Ecommerce web design in Newcastle, NSW: a shop people buy from.

Product pages, a cart and a checkout on the front. Stock, payments, postage, tax and returns sitting behind it. The second list is where the work and all the decisions are.

Everybody arrives at this conversation talking about the front of it. How the product pages look, and how the checkout flows. That part is real, and it is the smaller half of the build.

What sits behind the shop

• The stock numbers behind it.

  What you have, what happens when it runs out, and whether the website and the counter are looking at the same number.

• The way the payments get taken.

  Who processes the card, what the fee on it is, and what happens to a payment that fails halfway through.

• The postage rules you settle on.

  What it costs, who calculates it, and whether it changes by weight, size or destination. This is the one that eats build time.

• The tax and the invoices it issues.

  GST handled correctly, and a receipt that will satisfy an accountant without anybody rebuilding it later.

• The returns process behind all of it.

  What a customer actually does, and what happens to the stock number when the parcel comes back through the door.

A shop where all of those are settled is a straightforward build. A shop where they are not is a series of surprises with a website attached to them.

Because the shop is open when the door is shut, and because it reaches past the people who can drive to you. Both are real, and both come with work that a service website never had.

A local retailer with an online shop is selling in the evening and on a Sunday, and to people in Maitland and Port Stephens who were never going to make the drive. All of that is a genuinely good case.

What comes with it is a second business to run. Orders have to be picked, packed and posted, the stock has to stay honest, and somebody has to answer the message asking where a parcel has got to.

The businesses that do well out of it are the ones that decided who was doing that work before the site got built, rather than discovering it in the first busy week.

Postage, stock, returns and who packs the orders. All four are business decisions rather than website ones, and a build starting without them stalls waiting for them.

A Shopify store usually slows down for reasons that have nothing to do with the platform, and almost everything to do with what was installed on top.

Whether to repair what is there or start again is the decision that comes before every one of these, and it is worth making on evidence rather than on how the site looks.

This is the list anybody sensible asks for first, and it is the reason some shop builds take a fortnight and others take six months.

What has to be decided

• How you are going to charge for postage.

  A flat rate, by weight, by destination, or free over an amount. Every one of those is a different amount of work.

• Where the stock number actually lives.

  The website, the point of sale, or a spreadsheet. Where it lives in two places, the two will disagree.

• What actually happens on a return.

  Who the customer contacts, what they get back, and what happens to the stock number afterwards.

• Who packs and posts the orders.

  A named person, and the hours in their week that it takes. This is the one most often left unanswered.

• What the business is legally on the hook for.

  Refunds, faults and delivery are covered by consumer law rather than by whatever the policy page says.

The rules on that last point are set out plainly by the ACCC, and they apply to a Newcastle shop exactly as they do to a national one.

The platform, the payment fees, the postage, and somebody's hours every week. The hours are the cost nobody puts in the plan, and they decide whether it is worth doing.

What a shop costs to build sits apart from what it costs to run, and the two get quoted together often enough to be worth separating.

The design fee is only one line of a shop quote, and what the design costs is worth separating from the software underneath it before anything is compared.

A shop carries an ongoing cost that no other website has, whoever built it, because money moving means somebody is taking a percentage of it.

What a shop actually costs to run

• The platform the shop runs on.

  A monthly fee on a hosted shop, or hosting and upkeep where the shop runs on the business's own site.

• The fees on every payment taken.

  A percentage of every sale plus a few cents on top. They are worth reading closely, because they genuinely differ.

• The gap on the postage.

  What you charge against what it actually costs to send. The gap is quiet, and it compounds over a year.

• Somebody's hours, every single week.

  Picking, packing, posting and answering messages. The real cost, and the one showing up as somebody's evening rather than an invoice.

None of that is a reason to avoid building one. It is a reason to know the numbers before the build rather than in month three.

Settle the business decisions first, then choose the platform against them. It is built with real products, somebody buys a real order with a real card, and it opens quietly.

Opening it quietly is deliberate. The first orders always teach the business something about packing or postage.

1. Settle the four decisions

Postage, stock, returns, and who packs. Every one of them written down. Everything after this goes faster once they exist on paper.

2. The platform gets chosen against them

Chosen after them, never before. The postage rules and where the stock number lives are what decide which platform is sensible here.

3. Build it with real products

Real photographs, real descriptions, real weights. A shop built on stand in products hides every problem the real ones would have shown.

4. A real order gets bought with a real card

The whole way through, including the receipt, the confirmation email and the refund afterwards. Then the same thing again on a phone.

5. It opens quietly

Before anybody hears about it. The first orders always teach the business something about packing or about postage.

6. Then fix what those orders showed

Postage rates that were wrong, a product needing a better photograph, a question three customers asked. This is the part that makes it work.

The build is short once the decisions are made. Product photographs, descriptions and weights are what stretch a shop out, because every single product needs all three.

The order it happens in

• First the business decisions are settled.

  Postage, stock, returns and who packs. Nobody builds anything yet, and skipping this is where a build stalls.

• Then the shop is built with real products.

  Photographs, descriptions and weights, one set per product. This is the long part, and it is content rather than code.

• Then it opens quietly, and the first weeks correct it.

  A real order bought with a real card, then the first weeks of packing showing what was wrong.

A business with a hundred products and no photographs of any of them is not a fortnight away from a shop, whatever the platform advertises.

Ask who owns the shop and the customer list, what a product change costs afterwards, how postage is being handled, and whether the shop can move elsewhere. The customer list is worth being firm about.

These are worth asking of any developer, including this one, so the answers given here are underneath each question.

• Who owns the shop and the customer list?

  The business owns both of them, in accounts in its own name, and that is settled before a single product goes on.

• What does adding a product cost afterwards?

  It should be something the business does itself. Where it is a job, that is a monthly cost in disguise.

• How exactly is postage being calculated?

  The rules, in writing, checked against what it actually costs the business to send a parcel.

• Can I move the shop elsewhere?

  Products, orders and customers exported whenever you want, with no fee attached to asking for them.

Plenty of Newcastle businesses run a hosted shop themselves and never need a developer. The point to bring somebody in is when the shop has to agree with something else the business runs.