Specify consulting
Specify helps businesses turn difficult customer demand into clearer commercial systems, better specification journeys and reusable capability.
Businesses often know they can deliver more than their storefront can express. The difficulty is turning that knowledge into a journey customers can use, a structure teams can govern and an outcome the business can responsibly offer.
That means two kinds of work: deciding what should exist, and building the parts of it the platform does not do yet.
Consulting is €400 per hour excluding VAT. Scope and estimated hours are agreed before any work begins.
Why this exists
The most common reason a business cannot move to a new commerce platform is not price or strategy. It is one missing thing: an integration with the system that actually runs the company, a component their product cannot be sold without, or an ordering process that does not resemble a standard checkout.
This entire site argues that businesses lose good demand by refusing requests before understanding whether they could be met. A platform that turned away a serious customer because of a missing connector would be making exactly that mistake about itself, and would deserve to be told so.
So when the product does not yet do what a business needs:
Examples of what that looks like
None of this makes Specify an agency, and none of it is a promise that any integration is possible. Some systems have no usable interface, and some components are a larger undertaking than a business expects. Scoping is where that gets established, in writing, before anyone commits.
Development
Engineering work, scoped and billed by the hour like everything else. This is what an onboarding usually needs when a business is too large or too specific for the product as it stands.
Interfaces the platform does not ship, for products that cannot be sold from a photograph and a dropdown.
Connecting Specify to the software that actually runs the business, including systems with no existing connector.
Where the standard path from specification to order does not match how the business sells.
Getting a large existing business onto the platform without losing what it already knows.
Anything built this way is scoped, estimated and agreed before it starts, and the agreement says who owns it and who maintains it afterwards. That conversation happens first because bespoke software has a cost that continues after the invoice.
Advisory
The other half of the work, and usually the half that should happen first. Building the wrong integration correctly is still the wrong integration. These are the problems Specify is built around, and if a request is outside them we will say so rather than take the work.
Understand the difficult customer requests that currently become email chains, phone calls, spreadsheets or silent abandonment.
Represent what a business can genuinely deliver, beyond what its catalogue happens to publish.
Design the process through which a customer describes what they actually need.
Expose the information customers repeatedly need and the site does not currently provide.
Decide how commercial truth is governed: who can promise what, and on what basis.
Inspect a commercial experience against a written standard and turn the findings into a sequence somebody can act on.
Turn an uncertain recommendation into a test that can come back negative.
Work out where AI can responsibly help in commerce and administration, and where it must not decide.
Decide whether demand-driven commerce is relevant to a business at all, before anyone builds anything.
Several of these overlap in practice. A capability model that nobody can approve against is not finished, and a specification journey built on an unmodelled capability will produce answers the business cannot honour.
Where this usually starts
If one of these is close to something you have said out loud in the last month, consulting is probably relevant.
The list is not exhaustive and none of it will match your wording exactly. The common thread is a gap between what a business can actually deliver and what its software lets a customer ask for. If that sounds familiar, a brief is the quickest way to establish whether there is work here worth doing.
Engagement formats
One clearly defined question, review or decision. A few hours, usually a single conversation with preparation either side of it. Appropriate when you know what you are asking and need an answer you can act on.
Understand the current process before proposing anything: interviews, existing evidence, real enquiries, and where the process actually breaks. Ends in a written problem definition rather than a solution.
Produce one concrete deliverable: a Capability Map, a constraint model, a specification-flow prototype, an improvement roadmap, a pilot brief, an experiment plan or an implementation brief. Scoped to a named artefact, so it is obvious when it is finished.
Building the component, the integration, the flow or the migration, against a scope agreed in advance. This is engineering work and it is the format an onboarding usually ends in. The agreement names who owns the result and who maintains it before any code is written.
Recurring help across product, commercial and implementation decisions, for businesses doing the work themselves and wanting someone to argue with. Billed against actual hours, with no retainer minimum.
All five are billed the same way, by the hour. The difference is the size of the question, not the rate. Advisory and engineering time cost the same, because pretending otherwise would just push every engagement toward whichever was cheaper.
The Request Readiness Sprint is a defined, fixed engagement that answers one question: is implementing this worth it for your business? It ends in a Pilot Decision Brief. If that is the question you have, take the Sprint, because it is scoped and priced for exactly that and the price is credited if you go on to implement.
Choose general consulting instead when the question is different from the Sprint's, when you already know you want to proceed, or when you need a specific artefact rather than a decision.
How it works
Five steps. Nothing is billable until the third one is signed, and the first two happen whether or not you go ahead.
1. Submit a brief
The form at the bottom of this page asks what is happening today, where the process breaks down and what should be different afterwards. It takes about ten minutes and it is the same structure we would use in the first conversation anyway.
2. We review it
Two questions: is this within what Specify is genuinely good at, and is there enough information to scope it responsibly. If the answer to either is no, we say so. Submitting a brief is not acceptance of an engagement.
3. Scope and agreement
The objective, the deliverables, who takes part, the estimated hours, the rate, the timeline, what we depend on you for, confidentiality where relevant, who owns the outputs and what they may be used for, and who reviews and approves. Where something is being built, it also says who maintains it afterwards and what happens to it if either side walks away. If the estimate turns out to be wrong, we tell you before the hours are spent, not after.
4. Work begins
The mix depends on the engagement. A diagnostic is mostly interviews and reading real enquiries. A consulting sprint is mostly modelling and writing. A build engagement is engineering, with your team involved in review rather than told about it at the end.
5. Findings become actionable
You get what was found, what we recommend, what remains unknown, and what we would do next. Open questions are listed as open rather than quietly resolved with an assumption.
Where an engagement reveals a pattern we think should eventually become part of the platform, we record that separately. It is our note about our product, and it never contains your confidential information.
Pricing
Consulting is billed at €400 per hour, excluding VAT.
Before work begins, Specify provides an agreed scope or working estimate covering the objective, the expected deliverables, the participants and the likely number of hours. You are agreeing to an estimate and a rate, not signing up to an open meter.
Currency and tax
Rates are in euro. €400 per hour is exclusive of VAT, which is applied according to your billing country.
What is billable
Time spent on the engagement, including preparation, workshops, analysis and written work. The scoping conversation before an agreement exists is not billable.
Estimates
Estimated hours are agreed in advance and are an estimate, not a fixed price. If the work is going to exceed the estimate we raise it before the hours are spent.
Expenses
Travel and third-party costs are agreed separately in advance if they arise at all. Most engagements are remote and incur none.
There is no package, no tier and no minimum retainer. The Request Readiness Sprint is the one fixed-scope engagement, and it is priced separately on its own page.
Why we do this
Specify consulting is not intended to become an unrelated agency business. It exists because the fastest way to learn what commerce software should do is to solve the problem by hand first, with a real business, under real constraints, and because a platform that can only serve the customers it already fits will not find out what it is missing.
Engagements reveal things a roadmap meeting cannot:
Some problems are specific to one business. Others reveal capabilities the platform should eventually make reusable. Most engagements will be the first kind, and we would rather say that than imply every piece of consulting quietly becomes software.
This matters commercially and not only philosophically. Custom code written for one business has to be maintained by somebody for as long as that business uses it, and a platform that accumulates enough of it stops being a platform. Deciding early whether something is bespoke or is a candidate to become general is how that is avoided, and it is a conversation we would rather have during scoping than two years later.
Merchant-confidential information stays confidential. Anything that informs the platform is an abstracted pattern, not your data, your pricing or your supplier list. Where an engagement produces something we would want to generalise, we ask first.
You retain the rights to your deliverables and your confidential information as set out in the signed engagement agreement. Nothing on this page changes those terms, and the agreement governs where the two differ.
What we do not claim
Consulting begins with evidence, constraints and a defined commercial question. Recommendations are not presented as measured outcomes, and any expected impact should be tested or verified where practical.
The single thing we will commit to is that you will know more about your own commercial process afterwards than you did before, in writing, including the parts that turn out to be inconvenient.
How we think about this
Specify keeps a catalogue of commercial improvement ideas: the problem each one addresses, how it could be implemented, what could go wrong, and what would have to be measured to know whether it worked. A selection is published, more is shared with customers, and the rest stays internal.
The published entries are a fair sample of how these engagements are approached. If the reasoning looks like the reasoning you want applied to your own catalogue, capability and constraints, that is what a brief starts.
Consulting brief
Four short screens, about ten minutes. It asks the same things we would ask in a first conversation, which means the conversation can start further along.
Start with what is actually happening rather than what you think the solution is. If you already know the solution, say that too.
Start here
About ten minutes. It asks what is happening today, what should be different, and who would need to be involved. Submitting it is not a commitment, and nothing is billable until a scope is agreed in writing.
If you would rather start with evidence than with a conversation, the Enquiry Audit is free, runs on this site, and gives you something concrete to bring to a brief.