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.
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
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Custom development
What I actually build beyond configuration: modules, back-office screens, connections.
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Rates
How I bill, fixed price or day rate, and what moves an estimate up or down.
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Choosing e-commerce hosting
Shared, dedicated, managed: what each option allows and what it rules out.
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PrestaShop developer
How I work on the platform that accounts for most of my projects.
Frequently asked questions
Should the platform be chosen before or after the mock-up?
Can I start small and change platform later?
Does a rebuild improve rankings?
Do you work with designers or agencies?
Will you take over a site someone else started?
Describe your need in one minute
A few targeted questions so I can reply with an estimate rather than another questionnaire.