Three Discovery Questions That Reveal What Your E-Commerce Project Will Really Cost

Discovery is where mid-market e-commerce projects are won or lost.

Get it right and the project is scoped realistically, expectations are set properly, and everyone trusts each other before a line of code is written. Get it wrong and you're six months in, explaining why the "simple Shopify replacement" needs another €80k for ERP integration.

The good news is that the real complexity in these projects isn't hidden very deep. It lives in the business processes, not the feature list, and a handful of questions will reliably surface it. Here are the three we lean on most.

1. "What happens when an order comes in?"

Walk through the full journey. Where does the order go? Who touches it? What systems are involved? Does it sync to the ERP automatically, or does someone print it out and walk it to the warehouse? Where do humans get involved, and why?

This single question reveals the integration picture faster than any technical discovery document. You'll find systems nobody mentioned in the brief. You'll uncover manual workarounds that have quietly been in place for years. You'll learn where the pain actually is, rather than where the brief says it is.

It also builds trust, as it shows genuine interest in how the business works rather than what the website should look like.

2. "Where does pricing live?"

If the answer is "on a spreadsheet that Sarah updates", that's one kind of project.

If the answer is "in the ERP, and it's different for each customer based on their negotiated terms", you've just found significant scope: real-time pricing lookups, customer authentication, probably a caching strategy to keep the site quick.

This question also surfaces pricing nobody thought to mention. Trade discounts. Volume breaks. Promotional pricing. Contract pricing. The more complex the answer, the more valuable the project, and the more important it is to scope it properly before quoting.

3. "What's painful today?"

Then be quiet and let them vent. Seriously - ask the question and stop talking.

The pain points tell you where the value is. Complaints about manual stock updates? That's the return on investment story. Frustration about phone calls asking "is this in stock?" That's a self-service opportunity. Drowning in order amendments? That's a customer account feature.

Pain also helps everyone prioritise. You can't fix everything in phase one, but fix the thing causing daily frustration and you've got a happy client and a cast-iron case for phase two.

One tactical note for agencies: write down exactly what they say, in their words, and use those words back in the proposal. "You mentioned that manual order entry takes your team two hours a day..." is far more powerful than any feature list.

If you're a business choosing a partner

Flip this list around: these are the questions a good agency should be asking you. If a prospective partner gets straight to wireframes without asking how an order flows through your business, they're quoting on the visible tip of the iceberg and the rest will surface later, at your expense.

You can also prepare. Before discovery, walk an order through your own business yourself, end to end. Note every system, every spreadsheet, every human step. That one exercise will make your discovery sessions twice as useful and your quotes twice as accurate.

If you're an agency or Umbraco partner

Get curious about operations, not just requirements. The brief tells you what the client thinks they want; the order journey tells you what the business actually needs. The gap between those two things is where projects fail, and discovery is the only affordable place to find it.

It's worth saying how this works in practice for us. The first conversation stays at a hundred-thousand-foot level: what are you trying to achieve beyond "a website that sells"? What are we connecting into? Only once an initial ballpark hasn't scared anyone off do we bring in team members who've delivered similar projects, so the client hears specifics from people who've actually done it. And be ready for the funnel maths: for every project we win, we'll talk to ten or fifteen prospects that go nowhere. Qualifying out early isn't failure - it's the system working.

A discovery phase isn't an overhead to apologise for. It's the cheapest insurance either side will ever buy.

The takeaway

Three questions: what happens when an order comes in, where does pricing live, and what's painful today. Between them they expose the integrations, the scope and the value of almost any mid-market e-commerce project. Ask them before anyone quotes - or if you're the client, expect them to be asked, and worry if they aren't.

Next week: the pricing question deserves a post of its own. Why "how much is this product?" can be genuinely hard to answer, and what breaks when platforms can't cope.

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.