How much does your e-commerce store really cost you?

You know how much your CRM costs you each month.

The amount appears on an invoice; you may have even negotiated it at the last renewal. Let's say €500 per month, or €6,000 per year. On paper, the calculation seems quite simple.

Except that this amount only tells part of the story.

Once the tool is installed in your environment, you sometimes have to add the time spent configuring it, the developments needed to connect it to your CMS, the interventions of an agency, or even the hours dedicated each month to its management. Not to mention cases where a second tool complements a missing feature in the first.

All these elements, put together, can seriously change the bill. And yet, when talking about the cost of an e-commerce tool, it's still often its monthly subscription that is looked at first.

So, how much does your e-commerce stack really cost you?

The subscription price doesn't tell the whole story

When comparing two tools, price is necessarily one of the first criteria looked at. Between a solution at €99 per month and another at €500, the difference seems obvious, and it's tempting to start the comparison there.

In reality, two solutions displayed at the same price can, however, represent very different costs once integrated into your store.

Imagine a first tool that requires several days of development to be installed, a few interventions from your agency during the year, and several hours of work each month to be properly exploited. In contrast, another solution costs a little more in subscription but integrates easily into your environment and requires very little intervention afterward.

The cheaper of the two is not necessarily the one you thought.

The problem is that these expenses are rarely grouped in the same place. The subscription appears on a SaaS invoice, development on your agency's, and the time spent internally... generally doesn't appear on either.

Consolidate all costs in one place

No need to build a complex financial model to get a clearer picture. Simply take one tool from your stack and try to reconstruct what it actually required from you over the last twelve months.

The amounts will obviously be different for you. The main purpose of this exercise is to reveal what lies behind the subscription price.

A tool billed at €299 per month can require several thousand euros more over a year if it regularly needs development or external service provider intervention. Conversely, a more expensive but highly autonomous solution can ultimately represent an easier expense to justify.

The time spent on a tool also has a cost

This is probably the most difficult part to measure because it easily blends into daily routine.

Think of that report that a team member has to rework every Monday because the data never comes back exactly as expected. Half an hour a week seems almost negligible. Over a year, however, it represents more than 25 hours spent circumventing a tool's limitation.

The same reasoning applies to manual exports, regular checks, synchronization problems, or minor manipulations that we eventually consider normal because they are part of the team's habits.

Obviously, it's not about timing every click. The idea is rather to identify tools that regularly demand time around them and to ask whether this effort remains reasonable compared to what they provide.

The opposite is also interesting. A solution costing €1,000 per month might seem expensive until you realize it saves several hours of work each week for three different people.

An expensive tool can very well deserve its place

Performing this exercise is not about ranking your stack from the cheapest to the most expensive software before starting to cut from the top of the list.

A costly tool can generate revenue, replace several other solutions, avoid developments, or save enough time for its price to be perfectly consistent with its use.

Alongside it, a small app costing €39 per month might have been around for two years, with no one really knowing why it's still there. It has little impact on the budget, but that doesn't mean it still has a reason to exist.

The question is therefore not only about how much a tool costs, but whether what it brings still justifies what you spend on it.

And that's where price alone becomes quite uninteresting. To properly evaluate a tool, you need to match its cost against its actual use and the value it brings to your business.

Replacing a tool isn't free either

You may have just discovered that a solution costs you much more than expected. Before immediately looking for a replacement, there's still a part of the calculation to be done: how much would its departure cost you?

A migration can require transferring data, rebuilding automations, redoing certain integrations, or training teams on a new interface. Sometimes, you also have to accept a transition period during which not everything works as well as before.

This is particularly true for long-established tools. Over time, they tend to connect to other components of your environment, and some dependencies may no longer be immediately visible.

An imperfect but well-integrated solution can therefore remain more attractive than a new tool that is cheaper on paper. This exit cost simply deserves to be considered before making a decision.

Start by looking at just one tool

If you have already listed the tools in your stack, there's no need to try to precisely calculate the cost of each one right now.

Instead, start with the one that gives you the most pause. This could be a subscription that has increased sharply, a solution that regularly requires your agency's intervention, or simply a tool whose usefulness you found hard to explain when doing your inventory.

Review what you've paid over the last twelve months, add the expenses directly related to its operation, and try to estimate the time it demands from your teams. The calculation probably won't be perfect, but it will already be much closer to reality than the amount shown on your last invoice.

You might discover that a tool costs you far more than you thought. Or, conversely, that the one you considered expensive is actually doing its job very well.

A good e-commerce stack is not necessarily the cheapest. The important thing is to know what you are paying for and to have a good reason to continue paying for it.