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E-Commerce Development
An e-commerce build is judged on revenue per visitor, not on how the homepage looks. That puts the emphasis on things that are easy to under-invest in: how quickly a category page loads on a mid-range phone, how few steps stand between add-to-cart and payment, and whether the product data feeding your shopping ads is complete and accurate.
Overview
Stores built around the checkout, the catalogue and the data feeding your ads.
Shopify or WooCommerce
Shopify handles the hard parts — payments, security, scaling, PCI compliance — and charges for that in platform fees and constraints. Checkout customisation is limited, and app subscriptions accumulate.
WooCommerce gives complete control and hands you the responsibility for hosting, security and performance along with it. It suits businesses with unusual pricing or fulfilment logic, or with development resource to maintain it. For most product businesses without a technical team, Shopify’s constraints are a feature rather than a limitation, and we will say so even though the WooCommerce build is the larger project.
The checkout is where revenue is decided
Most abandonment happens at predictable points: unexpected shipping costs revealed late, a forced account registration, too many form fields, or a payment method the customer expected and did not find.
The fixes are unglamorous and reliably effective. Show total cost early. Offer guest checkout. Reduce fields to what is genuinely required. Support the payment methods your market actually uses — in India that means UPI and the major wallets alongside cards, and treating them as an afterthought costs real conversions. We test the checkout on a mid-range phone on a mediocre connection, because that is how a substantial share of purchases actually happen.
Product data is marketing infrastructure
Product information is not just what customers read. It is the feed powering shopping campaigns, the source of your structured data, and what determines whether products appear in search results with prices and availability attached.
Incomplete or inconsistent product data quietly limits every channel downstream. We structure it properly from the start: consistent attributes, correct categorisation, images meeting feed requirements, and inventory and pricing that sync accurately. Merchant feed errors are one of the most common and least visible causes of underperforming shopping campaigns, and they originate here rather than in the ad account.
Tracking that survives a real purchase journey
E-commerce tracking breaks in specific, well-known ways: purchases counted twice on refresh, revenue recorded including or excluding tax inconsistently, refunds never reflected, and platform conversion data drifting from what the store actually took.
We implement server-side tracking with proper deduplication, verify that reported revenue reconciles against real orders, and make sure refunds flow back. Without that, every optimisation decision on every channel is made against numbers that are wrong in an unknown direction — which is worse than having no data, because it looks reliable.
What's included
The scope of the engagement, stated plainly so there is nothing to discover later.
- Platform recommendation with an honest account of the trade-offs
- Store build from the approved design across all key templates
- Product data structure and catalogue import
- Checkout optimisation with guest checkout and minimal fields
- Payment gateway integration including UPI and wallets for the Indian market
- Shipping rules, tax configuration and fulfilment integration
- Merchant feed setup validated against platform requirements
- Server-side conversion tracking with deduplication and refund handling
- Revenue reconciliation between platform, analytics and ad accounts
- Performance work focused on category and product templates
- Structured data for products, pricing and availability
How we run it
The order matters more than the individual tasks. Doing these out of sequence is what wastes months.
Choose the platform properly
Against your catalogue size, fulfilment complexity, technical resource and growth plans — not against which build we would rather do.
Build the catalogue foundation
Product data modelled first, because it feeds the storefront, the shopping feeds and the structured data. Retrofitting a catalogue structure is painful.
Build and optimise the funnel
Templates built with category and product page performance treated as a first-class constraint, and the checkout reduced to the minimum viable path.
Verify the numbers
Tracking implemented, then reconciled against actual orders before launch. Ad platforms are connected only once the data feeding them is trustworthy.
What you get
Concrete artefacts you keep, whether or not the engagement continues.
- Complete store build on the chosen platform
- Structured product catalogue with consistent attributes
- Optimised checkout with the payment methods your market uses
- Validated merchant feed for shopping campaigns
- Server-side conversion tracking with deduplication verified
- Revenue reconciliation report proving the numbers agree
- Performance report for category and product templates
- Operations documentation for your team
Common questions
The questions that come up most often on discovery calls.
Shopify or WooCommerce — which do you recommend?
Shopify for most product businesses without a technical team, because it removes the operational burden that otherwise becomes someone’s part-time job. WooCommerce where you need unusual pricing, fulfilment or subscription logic and have the resource to maintain it. We recommend against our own commercial interest here when the simpler platform is right.
Can you migrate our existing store?
Yes. The work is in the details — preserving URLs and redirects so search rankings survive, migrating customer accounts and order history, and reconciling product data that is often inconsistent in the source. We audit the existing catalogue before quoting, because data quality drives the timeline more than platform does.
How do we reduce cart abandonment?
Start with the mechanical causes before the psychological ones. Show shipping cost early, allow guest checkout, cut unnecessary fields, and support the payment methods your customers expect. Abandonment email flows help, but they are recovering a problem that is usually cheaper to remove at source.
Do we need an app for every feature?
No, and app sprawl is Shopify’s version of plugin sprawl — each one adds monthly cost and page weight. Many common requirements can be built into the theme directly. We would rather build a small feature once than add a subscription that loads scripts on every page for it.
Why does our ad platform revenue not match our store?
Almost always tracking rather than fraud. Common causes are duplicate purchase events on page refresh, tax and shipping counted inconsistently, refunds not flowing back, and view-through attribution claiming sales that would have happened anyway. We reconcile all three sources and document where the remaining differences legitimately come from.
Related work
This sits inside our Web Development practice.
Want this done properly?
Start with a discovery call. We will tell you whether e-commerce development is actually your bottleneck, or whether something else should come first.