Online shop: the six questions that tie you in for five years.
Platforms are compared on their monthly subscription. They are left — or not — over what they do with your data, your orders and your habits. Here is what to ask before signing.
Published on 4 August 2026 · 5 min read · by the SkyNet technical team
You compare quotes.
You sign up to a dependency.
You want to change online shop. You ask for an export of your data. The file arrives: the product records are there, the photos at reduced resolution, the customer reviews nowhere, the order history half missing. You are not moving house — you are starting again.
An e-commerce platform (the software that runs your shop) is chosen on its entry price and endured on its exit price. The six questions that follow say little about features: they say what you will still be able to decide in three years.
An online shop launches quickly.
Leaving it is slow.
The difference is decided by answers obtained before signature — not by the internal search engine or the number of themes available.
Six questions,
and what a wrong answer costs.
1. Who owns your data?
Ask for the full export before signing, not the promise that it exists. Look at what is missing: photos at original resolution, customer reviews, order history. What is not in the file will no longer exist on the day you leave.
2. What does growth cost?
A commission on sales is painless at the start and becomes a heavy cost when volume rises. A fixed subscription does the opposite. Project the bill onto your turnover three years from now, not onto today’s.
3. Who applies the updates?
Rented shop: the publisher takes care of it, and you do not choose the timetable. Shop installed on your own server: you decide everything, including doing nothing. An extension (a module added to the shop) abandoned two years ago is an open door, and nobody will warn you.
4. How does it talk to your other tools?
Sales management, stock, till, carrier, accounts. If stock levels do not feed through on their own, somebody re-keys them — often on a Sunday evening. “It’s possible” is not an answer: ask by whom, in how many days, and at what price.
5. Who answers when the shop goes down?
Support through a form, promised “within 48 business hours”, does not cover a Saturday in December. And ask the question everyone forgets: who determines whether the fault comes from the platform, from the hosting, from the payment module or from your internet link?
6. What does moving premises cost?
The export, the recreation of the records, the redirects from the old addresses (without them, the search ranking you have built disappears), reconnecting the tools, the training. That amount appears on no entry-level quote. Yet it is what decides whether you are free.
Commission or subscription:
it all depends on where you will be.
A commission on sales follows your success. A fixed subscription does not move. So there is a point where the two cross, and it is not in the same place for a shop that is starting out and for a shop that is up and running. It is that point you have to locate, with your own volumes.
The outage gives no warning.
The contract does.
Read the support hours before signing, not during the incident. And check who, in the chain, is able to say where the problem really comes from.
We will not tell you
which platform is the best.
The answer depends on your catalogue, your flows and your teams. An integrator with a single answer is selling its own tool, not yours.
- We start from your six answers, not from a catalogue of platforms
- The cost of leaving is priced at the assessment stage, and it is written down
- Our services rely on ISO 27001 and HDS certified data centres located in France
- We also operate your link, under our operator identifier: when the shop slows down, we know which side to look at
What we do not know. We have no average migration cost to quote you: it depends on the number of records, of old addresses to redirect and of tools connected. Those three numbers are counted at your premises, and they give an amount — not an average.
The shop, the link and the phone that rings.
What to remember
- The quote compares subscriptions. The real commitment is the cost of leaving.
- Ask for the export file before signing: what is not in it will be lost.
- Commission or subscription: project the bill onto your volume three years from now.
- Redirects from the old addresses are not a detail: without them, the search ranking you have earned disappears.
- Put a name and a set of hours against “who answers when it goes down”.
Your six answers, in writing
Give us your current platform, your number of product records and the tools plugged into it. We give you back the six answers for your own case, and what leaving would cost. It is a status review, not a quote in disguise.