Retail and e-commerce development
Storefronts and the unglamorous systems behind them that decide whether orders ship.
Most retail businesses do not need a custom storefront, and we will say so. What they frequently do need is everything behind it: stock that is true across channels, pricing that reflects contracts, and fulfilment that does not depend on somebody re-keying orders each morning. That back-office half is where custom work earns its money.
The problems specific to retail & e-commerce
Stock accuracy across channels
Selling on a site, a marketplace and in store means one number has to be right in several places at once. Overselling costs more than the engineering to prevent it.
Pricing complexity
Contract pricing, volume breaks, promotions and regional differences quickly exceed what a platform's pricing model can express.
Performance drives revenue
Storefront speed has a direct and measurable relationship with conversion. It is a commercial constraint, not a technical preference.
Peak load is predictable and brutal
Sale events concentrate a month of traffic into hours. Capacity that is untested before the day is capacity you do not have.
- Custom storefronts where a platform genuinely cannot fit
- Order management and fulfilment workflows
- Stock synchronisation across channels
- B2B portals with contract pricing and account ordering
- ERP, POS and 3PL integrations
- Headless commerce on top of an existing platform
- Platform first
- Shopify and its peers handle payments, compliance, hosting and scale for a predictable fee. Building the storefront is justified by a specific constraint, not by preference.
- Payment compliance
- A hosted payment provider keeps card data off your systems, which keeps both scope and liability manageable.
- Tax and shipping
- Multi-region tax and carrier-specific rules are deceptively large, compliance-sensitive pieces of work.
- Migration and URLs
- Replatforming without preserving product URLs discards rankings that took years to earn.
What we have shipped in retail & e-commerce
Should we leave Shopify?
Usually not. Leaving makes sense when platform fees at your volume exceed what a build and its upkeep would cost, when your pricing or fulfilment logic cannot be expressed within it, or when the store needs to be a component of a larger system rather than the system itself. Wanting more design control is rarely sufficient on its own — headless gets you that without giving up the platform.
What is headless commerce, and do we need it?
Keeping a platform for products, checkout and payments while building your own front end against its API. You get full control of the experience and keep the parts that are genuinely hard. It suits businesses whose storefront is a differentiator; it adds cost and complexity for those whose storefront is fine.
How do we stop overselling?
By designating one system as the authority on stock and having everything else defer to it, rather than syncing peer to peer. Most overselling traces back to two systems each believing they are correct, which no amount of faster syncing resolves.
Can you handle a Black Friday peak?
Yes, with load testing well before the day rather than optimism on it. Peak readiness is mostly caching strategy, database behaviour under contention and a tested plan for what degrades gracefully if something does give.
Get an indicative range for a project of this shape before you talk to anyone.
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