E-commerce Development
Payments, inventory, and checkout that work whether you're on Shopify, WooCommerce, or neither.
Platform-specific pages exist for Shopify and WooCommerce; this one is for the engineering underneath any of them, and for stores that have outgrown a theme change. Most stores that come to us aren’t broken because of the platform — they’re broken because a gateway declines valid cards from customers in a region the risk rules weren’t tuned for, a category page re-fetches the whole grid on every filter click, or the stock number on the site hasn’t matched the warehouse since Tuesday. We build new stores and replatform existing ones, and either way the real work is in the plumbing: payments, inventory, currency, and how fast the product pages actually load.
Payment integration is rarely “add Stripe and done.” A brand selling into multiple markets usually needs local payment methods switched on per market — iDEAL and Bancontact in the Netherlands and Belgium, Klarna where buy-now-pay-later actually converts — not one US-shaped checkout shown to everyone. A marketplace with multiple sellers needs Stripe Connect or split payments, not a single merchant account absorbing everyone’s funds. If a client already has PayPal volume and customer trust in that button, we integrate PayPal alongside Stripe rather than arguing them out of it, and where the customer base calls for it we bring in a regional gateway — Mollie in the EU, Razorpay in India. Raw card data stays off our servers either way: hosted fields and the platform’s own checkout, never a custom card form, because a bespoke PCI-scoped payment capture is a liability no mid-market store needs to own.
We default to a mature platform for the cart and checkout logic itself — WooCommerce or Shopify’s checkout, not something built from scratch — because tax calculation, discount stacking, and payment capture are solved problems, and re-solving them is months of work that buys a client nothing new. What we build custom is everything around that core: catalog structure, inventory sync, integrations, and page performance. Inventory is where stores quietly lose money — one site plus a marketplace and a physical register needs a single stock number updated in minutes off webhooks, not a nightly cron job that lets the site oversell for half a day. Multi-currency has the same trap: showing a converted price is trivial, but charging and settling in that currency and keeping totals consistent through a refund is where most bolt-on plugins fall over, which is why we treat it as part of the checkout build, not an add-on.
Headless earns its cost sometimes, not always
A decoupled frontend — typically Next.js — against a commerce API like Shopify’s Storefront API or a custom backend buys real speed and design freedom, and costs real ongoing engineering: every merchandising tweak a theme editor used to handle now needs a developer. We build headless when there’s a specific reason — one catalog feeding several storefronts, UX no theme can produce, or a Core Web Vitals problem theme optimization genuinely can’t fix. For a catalog that just needs to load fast and convert, a well-tuned Shopify or WooCommerce build gets there for a fraction of the cost and leaves the client’s team able to edit their own site. We’ll say which side of that line a project is on before we scope it.
What’s included
Depending on scope: a platform and performance audit; payment gateway integration and testing across the currencies and methods customers actually use; inventory and order sync across storefront, marketplace, and any POS or ERP already in place; multi-currency pricing and tax built into checkout rather than patched on; product listing and category page work — image pipelines, server-side filtering, a hard look at which third-party scripts are actually earning their place before the first paint; and migration off a legacy platform with redirects and SEO equity intact.
How we work
We work in two-week phases against a staging environment that mirrors production, with something demoable at the end of each one. Code lives in a Git repository the client owns from day one — GitHub Actions for CI, Docker where the environment needs to match exactly between dev and production. We keep response times tight during the build, so questions usually get same-day answers rather than sitting overnight.
When this isn’t the right service
If you’re launching a first store with a standard catalog and no unusual payment, inventory, or performance needs, a templated Shopify or WooCommerce build gets you live faster and cheaper — see those service pages instead. This one is the right call once a store has outgrown its architecture, needs payment or inventory complexity a template can’t absorb, or is converting worse than it should and nobody’s found out why.
What this is meant to achieve
The measures we hold the work to, agreed with you before the build starts.
Checkout that doesn't lose orders to declined cards from the countries you actually sell into
One inventory number that's accurate across storefront, marketplaces, and POS — not three different ones
Product listing pages that pass Core Web Vitals on a mid-range phone, not just a dev laptop
A codebase and Git history your team can hand to another developer without starting over
Multi-currency checkout that settles correctly and stays consistent through refunds and disputes
A platform decision — headless, monolith, migrate, or leave it alone — backed by a specific reason, not a trend
Questions people ask before signing
Straight answers on pricing, code ownership, timelines and what happens after launch.
If you need a new store built on a theme or template, start with Shopify Store Development or WooCommerce Development — they’re more direct and usually cheaper. This page is for the layer underneath: gateway integration, inventory sync across channels, multi-currency, and performance work that applies whether the store runs on Shopify, WooCommerce, or something else. Plenty of engagements start on one of those pages and move into this one once the store is live and the real problems show up.
Probably not, unless you have a specific reason — one catalog feeding multiple storefronts, a UX a theme genuinely can’t produce, or a Core Web Vitals problem theme-level optimization can’t fix. Headless buys speed and design freedom and costs ongoing engineering for every merchandising change afterward. We’ll tell you honestly which side of that line you’re on before we scope anything, not after.
Depends on where your customers are, not on which one we prefer. Stripe is our default for most merchants; PayPal runs alongside it when a client already has buyer trust in that button; regional processors like Mollie or Razorpay come in when the customer base is concentrated somewhere they’re the norm. Card data always goes through hosted fields or the platform’s own checkout, never a custom form, to keep PCI scope off your servers.
Yes — that’s a common starting point for this service. We audit the current data model and traffic, build the new store on staging while the old one keeps taking orders, map every URL to a redirect so search rankings survive the move, and cut over in a low-traffic window with the old system left running read-only as a fallback for a few days.
Rarely from scratch. WooCommerce Blocks Checkout and Shopify’s checkout already handle tax, discounts, and PCI-scoped payment capture correctly, and rebuilding that is cost without benefit for most stores. We customize around it — B2B quoting, subscription logic, a genuinely non-standard flow — when there’s a concrete reason, not by default.
You get the Git repository, admin access, and documentation — nothing is held back to keep you dependent on us. Most clients keep us on for a support retainer to handle gateway changes, platform updates, and the second round of performance work that always turns up once real traffic hits, but it’s optional, not a condition of the build.
Ready to talk about E-commerce Development?
Tell us what you need built. You will get a written proposal with scope, timeline and price before any work begins.