Service guide · Berlin
The storefront is the visible part and the cheap part. What decides an e-commerce budget is everything behind it: stock, tax, shipping, returns, and the reconciliation between them. Studios that lead with design and finish with integrations tend to discover the real project in month three.
A catalogue with straightforward products and one warehouse is a short project on any modern platform. The same catalogue with configurable products, multiple stock locations, a legacy stock system and country-specific tax rules is a different project entirely, and the storefront is perhaps a fifth of it.
Ask candidates to price the integrations separately from the shop. If a supplier cannot split the number, they have not thought about it, and the number will move.
The people who will live with this build are in the warehouse and in customer service, and they are rarely in the room. Find out how an order that goes wrong is corrected, how a refund is issued, and how somebody edits a product at eight in the morning. A build that is elegant and unusable by the people who run it is a failure that takes six months to admit.
The strongest suppliers ask to speak to those people during discovery. Treat that as a good sign rather than as scope creep.
Hourly bands commonly quoted in the city. Integration work is usually the largest single line in a serious build and the one most often underestimated at proposal stage.