E-commerce Store Development

A business that already sells in person has a catalogue, a price list, delivery arrangements, and staff who answer stock questions. Putting that online means expressing each decision in software. The problems we get called in to fix are rarely about how the store looks: an order arrives with the wrong tax line, a payment method half the customers use is missing at checkout, or one variant creates a shipping rate nobody configured.

We build storefronts on Shopify, WooCommerce, and custom stacks, and the checkout gets the most attention. If a customer cannot complete a purchase on a phone in under a minute, the rest of the work matters less.

What an online store is made of

Four systems have to agree with each other: the catalogue, the payment path, the fulfilment rules, and the theme customers see.

The catalogue is products, variants, collections, and stock. Variants are where stores break: a shirt in five sizes and four colours is twenty sellable items with their own prices, weights, and stock counts, and shipping rates often depend on those weights.

The payment path covers the gateway, the wallets, the currencies, refunds, and the failed-payment handling that follows a customer for days, including 3-D Secure steps that keep the cart on a phone.

Fulfilment means shipping zones and rates, tax rules for every country you sell into, and the transactional emails that confirm what happened. A Cyprus store selling to the UK, the EU, and the UAE has three tax regimes and several delivery promises to keep straight.

The theme presents all of it: collection pages, product pages, cart, and checkout. Marketplace templates save weeks and add code you cannot easily audit.

Platform choice

Shopify

Shopify runs the hosting, the checkout, the tax tables, and inventory sync. For retail and direct-to-consumer brands with a standard catalogue that removes a large operational load, which leaves our work in the theme, the product and collection structure, and the details around checkout.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce fits businesses where content and commerce share one site, where WordPress is already the team's tool, or where pricing needs logic a plugin does not cover. You own the hosting, the plugin set, and the update cycle. That overhead is real, so we keep the plugin list short: someone patches the site every month, either on your side or ours under a maintenance arrangement.

Custom and headless

Some catalogues resist standard platforms: configurators, rental periods, wholesale price tiers, or products assembled from parts. There we build a Next.js or custom storefront on the Shopify Storefront API or a commerce backend of our own, with Stripe handling payments and a database holding the pricing rules. This is the shape a store takes when it has to talk to an ERP, a warehouse system, or a dealer portal, and it is where B2B dashboards for wholesale accounts usually enter the picture. Moving from Magento, WooCommerce, or an old Shopify theme follows the same method: products, customers, and order history migrate, and old URLs are redirected so search positions and external links survive.

Who this is for

Retailers and product brands replacing a template store with something built around their range. Manufacturers and distributors who need wholesale tiers, quote requests, and a dealer catalogue beside the retail store. Sellers in Cyprus, the UK, and the UAE who ship internationally and need tax and delivery rules that hold up across borders.

What we deliver

• Product and collection architecture, including variants, attributes, and the filters customers actually use
• A custom theme in Liquid, WooCommerce templates, or a React front end, built mobile first
• Payment gateway integration for cards, wallets, and local methods, with webhooks, refunds, and failure handling
• Shipping zones, weight and price based rates, carrier options, tax rules for each jurisdiction, and the transactional emails behind them
• Checkout work: guest checkout, address autocomplete, express wallets, readable error messages, and cart persistence
• Speed and Core Web Vitals tuning on product and collection templates, covered in more depth under website speed and performance optimization
• Structured product data, sitemaps, and feed output for search and shopping channels
• Analytics setup that shows where carts are abandoned, plus admin handover, documentation, and a training session for the people who run the store

How a project runs

A Shopify or WooCommerce store usually takes two to four weeks from kick-off to launch, the range published on our pricing page.

Discovery takes a few days: the product list, the current sales process, the payment methods your customers expect, and the countries you ship to, then a confirmed platform and scope.

Design and build run in parallel for most stores. We design the collection and product templates first, since those pages carry the sales load, then extend to cart, account pages, and static content: theme sections and metafields on Shopify, templates and product data on WooCommerce.

Integration and payment testing come next, on a staging store with real test orders: successful charges, failed cards, refunds, and the webhooks behind each one. Shipping rates and tax lines get checked against real addresses in every zone you sell into.

Launch covers redirects, feeds, email templates, and a final pass on the checkout on a phone. After launch, bug fixes on custom code follow our standard bug-fixing policy, described on the pricing page, and ongoing development runs either hourly or as a monthly capacity plan.

What it costs

Work starts at our flat rate of $39 per hour. For a standard storefront our published typical order is $2,400 to $4,800 across two to four weeks, and the pricing page lists that figure together with monthly capacity plans from $2,699 for teams with continuous work.

Scope drivers sit in weeks and phases. A configured theme on a catalogue of under a hundred products is the short end. A custom theme with original design, subscriptions, multi-currency pricing, wholesale tiers, or a migration from another platform adds phases. Each additional payment method, tax jurisdiction, and shipping carrier takes testing time. We quote the scope after discovery and tell you which parts can move to a second phase without holding up the launch.

Proof

Sur.co is a premium brand whose Shopify store ran on a template shared by thousands of other shops. We designed and built a bespoke Liquid theme from scratch: mobile first, conversion-oriented product and collection pages, and a purchase flow that stays consistent through Shopify's native checkout, payment gateways, and shipping setup. It shows we can take a brand from design decisions to a working storefront on Shopify without borrowing someone else's theme.

TrackVision Tech sells GPS trackers to individuals and fleet software to companies from one platform. The consumer side is a Shopify store with model comparison, local EU delivery, and monthly or annual plan selection, while the business side is a custom fleet dashboard on the same backend. The project proves a storefront can carry subscription billing and sit beside a B2B product without splitting into two systems.

A Better Florist was an infrastructure engagement across 114 WordPress and Magento storefronts in a global flower and gifting network, primarily on AWS with a smaller DigitalOcean segment, supported until 2022. That project shows what happens after launch at scale: commerce run as a fleet of regional domains where hosting stability decides whether the business keeps taking orders.

Related services

• Web development for the wider range of front-end, back-end, and application work behind a store
• WordPress development for WooCommerce builds, custom plugins, and content and commerce on one site
• Payment gateway integration when the payment path needs more than a standard gateway plugin
• Website speed and performance optimization for Core Web Vitals work on existing storefronts
• Custom Shopify theme development when the store needs a theme designed and built for it in Liquid

Next step

If you are choosing between Shopify, WooCommerce, and a custom build, or you have a store that converts worse than it should, send us the product list and the current site. We will say which platform fits and what the first phase involves.

Contact us with a link to your store or your product spreadsheet, or run your requirements through the Vasilkoff.info estimator to get an initial scope and cost range before you talk to anyone.