A number produced without questions counts as a red flag rather than good service. A competent team responds with questions first: about users and volumes. A provider that prices before understanding the scope is simply working from a template, react native vs flutter and a guess resurfaces as a change order — on your budget.
Watch for a mismatch between the people you meet and the developers actually assigned. Request the names and CVs of the actual team in the contract, with wording that requires notice before anyone is swapped. A provider that will only describe roles and refuses to name individuals is reserving its own flexibility at your cost.
Ask for commit-level visibility from the first week. A partner that hands over a build only at the end of each phase is inviting you to accept a black box. Regular commits and pull requests tell you how many people are really working far better than a weekly report. The same holds for the automated test suite: if nothing runs automatically, go development company assurances about quality are unverifiable.
Ambiguous wording in the contract around intellectual property is never an accident. The agreement should state plainly that all outputs produced under it become the property of your ecommerce software development company as they are paid for. Look too at which country’s law applies and the milestone terms: heavy prepayment with no milestone tied to it removes the only leverage you have.
Last, pay attention to how they communicate. Ask what overlap the teams will share with your timezone, which person answers your questions and on what response times. Four hours of overlap is usually enough; no overlap converts a five-minute question into a twenty-four hour round trip. Careless writing in the early emails does not improve later.