E-commerce Build
A shop is not a website
with a buy button on it.
Four of the fourteen sites sell something, and two of the three apps do too. The interesting work is rarely the storefront. It is how a price gets calculated, and what the owner can change on a Tuesday afternoon without calling anyone.
The problem
The storefront is the easy half.
Every platform will give you a grid of products and a checkout. That part is solved, and paying someone to rebuild it is usually waste. What is not solved is the shape of your particular catalogue: the product priced by the square metre, the item that needs a measurement before anyone can quote it, the bundle that only exists in your head.
The other unsolved half is who runs it afterwards. A shop the owner cannot change is a shop that goes stale, and then quietly stops being the thing anyone updates.
What you get
A catalogue that matches reality
Your products modelled the way you actually sell them, including the ones priced by measurement rather than by unit.
The path to purchase
What a buyer has to know, and in what order, before they will commit. Asked at the point it saves a round of email rather than after.
The shop itself
Built on a platform picked for your catalogue and your team, with payment, delivery and tax wired up.
The owner's controls
Adding a product, changing a price, running an offer, publishing a gallery. All of it without me.
A handover
Written for whoever will actually be doing it, not for a developer.
How it runs
Six to twelve weeks, driven mostly by how unusual the catalogue is.
Model the catalogue
How your products vary, how they are priced, and which of those variations a customer must choose before checkout.
Design the path
The route from arriving to buying, with the questions placed where they help rather than where they interrupt.
Build and wire
Storefront, payment, delivery and tax, plus whatever admin the owner needs behind it.
Load and hand over
Real products in, tested end to end with a real payment, then handed to the person who will run it.
What this looks like
Two published, and one that sells nothing on purpose.
- WAD-StudioWallpaper sold directly, with the bespoke option asking for wall length and height at enquiry, because on a printed wall the price is a function of the measurement.
- Fedia JacobsA bilingual site for a psychiatrist and author, selling her books alongside the professional practice.
- Spiti GreeceNot a shop, deliberately. Live availability and a visible nightly price, but an enquiry the owner accepts by hand, because a family letting two houses wanted the last word on who stays.
What it costs
Quoted on scope
Quoted on scope, usually six to twelve weeks
Quoted on scope, after a conversation.
Catalogue shape drives the cost far more than product count does. Two hundred simple products is a smaller job than twenty that are priced by area, configured to order and shipped on different terms.
So the number comes after a look at what you sell. It is fixed for an agreed scope, and if a platform you already pay for would do the job, I will tell you that instead of quoting a build.
Fit
Best when the catalogue is awkward.
The value here is highest when your products do not fit the default shape a platform expects: made to measure, configured, priced by dimension, or sold to two very different buyers at once. If you sell a hundred ordinary items, a good template and an afternoon will beat hiring me.
If the shop is a small part of a larger site, that is the website page. Either way, the honest answer sometimes is that you do not need a build.
Common questions
- Will we be able to run it ourselves?
- That is a requirement, not a nice to have. Every one of these is built so the owner can add products, change prices and publish work without booking a developer first.
- Do you do the product photography?
- No. I will tell you what the shop needs and how it has to be shot, and it is worth budgeting for properly, because on a shop the photography does more selling than the copy.
- Shopify, WooCommerce, or something built?
- Depends on the catalogue and on who maintains it. WAD-Studio is on Wix because the owner needed to publish galleries and adjust prices herself. I have no platform I am trying to sell you.
- Can it handle more than one language?
- Yes. Several of these are multilingual, with each language served properly rather than machine translated on the fly.
Tell me what you sell and how it is priced. That is usually enough to say whether a build is worth it.
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