Is It Out of Scope? — Web design
Is adding e-commerce functionality out of scope for a web design project?
Yes, clearly. Product pages, cart, and checkout are a fundamentally different design problem than a marketing site, and belong nowhere near the original scope regardless of how the request is phrased.
The project scoped a marketing/brochure site — home, about, services, contact. Somewhere along the way, the client asks to add a small shop: "just a few products, nothing fancy." Even a small store means new page types (product grid, product detail, cart, checkout), new design decisions (pricing display, variant selection, empty-cart states), and design QA for a completely different kind of user flow than a marketing site involves.
Is it out of scope?
Yes, unambiguously. This is one of the least contestable out-of-scope requests that comes up — e-commerce is a different product category from a marketing site, involving page types, flows, and design considerations the original scope never touched, regardless of how small the catalog is.
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Exclusions clause→ — Marketing-site proposals commonly exclude e-commerce explicitly for exactly this reason — it's a recurring enough request to name up front.
Example contract wording
Example contract wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
Our scope covers the marketing site — it doesn't include e-commerce functionality (product pages, cart, checkout), which is a different kind of build even at small scale. I'd be glad to scope a store as a separate project — can you share roughly how many products, so I can put together an estimate?
How MarginFlow flags it
This is one of the higher-confidence classifications MarginFlow makes — e-commerce functionality virtually never appears in a marketing-site deliverables list, so the classifier flags it outside_scope with high confidence and a suggested charge based on typical small-store build rates, giving the account manager a strong starting point for the conversation rather than a hedge.