Services / Ecommerce
An online shop built around your margins, not a theme demo
Quotes for the same shop routinely come back three times apart, and nobody explains why. Here's what actually drives the difference, and what I'd build for you.
from £4,500
Fixed price, agreed in writing before anything starts.
Before you brief anyone
The questions that decide the price
If you ask three shops to quote and don't pin these down, you'll get three different numbers for three different jobs and no way to compare them. Ask every single person you're considering these, including me.
How many products, and who keeps stock straight?
Forty products with two options each is a different job from four thousand with variants. And if stock lives in a warehouse system, something has to talk to it.
What has to connect to what?
Accounts package, courier labels, EPOS, email marketing. Integrations are usually the single biggest cost driver and the one most quotes stay vague about.
Is it accessible — and do they know what that means?
If the answer is a blank pause, that tells you something. It's a legal question as well as a commercial one, and retrofitting it costs far more than building it in.
Who writes the product copy?
Descriptions sell the thing and get you found. If it's you, that's fine — but it needs to be in the plan, because 200 products is weeks of writing.
Will it be measurable on day one?
If nobody sets up proper tracking, you'll never know which changes made money. Ask whether analytics and checkout tracking are included, or extra.
What happens if it converts worse?
The real risk in a redesign. Ask what gets measured before launch so there's a baseline to compare against — and what they'll do if the numbers drop.
Platform
Shopify or WooCommerce — and the honest answer
Shopify if you want to get selling with minimum fuss and don't mind paying a percentage forever. It's genuinely very good, and for a lot of businesses it's the right call even though it means I do less work. The costs that catch people out aren't the monthly fee — they're the transaction cut and the pile of apps you end up subscribing to.
WooCommerce if you need it to bend to how you actually trade: unusual pricing, trade accounts, VAT rules, a stock system it has to speak to. You own it outright and there's no cut of every sale, at the cost of somebody needing to look after it.
I'll tell you which on the free call, and if the answer is Shopify with a decent premium theme and no agency involved, I'll say that too.
What's always included
- A checkout that works on a phone, tested on real devices
- Accessibility built in from the start
- Speed measured and reported, not assumed
- Product and category pages structured to be found in search
- Full ecommerce tracking so you can see where people drop out
- A baseline recorded before any redesign goes live
- Training so you can add products without ringing me
Moving from another platform?
The thing to be careful about is search. A migration done carelessly loses the rankings you've spent years earning, because every product URL changes and nothing tells Google where things went. Every old address gets mapped to its new one before launch, and I watch the numbers for weeks afterwards. It's unglamorous and it's the difference between a migration and a disaster.
When not to hire me for this
- You haven't sold anything yet. Start on Shopify with a good theme, prove people want it, then spend money on a proper build.
- You're chasing a redesign to fix flat sales. Sometimes the shop is fine and the problem is traffic, or price, or the product. I'd rather find that out first.
- You need a hundred-thousand-product catalogue. That's a bigger team than me.
Get a straight answer about your shop
Free half-hour call. Bring your numbers if you have them — traffic, conversion rate, average order value — and we can work out together whether a build pays for itself.
