Red Flags in E-Commerce Projects (From Both Sides of the Table)

Some things said in early e-commerce conversations should make everyone pause. Not necessarily walk away - but slow down, ask more questions, and price in risk.

After 20 years of these conversations, four phrases stand out. I'll be honest about what each one usually means, and (since this blog is read by businesses and agencies alike) what to do about it whichever side of the table you're on.

"We just need a simple checkout"

In my experience, nobody who says this has a simple checkout. There's always something. Guest checkout, but also accounts. Payment on account for trade customers. Click and collect. Multiple shipping options with different rules.

If you're the agency: dig deeper before you believe it's simple. If you're the business: try writing down every way an order can be placed and paid for in your company. If the list surprises you, it'll definitely surprise your agency, so share it early.

"The ERP integration should be straightforward - we did it years ago"

That integration was probably held together with duct tape by someone who's long gone, and the documentation is either missing or wrong.

If you're the agency: budget accordingly, and ask to see the existing integration before quoting. If you're the business: dig out whatever documentation exists, and find out who actually understands the current setup. "Nobody, really" is a common answer, and it's far better discovered now.

"We've already promised the board a launch date"

If the timeline is fixed before the scope is understood, that's a problem. You can have a fixed date or a fixed scope. Rarely both.

If you're the agency: find out how firm the date really is, and what's driving it. If you're the business: be honest internally about what was promised and why. A board that's been sold a date will be far more forgiving of an early, honest conversation than a late surprise.

"Our current agency couldn't handle it"

Sometimes true. Some agencies do take on work beyond their capability. But sometimes the project is genuinely impossible at the budget on offer, and sometimes the problem travels with the client.

If you're the agency: ask what went wrong, specifically. If every previous partner gets the blame, that's telling you something. If you're the business about to say this: the agencies you want will ask hard questions about it, and the honest answer serves you better than the flattering one.

The site that never launched

A few years ago a client came to us after falling out with their previous agency. That alone should have given us pause, but we liked the challenge. We quoted properly, they accepted, and we built a genuinely good site. It made it through development, through UAT, into QA. We were weeks from launch.

Then it stalled. The client's team didn't want to do the ERP data cleansing needed to go live, and the project that was "nearly there" just stopped. We'd built exactly what they asked for, but the internal appetite to finish wasn't there. Honestly, we should have spotted it earlier: the data wasn't getting fixed while we were building, and that was the tell.

Sometimes the red flag isn't about capability. It's about readiness. A project needs internal appetite, not just budget. If a client has burned through multiple partners, everyone involved should ask: what's the common denominator, and is this time really going to be different?

Qualifying in or out

Not every enquiry is a mid-market project, and part of discovery is being honest about that.

You're probably in the sweet spot if ERP integration is required rather than optional, there's pricing or customer complexity (trade accounts, volume discounts, customer-specific rates), the current platform has genuinely been outgrown, and the budget conversation doesn't end at €50k.

You're probably not if the real need is a better-looking shop (that's a design problem, not a platform problem), there are no integrations beyond payment, or the comparison set is Shopify agencies. If one quote is four times everyone else's, either someone has misunderstood the project or someone has misunderstood the market.

It's okay to qualify out, in either direction. Better to know early than to waste six months and a relationship finding out.

The takeaway

Red flags aren't reasons to walk away. They're reasons to ask more questions and price in risk - and they cut both ways. Businesses should worry about agencies that don't probe these phrases, and agencies should worry about themselves if they let politeness override pattern recognition. Readiness matters as much as budget, and the cheapest place to discover either is before the contract.

Next week: the technology itself. Why boring wins, what a typical mid-market architecture actually looks like, and the warehouse system we could only integrate with by building a robot to use its website.

Tim Gaunt is the founder and CEO of TSD, a UK e-commerce agency that's been designing, building and supporting complex commerce platforms for over 20 years. This post is part of a series based on his Codegarden 2026 talk, The €200k Sweet Spot.