Calculating Shopify scope hours & pricing
The hard part isn't the number.
It's consistency.
If every scope is calculated from scratch (or a spreadsheet owned by one person), pricing drifts and delegation breaks. When the person who "knows the numbers" is unavailable, the team either guesses or waits.
Who this is for
- Agencies with inconsistent pricing across team members. If two people scope the same project and produce different hours, the problem is not skill — it is the absence of shared rules.
- Teams whose hours and pricing logic lives in one person's head. That single point of failure means pricing stalls when that person is on leave, busy, or leaves the company.
A practical approach
-
Define scope variables (inputs). Identify the project attributes that actually change the effort: build type, catalogue complexity, number of templates, integrations, and markets. These are your pricing inputs.
-
Define effort rules for each variable. For each variable, set the hours or effort it adds. A migration with 5,000 SKUs requires different data work than a new build with 200. Write those rules down so anyone can apply them.
-
Define inclusion rules (which sections appear). Not every scope includes B2B, POS, or multi-market configuration. Tie section inclusion to the variables so the scope only contains what is relevant to the project.
-
Store it as a system, not a one-off spreadsheet. A spreadsheet works until someone duplicates it, edits a formula, or forgets to update the master. A system ensures every scope draws from the same logic.
Common pricing mistakes
- Pricing logic in spreadsheets owned by one person. When that spreadsheet is copied, forked, or out of date, pricing becomes inconsistent without anyone noticing until margins slip.
- Hours estimated from memory rather than defined rules. Experience matters, but memory is unreliable. Two estimates for the same brief should not differ by 30% depending on who did the maths.
- No link between scope variables and effort calculations. If your hours are not tied to measurable inputs, there is no way to explain the price to a client — or to audit it internally after the project.
Where RuleDox helps
- Rules replace spreadsheets. RuleDox lets you encode hours and pricing rules so they are applied consistently every time a scope is assembled inside Google Docs.
- Delegation without drift. Any team member can generate a scope with accurate pricing because the logic is defined once and reused — not re-invented per project.
- Inputs drive outputs. Change a scope variable and the hours, pricing, and conditional sections update automatically. The maths follows the rules, not the other way round.
Note: This is about process automation, not "perfect pricing".