Discovery & Strategy
Most ecommerce projects that fail don't fail in development. They fail in the decisions made before development started. Wrong platform choice. Wrong assumptions about customer behaviour. Wrong priorities in the feature list. Wrong integration architecture.
Discovery exists to make those mistakes cheap and early instead of expensive and late. We spend 2 to 4 weeks researching, mapping, and pressure-testing before committing to a build plan. The output is a scoped project with clear priorities, realistic timelines, and architecture decisions backed by evidence rather than gut feel.
Business and customer research
We dig into your analytics, customer data, support tickets, and competitive landscape. We map how your customers actually find, evaluate, and buy your products. Not how you think they do. This research drives every architecture and UX decision that follows.
Technical architecture
Platform selection, hosting, CMS, search, integrations, third-party tools. We map your current tech stack, identify what stays and what goes, and architect the target state. Every recommendation comes with trade-offs explained so you can make informed decisions.
Information architecture and UX mapping
Site structure, navigation hierarchy, collection taxonomy, content strategy, and user flows. We define how your store is organised before anyone opens a design tool. Getting this wrong means redesigning later, which is expensive.
Integration planning
Your ERP, 3PL, email platform, reviews, loyalty, POS, analytics. We map every data flow between systems, define sync requirements, and identify where custom middleware is needed versus native connectors. Integration failures are the number one cause of post-launch fires.
Commercial scoping
Fixed-price quote for the build phase, broken into milestones. We define what's in Phase 1 (the core launch) and what sits on a post-launch roadmap. You control the menu. No surprise invoices, no scope creep without a conversation first.
Discovery makes sense when you're building something new, migrating platforms, redesigning an existing store, or adding significant complexity like headless architecture or international expansion. If you're making a change that costs more than $30K to build, spending $3-5K on discovery first is insurance against building the wrong thing.
Do I need a discovery phase? Can't we just start building?
You can. But every project we've seen skip discovery has paid for it later in scope creep, rework, or a platform that doesn't fit the business. Discovery typically costs 5-10% of the total project budget and saves multiples of that in avoided mistakes.
How long does discovery take?
2 to 4 weeks depending on complexity. A straightforward Shopify build with known requirements sits at the shorter end. A headless architecture with multiple integrations and international markets needs the full four weeks.
What do I get at the end of discovery?
A scoped project plan with defined deliverables, architecture recommendations, wireframes or site maps, integration specifications, a realistic timeline, and a fixed-price quote for the build phase. Everything you need to make a confident go/no-go decision.
What if we've already done our own research?
That helps. We'll build on what you've got rather than starting from scratch. But we'll still validate assumptions with our own analysis. What brands think their customers do and what analytics show they actually do are often very different.