A bakery decided to start selling online. Nothing unusual — they had products that ship well, and customers who had already asked whether they could order from home.
They found a young freelancer who worked cheaply and was enthusiastic. They agreed on an online store. Because they wanted it to look good, they took care of everything else too: they hired a photographer for the products, paid somebody to write the descriptions and the copy, and had the logo tidied up. All in, including the build, it came to around five thousand euros.
The store never happened. Work stopped somewhere around halfway, replies got rarer, and then the freelancer stopped answering altogether. What was left was a few folders of photographs, a document of copy, and access to a domain that was registered in his name.
What actually happened here
The simple explanation would be that they picked the wrong person. That explanation is comfortable and almost useless, because it tells you nothing about what to do differently next time.
The more honest explanation is that the job was set up from the start so that a single person dropping out was enough to sink it. There was no written agreement about what exactly would be built and by when. There were no milestones at which payment followed delivered work. All of it lived in one person’s head and on one person’s computer. And the access — domain, hosting — was in his name, not the company’s.
Each of those four things is small on its own. Together they mean the company had no point at which it could say: this much is done, this part is ours, anyone can carry on from here.
This isn’t a story about freelancers
Worth saying plainly, because the wrong conclusion suggests itself. We know young freelancers who work more carefully and more diligently than plenty of ten-person companies. And we know agencies with nice offices that abandoned a client mid-project.
The risk doesn’t come from age or price. It comes from the whole project depending on one person, with nothing written down. If that person falls ill, takes a job, moves away or simply loses interest, the project stops — and nobody else can continue, because they don’t know where to start.
The good news she couldn’t see
When we went through what she had left, it turned out that the five thousand hadn’t vanished entirely. The product photographs were hers and they were good. The copy and the product descriptions were written and usable. The logo existed.
That matters, because those are exactly the parts that are hardest and slowest to produce. Photography and writing are slow. Building the store, once you have the photographs, descriptions, prices and delivery rules ready, is considerably faster — most of the time in a project like this goes on gathering the content.
In other words: she lost the money for the build and a few months. She didn’t lose everything. The store did open later, and it cost substantially less than she expected, because half the work was already done.
Five questions to ask before you pay anyone
Ask these of any supplier. Including us.
- In whose name will the domain and hosting be registered? The answer has to be: your company’s. If the answer is “we handle that on our side”, ask what happens if you part ways. The domain is the one thing in this job you cannot replace — everything else can be redone.
- What exactly will be built, and by when? On paper, point by point. Not “an online store”, but how many products, which payment methods, which delivery, who enters the products.
- How is payment split? Never everything up front. Milestones make sense, or at minimum half on order and half on completion — so that at each payment you can see what you got.
- What happens if you are hit by a bus tomorrow? An awkward question that tells you a lot. Is there anyone else who knows where things are? Are the logins written down somewhere you can find them too?
- What do I keep if we stop halfway? The answer should be concrete: photographs, copy, a content export, the logins. If the answer is vague, that is information.
If you are in this position now
First is the domain. Check whose name it is in and transfer it to your company — that is a task that can often be sorted even without the previous supplier’s co-operation, if you have proof of payment.
Second, gather everything that was already produced: photographs at original size, copy, product lists, prices, the logo in vector format. Even if it looks like a heap of unconnected files, that is material you don’t have to pay for twice.
Only third comes the decision about how to proceed. And often it is smarter at that point to start fresh with somebody else than to finish something nobody understands — another supplier’s unfinished work is frequently dearer to repair than to rebuild.
If you recognise yourself in this story, the fastest route is simply to tell us what you have and what is missing. We’ll say what can be reused from the existing material — often more than people think — and what that would cost. We can build and run the store on a rental (from 59 €/month plus a 790 € setup fee, five-year contract) or build it for you to own (from 2,900 €); the items are in the online store price list, and the process and deadlines are on the how we work page.
And whoever you choose: put the domain in your own name, get the agreement on paper, and don’t pay everything up front. Those three things are free, and in the story above they would have changed everything.