10 questions to ask before choosing an ecommerce platform
Subscription, commission, payments, shipping, variants, warehouses and selling abroad: ten questions to answer before you choose an ecommerce platform.
The Milofly team
Getting started5 min read
Contents
Your ecommerce platform is the ground your store works on every day. How you add products, move orders along, ship parcels and how much you pay at the end of the year all follow from this choice. You can change it later, but it is hard work: products, addresses, customer habits and everything your team has learned have to be set up again.
So before you decide, look past the headlines on sales pages and try to get clear answers to the questions below. They apply to every platform, Milofly included, and we suggest writing the answers into a table to compare them side by side.
1. What does it really cost?
The monthly or yearly subscription is only part of the cost. Ask about each of these separately:
- Commission on sales: Does the platform take a share of every sale? The payment provider's own fee is a separate cost.
- App and add-on fees: Do discounts, shipping or marketplace connections come as separate paid add-ons?
- Renewal price: If there is a special first-year price, find out what you will pay in the second year.
- Setup and migration fees: Can you open the account yourself, or is setup charged separately?
Add these up to get the yearly total. Two platforms can have the same subscription price and still end up far apart once commissions and add-ons are counted.
2. Which feature is on which plan?
With tiered pricing, a feature you need can sit on a higher plan. Write down the features you will use today and a year from now, then check which plan each one is on. Marketplace connections, multiple warehouses, customer segments and selling abroad often sit on the higher plans.
Ask for a line-by-line comparison of the plans. Seeing exactly where each function lives makes the decision easier than general words like “advanced” or “unlimited”.
3. Do payments and shipping run on your own contracts?
Some platforms ask you to use their own payment system; others connect to the payment provider you have a contract with. In the second case you negotiate the rate with the provider yourself, and the money goes straight to your account.
Ask the same question about shipping: can your agreement with a carrier be connected to the platform? Are labels and tracking numbers created from the admin, or do you type every shipment into the carrier's website by hand? If you offer cash on delivery, remember that it depends on your carrier contract.
4. Can it handle your product structure?
Think about your own products and test whether the platform can show them properly:
- Are there several option axes such as colour and size, and can each option have its own stock and price?
- Can products sold by the kilo or litre show a unit price?
- Can you sell several products together at one price, or sell a pack of six as one item?
- Can you add paid extras such as gift wrapping or assembly?
5. Is your stock in more than one place?
If you ship from one warehouse, this question may not seem to matter today. But once a second warehouse, a shop or a supplier's stock is added, these become important: do shoppers see the total stock, which warehouse does an order ship from, and can units one warehouse is short come from another?
6. Are you thinking about selling abroad?
Even if you are not today, it pays to choose a platform that keeps the door open. The key question is this: do you need a second store to sell in another country, or do you add a new country to the same store? In the second case your products stay shared, and language, currency, prices, payments and domain are set country by country.
We cover this in detail here: Selling online internationally: language, currency and region.
7. Who changes the design, and how?
If every storefront change needs a developer, you lose speed. Ask: can pages be built from ready sections, can you see a change on phone and desktop before it goes live, and can you undo a mistake?
8. Can you take your data with you?
A good platform does not lock your data in to keep you. Check that you can export your product catalogue as Excel or CSV, and that you can see the result of an import before it is saved.
9. How will your team work?
The people who pack orders, add products and keep the books may be different people. Is there a limit on team members, can everyone get only the access their work needs, and can a staff member be set up to see orders without being able to change prices?
10. Can it connect to other systems?
An accounting program, a marketplace, an ad account or a tool you built yourself: there will be systems you want to connect later. Ask whether there is a documented API, permission-based apps and webhooks.
A short checklist
| Question | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Is there a commission on sales? | Your costs grow as your revenue grows |
| What is the renewal price? | It sets your budget for the second year |
| Do payments run on your own contract? | You control the rate and how money reaches your account |
| Are there variants and unit prices? | Your products look right on the storefront |
| Do you need a second store to sell abroad? | Catalogue and stock are not kept in two places |
| Can you export your data? | Moving later becomes much easier |
How Milofly answers these questions
Milofly takes no commission on your sales, has no setup fee, and what each of its three plans includes is written out line by line on the pricing page. Payments and shipping run on your own contracts, and you can bring your products from Shopify, WooCommerce or Excel. The features page shows what each feature does.
