The €200k Sweet Spot: My Codegarden 2026 Talk on Mid-Market E-Commerce
Last week at Codegarden I argued that the most underserved part of e-commerce is the €150-300k middle: too complex for Shopify, too sensible for enterprise. Here are the slides, the argument, and what's coming next.
Tim Gaunt
Yesterday I was at Codegarden talking about something I've believed for years: the most interesting part of e-commerce isn't at either end of the market. It's in the middle. And almost nobody is properly serving it.
The talk went down well. The questions afterwards (and at the bar) kept circling the same themes: ERP integration, how to run discovery properly, and the iceberg of costs that clients never see coming. So rather than let the deck gather dust, I'm turning it into a series of posts over the next couple of months. This first one shares the slides and the core argument. The rest will dig into the detail.
Downloads:
- Presentation: Codegarden 2026 deck - The €200k Sweet Spot
- Speaker Notes: Codegarden 2026 - The €200k Sweet Spot
The gap in the middle
Picture the e-commerce market as a spectrum.
On the left you've got Shopify. Brilliant for getting started, and most builds come in under €50k. Shopify Plus stretches that to maybe €150k for larger brands.
On the right sit the enterprise platforms: Optimizely, Commercetools, SAP Commerce. You're looking at half a million minimum before you've done anything interesting, and often a great deal more.
In between is a band of projects worth roughly €150-300k. That's where you find businesses with real complexity (ERP integration, customer-specific pricing, B2B and B2C on the same platform) but sensible expectations. They don't want to spend €200k on software licences before a line of code is written, and they haven't got 18 months to wait for a launch.
These businesses are too complex for templates and too sensible for enterprise. They're stuck, and they're underserved. Most agencies are either too small to handle the integrations or too big to care about the budget.
That's the sweet spot. We've spent the best part of 20 years working in it.
Why this matters to you
If you're a business in that middle band, the takeaway is reassurance: your requirements aren't weird, and you don't need an enterprise budget to meet them. The complexity you're wrestling with (pricing that lives in the ERP, trade accounts alongside a public shop, stock across multiple warehouses) is normal for businesses your size. The trick is finding a partner who treats it as normal too.
If you're an agency or an Umbraco partner, the takeaway is opportunity. You probably already have most of the skills these projects need. The .NET experience transfers. The content management expertise transfers. What's usually missing is the confidence to scope the invisible 70% of the work, and that's learnable. This series is me sharing our playbook.
What's coming in the series
Each week I'll take one theme from the talk and go deeper than 34 minutes on stage allowed:
- The iceberg - where €200k actually goes on a mid-market build, and why nearly half the budget sits below the waterline
- ERP integration - why it's unavoidable, why it's harder than anyone admits, and the 2006 CSV process we built that's still running today
- Discovery questions - the three questions that reveal a project's true shape before anyone signs anything
- Complex pricing - why "how much is this product?" can be a genuinely hard question, and what breaks when platforms can't answer it
- Red flags - the phrases that should make everyone slow down, told from both sides of the table
- Boring technology - the architecture patterns that keep these projects running for decades, not quarters
- Operational improvement - the mental shift that turns a €200k website into a business investment, with the experiment that proved it
If one of those topics is the thing keeping you up at night, the relevant post is a week or several away. If you'd rather not wait, you know where I am.
The takeaway
The mid-market gap is real, it's large, and it rewards whoever takes it seriously. Whether you're buying one of these projects or building them, understanding their true shape (the integrations, the data, the operational change underneath the storefront) is what separates the projects that launch from the ones that stall.
More next week.
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. If you'd like a chat about a project, or an argument about barbecue technique, he's easy to find.