What an ecommerce audit costs, and what each price buys

An ecommerce audit costs whatever the scope costs. A few hundred pounds buys an automated scan or a single topic looked at properly. A few thousand buys a person reading every template, the analytics behind the numbers and the code that renders the pages. Tens of thousands buy the same thing for an enterprise store with several countries, dozens of integrations and a migration on the way. The number on the invoice mostly tells you how much of the store someone is going to read.

I publish my audit prices, which most people in this work don’t, so this piece can be specific. It starts with what the market publishes, sets out what actually drives the price, says what cheap audits tend to miss, and ends with what each of my four audits costs and delivers. If you’d rather skip to which one fits, the ecommerce cost calculator asks three questions and tells you.

What the market charges

There’s no survey of UK audit prices. What there is, is agencies publishing their own ranges, which are useful as long as you read them as marketing from the people selling the thing.

Why the range is so wide

Grumspot’s UK guide describes the bottom end as basic health checks of crawling, metadata and obvious technical faults, and the top as enterprise work on large catalogues, migrations and international sites. Those are different jobs sharing one word. Comparing a £500 audit with a £12,000 one is like comparing an MOT with a rebuilt engine.

Conversion audits are priced separately

ShopExperts puts a one-off Shopify conversion audit, a review of the home, collection, product, cart and checkout pages, at $500 to $3,000, and an audit that includes fixing the high-priority issues at $2,000 to $8,000. Speed, search, conversion and code are often sold as separate audits, which is one reason a store can pay for three and still not have the whole picture.

What the published ranges don’t tell you

None of these ranges says how many templates were read, whether anyone looked at the code, or whether the analytics were checked against the orders. Those are the things that decide whether the audit finds the problem. Before comparing prices, compare what each one reads.

What actually drives the price

Four things set the cost of an audit, whoever does it. Knowing them lets you tell a fair quote from an inflated one, and a cheap audit from a useful one.

Scope: one topic or everything

An audit of one question, such as why the checkout loses people or why the site is slow on phones, is quick to do well. An audit of everything, speed, search, conversion, analytics, code and hosting, is several audits in one. The price roughly follows the number of questions being answered.

Access: from the outside, or inside

An audit from the outside needs nothing from you: it reads the store the way a customer, Google and an AI assistant see it. Read-only access to analytics, ads, feeds and the code lets an auditor put a number on each finding and find its cause. Access to the servers and database, sometimes called white box, adds hosting, configuration and queries. Each step in takes more time, and costs more.

Size: templates and systems, not pages

A store with 20,000 products doesn’t have 20,000 things to audit. It has a home page, a few category layouts, a product template, search, basket, checkout and account pages. What adds work is the number of distinct templates and the number of systems the store connects to: ERP, PIM, marketplaces, payments. That’s what a fair quote is built on.

Depth: a crawl, or a reading

Automated tools crawl a site in minutes and produce long lists. Reading the code line by line, checking every installed module and plugin for age and known vulnerabilities, and tracing a slow page back to the query that causes it takes days. Both have a place. They aren’t the same product, and they shouldn’t cost the same.

What a cheap audit usually misses

A low price isn’t a problem in itself: a health check at £500 is worth doing if it answers one question properly. The trouble is a cheap audit sold as a complete one.

The tool export

A common kind of cheap audit is an automated tool’s report with a logo on the front. It lists hundreds of warnings, most of which don’t matter, and it can’t tell you which ones are costing you money. If the report could have been produced without anyone looking at your store, it probably was.

The free audit

A free audit is a sales meeting with a document attached. That’s not always bad, but its job is to find work for the person offering it, so read its recommendations with that in mind.

The audit that recommends its author

An audit that concludes you need the auditor’s own retainer, rebuild or platform deserves a second opinion. I’d say the same about mine: a good audit is written so that anyone competent could act on it, including your own team.

Questions worth asking before you pay

• What will you read? Which templates, which accounts, whether the code is included.
• What will I receive? A document with a page per finding, or a spreadsheet of warnings.
• How is each finding prioritised? By what it costs you, or by how serious it sounds.
• Who does the work? The person you spoke to, or someone you won’t meet.
• What happens to my code and data? Where it’s kept, who sees it and when it’s deleted.

What my audits cost, and what each one covers

These are fixed prices, published on the audits page, excluding VAT. The complete audit is quoted, because its size depends on how many templates and systems there are. Build and development work is priced differently, per project, on what it’s worth to your business; there’s no rate card.

The health check, £500

One question, answered properly: speed, the checkout, search visibility or AI visibility, read from the outside with no access needed. It arrives as nine plain-English pages with the three problems costing you most and what to fix first. It suits a store with one clear worry, or anyone who wants to see how I work before spending more. The health check

The visual audit, £950

Every template, on a laptop and a phone, measured for speed, search and conversion, and compared with your competitors on the same day. Still nothing needed from you. It suits a store where something is off and nobody can say what. The visual audit

The backend audit, from £1,200

Read-only access to analytics, ads, feeds and the code, so a problem in the numbers gets a cause and a cost: £1,200 at grey box, or £1,500 at white box with the servers and database included. The code is read line by line, database first, then the layers above it, then the front end, and every module and plugin is checked for age and known vulnerabilities. The backend audit

The complete audit, quoted

Everything together, in one document to plan a year of work from. Reports usually run to 100 to 150 pages, with a page per finding: what it is, what it costs you, how to fix it, how long that takes and what it costs to resolve. The longest so far was 350 pages, for a Magento 1 store with 59 plugins, half of them custom. The complete audit

How your code is handled

For the audits that read code, it goes into an isolated environment of its own, on its own encrypted disk. I ask for a sanitised database with no customer data, and write dummy data where that isn’t possible. Your code isn’t given to an AI tool, and when the audit ends it’s deleted and the environment destroyed.

When an audit isn’t the right spend

An audit is worth paying for when you don’t know what’s wrong, or when a big decision rests on knowing. There are times it isn’t.

You already know the fix

If the problem is obvious and specific, a broken payment method or a page that errors, pay for the fix, not a report about it. An audit earns its money when the cause is unclear or when there are several possible causes to rank.

The store is very new

A store with a few weeks of traffic doesn’t have enough data behind its numbers for an audit to say much about conversion. A health check on speed or search visibility can still help, because those don’t depend on sales history.

The decision is already made

If a rebuild is going ahead whatever happens, an audit of the old store only helps if it feeds the new one: which URLs earn traffic, which integrations matter, which problems must not be carried across. Scope it for that, or skip it.

Nobody will act on it

The most expensive audit is the one that sits in an inbox. Before buying, decide who will read it and who will make the changes. If the answer is nobody for six months, wait six months.

What to have ready before an audit

The outside audits need nothing from you. For the ones that go inside, a little preparation saves days.

Read-only access

Analytics, Search Console, the ads accounts, the product feed and the code repository, each with read-only access for the auditor. Read-only matters: it means nothing can be changed by accident, and it’s easy to remove afterwards.

A list of what’s installed

Every app, extension or plugin, and every system the store connects to: ERP, PIM, email, payments, marketplaces. Include the ones you think nobody uses, because those are often where the problems are.

What changed, and when

A launch, a theme change, a new app, a migration, a price rise. The dates let an auditor line up a drop in the numbers with its likely cause, instead of rediscovering your history.

What you want from it

One sentence on the decision the audit should help you make. An audit written towards a decision is shorter, sharper and cheaper than one written to cover everything.

How to tell whether an audit was worth it

The test isn’t the page count. It’s what you can do with it the week after it arrives.

Re-measure after the fixes

An audit that found real problems should show up in the numbers once they’re fixed: faster templates, fewer checkout drop-offs, more pages indexed. If nothing moves, either the fixes weren’t made or the audit didn’t find what mattered.

When a replatform is on the table

If an audit is the first step towards a bigger decision, such as moving platform, the complete audit is designed for that, and there’s a separate piece on what a UK replatform costs.