The 10 questions I ask before quoting any commerce build
A written list of the exact questions I put in front of every founder before I quote a commerce project. Skip these and your fixed-price quote is fiction.
Every fixed-price quote is a bet. The good ones are informed bets — every material assumption named in writing, every constraint documented. The bad ones are wishful thinking.
Below are the ten questions I put in front of every founder before I write a quote. If any of the answers is "we do not know yet", that gets called out in the proposal, and the pricing adjusts.
- What number in your board deck moves if this ships? Checkout conversion, average order value, page-load p75, organic traffic — name one. Without a target metric, we cannot tell if the project succeeded.
- Who signs off on final acceptance? The person with the budget is not always the person with the taste. Name both up front.
- What is the target launch window, and why? "Before Black Friday" is a real constraint. "As soon as possible" is not — it means the timeline is negotiable, and it usually gets negotiated.
- Who owns hosting and DNS after launch? Because the person on-call at 3 AM needs to know before launch, not after.
- What is your current PSP, and is it staying? Payment migrations are their own project. If you are switching PSPs at the same time, the quote is different.
- What integrations must survive from the old system? ERPs, warehouse systems, tax engines, shipping calculators, CRM exports. Every one of these is a contract you are consuming. Name them.
- What content does the marketing team publish weekly? If they change the hero every Monday, headless CMS pays for itself. If content changes twice a year, we do not need one.
- What is your growth curve for the next 18 months? The architecture that fits a hundred orders a day is not the one that fits ten thousand. Sizing decisions come from this.
- Who else has bid on this project, and how? Not because I care about the competition — because the shape of other bids tells me what assumptions the market is making, and where they are probably wrong.
- What happens if we launch and it does not move the number? The best founders have already thought about this. If they have not, we should. Every project needs a rollback plan and a follow-on experiment queue.
Ninety minutes on these ten questions saves both of us a bad quarter. Every founder I have worked with for more than one engagement started as someone who could answer at least six of these before we spoke.