We build websites, so this article costs us money. A large number of shops in the Maldives are quoted for a full ecommerce project when what they need is their existing catalogue on a page that customers can order from. The two things are priced an order of magnitude apart, and the cheaper one is often the correct answer.
Here is how we tell the difference.
What most shops are actually doing now
They are selling in a chat window. A customer asks whether the milk powder is in, somebody photographs a shelf, a price is quoted from memory, and the order is agreed in a thread that nobody can find next week. It works, it does not scale past one busy person, and none of it is visible in the shop's own numbers.
The problem being solved is not really a website. It is a catalogue that is accurate, public, and connected to the stock the shop already keeps.
When a catalogue attached to the till is enough
If your products are the same ones you sell over the counter, if the prices are the prices, if you take payment on delivery or by transfer, and if what you want is for customers to stop asking you to photograph shelves, then you do not need a website project. You need the shop's own catalogue published, with a basket and an order that lands somewhere a person can confirm it.
The economics are different too: no separate product list to keep updated, no second price to forget, and no monthly bill for a platform that duplicates the stock you already track.
When a real build is the right spend
Commission the project when the shop needs to be a brand rather than a catalogue. Specifically when you need editorial content and a story, a custom ordering flow, integrated card payment, a booking or subscription model, multiple languages, or a design that is unmistakably yours because you are competing on more than price and availability.
Those are real requirements and a catalogue page will not fake them. They are also considerably more expensive, which is exactly why it is worth being honest about whether you have them yet.
The order that matters is: get the catalogue accurate first, prove people order from it, then decide whether the brand build is worth the money.
The three things that decide whether either one works
- Photographs. A catalogue of grey boxes does not sell anything. Daylight, a clean surface, ten minutes a category.
- Honest stock. The quickest way to lose an online customer is to confirm an order and then ring to say it is not there.
- Somebody watching the orders. An order sitting unconfirmed for a day is worse than not being online at all. Give it to a person, not to everybody.
What we would suggest first
Publish forty products, not four hundred: the ones customers ask for by name. Put the link where the conversations already happen, on the receipt and in the reply you send when somebody asks whether you deliver. Watch it for two weeks. If it is busy, you now have a real reason to spend on a proper build, and evidence of what it should do.
The same subject from the other side of the counter, written for the person using the till rather than choosing it, is on the product's own blog: selling online without building a website.
Every shop running RekordPOS can switch on a store with an address of its own and publish products straight from the catalogue the till uses, and connect its own domain later. If you would rather have the full build, that is what the studio does. Ask us which one you need and we will tell you honestly, even when the answer is the cheaper one.