Home Ecommerce Website Design
Online shops built to be run by the person who owns them. WooCommerce or Shopify, set up properly, with product pages that get found and a checkout that behaves itself on a phone.
Four things account for most of it. None of them are about how pretty the site is.
Products that never show up in search
Category and product pages are where most of the searching happens. If they are thin, copied straight from a supplier feed or buried three clicks down, Google has very little to work with and neither does the customer.
A checkout that loses people
Most abandoned baskets are a usability problem rather than a pricing one: too many steps, delivery costs that appear at the last moment, a forced account, or a card form that fights with a phone keyboard.
A shop that is painful to run
If adding a product, changing a price or issuing a refund means emailing a developer, the shop stops being looked after. Stock goes stale, offers run past their date and the whole thing slowly stops earning.
No reason to trust you yet
Somebody buying from a shop they have not used before looks for delivery and returns terms, a real address and phone number, reviews and visible security. If those are missing, they go back to the search results.
Every shop is quoted individually, but this is the shape of the work.
I work with both, and the honest answer is that it depends on the shop rather than on which one I prefer.
WooCommerce runs inside WordPress. You own the whole thing, there is no platform commission, and it bends to almost anything you need, which matters if the shop sits alongside a content-heavy site or you have unusual products, variants or pricing rules. In return it needs proper hosting and ongoing maintenance.
Shopify is hosted for you. There is a monthly fee and less flexibility at the edges, but far less to look after, and payments and PCI compliance are handled on the platform. For a straightforward catalogue where nobody wants to think about updates, that is often the right call.
We decide this at the planning stage, once I know how big the catalogue is, how much you want to run yourself, and whether the shop is the whole business or one part of a wider site.
Longer than a brochure site, and with more to agree up front. The sequence keeps it predictable.
What you sell, how many products, how many variants, how stock reaches you, what delivery looks like and who is buying. This is also where we find out what the shop has to talk to: accounts, stock systems, a till.
Category structure, keyword research and the platform decision, then a written plan and a fixed quote. Getting the category structure right early is the single biggest lever on search visibility later.
Storefront, category, product, basket and checkout are all designed rather than left as platform defaults. You see and approve the design before the build starts.
The build, then payments, shipping rules, tax, stock and order emails, plus any connections to systems you already use. Everything tested with real test orders rather than assumed.
Test purchases on real devices, refunds and failed payments, loading speed, redirects from any old shop, then launch and a proper walkthrough so you can run it from day one.
An online shop needs more looking after than a brochure site. Payment gateways update, plugins and apps change, stock and prices move, and a checkout that quietly breaks costs you money every hour it stays broken.
So most shops carry on with website maintenance covering updates, security, backups and monitoring, and many add SEO services, because ecommerce search work never really finishes: new products, new categories, seasonal demand and competitors doing the same thing. If you would rather handle it yourself, that is fine too, and the training covers it.
I am based in Edinburgh and meet clients face to face across the city and central Scotland: Leith, New Town, Old Town, Southside, Stockbridge, Morningside, Bruntsfield and Corstorphine, as well as the Lothians, Fife, the Scottish Borders, Falkirk, Stirling, Livingston and Dunfermline.
I also work with businesses in Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen, Perth, Inverness and the rest of the UK by video call and screen sharing, which suits plenty of clients perfectly well.
More answers are on the FAQs page.
A complex shop with integrations to stock or accounting systems typically runs to three to six months. A smaller catalogue on a standard setup is quicker. You get milestone dates during the planning stage, and the catalogue size is usually what decides it.
It is quoted individually, because a thirty product shop and a three thousand product shop with variants and trade pricing are very different jobs. After the first conversation you get a written, fixed quote covering exactly what is included.
WooCommerce if you want to own the platform outright, avoid a monthly platform fee and need flexibility. Shopify if you want less to look after and a simpler catalogue. I build on both and will give you a straight recommendation once I know what you are selling and who is going to run it.
Yes. Products, variants, customers and order history can normally be migrated, and every old product and category address is mapped to its new one with a 301 redirect so you keep the search visibility you already have.
No. Adding products, changing prices, running a discount and processing refunds are all things you will be shown how to do, and they are meant to be done by whoever runs the business rather than a developer.
Payments go through an established payment provider, so card details are handled by them rather than stored on your site. The shop runs over SSL, and security, updates and backups are part of ongoing maintenance.
Tell me what you sell, roughly how many products there are and how you handle stock at the moment. I will tell you which platform I would use and what the build involves.
Or call 07905 819522, Monday to Sunday, 9am to 7pm.
