E-commerce and retail

Most replatform projects are priced as a build and then lose a quarter of organic revenue at launch. The difference is almost entirely in work done before go-live.

Judged on

Mobile LCPMeasured on a throttled connection, not on office wifi.
Organic revenue by URL cohortMigrated, redirected and new, tracked separately so a dip has a cause.
Contacts per 100 ordersThe honest measure of whether support automation worked.
Checkout completionBy device and payment method.

The pattern

What we keep
walking into.

The store is slow on mobile, and every merchandising change needs a developer.
Previous quotes treated SEO as a post-launch task, so the project keeps being postponed.
Nobody knows which URLs actually earn traffic, which makes the redirect map guesswork.
Support volume is dominated by “where is my order” and returns eligibility.
Tracking broke at some point during a consent or platform change and nobody noticed.

The approach

What we do
about it.

Map the URLs against revenue first

Every URL, crawled and joined to analytics and search data — including the ones getting traffic that appear in no sitemap. This happens before design, not after.
Build to a performance budget

A stripped-back theme with the budget written into the contract: Lighthouse 95+ on mobile, LCP under 2.0s, CLS under 0.1.
Rewrite the pages that earn, before launch

The highest-value category and product pages are rewritten while there is still time to test them, rather than being fixed in a panic afterwards.
Rehearse the redirects

The redirect map runs against live crawl data for two weeks before go-live, then gets watched hourly for the first seventy-two hours.
Analytics that survive the move

GA4 with server-side tagging and consent handled for UK GDPR and UAE PDPL, in place on day one rather than bolted on.
Then support automation, if volume justifies it

An order-status and returns agent with a hard limit on what it can approve without a person.

Shape of the work

Timeline, team
and starting point.

	Detail
Where it usually starts	A Site Health Audit and Fix, or an SEO and AI-Search Audit if rankings are the worry.
Typical build	Store replatform: ten to sixteen weeks depending on catalogue size and integrations.
After launch	A growth retainer for the first two quarters, because the weeks after a replatform are when the compounding happens.
Who works on it	Strategist, designer, two developers, a marketer. An AI engineer joins only if a support agent is in scope.

Packages

Where this
usually starts.

Package	Model	From
E-commerce BuildNew store or replatform, including checkout and merchandising	Fixed scope	from £12,000
Site Health Audit and FixPerformance, accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA, and security hardening	Fixed price	£1,800
SEO and AI-Search AuditTechnical, content and citation work, with a prioritised plan	Fixed price	£2,200
Growth Retainer — PlusMulti-channel, CRO and lifecycle email	Monthly, 90-day notice	from £5,000 / mo