The Iceberg: Where €200k Actually Goes on a Mid-Market E-Commerce Build

When a client pictures their new e-commerce site, they picture what they can see. The storefront. The product pages. The checkout. That's natural - it's the bit they'll show the board, and it's the bit their customers will judge them on.

The trouble is, the visible storefront is maybe 20-30% of the work. Everything else sits underwater: the integrations, the business logic, the data migration, the order management workflows. It's the iceberg of mid-market e-commerce, and if nobody explains it upfront, one of two things happens. Either the project gets underquoted and runs aground halfway through, or the client looks at a realistic quote and assumes they're being overcharged.

Neither ends well. So let's put the whole iceberg on the table.

The breakdown

Here's where €200k typically goes on a mid-market build:

Platform and licensing - under €20k, often closer to €5k. This surprises people. With Umbraco, even including hosting, you're spending under 10% of the budget on the platform itself. The same project on an enterprise platform could carry €60-80k in licensing alone. That difference doesn't disappear - it goes into solving actual business problems.

• Design and frontend - €30-40k. The bit everyone gets excited about. Look, feel, user experience, the brand made tangible.
• Core commerce build - €40-50k. Catalogue, checkout, customer accounts, the e-commerce functionality everyone expects to exist.
• Integrations - €50-70k. And here's the big one. ERP, PIM, fulfilment, payment providers beyond the basics. This is the single largest line on the budget, and it's almost entirely invisible in a design mock-up.
• Data migration - €15-20k. Nearly always underestimated, nearly always painful. If a business has ten years of customer data and order history, moving it cleanly is a project in itself.
• Testing, QA and launch - €15-20k. You need time to break things and fix them before customers find them for you.

Add it up and the pattern is hard to miss: integrations and the invisible work account for nearly half the budget. The storefront, the thing everyone pictures, is a fraction of it.

If you're buying one of these projects

This breakdown is your sanity check. When quotes come in wildly different for "the same" project, the gap is almost always in the underwater section. One agency has scoped the ERP integration and data migration properly; another has waved at it and hoped.

A cheap quote that ignores the iceberg isn't a bargain. It's a deferred invoice. The integration work doesn't go away just because nobody priced it - it turns up six months in as a change request, usually at the worst possible moment.

So ask any prospective partner to show you their version of this breakdown. If their numbers are all storefront and no plumbing, dig deeper before you sign.

If you're building one of these projects

Communicating the iceberg is as much a part of the job as building it. We've found that walking clients through where the money goes, before they've asked, does two things. It builds trust (you're clearly not pulling numbers out of thin air), and it reframes the conversation from "why is this so expensive?" to "which of these problems matters most?".

It also protects you. The agencies that get burned on mid-market projects are usually the ones that quoted the visible 30% and discovered the other 70% during the build.

The takeaway

On a mid-market e-commerce project, the storefront is the tip. The cost, and most of the value, sits underneath: integrations, data, and the operational plumbing that makes the whole thing work. Whether you're buying or building, the budget conversation should start below the waterline.

Next week: the biggest underwater item of all. ERP integration, why it's unavoidable, and the process we built in 2006 that's still running today.

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.