Common questions about Craft Commerce websites

In today's competitive B2B landscape, your website isn't just a digital brochure—it's a core component of your sales and operational strategy. Choosing the right ecommerce platform can be the difference between a scalable, efficient system and a costly burden.

If you're considering migrating your website to Craft Commerce, this article will help you evaluate if Craft is a good fit. We'll also examine how our approach to development addresses key concerns that B2B businesses face, regardless of their platform choice.

The number one question we are typically asked about Craft Commerce builds is about the cost. While the answer to this question depends on your specific needs, generally speaking, when compared to other commerce platforms, Craft Commerce is exceptionally cost-effective.

Below are ballpark numbers for two typical B2B Craft Commerce build scenarios:

• Smaller B2B sites with standard features can range from $50,000 to $70,000.

• More complex builds — with custom workflows, ERP integrations, and unique pricing logic — can range from $70K to $150K+.

But here are two other significant data points:

• Craft itself doesn't charge any transaction fees, which potentially can save businesses tens of thousands of dollars annually.

• At Foster Commerce, we offer robust, pre-built solutions that meet standard B2B business requirements and save businesses money. For example, our plugin, Variant Manager, is a plug-and-play solution that automates complex product management.

The takeaway: While you’ll have hosting costs with a Craft build and Craft Commerce itself has licensing costs ($499 for the CMS and $1,199 for Commerce at the time of this writing), the bulk of the investment for a custom Craft Commerce website is in development time. You're paying for a tailored, high-performance setup that extends core functionality — not a cookie-cutter solution.

Craft is one of the easiest content management systems to use. The admin is clean, modern, and not cluttered with unnecessary elements.

If your development team or agency builds it smartly (and trains your team), non-technical users can:

• Add/edit products, images, and pages

• Manage orders

• Update content easily

If you've got a development team who is committed to empowering you to manage the site on a daily basis, you won't need a developer to create routine changes. At Foster Commerce we typically build custom dashboards and content fields to fit your workflows — not force you into ours — and we code so you can control content changes.

Craft Commerce can also be used to develop a headless website if you need additional flexibility, such as the ability to easily implement omnichannel marketing.

Yes! We have designed and pre-built an optimized cart and checkout in our plugin, Foster Checkout.

Foster Checkout provides a default cart and checkout flow for Commerce in the same way that Shopify does for its sites. This means that when you build your store with us, you won't need to design or develop your own cart and checkout.

Foster Checkout saves tens, if not hundreds, of hours in design and development. It comes ready to work with Klaviyo Connect and gift voucher plugins, It supports Stripe and other payment gateways too.

If you need a checkout flow that requires more customization or full customization, we can easily extend our plugin or even build one from scratch entirely. Either way, you'll have an optimized checkout flow.

Yes! While Craft Commerce doesn't come with robust reporting out of the box, you can choose to send data to any third-party reporting service. For example you can connect:

• Looker Studio

• Power BI

• Your CRM

SEOmatic is a powerful Craft plugin that can also connect your website to Google Analytics 4 or Matomo for web stats.

Need something bespoke? We frequently create custom reports tailored to a business's specific data needs. For example, we can build custom dashboards inside Craft that provide data on product performance, orders, etc. We also have a pre-built plugin, Best Sellers, a reporting solution that provides simple, meaningful commerce reports.

Yes, providing a sandbox environment is standard practice in our builds. We can even customize this feature to enable more complex content previews for marketing campaigns or launches.

With a staging or sandbox version of your site you can:

• Test features

• Train your team without touching real customer data

• Review changes before they’re added to the live website

While you have to manually add sandbox content to the live site, code changes are applied automatically after review on staging. You can also add content for review before publishing by creating a draft.

Yes! We can integrate a PIM or ERP that has an API with your Craft Commerce website. Or, we can build a bespoke solution based on your particular workflows.

In our experience, each business is different. Some prefer an integration with a third-party vendor that can pull in product data and also send customer and order data to their system. Other businesses prefer using a CSV file and a manual process to manage products and their variants.

We'll start with a discovery session to understand your systems, data formats, and sync needs. Whether you prefer an ERP, PIM or CSV files, we can accommodate your needs.

The ease or difficulty of migrating data depends on the quality of your current data. Before starting a migration, it's worth cleaning up outdated or incorrect data to ensure your data migration is as straightforward as possible. We also clean up data during the migration process to fit Craft's structure.

We can handle data migrations for your:

• Products

• Categories

• Customers

• Orders (if needed)

• Media

If you're currently using BigCommerce, Shopify, or Magento, we can typically write scripts to export and import all your data to your Craft Commerce website. The good news is that migrating data is a one-time lift, and we've done it many times without a hitch.

Craft is secure by design — and we add extra layers:

• HTTPS, firewalls, and server hardening

• ADA and GDPR compliance measures

• Role-based user permissions

• Logging and monitoring

We also offer ongoing and affordable Site & Server Management plans that ensure your website and its plugins are updated as needed, or you can manage it in-house with training.

In our experience, growing businesses expect to add new features and functionality to their website after initial launch. Since Craft Commerce software enables modular growth, it's simple to add precisely what you need to your site as your business grows and expands. For example, after launch, we can:

• Add distributor logins, gated content, or quoting tools

• Hook in new APIs or services

• Build out custom landing pages or microsites

• Translate your site into different languages using AI

When you build your website with Craft Commerce and choose us as your development team, we won't fence you in. We can scale with you — and you don't have to rebuild from scratch when things change.