An online store, turnkey, with catalogue and payments

The price was higher than I had set aside. A freelancer had promised a store for half the money, but before him two of my shop windows simply did not take payments. Half my enquiries were lost in DMs because I did not open them for weeks — I see them all now. Edits go into the Telegram chat, a day or two and it is done.

I am in Manchester, so I braced for timezone problems and for explaining everything twice. None of it happened — in Slack they answered faster than my local contractor. The store is in English and runs without hiccups. The one thing I can hold against them: the mailing list only came up in the third week, though I had asked from the start.

Three thousand items in the catalogue and the server holds it. That is the part I am willing to sign for, because the two contractors before them broke on exactly this. Search is instant, and the sales reps no longer mail price spreadsheets. The interface is not beautiful, I asked for something else, but it does not affect speed, so I did not go to war over it.

The 1C integration came up, and that is the reason we started any of this. Half a star off for the admin handover: it dragged on, I did not read the docs myself, and the person who walks you through the interface only turned up in the third week. The questions stopped once they sent a separate guide. The warehouse no longer keeps its count in a notebook.

I change prices and stock myself, without a developer, and the project has already paid for itself on that alone. It used to take up my Monday evening. Demand here is seasonal and spikes in summer, and what matters is that the site does not fall over in the heat — so far it holds. I did not want a CRM at first, it struck me as something for office people, but they explained it without any talk of digital transformation.

I ordered it to sell, not to look pretty. For the first weeks I regretted spending that much — until I saw the average cheque go up. I do not regret it now, although by the standards of our market it is a lot. I do not like long threads, they answer short, and for me that matters more than a nice call in Zoom.

My WooCommerce took forever to open on a phone. They replaced the front end and you feel it by hand, without any numbers. They wrote speed and SEO into the contract as a separate line — that is why I gave it to them and not to a freelancer asking half as much. For three weeks I could not hand over the domain access, and nobody turned it into a scandal.

They made the deadline and stayed with the amount we had agreed. The site is alive and brings orders. Small tweaks were answered the same day, even though I asked three times and the small stuff was my own fault.