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Building or rebuilding an online shop

The rest of this site is about shops that already exist and are going wrong. This section is about what comes before: choosing a platform, knowing what you will pay, preparing what you have to supply, and deciding whether a rebuild is really the right answer. It also states, page by page, when I am not the answer.

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An online store under construction on a platform, with a small crane placing a shopping cart.

The platform follows the catalogue, not the design

Almost every build request I receive opens on appearance: a theme, a home page, an identity. That is the least decisive part. What settles the platform is the shape of what you sell: how many references, how many variants per reference, how many different prices for one product, how many carriers, and whether a back-office system has to talk to the shop.

PrestaShop is built around the structured catalogue: variants, per-group pricing, carrier rules, multiple VAT rates, multistore. WooCommerce is a WordPress extension: it shines when editorial content weighs as much as selling, and it costs in plugins what PrestaShop costs in hosting. Shopify removes the server and the upgrades, but you rent everything and pay monthly for each function you add.

None of the three is better in the abstract. What exists are catalogues for which one of the three costs twice as much as the others over five years.

Six decisions that get expensive when taken late

  • The platform, chosen on catalogue structure and on who will run the back office day to day, not on the mock-up.
  • What happens to existing URLs in a rebuild: with no inventory beforehand, earned rankings go on launch day.
  • Who supplies the catalogue, in what format, by what date. This is the leading cause of delay, far ahead of development.
  • Payment methods and carrier accounts: they depend on third parties, they take weeks, and they do not speed up.
  • What you own at the end: domain, hosting, code, database, backups. Agreed in the quote, never afterwards.
  • The maintenance budget for year two. A shop with no maintenance line becomes a shop that is down.

Pages that carry this subject further

In this section

Frequently asked questions

Should the platform be chosen before or after the mock-up?
Before, every time. A mock-up drawn without constraints produces screens the platform cannot render without development: a variant picker that does not exist, a filter assuming a data model that is absent, a product page needing four dimensions when the platform accepts three. Choosing first avoids paying twice for the same page.
Can I start small and change platform later?
Yes, but the change is paid for. A platform migration is not an export followed by an import: the product model has to be remapped, pricing and shipping rules rebuilt, and above all every old address redirected to its new one. Starting small is sensible; assuming the switch will be free is not.
Does a rebuild improve rankings?
Not in itself. A rebuild moves addresses and changes content: by default it costs traffic. It only improves rankings when URL structure, copy and speed are treated as project deliverables, with an old-to-new mapping table written before launch rather than after.
Do you work with designers or agencies?
I work alone on the technical side. If visual identity or copywriting are needed, they come from your side or from someone you appoint, and I integrate them. I would rather say it up front: a project where art direction is expected of me starts on a misunderstanding.
Will you take over a site someone else started?
Often, yes, but after reading the code. A site whose core has been edited directly, with no source repository and no test environment, can cost more to take over than to rebuild. I say so before starting rather than discovering it three weeks in.

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