Our quote is a base fee plus growth share for a scope written down before the price appears. It sits on page four of the plan, after the diagnosis, the fixes and the list of things we would leave alone.
The order is deliberate. If the price comes first, everything after it is a justification. If the work comes first, the price is arithmetic: this much of this kind of work, this often, at this volume.
It also means the quote can be read backwards. Take the number, look at page two, and you should be able to see what you are buying. If you cannot, ask, because a fee that cannot be traced to a list of work is a fee set by something other than the work.
Four things move our number, and all four are visible in the plan you already have. None of them is your revenue, and none of them is how much you appear able to pay.
The scope comes from the diagnosis, so the price comes last
Everything starts with which of the four numbers is weakest. Visitors, conversion rate, average order value, repeat purchases. The plan says which one is leaking and what evidence points there, then lists the fixes in order.
That list is the scope. It is specific: this feed rebuilt, these page templates changed, these flows built, this campaign structure rebuilt, this reporting set up. Not ongoing marketing support, which means nothing and can be sized to whatever number was wanted.
We also write what is not in scope, because that is where quotes usually go wrong later. If the plan says the email work is out of scope for now, that is a decision you can revisit, not a gap that will quietly appear on an invoice.
Only then do we price it. The fee covers the work on the list plus the ongoing management the list creates, since a rebuilt campaign needs running and a new flow needs watching. If the list changes, the fee conversation happens before the work does, not afterwards.
The price answers the scope, not how much you appear able to pay.
How many levers need work
The first factor is breadth. One lever is a smaller scope than four.
A store whose product pages and checkout are fine but whose traffic is expensive needs work in one place. A store that leaks at every stage needs work in several, and several levers running at once is more to build, more to watch and more to report on.
This is the factor that surprises people, because it means a bigger store is not automatically a bigger fee. A large store with good pages, sensible flows and a clean feed can have a narrower scope than a smaller store where nothing has been touched since launch.
It also means the fee can fall. When a lever is genuinely finished, its ongoing management is lighter, and the honest thing is to say so at the point where the scope narrows. Under a month to month arrangement there is nowhere to hide that conversation anyway.
How much volume there is to manage
The second factor is size, measured in things to look after rather than money.
Products, because a catalogue of forty behaves differently from a catalogue of forty thousand. Feed work, page templates and campaign structures all scale with the number of items and the number of variants.
Traffic and orders, because more of both means more data to read, more support signal, and more that can go wrong in a week. Markets and currencies, because each additional one duplicates the feed, the shipping rules, the tax handling and the reporting. Channels, because a store running shopping, social and email needs three sets of eyes rather than one.
Volume is not the same as revenue, which is why we ask about it separately. A store with a huge catalogue and modest sales can be more work than a store with three products and strong sales. The fee follows the work.
If your volume grows a lot mid-engagement, that is a scope conversation. If it grows a little, it is not, because a fee that moves every month is a fee nobody can budget for.
How much is already built
The third factor is what exists. A store with working flows, a clean product feed and a tuned checkout needs less from us than one starting from a default theme and a receipt email.
So the plan takes stock: which flows exist and whether they are switched on, whether the feed is complete and free of persistent errors, whether tracking is set up and reporting the right values, whether the checkout has been touched since launch, whether the product pages carry the information buyers ask for.
This is where a store's previous work earns a lower number, and it is why we ask what you have already tried. Half-built work counts too. A flow that was configured and never turned on takes an hour to finish, not a week to build.
Occasionally the honest finding is the opposite: something that exists is worse than nothing, because it is producing wrong data or sending the wrong messages, and undoing it takes real time. When that is the case the plan says so plainly, since it affects the number.
Whether a developer is needed
The fourth factor is the line between settings and code, and it makes a larger difference than most stores expect.
A great deal of what we do is configuration: shipping rules, checkout settings, feed attributes, campaign structures, flow logic, page content within the theme's existing capability. That work moves quickly and it can be reversed.
Some of it is not. A template that cannot show delivery estimates, a theme that loads three blocking scripts, a custom platform where every change is a ticket, an integration between systems that do not talk to each other. That work needs development time, it needs testing, and it carries risk.
The plan says which fixes fall on which side, so you know before you commit. If you have a developer, the scope can assume they do the code and we do the specification, which usually lowers the fee. If you do not, that work either sits in scope with a different cost, or waits.
What we will not do is describe a code change as a quick fix in order to keep a quote tidy.
What we do not price on
Some inputs are common in this industry and absent from ours.
We do not take a percentage of ad spend. That would pay us more for spending more of your money, which puts a financial interest on one side of every budget conversation.
We do not take a percentage of the sales you already make; our growth share applies only to revenue we add above your baseline. That charges you more for revenue you already had, including repeat orders from customers won long before we arrived, and it makes the fee unpredictable in exactly the months you least want a surprise.
We do not price on how much you appear able to pay. The same scope at the same volume gets the same number regardless of how your brand looks or how the conversation has gone.
And we do not add a fee for setup or onboarding, because the diagnosis happened in the plan, which was free.
The practical consequence is that our fee is boring. It sits at the same number month after month, it appears in your accounts as a fixed cost, and when it changes there is a scope document explaining why.
What changes the number later
A quote should be stable, and ours is, but it is not frozen forever. Three things move it, and all three involve a conversation first.
Scope added. You want a lever we left out of the plan, or a new market, or a channel we agreed to postpone. That is a new line of work and it is priced as one, before it starts.
Scope finished. A lever reaches the point where the build is done and only light management remains. The fee should reflect that, and saying so is part of the job. This is the direction people expect never to hear about, which is precisely why we write it down.
A material change in volume. A catalogue that triples or a move into several new markets changes how much there is to manage. Ordinary growth does not, and we do not reopen the number because you had a good quarter.
What never changes it is a rise in your ad spend or a rise in your sales. Those are yours.