The price of e-commerce consulting is not one number but a total built from which decisions the scope covers, how many integrations and channels are involved, whether a platform change is needed and who implements the work. At INDOLES the decision stage — an operations audit or a growth sprint — takes three to four weeks and costs €5,500 to €7,500 (US$6,000 to $8,200) excluding VAT; if the audit calls for a custom software component, the eight-week MVP Build is €22,500 ($24,500). Store build and integration work, platform licences and ad budget sit outside that band and are written up separately after the flow map.
Aslı is co-founder of a cosmetics brand, and three proposals sit on her desk. The first asks for a fixed monthly consulting fee but does not say what will be done. The second builds the store turnkey but does not say which integrations are inside the price. The third asks for a share of revenue on top of a low set-up fee. The three proposals are priced in three different units; Aslı cannot even tell which one is expensive.
I invented Aslı for this article; I did not invent her question — "what does e-commerce consulting cost?" comes up in the first ten minutes of every buying conversation. Below I take the variables that set the price one by one, say which of our own published package prices correspond to an e-commerce buyer and which do not, with the reasoning, and then show what sits outside the band and how to work out the return on the budget with your own numbers.
This article is the "what does it cost" part of the e-commerce decision set. The criteria for shortlisting a consultant are in how to choose an e-commerce consultant, the platform decision itself in e-commerce platform consulting, and how the work runs on our e-commerce consulting service page.
What sets the price of e-commerce consulting?
Five variables set the price: which decisions the scope covers, the number and depth of integrations, the number of ad channels to audit and the state of measurement, the type of platform and any migration, and who implements the work. Two proposals from the same consultant to two stores can differ several times over because one of the five differs.
Scope is the first variable, because the name "e-commerce consulting" can carry four separate decisions: which platform, which ad channels and budget split, what operating system, and which loss to close first in order to grow. One proposal may cover only the channel plan, another only the store build, a third all four, and all three are sold under the same name. Before comparing proposals, write down which decisions each one makes.
Integration is the heaviest variable on the build side. Card payments and instalments, e-invoicing, accounting or ERP, carriers, marketplace orders and dealer pricing are separate connections; each one is built, mapped and tested with a real order. That is why we estimate build time by the number of integrations: a standard store on an off-the-shelf platform usually takes six to eight weeks, and adding ERP integration and a dealer flow can extend that to three months.
Channels and measurement are the variable on the growth side. How many channels are audited sets the timeline: the Growth Sprint is a four-week job planned around auditing two or three channels, and adding a fourth channel or a second market means duration and price are recalculated in writing. If measurement is broken, the channel comparison is made on broken data too; that is why repairing measurement is an item that comes before the channel decision.
The last two variables push the price from different directions. On an off-the-shelf platform the build is fast but customisation goes only as far as the platform allows; with custom development anything is possible but every change is development time; and a platform change adds one-off items such as data migration and address redirects. Whether the consultant, your in-house team or your current agency does the implementation decides which line of the budget the cost sits on.
I am not giving a market price range in this article. I do not have a compilation of e-commerce consulting prices for Türkiye with a published method, and deriving a range from individual proposals would mislead you, because the proposals do not describe the same work. Instead I am writing down our own published prices and what makes each item grow.
What is the price band for e-commerce consulting at INDOLES?
Our published band for the decision stage is €5,500 to €7,500 (US$6,000 to $8,200) excluding VAT, over three to four weeks. The two ends of the band are two separate packages, and which one you start with depends on where the constraint sits: on the order, stock and operations side, the Digital Transformation Audit; on the ad channel and conversion side, the Growth Sprint.
- Digital Transformation Audit: 3 weeks, €5,500 ($6,000). It produces a friction map of e-commerce operations: order flow, inventory and customer communication are mapped, 3-6 people from the operations team are interviewed, 3-5 automation recommendations are ranked by projected time saved per order and annual operations saving, and a six-month roadmap is drawn. Each recommendation comes with a separate spec covering tool selection, integration requirements and estimated cost.
- Growth Sprint: 4 weeks, €7,500 ($8,200). It audits current channels (Google, Meta, TikTok, SEO, email) on ROAS, CAC and conversion rate, and produces a 90-day channel hypothesis and budget allocation, an A/B test plan with at least three hypotheses for the most critical funnel step, a one-page brand tone and message framework, and a weekly five-metric dashboard.
The reason I put these two packages in the e-commerce band is written into their own scope. The audit's commerce-side scope is written specifically for e-commerce operations; commerce teams that want to know which tool to buy, and why, before an OMS or WMS investment, and marketplace sellers that want to automate manual processes, are among its target buyers. The sprint is for D2C and e-commerce brands that spend on ads but whose growth is not landing as expected; brands growing on Shopify, WooCommerce or marketplaces with rising customer acquisition cost are its stated target.
Let me set out the two packages outside the band, with reasons too. MVP Build runs eight weeks at €22,500 ($24,500); it is for building something that has no equivalent today, such as an order management tool, order tracking or a customer portal. If the audit calls for such a custom component, that is the next step; but if an existing tool does the same job, writing software is the expensive route, and migration projects that replace a large existing system are outside this package's scope. AI Pilot I left out of the calculation entirely: it tests a single AI use case, such as product recommendations or basket abandonment prediction, over six weeks; it does not make the store's platform and flow decisions.
The platform decision has no separate published package. If the constraint sits on the operations side, the decision goes into the audit's tool selection spec; if it is handled together with a store build, it is written into the build scope. Let me state one limit plainly too: we do not recommend the Growth Sprint to brands with annual revenue below 20M TL, because at that scale the gap a channel audit can open stays narrow. Nor does it suit a brand that has not yet started spending on ads; the sprint works by auditing existing channel data.
What is included in the package price, and what is not?
Both packages are sold with fixed scope, fixed duration and a fixed price; as long as the scope does not change, no extra line reaches the invoice, and if it does change, duration and price are recalculated in writing. What is included are the items on the scope list: in the audit, on-site observation, interviews, current-state maps, prioritised recommendations and the roadmap; in the sprint, the channel audit, the 90-day channel hypothesis, the test plan, the message framework and the dashboard setup.
What is excluded is written down too: in the audit, software licences, tool subscriptions, hardware and implementation labour; in the sprint, ad budget, tool licences and creative production. The estimated budget for the recommended tools and pilots sits in the report as an estimate, not on the invoice. In other words, the audit tells you what to buy, in what order and at roughly what cost; what you then buy sits on separate lines.
The line to look for in the proposal: the items on the scope list, the names of the documents to be delivered, and how repricing works if the scope changes.
How is the budget for store build and integration worked out?
We have no fixed published price for build and integration; the scope is written after the flow map, according to the integration list. The reason is simple: what makes two stores cost the same to build is not the storefront but the number of connections behind it, and that number is unknown until the flow is drawn.
Think of the build budget line by line. The store itself: category structure, product pages and search. Payment and invoicing: card payments, instalments, bank transfer, deferred payment for corporate buyers, e-invoicing. Stock and the accounting or ERP connection. Carrier integration and tracking notifications. A dealer flow where there is one: dealer-specific pricing, a bulk order screen, account balances. Measurement setup. And finally training and handover. The duration of each line depends on whether the system on the other side is open to integration; if a program has no integration path, that should surface at the flow mapping stage and be presented with an alternative and its cost.
The line to look for in the proposal: the list of integrations by name, how each will be tested, and how a connection that is not on the list will be priced if it comes up. "All integrations included" is not a list.
Why are platform licences and infrastructure a separate line?
Platform cost is not part of the consulting price: it is a separate line and continues after the work ends. The consultant's job is to make it visible at the moment of decision. One commercial tie of ours belongs on this line, so I will state it plainly: INDOLES is a reseller of the İKAS e-commerce platform; because that tie could sway the recommendation, we put the platform decision in writing with the options ruled out and a cost comparison.
The shape of this line depends on the type of platform. On an off-the-shelf platform there is usually a monthly or annual subscription, theme and add-on fees, and in some models a transaction fee per sale. On a platform running on your own server, hosting, security updates and maintenance hours come to the fore. With custom development, cloud infrastructure, the domain, third-party licences and maintenance after handover are separate lines; in our MVP Build package these sit outside the price as well, because they vary with usage and showing them as fixed would mislead. I am not giving figures, because every platform's price list is its own and it changes; read it from the platform's own page at the time of the proposal.
Do the sum as a two- or three-year total: build, annual subscription or hosting, add-ons, maintenance hours and the time your team will spend. A platform that is cheap to build and expensive to run looks profitable in the first year. The line to look for in the proposal: whose name the licences and subscriptions are opened in, and which of them are not included in the price.
What does changing platform add to the budget?
A platform change adds one-off items to the budget that are expensive to skip: moving products, variants, customers and order history; redirecting old addresses to new ones; rebuilding integrations on the new platform; revalidating measurement; getting the team used to the new admin panel and watching both systems side by side for a while.
The redirect item is the most underestimated. We moved our own site to a new platform at the end of August 2026 and redirected the old addresses; when we checked Search Console twenty days later, Google had not recrawled any of the four old service addresses we inspected since the move, so it had not yet seen the redirects. We had to resubmit the old addresses in a separate sitemap. The search side of a migration does not end when the redirects are set up; it ends when you have confirmed Google has seen them, and that monitoring is a line in the budget too.
A migration that replaces a large system has no fixed price in any of our published packages; its scope is written after the audit. When a migration is needed, and when it is not, I have set out separately in the e-commerce platform consulting article. The line to look for in the proposal: the list of data to be moved, who prepares the redirect map, and for how many weeks things will be monitored after the switch.
Should you pay per project or per month?
Both are right, depending on the phase: the decision and the build run as a project, ongoing growth work runs monthly. Reversing the order — starting a monthly consulting fee before the flow and channel data have been read — means paying the first months' fees without knowing what will be done.
In a monthly model, make what the fee buys countable: how many hours of work a month, which reports, which decision meetings. Ad management is not the same job as e-commerce consulting; we publish its monthly management plans separately on our performance marketing service page. The ad budget itself is neither a consulting fee nor a management fee; it should be tracked as a line of its own. A continuous testing programme is separate work too; how its price is built is in the article on CRO consulting pricing.
Why is a revenue-share consulting model risky?
A revenue share means paying for variables the consultant does not control. E-commerce revenue moves with the season, the campaign calendar, the ad budget, stock and marketplace sales; if the contract cannot separate the part of that movement that comes from the consultant's work, the fee has been tied to noise.
Three problems recur. The first is the baseline: against which period is the increase measured, and is November included? The second is incentive: a fee tied to revenue rewards moves that lift revenue by paying for it out of margin — deep discounts, a lower free-delivery threshold. The third is scope: do marketplace and in-store sales count towards revenue? If you still want the model, write the metric as contribution per order rather than revenue, fix the baseline period and the measurement source before signing, add the variable fee on top of a fixed base and give it a cap.
Which line might be missing from a cheap e-commerce proposal?
A cheap proposal usually gets cheap by deleting a line; the question is which line. Look in five places.
- No integration list: it says "all integrations included" but names none; any connection not on a list comes back later as extra work.
- No testing: connections are built but never tried with a real order; the first fault is found in production, on a campaign day.
- No measurement: the store opens but nobody can read which channel sells; the next budget decision is made by guesswork.
- Unclear ownership: the accounts are opened in the agency's name; when the work ends, the data and the code leave with it.
- No handover: training, a usage guide and integration documents are not in the proposal; the team stays dependent on the consultant for every question.
Work out the real price of a cheap proposal in one line: the proposal amount, plus the integration work that will come later, plus the separately invoiced licences, plus the hours of manual work your team will keep doing. The last item looks like zero, because nobody ever invoices it.
How do you work out the return on a consulting budget?
Rather than estimating the gain you expect, calculate the gain the budget needs in order to pay for itself; the second needs only your own numbers. In e-commerce the gain comes from two places: manual work that disappears, and extra orders. Calculate them separately, because each of the two packages focuses on one of them.
The figures below are hypothetical; they belong to none of our clients and were chosen only to show how the calculation is built. The cost side is real: €7,500, the list price of the Growth Sprint. The store takes 1,400 orders a month, the average order is €50, and after product cost, delivery and payment fees the contribution per order is 30%, or €15. Assuming the sprint's effect lasts twelve months, that is €625 a month; dividing €625 by €15 gives roughly 42 extra orders a month. Against 1,400 orders that is a relative lift of 3%.
On the operations side the calculation is in hours. If, in the same store, stock deduction, invoicing and shipment entry take 5 minutes of manual work per order, then at 1,400 orders a month that is 7,000 minutes, or about 117 hours. Put in your own hourly cost: the €5,500 fee of the Digital Transformation Audit is weighed against how many months it takes for the hours removed by its recommendations to add up to that amount. The audit report ranks its recommendations by exactly that measure: time saved per order and annual operations saving. One caution: this calculation covers only the consulting fee; implementation labour and licences are separate lines and are added the same way.
Run it with your own numbers and read the result. If the relative lift needed is a few per cent, you are discussing a reasonable target; if it is above twenty per cent, you first need work on traffic or the product, not consulting. Which changes can produce that lift is in the article setting out twenty-one tactics for raising your conversion rate; where your own rate sits against your sector is in the e-commerce conversion rate benchmarks article.
How does the budget change with the size of the store?
Scale changes the weight of the five variables. The three profiles below give no figures; they describe where the budget should go.
An SME store
For a store with annual revenue below 20M TL a paid growth sprint is usually premature; the budget belongs in a few solid integrations on an off-the-shelf platform, measurement set up from the start, and fixing the obvious blockers. At this size a free diagnosis is a good start: Diagnoo scans the store's seven key pages and reports mobile speed, friction in the checkout step and missing tracking tags separately. Fixes your own team can make may earn more than a paid programme.
A growing brand selling mostly on marketplaces
According to the survey of 781 businesses in the Ministry of Trade's 2025 e-commerce outlook report, published on 12 May 2026, 39.5% of businesses sell only on marketplaces and 48.8% sell both on their own site and on marketplaces. For this profile the weight of the budget is not in the storefront but in processing every order in one flow, wherever it comes from: until stock, invoicing and shipping are tied to one routine, every new channel multiplies the manual work. At this scale the audit's value lies in putting the automations in order.
A manufacturer selling to dealers and wholesale
On the B2B side, integration drives the budget: dealer-specific price lists, a bulk order screen, account balance visibility, deferred payment and an ERP connection. In our builds, work that adds ERP integration and a dealer flow can extend to three months, and the price grows with the timeline. At this scale the most expensive mistake is finding out the ERP side's integration path after the build has started. The audit answers that question first; if a custom customer portal with no equivalent today is needed, the next step falls within MVP Build's scope.
Conclusion: which lines should you set side by side before approving the budget?
The price of e-commerce consulting is not a label but the result of five variables: the decisions in scope, integration, channels and measurement, platform and migration, and who implements. Before comparing two proposals on the total, set the lines side by side; most of the gap shows up there, and it usually points to the line the cheaper proposal deleted.
Here is the concrete test you can run today: draw a seven-line table for every proposal on the table — decision stage, channel and budget plan, build and integration list, measurement, licence and platform cost, migration, training and handover. Write "included", "excluded" or "not stated" in each line. "Not stated" is the most expensive answer; those lines are the list of questions to ask before you sign.
Fill in the same table for us. The scope of our e-commerce consulting service — what is included and what is not — is written out on the service page, and our package prices are open on the package pages.