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Design & Build

Choosing and building the right store platform

Choosing the right platform to sell on, and then building it. Most of the value here is the first half. Platform choice is a decision you live with for years and it is usually made by whichever agency you asked first, because every agency sells the one it likes building.

How it runs

What actually happens, in order

  1. The questions that actually decide it

    One conversation

    How many products and how often they change. Whether you sell one-off items, subscriptions or configurable products. Whether you have someone in-house who will maintain it. What your margin is — because platform fees are a percentage and at low margin they matter far more than the monthly cost.

  2. A written comparison, with running costs

    Week 1

    Shopify, WooCommerce and headless compared against your specific answers, with the five-year cost of each including transaction fees, apps, hosting and maintenance. Not a generic table — one built on your numbers, including the recommendation not to move if the store you have is fine.

  3. Build

    Weeks 2–6

    On the platform that came out of that comparison, whichever it was. Catalog structure, checkout, payments, shipping and tax, all tested against real orders before launch.

  4. Make it findable

    Week 6

    Product and category structured data, clean URL structure, and category pages built to rank rather than treated as a filtered list. Category pages are where e-commerce search traffic actually lands and they are the most neglected pages on most stores.

  5. Launch and watch the funnel

    Week 7

    Analytics configured to show where people leave — not just how many visited. A store with traffic and no sales is a diagnosable problem, but only if the measurement was set up to diagnose it.

Scope

What is included — and what is not

Both lists, because the second one is where projects go wrong and almost nobody publishes it.

  • Written platform comparison against your catalog, margin and team, with five-year running costs
  • Store build on the chosen platform
  • Payments, shipping and tax configured and tested with real transactions
  • Product, category and offer structured data
  • Funnel analytics, so you can see where orders are lost
  • Training and documentation for adding and editing products
  • Product photography, catalog copywriting and data entry for large catalogs
  • Ongoing marketplace management — Amazon, eBay, Etsy
  • Custom ERP or warehouse integrations, which are scoped separately

Straight answers

Questions people actually ask

Shopify or WooCommerce?
Shopify if you want it to keep working without anyone thinking about it, you are comfortable with a monthly fee plus a slice of each transaction, and your needs are close to standard. WooCommerce if margins are tight, you need something unusual, or you already run WordPress and have someone to maintain it. The honest tiebreaker is whether there is a person responsible for updates — without one, Shopify is the safer answer.
What does it really cost to run per month?
For Shopify: the plan, plus transaction fees on every order, plus apps, which is the line that surprises people — a handful of apps often exceeds the plan itself. For WooCommerce: hosting, a few licenses, and maintenance, with no cut of your revenue. We put your actual numbers into both before recommending either.
Can I move platforms later?
Yes, but it is a project rather than an export. Products and customers move reasonably well; order history, URLs and reviews are where it gets expensive. That is exactly why the choice is worth a week of thinking at the start.
Do I need a store at all, or would a catalog with inquiry forms do?
For a lot of local businesses — trades, wholesale, made-to-order — a catalog with an inquiry form outperforms a checkout, because the price depends on the job. We will tell you if that is your situation. It is a smaller project and we would rather say so than sell you a cart nobody uses.
How do I compete with Amazon?
Not on price or delivery speed. On the things a marketplace listing cannot do: knowing the product, being reachable, serving a local area, and being findable for the specific search someone types when they have a specific problem. That is a content and search strategy, not a store feature.

Related

Usually bought alongside

WooCommerce stores that stay fast as they grow

WooCommerce builds and rescues. Checkout that converts, and a catalog that doesn't slow the site to a crawl.

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