Every agency says they are agile. The useful questions are about what happens when something goes wrong.

Questions that separate the field

• Who is my delivery lead, and how many other accounts do they carry?
• What is your change request process, and what does a mid-sprint scope change cost me?
• Can I see a burndown or velocity chart from a completed project of similar size?
• How do you handle a sprint that misses its commitment — what changes next sprint?
• What is your escalation path when I am unhappy, and how fast does it move?

Warning signs

A single fixed price with no change process, no named individuals in the proposal, and estimates that arrive without any stated assumptions. Each of these transfers risk to you quietly.

What good looks like

Two-week sprints with a demo at the end, a shared backlog you can see, a written definition of done, and a weekly status that reports variance honestly rather than reporting green until the week before launch.

A build quote without a three-year view is not a budget; it is a deposit.

Where the real money goes

1. Platform licence — often revenue-based, and it escalates as you grow. Model it at your projected volume, not today’s.
2. Hosting and infrastructure — including the environments you need for staging and QA.
3. Third-party services — search, tax, payments, reviews, personalisation. Each one is small; together they are not.
4. Integration maintenance — connectors break when either side upgrades. Budget for it annually.
5. Support and enhancement — the retainer that starts the month after launch.

Questions to ask before signing

What is not included in this number? What happens to the price if scope grows by twenty percent? What does year two cost if we change nothing? A partner who answers these plainly is easier to work with than one who quotes low and reconciles later.

Support contracts tend to be signed in the relief of having launched. That is exactly when they should be read carefully.

Clauses that matter

• Severity definitions — who decides that checkout being slow is a P1 rather than a P3.
• Response versus resolution — a one-hour response with no resolution commitment is close to meaningless.
• Coverage hours — whether the SLA holds during your peak trading period, including weekends.
• Bug versus change — the most common source of billing disputes.
• Rollover — whether unused hours expire monthly, quarterly or not at all.
• Security patching — included, or quoted separately each time.

A practical test

Ask what happens if checkout breaks at 9pm on your busiest Friday of the year. The answer, and whether it is written down anywhere, tells you more than the rest of the document.