Every shop owner I speak to across Belfast and the wider Northern Ireland trade has been quoted a monthly figure for online ordering. It is usually somewhere between forty and a hundred and fifty pounds. What almost nobody has been shown is the second and third number sitting underneath it, and those are the ones that decide whether the system pays for itself.
I build these systems, so I see the invoices from the other side. Here is the honest arithmetic.
The three numbers, not one
A quote for an online ordering system almost always shows you the platform fee. That is the smallest of the three costs you will actually carry.
- Platform fee. The advertised monthly figure. Predictable, easy to budget, and the least interesting number on the page.
- Transaction cost. Card processing sits around 1.4% plus 20p on a UK consumer card, and a good deal more on commercial and non-UK cards. Some platforms add their own percentage on top of that. On a shop turning over £8,000 a month online, one extra point of commission is £80 a month, which is often more than the platform fee itself.
- Your time. The cost nobody quotes. If someone on the counter is retyping web orders into the till, that is real money every single day, and it is the first thing I try to design out.
Ask any supplier for all three, in writing, before you sign anything. A supplier who will only discuss the first number is telling you something.
Where the integration actually breaks
The demo always works. The demo has four products and one member of staff. Real shops break systems in a small number of predictable places, and I would want answers on each before committing.
Stock going out of sync. If the website and the till hold separate stock counts, they will drift, and they will drift fastest on the products that sell hardest. Either they share one source of truth or somebody is reconciling by hand on a Sunday night.
Pricing rules that only exist in your head. Multi-buys, trade prices, a discount for the customer who has been coming in for fifteen years. These live comfortably in a shop and awkwardly in software. Write them down before you go looking for a platform, because they are usually what rules half the market out.
Getting your data back out. This is the one that catches people. If the platform holds your customer list, your order history and your product catalogue, and offers no clean export, then moving supplier in three years means starting from zero. I treat a proper export as a requirement, not a nice-to-have.
Buy, or build
I am a developer and I still tell most shops to buy an off-the-shelf platform. If you sell reasonably standard products in reasonably standard ways, a subscription platform will beat anything bespoke on cost and on the speed you can get trading.
Building is worth it in a narrower set of cases: when your pricing or fulfilment logic genuinely does not fit what is on the market, when you are integrating with an existing system that has to remain in place, or when the commission on your volume has grown past the cost of owning the software outright. That last one sneaks up on people. At sufficient volume, a percentage-of-revenue model quietly becomes the most expensive line in the business.
The middle path is usually the right one. Keep the platform you have, and build only the piece that hurts, most often the bridge between the website and whatever system already runs the shop.
Five questions worth asking a supplier
- What is my all-in cost per £1,000 of online sales, including card fees?
- Does stock update in both directions, automatically, and how quickly?
- Can I export my full customer, order and product data at any time, without asking permission?
- What happens to orders taken while your service is down?
- Who do I ring at half past four on a Saturday, and what do they actually have the ability to fix?
You will learn more from the answer to the last one than from any feature list.
If you run a shop in Northern Ireland and you are weighing this up, or you have a system that half works and you are not sure whether to mend it or replace it, get in touch. I am happy to give you a straight answer even when the answer is that you do not need me.