Ecommerce Client FAQ: What Businesses Ask Us Most

The same four questions come up in almost every e-commerce kickoff call we run: which platform to build on, why the checkout is losing people, whether the mobile experience needs a rebuild, and what payment compliance actually demands.

Over 500-plus projects, this is the ecommerce client FAQ we've built from those conversations, not a list of hypotheticals.

The Ecommerce Client FAQ We Keep Answering

Platform choice is where nearly every project starts. Shopify's pricing runs across four tiers, from Basic through Plus, and the per-transaction card fee drops as a store moves up them.

That structure matters more than the sticker price. A store doing enough volume can end up paying more in transaction fees over a year than a custom build would cost to run.

We build on both custom and platform-based storefronts, and the honest answer is that the crossover point depends on volume and how far the checkout needs to deviate from the platform's defaults.

A store selling a few hundred SKUs rarely needs custom infrastructure. One juggling complex pricing rules, multiple warehouses, or a subscription model usually does.

Why Shoppers Abandon the Cart at Checkout

Cart abandonment is the second question, usually framed as why traffic isn't turning into orders. Baymard Institute's research, drawn from 50 separate studies of live checkouts, puts the average abandonment rate at just over 70 percent.

Shoppers who explain why they left usually point to a specific handful of reasons:

• Extra costs like shipping or tax that only show up at the last step
• A delivery window that reads as too slow
• Discomfort handing over card details on an unfamiliar site
• A checkout that demands an account before it demands a sale

None of that is exotic. It's mostly friction a redesign can remove, which is why checkout and cart UX work is often the highest-leverage change on an e-commerce site.

Baymard's broader checkout audits found the average flow still carries more form fields than it needs. Closing that gap is part of an estimated 35 percent conversion lift the institute ties to fixing common usability issues industry-wide.

Mobile has taken over as the primary checkout surface, too. Demandsage's tracking of global online retail puts mobile at 59 percent of e-commerce sales in 2025, continuing a steady climb from the year before.

A checkout that only works well on desktop is losing more of the sale than it used to.

What Payment Compliance Actually Requires

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The compliance question usually surfaces once a client realizes payment data isn't something they can store on their own server without consequences.

Any business accepting major card brands online has to meet PCI DSS requirements, and the US Chamber of Commerce's compliance guide breaks the standard into four levels based on transaction volume.

Most stores selling under 20,000 card transactions a year land in the lowest tier, Level 4, which asks for a self-assessment questionnaire rather than a full audit.

The requirements underneath it are still real: firewalls, encrypted cardholder data, restricted access, and regular vulnerability scans.

The easiest path through it for most small stores is not handling card data directly at all. Modern payment processors tokenize the transaction, so the card number never touches the store's own servers.

That sidesteps most of those requirements before they become the client's problem. It also opens room for automated fraud checks and order-status messaging, which is where automation work usually enters an e-commerce build.

Once the store itself is solid, the next question is almost always how to keep the traffic flowing, which is a separate conversation about ongoing marketing rather than a one-time build.

None of these questions has a single right answer. But knowing which one you're actually asking, platform, checkout, or compliance, saves weeks of talking past each other before the build even starts.

Cover photo by https://kaboompics.com/ on Pexels