What is ecommerce development?

Ecommerce development is the work of building and running the store itself: templates, checkout, integrations, and the product and customer data underneath. Design decides how it looks. Development decides whether it loads, converts, and survives your biggest day.

How do I value an ecommerce platform design and development agency?

Weigh the fixed number against the written scope, never the day rate. Custom theme builds run $10,000 to $20,000. Shopify Plus builds with B2B or complex integrations run $20,000 to $50,000. Migrations start at $15,000. Ours is fixed before development starts, so if we underestimate, that cost is ours. If you are handed a range, ask what closes the gap.

How long will my build take, and what do you need from me?

Most stores go live within six weeks of kickoff: four to six for a new build, six to eight for a migration carrying full product, customer and order history. From you we need admin access, brand assets, and one person who can decide without a committee. Budget two hours a week.

What should I look for in an ecommerce development partner?

Ask who writes the code and whether you get to talk to them. Here, the developers who scope your project build it. No account manager relaying messages, no part handed to a subcontractor you never met. Get the fixed price and go-live date in writing before you sign.

How do I choose an ecommerce agency for brand growth?

Compare on results, not on how busy they look. Ask what happened to revenue after launch, not how many stores were shipped. A freelancer is the better hire for one well-defined task, like a theme tweak or a single integration. An agency earns the difference when design, development, migration and search move at once, and somebody has to answer when one breaks another.

How do I choose a digital commerce agency for my industry?

Ask for the two builds closest to your category and what changed after launch. Plenty carries across every industry: checkout, speed, data structure. Plenty does not. Subscription billing, wholesale pricing, configurable products and regulated categories each fail in ways you only learn by shipping. If nobody has shipped yours, you fund their education.

When should I hire an ecommerce strategy agency, and when should I not?

Hire one when the work spans more roles than you employ, or when a deadline makes getting it wrong cost more than the fee. Do not hire one when your problem is the product or the price, because a rebuild moves that problem rather than solving it. Under $250,000 in revenue, the same money returns more spent on finding customers.

Who owns the code when the project ends?

You do. Every line of code, every Liquid template, every metafield definition, and the documentation beside it. Nothing runs on a private system that keeps you paying us. Any developer can pick it up and carry on.

Ecommerce Agency

An ecommerce agency built on reliability and excellence

If something breaks on a weekend, most agencies are closed and you wait until Monday.

We don't do that. One person or the whole team, whatever it takes to fix it, we're there.

This isn't a support tier you pay extra for. It's just how we work.

Talk to usSee our work

Ecommerce agency team building a custom Shopify storefront

We have built 150+ stores. Here are a few.

The people who scope your build are the people who build it.

You have hired an ecommerce agency before. The designs looked good. Then the launch slipped twice, the invoice passed the quote, and six months later your sales had not moved.

The design was rarely the problem. Nobody wrote down what you were buying, or what it would cost, before the work started. So when the job drifted, there was nothing to measure it against.

We write both down first. One price, one date, agreed before anyone touches your store.

In short

We build Shopify stores and then grow them: design, build, migration, and the marketing that brings people in. One team, one fixed price agreed before we start. Most go live in six weeks, and you own the code and documentation from day one.

What we actually do

A full service ecommerce agency should do both halves of the job: build the store, and bring people to it. We do both. Most agencies pick one and hand you to somebody else for the other, which is how you end up with two suppliers blaming each other.

On the building side: a new store, a move off a platform that stopped working, or a rescue when the last team left you something broken. Anything no app can do, we write ourselves as custom development.

On the selling side: search, turning visitors into buyers, email and SMS, and the ads themselves. Same team. If your traffic climbs and your sales do not, nobody gets to point across the room.

Builds land between $10,000 and $50,000. Growth work is monthly. Either way the number and the date come in writing first.

Who we build for

Ask any agency which categories they have actually shipped in. These six are ours. The plumbing is the same everywhere. What changes is what breaks when you grow, so here is what we watch in each.

Fashion and apparel
Size and fit data, returns that do not eat your margin, and drops that hold when traffic spikes.
What breaks first: Returns. When your size chart does not match what arrives, one sale becomes two shipping legs and a refund.
Beauty and skincare
Routine merchandising, ingredient detail at scale, and subscriptions a customer can cancel without emailing you.
What breaks first: Cancellation. Hide the exit and a churned subscriber becomes a chargeback and a public review.
Food, drink and supplements
Subscription billing, batch and expiry tracking, and the label rules that follow anything people swallow.
What breaks first: Lot and expiry. Shopify counts a product, not a batch, so short-dated stock and recalls need a system on top.
Jewelry and accessories
Product pages built for a long decision, made-to-order and engraving options, and heavy images that still load fast.
What breaks first: Page weight. Full-quality images at this price point push your load time past where mobile buyers leave.
Sports and outdoors
Spec tables buyers compare line by line, wide size grids, and stock that moves with the season.
What breaks first: The option ceiling. Shopify allows three options per product, so size by width by color leaves nothing for length or fit.
B2B and wholesale
Company accounts, a price list per customer, net terms, and quote-to-order without a second store.
What breaks first: Price leakage. Trade pricing that shows to logged-out visitors ends up indexed in Google.

What does each platform really cost you?

What does each platform really cost you?
Cost or limit	Shopify	Shopify Plus	BigCommerce	WooCommerce	Adobe Commerce
Yearly fee at $1M in salesJust the platform fee. Apps, hosting and card processing are on top.	$3,588	$27,600	$3,588 plus 0.9% over the cap	$0	Quote only
Yearly fee at $10M in salesWooCommerce stays free to license. By this size your servers are the bill.	$3,588	From $27,600	From $17,988	$0	Quote only
Yearly fee at $50M in sales	Not this plan	You negotiate	You negotiate	$0	Quote only
Extra fee if you use your own payment providerThis is the number that bites. At $10M in sales, 0.6% is $60,000 a year, which dwarfs the platform fee above it.	0.6% to 2%	0.2%	0% to 2%	None	None
How many versions of one product you can list	2,048	2,048	600	No limit	No published limit
Can you change the checkout?Open does not mean free. On the last two, anything you change is yours to build and yours to maintain.	Apps only	Yes, within limits	Yes, it is open source	Yes, it is your code	Yes, it is your code
Getting your data out if you leaveSaved card details never travel in a spreadsheet. Moving them is a deal between the two payment companies, and only Shopify Plus can do it. Skip it and every subscriber re-types their card.	Products, customers, orders	Same, plus saved cards	Products, customers, orders	Products only	No order export

An agency worth paying earns its fee on this table, not on the build. The monthly fee is almost never the number that matters: the payment fee and the first limit you hit will both cost you more. Published pricing also runs out at about $2M in sales, so above that you pay what you negotiate. Shopify wins most of these rows under $50M. Not all of them, and we will tell you when yours is the exception.

When we would tell you not to move to Shopify

You need more than three choices on a single product. Working around that cap costs more than it saves.
Your checkout has to do something unusual. Shopify only lets you change it in set ways, and some rules will not fit.
You sell something most payment companies refuse to handle. The platform stops mattering if you cannot take the money.
You sell wholesale in a way that needs quotes going back and forth. Rebuilding that costs more than the platform saves.
You already have a system that talks to your warehouse and it works. Keeping something nobody loves is sometimes right.

Where headless fits

You may have been pitched headless. It is not a sixth option, because it is not a platform: it means running your shop window separately from the machinery behind it, on any of these five. You get total control of how the site looks. You lose the drag-and-drop editor, most apps, and a front-end developer forever. Under about $20M it takes more than it gives.

Not sure which column you belong in? Send us your store address and we will tell you. No charge, no pitch.

Get your free audit

What working with us looks like

Whether you hire us for one build or keep us on as your ecommerce management agency, the first five steps are the same. One price, one date, both written down before anyone starts.

Before you pay anything
We look at your store
We go through what you have now and find where people drop out, what is slow, and what it costs you. You get that in writing whether you hire us or not.
Week 1
We agree the price
We write down what you are getting, what you are not, and the day it goes live. You have the price and the date by Friday. We do not bill by the hour, so a slow week is our problem, not your invoice.
Weeks 2 to 4
We build it
Everything goes into a practice copy of your store you can open whenever you like. You see progress every week instead of one big reveal, and you approve each stage before the next starts.
Week 5
We move your data
Products, customers and past orders come across. Every old web address gets pointed at its new one and tested first, so the Google traffic you already earn does not vanish. Then we test on phones, tablets and the browsers your customers use.
Week 6, then 60 days
We launch and hand over
We go live with a way to undo it if anything looks wrong. You get the code, the files and written notes on how it works. Then 60 days of support, with your search traffic and checkout watched closely for the first month.

What we don't do

We do not make money on apps. Nobody pays us to recommend theirs, so if we tell you to install one, that is the only reason.
We do not make changes straight onto your live store. Everything gets tried on a copy first, even a one-line fix, so your shop never goes down.
We do not take a share of your company or your sales. You pay us a fee and you keep everything the work earns.
We do not give you a price in a meeting. Every number comes in writing, after we have looked inside your store.

Work we have done

John Hardy

Shopify Plus
Migration
Theme Development

Vertical: Jewelry and accessories
What was built: Replatform from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify Plus
Outcome: +71% conversion rate

Capelli Sports

Shopify Migration
UX Design
App Setup

Vertical: Sports and fitness
What was built: Migration off WordPress with full redirect mapping
Outcome: +24% conversion rate, 95% of SEO equity retained

Wild

Shopify Plus
Subscriptions
Integration Services

Vertical: Cosmetics and beauty
What was built: Ground-up Shopify Plus build with a subscription program
Outcome: 80,000+ monthly subscribers

See all case studies

The objections we hear most

“We paid an agency for a rebuild last year and conversion did not move.”

That happens, and it is not always the agency's fault. A rebuild only moves conversion when the build was what lost you the sale. So before we quote, we open your analytics and find where people drop out: the ads you buy, the product page, the cart, or the checkout. If it is not the build, we say so and you keep your money. Where you would be right to doubt us: we can find the leak, but we cannot price what closing it is worth.

“How do I know the price will not move?”

You have the number before we start, and if the job grows we requote before we build, not after. Prices move when an e-commerce agency quotes a range against a vague brief and then discovers the brief. We write the scope down first, which is why our quote takes two days rather than an afternoon. We do not bill by the hour, so a slow week costs us, not you. Change what you asked for mid-build and the number does change, but you see why first.

“What happens if you disappear after launch?”

You own the code and the documentation from day one, so walking away costs you nothing but time. Every project carries 60 days of support after launch. After that you can keep us on, hire in-house, or hand the codebase to another team. The honest limit: ownership protects you from us, not from your next hire. Hand a Shopify codebase to somebody who does not know Shopify and you will still have a bad year.

Frequently asked questions

Ecommerce development is the work of building and running the store itself: templates, checkout, integrations, and the product and customer data underneath. Design decides how it looks. Development decides whether it loads, converts, and survives your biggest day.
Weigh the fixed number against the written scope, never the day rate. Custom theme builds run $10,000 to $20,000. Shopify Plus builds with B2B or complex integrations run $20,000 to $50,000. Migrations start at $15,000. Ours is fixed before development starts, so if we underestimate, that cost is ours. If you are handed a range, ask what closes the gap.
Most stores go live within six weeks of kickoff: four to six for a new build, six to eight for a migration carrying full product, customer and order history. From you we need admin access, brand assets, and one person who can decide without a committee. Budget two hours a week.
Ask who writes the code and whether you get to talk to them. Here, the developers who scope your project build it. No account manager relaying messages, no part handed to a subcontractor you never met. Get the fixed price and go-live date in writing before you sign.
Compare on results, not on how busy they look. Ask what happened to revenue after launch, not how many stores were shipped. A freelancer is the better hire for one well-defined task, like a theme tweak or a single integration. An agency earns the difference when design, development, migration and search move at once, and somebody has to answer when one breaks another.
Ask for the two builds closest to your category and what changed after launch. Plenty carries across every industry: checkout, speed, data structure. Plenty does not. Subscription billing, wholesale pricing, configurable products and regulated categories each fail in ways you only learn by shipping. If nobody has shipped yours, you fund their education.
Hire one when the work spans more roles than you employ, or when a deadline makes getting it wrong cost more than the fee. Do not hire one when your problem is the product or the price, because a rebuild moves that problem rather than solving it. Under $250,000 in revenue, the same money returns more spent on finding customers.
You do. Every line of code, every Liquid template, every metafield definition, and the documentation beside it. Nothing runs on a private system that keeps you paying us. Any developer can pick it up and carry on.

Next step

Tell us about your store

You've got two ways to do this. Use the button below to book a free 30-minute call at a time that suits you, or fill in the form and we'll get back to you. On the call you'll speak to an ecommerce expert who listens to what's going on and tells you honestly whether we can help.

We'll also audit whatever is holding your store back. Tell us the one thing bothering you most, whether that's speed, conversion, or a build that has stalled, and we'll come back with what's actually happening, why it's happening, and how to fix it. This free audit covers that one problem you're facing right now. It won't be a complete review of your entire site.

You'll have it within three business days.

Book a 30-minute call

A senior developer replies within one working day. You won't be added to a mailing list, and nobody will call you to ask if you read it.

An ecommerce agency built on reliability and excellence

We have built 150+ stores. Here are a few.

What we actually do

Who we build for

Fashion and apparel

Beauty and skincare

Food, drink and supplements

Jewelry and accessories

Sports and outdoors

B2B and wholesale

What does each platform really cost you?

When we would tell you not to move to Shopify

Where headless fits

What working with us looks like

We look at your store

We agree the price

We build it

We move your data

We launch and hand over

What we don't do

Work we have done

The objections we hear most

“We paid an agency for a rebuild last year and conversion did not move.”

“How do I know the price will not move?”

“What happens if you disappear after launch?”

Frequently asked questions

What is ecommerce development?

How do I value an ecommerce platform design and development agency?

How long will my build take, and what do you need from me?

What should I look for in an ecommerce development partner?

How do I choose an ecommerce agency for brand growth?

How do I choose a digital commerce agency for my industry?

When should I hire an ecommerce strategy agency, and when should I not?

Who owns the code when the project ends?

Tell us about your store

By market

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