When you are going to hire a website (and especially an eCommerce), there are many issues that you have to take into account.

If we take it to the real world (offline), a web page is like a house: it is necessary to dig the foundation, lay it solidly, install the ground infrastructure, lay the walls, prepare the electrical network, the plumbing, the platform for the ceilings, the roof, the paint, and all this without even including the furniture ...

As there are so many components involved in the project, it is very important that we ensure that they are of quality and are properly installed, especially those that have to do with the availability and security of our site.

In this guide, you will find the most common questions that you should ask the different providers you deal with before hiring any option. If you think it is worthwhile to include any more questions in these texts, please contact us. With that said, let's get down to business!

When designing a website, it is common for many professionals to use templates. These templates help save time and reduce costs (both for you and for the professional), they can also be modified to adapt to the client's brand image.

On the other hand, a custom-made website will obviously conform 100% to what you want. On the other hand, it will have a much higher cost.

At ECShops, in this sense we adapt to what the client prefers, being able to offer both options, the most common being the use of templates due to time and cost savings.

It is important that you know how your website is going to be presented to the world. Since your page is going to be the official showcase of your business in the online world.

In order to see the designs, there may be several options: that they show you the templates that we mentioned above (and you choose the one you like the most), or in the case that it is a custom-made design, that they show you the drafts of the designs.

At ECShops we have fluid communication with our clients, so that you can see the designs of your website before we start working on the foundations of it.

There are professionals who allow a certain number of changes in the design. And if you want additional changes, they are priced separately.

For us, customer satisfaction comes first, that is why we do not put a certain limit on the number of design changes included in the proposal.

The brand image of your company tells the world about the personality it has. Your logo, the type of fonts you use on the web, corporate colors speak directly to the subconscious of your site visitors.

It is common to find professionals (especially independent ones: freelancers) who are specialists in the more technical part (web development), and who pay less attention to the design part (or the other way around), however this part is the one that helps you to better sell your company and its products or services.

By working with ECShops, you can be sure that we align with your brand image. Using your fonts, corporate colors and other important aspects of it.

A few years ago, having a website adapted for mobile phones was optional, since most of the internet traffic came from PCs and laptops. Today, the volume of use of the mobile device network accounts for 73% of the total (globally).

Most professionals are already aware of this trend, and they usually take it into account when developing / designing your website.

In our case, we have all the necessary tools to adapt your site to all types of devices: iPhone, Android phones, tablets, laptops, etc.

There are several ways to link your social networks to your website: one is to include on your site the link to your Facebook page, your Instagram profile, and so on. This is the simplest case.

Another way would be to show the content of your feed on your website, for example by showing your Instagram posts.

For e-commerce, there is the option of integrating your store's inventory and sales with Facebook shopping (or Instagram shopping).

In any case, to avoid misunderstandings, it is important that you clarify this integration with your provider. Today, most vendors provide the first and second models. However, inventory integration with Facebook / Instagram shopping is not as widespread.

ECShops customers can enjoy all the options that we have mentioned above, both from the most basic, to the most advanced, such as integration at the sales and inventory level with Facebook and Instagram shopping. Simply let us know which one your project needs.

A newsletter (or newsletter) is a wonderful way to communicate with your customers or prospects. Email is an inexpensive, personal and direct channel that you can use to share content or promotions with your subscribers list.

Most providers include this option in their proposals, it is a basic industry standard.

In our case, we offer two options. You can use our newsletter platform within the ECShops solution, or install an external one on your website such as Mailchimp.

There are a multitude of web analytics tools, being the most common: Google Analytics. These tools allow you to know a multitude of data concerning how visitors interact with your website.

The usual thing is that a professional configures for you, or helps you to configure this type of tool, in such a way that you can have access to this data, and with it you make decisions based on facts, and not assumptions.

Working with ECShops, you can use the web analytics tool you want: Google Analytics, Yandex Metrica, Hotjar, Omniconvert, etc. Our team will help you with its configuration and management, so that you get the most out of your site.

For e-commerce, optimization of margins is very important. There are different aspects that affect the margin of online sales, one of them is the payment gateway.

Depending on the gateway you choose, you will pay some commissions or others. But apart from this aspect, you also have to take into account the business processes, for example, how complicated is it to make a refund with this payment gateway?

In the case of ECShops, we work with Stripe, one of the world's leading companies in this type of technology, however, its transaction costs are much cheaper than those of competitors such as Paypal (or Braintree - owned by Paypal).

It may happen that when you sign the contract, your supplier's equipment is not immediately available, and you have to wait a while until it is free to start the work.

Here the most important thing is to have clear communication and manage expectations appropriately; These are fundamental aspects for us, and from which all our clients benefit.

As in the construction of a house, in web development there are unforeseen events. It is true that with proper planning, these are greatly reduced, but you have to be aware that these can happen.

Having said that, you should have a publication date for your website (in computer jargon: "go to production"). So you can plan your marketing efforts for the big day, with ads, social media posts, and so on.

Depending on the service you have contracted, a greater or lesser participation may be necessary on your part. For example, it may be necessary that your participation is only to choose between the options proposed by the providers (which font do you like the most? What logo do you like the most?).

But it may also be that you take care of certain aspects of the web, such as the composition of the texts ("copies") of the site, or providing the photos you want to show on your page.

Before starting, you should clarify what is the responsibility of the provider, and what it needs that you take care of.

In a web design and development project, there are many decisions to make. Likewise, it is important to manage expectations properly, so the communication is essential.

Pay attention that there is a clearly marked roadmap with the jobs to be done, for example using a project management tool. On the other hand, it is also necessary to know if after the publication of the site, the communication for incidents will be via email, or through another channel.

In the case of ECShops, during the project we used the # 1 project manager in the industry: Trello. The information in Trello is available to each of our clients, so that you can see how your project evolves.

After the project, our clients have a support solution with traceability, so that they can communicate with us via email, or with a ticket to the support app. If necessary, we can use video conferences or telephone calls to clarify what is not clarified by the other channels.

This question is very important, since it would be a disaster if someone spent weeks (or months) working on your project and when they showed it to you at the end, they did not take into account key aspects for you.

For that reason, if you contract your project with ECShops, you will see that it is divided into phases, and subdivided into sprints. The project will not move forward to the next phase or sprint if an issue has not been adequately resolved.

It depends on the type of service you have contracted, the responsibility for maintaining the website may include some aspects or others.

Verify if the maintenance includes the infrastructure (hosting) or not, if it includes the support service for incidents (or these are charged separately), if there are other aspects of the maintenance that impact on its price.

Our clients have a comprehensive service, in the maintenance we include infrastructure costs, management service, support for incidents, platform improvements, and security updates.

A website is a tool that fulfills a business purpose: this can be to reinforce our brand image, or to sell our products or services online.

If the web is not easy to use for its visitors, it will be difficult for it to fulfill its mission. Be careful with this aspect because there are developers who leave this part a little aside.

We at ECShops are aware that the experience of your visitors must be fast, easy to understand and safe, and it is something that we take into account for all projects.

SEO basically consists of the position that your website occupies when a person performs a search for certain words (for example: "green long sleeve shirt") in a search engine such as Google, Bing or Duckduckgo.

It has a technical part; here the loading speed of your website, its architecture, technical configuration, among others ... Another part of strategy, where it's important the analysis of keywords for which you want to show your content, the internal and external linking strategy, and many other factors.

Professional web developers or designers do the configuration at the technical level of SEO. However, the strategy and content part is usually priced separately. Since SEO is a massive discipline in itself.

In this sense, at ECShops we are aligned with the industry, in such a way that we do the technical part of SEO for you. In addition, if you want to manage the SEO of your page yourself, we put at your disposal tools to facilitate this task. Alternatively, we have specialized associate collaborators that we can recommend to help you with SEO.

Similar to SEO, here is a technical part and another related to the content. The technical one consists of managing the infrastructure, backups, databases, and so on. The content consists of adding, eliminating or editing the content (images, videos or texts) that appears on the web.

You have to be careful with this aspect, since there are some professionals who do not allow their clients to change the content of the web themselves, in such a way that they will charge you for each change you need to make to your page.

Our clients have the tools and the guides / training necessary to be independent when making content changes, so that they can make these themselves. If they prefer it, they also can request ECShops team to do these changes for them - with a pre-agreed fee.

Your website is a living entity with hundreds of internal and external components working in a coordinated way. With so many parts working together, it is not uncommon for incidents to occur from time to time. When these may occur, you should know what to expect.

Several questions that you have to take into account: is support for incidents priced separately? What minimum response time does the support include?

As we mentioned before, there are professionals who charge the support separately, in such a way that you have to pay them an extra fee in case you need help. In our case at ECShops, support for incidents is included in the monthly maintenance fee you pay.

Depending on the type of contract you make, you will get some levels of access or others. The difference would be as if in the real world, you rent an entire building, a flat, or a room in a shared flat. And on the other hand, as if maintenance is included in that rent, or is it your responsibility.

In terms of web services, things can be complicated or simple depending on the way in which you "rent" the service. Examples of these services could be the hosting, cPanel, FTP, the CMS editor, or Google Analytics ... This is a massive topic that to cover it properly would require a full blog post just for itself.

In any case, at ECShops, you have access to all the services that are necessary for your operations, in such a way that the technical part is our responsibility, and you do not need to worry about it, and the operational part is your responsibility, and therefore , you have access to all those services.

This question is very licit, since when you start a relationship with a supplier, you “marry” him. But just like in real life, in web development there are also "divorces". Keep in mind that there are providers that have aggressive policies in this regard, and "they won't let you go" ...

At ECShops, we work so that our clients are satisfied with the solution obtained, but we are aware that for X reasons such a situation may occur. In the event that this happens, we will facilitate the migration to the destination accommodation as much as possible.

The provider of your website or eCommerce is an extended part of your team. You should know what their strong and not so strong points are when executing your project.

Are they people with years of experience? Are they better at design? Are they better at development? Is it a single person or is there a team with different people working in coordination?

At ECShops we have senior multidisciplinary profiles with years of experience in the industry. Our greatest specialization is the automation of e-commerce processes, but we also have experience in other fields of web development and design.

It must be clear what work “each supplier” does. It is true that you probably only deal with "your provider" but the part that they outsource will impact the final result of the service. Imagine that your provider uses a "cheap" but "poor quality" hosting service, that will impact your page since it will be hosted there.

Do not be afraid that part of the work is outsourced, it is normal in this industry, but it is necessary that we make sure that the "extended providers" are reliable.

We at ECShops are aligned with the industry, and there are certain parts that we outsource, since they are outside of our specialization, but we will always tell you which parts and in what way.

Before answering this question, we must know what is a CMS? A CMS (Content Management System), is a system that allows us to edit the content of your website.

There are different CMS on the market, each one was designed with a different purpose in mind: some are more designed for Blogs, such as WordPress, others for Online Stores, such as Magento... You should ask what CMS will be used in your project, and what strengths and weaknesses it has compared to others.

As ECShops specializes in e-commerce, our CMS base is Magento 2, a leader in this type of technology recognized by the Gartner Magic Quadrant. In addition, we have other technologies that also complement and simplify the management of content.

This is a critical question, it can mean a difference of many Euros at the end of the year. Since it is the difference between being independent and not being it.

In the industry you can find both cases ... companies that allow you to "be independent" when making these changes, others that "force" you to pass the content to them to make the changes themselves.

Our philosophy here is that it is the client who chooses. In such a way that for those clients who wish to make the changes themselves, we give them the means to do so; and for those clients who prefer us to make the changes, we provide them the service.

You probably did not know that cyberattacks have increased by 40% worldwide during the coronavirus crisis, and they will not stop growing... Therefore security measures are more important than ever, especially if your project is an e-commerce ( since it will save the personal information of your clients: name, telephone, email, etc…).

This topic is suitable for a Hollywood movie... But to summarize (a lot), you can ask: will my website use the https: // protocol? This protocol encrypts the exchanges of information between visitors to the web and the web itself.

Will my website have WAF, antimalware and network firewall? They help prevent against viruses, spam or other attacks.

Will my website have double authentication to access the "back-office" of it? It is a very important additional layer of security.

What update policy does the service include? It is essential that as new versions of software become available, they are applied, since the most damaging attacks in recent years (such as the famous Wannacry) took place precisely because the version of a software was not updated.

There are providers that leave security a bit in the background. Bearing in mind that absolute security does not exist, for us at ECShops it is priority number 1. And we make all the efforts that are in our power to help protect our clients, such as those mentioned above, among other aspects.

A "backup" is a copy of the original data that is made in order to have a means of recovering it in the event of its loss. It is important that you know if your provider performs them, and how often: daily, weekly, monthly...

As with security, there are providers who do not pay much attention in this matter ... For ECShops this is basic, so we make daily copies. For those clients who hire it, we can distribute them between different data centers, so in case there is an incident in a data center such as the fire that occurred at the OVH facilities in March 2021, the risk would be distributed in various physical locations.

This question is important, it is necessary to know the hosting provider, where it has its data centers, how reliable it is...

You can find both options, that your website provider provides the web hosting, or that they/you outsource it to a third party.

ECShops clients are not responsible for hosting their website. This service is managed by us, through our partner ScalaHosting, which has an excellent rating on Trustpilot.

It is important that the responsibility for the content that will appear on your website is defined, who owns it and who provides it?

Our recommendation is that you use your own pictures, since in this way your website will be more aligned with your brand image. However, you can also use photographs from image banks, both free and paid.

The texts on your website are very important, as they will affect both your SEO positioning and the experience of the people who visit your site.

Writing the texts in a professional way requires an effort in significant hours, so that you must know whose responsibility it is to do so, if your provider or yours.

Most providers charge for the writing service separate from the design / development service. In our case, we are aligned with this industry trend.

Software development is not something simple, it is very common for there to be unforeseen events. However, that does not eliminate the responsibility for quotations/contracts to define the items included in them.

There are suppliers who do not clearly break down the number of hours of work for each item, which should not be the case. Since that leads to confusion and / or lack of transparency.

Your quotation and contract with ECShops will always include the breakdown of each concept. Anyway, if something is not clear to you, we will be more than happy to clarify it.

Just as knowing the number of hours of a budget is important, it is equally important to know what functionalities are included in it.

Make sure that there are no misunderstandings, and that everything is reflected in the contract and documentation.

This question seems obvious but it is very important because there may be some factors that you have not considered and that should be included in it, do not forget to ask this!

It may happen that the provider you are talking to does not realize the importance of X aspect that is not included until you ask this question.

A web project involves many components and people, so it is not surprising that there is something that does not go as expected. In that case, what guarantees are there? Depending on the level of guarantees that are included in the contract, you will have the right to claim more or less...

There are providers that include within their proposals an SLA (Service Level Agreement), where certain conditions of service availability are specified, among other issues, but this is not usual...

In our case, depending on the service you hire, you will have the right to certain levels of guarantees or others, but in any case, we will always try to solve the possible obstacles that we will encounter along the way.

Unfortunately there are "professionals" who accept a job and then put it aside "temporarily" because they accept a more economically beneficial one.

It is important that you protect yourself from this type of situation by including a clause in the contract that defines what happens in case of delivery delays (being this caused by the supplier).

In the world of web design (or development) there are two very common phenomena: the friend phenomenon and the intruder phenomenon.

The "friend phenomenon" could be summarized with the following example: "a trusted friend is going to make the web for me, and I trust him..."

The intruder phenomenon is a "professional" from another industry who makes "web pages" and makes them at a "very good price"...

In both cases, the client is running a huge risk, since what typically happens with "these providers" is that they eventually cease their activity, and now your site is left in a situation of risk that is difficult to solve.

The domain is the "unique name" of your website. It is very important that you are the owner of the domain, not your provider.

It is not strange that the providers help you to contract the domain. In fact, if you wish, ECShops will help you to hire yours, however, as we say, it must be in your name and be owned by you.

This is a lawful question, since your website are "your digital facilities". As you do not show your physical information to your competitors, you do not want it to happen with your website.

Economically speaking, it is costly to request that a supplier not to provide the service (that it provides to us) to our competitors, since it implies a potential loss of profit on their part. Is it feasible? Yes, however it will not be free, and in fact it will be quite expensive as we indicated.

This does not mean that a provider is sharing your data with the competition, that would be immoral and illegal, so in this sense, we should not worry. In addition, any competitor can visit your website and get inspiration for theirs...

It will probably surprise you that this question reaches so far down in this help guide, since it is usually one of the first that comes to mind when we think of a new project.

The thing is that we have to "compare pears with pears", and that is why it is necessary to do all the previous questioning, so that when we get to this point, we have the certainty that the proposals of the different suppliers are comparable, and therefore, also on an economic level, but not only on an economic level.

There are companies that make packages of their services, something like: basic, medium or premium. Asking this will help us understand if the supplier has understood our financial mindset when tackling the project. If the website was a car... Are we looking for "a Ferrari"? "A Skoda"? Or maybe "a Volkswagen"?

How is the service paid? In this sense, you can find everything ... Do you have to advance 100% of the start-up payment? A part at the beginning and another at the delivery?

 In our case, the start-up can be divided into 2 or 3 payments (depending on the size of the project). And the maintenance is paid with monthly recurrence in advance.

There are many payment methods, it is logical to consider that your provider does not accept all of them...

The most common is to be able to pay by bank transfer and / or credit / debit card. In the case of ECShops, you can pay for the start-up of the service with any of the previous modalities, and the monthly maintenance with your credit / debit card.

If your website goes from having 100 visitors a day to 100,000, it must be prepared to be able to assume that growth. This implies adaptations at the infrastructure level that suppose an extra cost for the provider, and as a consequence for you.

There are providers that have anticipated these situations, but others that do not… In such a way that you should ask the economic implications of this growth.

It is interesting to ask this ... Especially the more complex your project is, as it will make more sense to raise it; since in complex projects is where experienced profiles are most needed, to solve unforeseen events, and ensure that the project comes to success.

However, this question should not be decisive in choosing our supplier, since the team may have references in other industries that can bring even greater value to the project than others that do have those references in our own industry.

1. Security is priority number 1. From security is built everything, without security, nothing exists.
2. Before choosing your provider, make sure it is professional, that the relationship will last over time, and that communication is transparent and fluid.
3. The budget is important, but like the references, it should not be decisive.
4. Make sure the agreement you sign makes sense for your purpose in both the short and long term.

If you've read this far, you're probably looking for help creating your website (or online store).

As you have read in this guide, ECShops specializes in these areas. If you want to get a free evaluation of your project, leave your details below.