Ecommerce Development Built Around How Customers Buy

Cost depends on the platform, the number of products and variants, custom design and, above all, integrations with stock, fulfilment and accounting systems. Platform fees, payment charges and maintenance are ongoing costs on top of the build. We provide a specific proposal after a growth audit, with both build and running costs.

A straightforward store on a hosted platform can launch in about two months. A replatform with a large catalogue, customer accounts and ERP integration commonly takes four to six months. Data clean-up and integration testing are the stages that most often run long, so we start them early.

Shopify is the simplest to run and suits most direct-to-consumer stores. WooCommerce offers more flexibility and strong content tools, with maintenance to match. Magento, sold commercially as Adobe Commerce, handles complex catalogues, multiple stores and B2B needs, and requires a larger budget and technical team. The right answer follows your operations.

Rarely. A custom build makes sense when the buying process is unlike a normal store, such as complex configuration, quoting or marketplace logic, and no platform supports it without heavy modification. You then own every feature, security patch and payment compliance obligation, which is a permanent cost.

Fix it if the problems are speed, design, data quality or conversion, since those travel with you to any platform. Replatform if the current system cannot support your catalogue, markets or integrations, or has become expensive to keep running. We audit first because replatforming is disruptive and often avoidable.

There is risk, because URLs, templates and often content change together. We reduce it by mapping every indexed URL to its new address, carrying over metadata and structured data, keeping category and product content, and comparing crawls before and after launch. Some short-term fluctuation is normal.

Usually, through an existing connector, a middleware tool or a custom integration built on the systems' APIs. The important decisions are which system owns stock, prices and customer records, and how often data is synchronised. We settle those before development, as they shape the whole build.

Access to the current store and analytics, a product data export, documentation or contacts for each connected system, and details of the payment and shipping providers you use. We also need time with whoever manages orders and stock, because they know where the present setup fails.

No. Appearance earns initial trust, but sales depend on findable products, accurate stock, clear delivery costs, a short checkout and reliable fulfilment. Many attractive stores underperform because of slow pages or surprises at checkout. Development effort is best spent on those fundamentals before visual refinement.