Freelance e-commerce by city

What "freelance in Paris" does and does not mean

Plenty of supplier sites imply a presence in every city they name. It is almost never true, and it helps nobody. I would rather write it plainly: my business is based in the Grand Est. Only four cities have a page here — Strasbourg, Colmar, Mulhouse, Metz — because they are in my region and an occasional visit is possible. Everywhere else in France the work is entirely remote, and a single page describes it, organised by trade rather than by town.

That is not a limitation of the service, it is how the trade works. An online shop is not on your premises: it is on a server. Code, database and error logs are read over SFTP, over SSH and from the hosting panel, in exactly the same way from the next room or from another region. A developer sitting two streets from your shop would work over the same connection I do.

What remote work changes in practice

Three things. First access: you need to give me access to the files, the database and the admin, which requires a trust that a site visit does not replace. Create a named account rather than sharing yours, and revoke it when the job ends; it is cleaner for both of us.

Then communication: it happens in writing, with video calls when a need has to be scoped or a screen shown. Writing has an advantage a meeting does not — it leaves a record you can consult six months later, when nobody remembers why a particular calculation rule was chosen.

Finally what distance does not cover: anything involving physical hardware. An in-store till, a label printer, a local network, a payment terminal to plug in — those need someone on site, and I say so upfront rather than billing a pointless journey. The software side of a till link or a gateway, on the other hand, is handled remotely without difficulty.

Why four city pages, and one for everywhere else

This site used to carry thirteen city pages. Nine of them described towns I do not travel to, and resembled each other far too closely: a page differentiated by nothing but a place name is what search engines call a doorway page. They have been merged into one, which keeps what was useful in them — the technical constraints of each trade, from wine to aerospace by way of fresh food and cosmetics — and drops the place name.

That leaves the four Grand Est cities, where a visit is genuinely possible. If proximity is your only criterion, a genuinely local supplier will suit you better, and that is sincere advice. If your criterion is technical skill on PrestaShop or WooCommerce, distance does not enter the equation.