An e-commerce store built to convert.
Not built around a theme.
Theme-based stores hit a ceiling. We build custom e-commerce platforms designed around your products, your customers and your brand, fast, flexible and built to scale.
Start a project →Why this matters
A Shopify theme gets you started. A custom-built store gets you ahead. We build e-commerce platforms that reflect your brand exactly and convert at a higher rate because they are designed around your specific customers.
- Custom storefront design
- Inventory and stock management
- Payment gateway integration
- mobile-first by default
- Fast load times built in
Shopify, WooCommerce, or built for you
Most shops should be on Shopify, and we will tell you so. These are the cases where it stops being the obvious answer.
| Shopify | WooCommerce | Built for you | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live by | Next week. | Next week, if someone maintains it. | Four to ten weeks. |
| Monthly | Subscription, plus apps, plus a transaction fee unless you use their payments. | Hosting, plus plugin licences that renew. | Hosting. |
| Where the cost creeps | Apps. Five at £15 a month is a second subscription nobody decided to take out. | Plugins, and the developer time when two of them disagree after an update. | Change requests, which are visible and optional. |
| Odd products and pricing | Hard past a point: bundles, cut lengths, per-metre, trade tiers, deposits. | Possible with plugins, fragile. | Whatever the rules actually are. |
| Connects to your till and stock | Through their app ecosystem. | Through plugins. | Directly, because it is the same system. |
| Who fixes it at 7pm on a Friday | Their support, eventually. | You, or whoever you can reach. | Us. |
| When it is right | Ordinary products, ordinary postage, you want to be selling now. | You already have WordPress and somebody who looks after it. | The rules do not fit, the fees have outgrown a build, or the shop has to share stock with a counter. |
The parts that decide whether a shop sells
Not the design. These are what the numbers move on.
Speed on a phone, on mobile data
Most shops lose people before anything is seen. Images converted and served at the size the device asked for, nothing blocking the first paint. Core Web Vitals are a ranking input, but the real cost is the visitor who left.
Checkout with nothing in the way
Guest checkout, address lookup, wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and no surprise at the last step. Forced account creation and postage revealed at the end are the two biggest causes of abandoned baskets, and both are choices somebody made.
Postage that tells the truth early
If delivery depends on postcode, weight or distance, say so on the product page. A basket that gains £12 at the final screen loses the sale and the customer.
Stock that is true in both directions
If you also sell over a counter, one stock count shared with the till. Selling something online that went out of the door an hour ago costs more in apology than the order was worth.
Product pages written for a person and readable by a machine
Real descriptions, real photographs, and Product structured data with price and availability so Google can show them. This is the difference between appearing in a shopping result and not.
The emails after the order
Confirmation, dispatch, and a reason to come back. The second order costs a fraction of the first and most shops never ask for it.
What you own, and what you are renting
Your customer list
Who bought what, when, and how to reach them again. On a platform that lives inside their account and exports on their terms; built, it is a table in your own database.
Your product data
Descriptions, images, variants and prices represent real work. Getting them out of a platform intact is harder than getting them in, which is worth knowing before the second migration rather than during it.
Your checkout relationship
Payments should go to your processor and your bank. Where a platform insists on its own payments or charges you extra not to, that is a cost of being on it.
Your URLs
Rankings live on addresses. Any migration keeps every old URL working with a redirect, which is the single most common way a replatform quietly loses its traffic.
Three published numbers that decide how a shop is built
A returns policy, a checkout and a loading target: each has a figure published by somebody other than us, and each is cheaper to get right at the start than to retrofit.
- Fourteen days, counted from delivery. Regulation 30 of the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 ends the normal cancellation period 14 days after the day the goods come into the customer’s physical possession - not 14 days after the order. Where an order arrives in parts, the regulation says which delivery it runs from.
- Authentication since 14 March 2022. That is the date the FCA set for full Strong Customer Authentication compliance on UK e-commerce. Exemptions exist for low-value and repeat payments and a competent provider applies them automatically, so the aim is a checkout where most customers never see the step at all.
- Two and a half seconds, for three quarters of visits. Google’s Largest Contentful Paint target is 2.5 seconds or less at the 75th percentile of page loads, split between mobile and desktop. The percentile is the part people miss: a shop that feels quick on your own phone can still be failing a quarter of its customers, and on an image-led shop that is usually about loading order rather than hosting.
Sources, checked 26 October 2026
- legislation.gov.uk, Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, regulation 30: the 14-day cancellation period
- Financial Conduct Authority, Deadline extension for Strong Customer Authentication: e-commerce deadline moved to 14 March 2022
- web.dev (Google), Largest Contentful Paint: 2.5 seconds or less at the 75th percentile of page loads
Before you ask.
Why build a custom store instead of using Shopify?
Can you move us off our current platform without losing rankings?
What happens to our existing products, customers and order history?
Who handles payments, and are we tied to one provider?
Before anything else, work out what the delivery apps cost you: the takeaway commission calculator is free, takes a minute, and the number is usually the whole argument.
Ready to get started?
Tell us what you need. We will scope it, price it and build it.
Start a project →