed product and category URL, signed off before launch, and monitor Search Console coverage daily for the first fortnight so you catch a problem while it is still small.

Should the same agency build the store and market it?

It can work well, since the people who built the site understand it. The risk is that performance reporting and site quality are then graded by the same team. If you bundle, keep the analytics property in your own name and agree separately what success looks like for each half.

Do I need custom development at all?

Most stores do not, at least at first. Hosted platforms cover the common cases, and custom work adds cost and maintenance burden that persists for years. Start from the standard build, list the specific things it cannot do for your business, and price only those as custom.

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