E-commerce development for London retailers.
We build online stores for London businesses on WooCommerce, Shopify and custom platforms — checkout flows that convert, integrations that hold, and a codebase your team can still afford to change in three years. Fourteen years of it, from a studio in west London.
The store is the business. Build it that way.
Most London retailers we meet are not losing sales to their design. They are losing them to a checkout that asks for too much, a stock feed that silently broke, or a site that takes six seconds on 4G outside Zone 1.
Checkout That Completes
Fewer fields, honest delivery costs shown early, and the payment methods your customers actually reach for. Most abandonment is decided before the payment screen.
Integrations That Fail Loudly
Stock, ERP, accounting, fulfilment and courier feeds — built to alert you when they break rather than go quiet. A silent integration failure costs months before anyone notices.
Fast on a Phone, on the Tube
Performance budgeted from the first commit, tested on real mobile connections. Speed is a conversion feature before it is a technical one.
WooCommerce, Shopify, or something bespoke?
There is no universally right answer, and any agency that gives you one before asking about your catalogue, your margins and who maintains the site is selling what they happen to build. The honest version is short.
- WooCommerce — when you need the store to follow your rules rather than the platform's: unusual pricing, trade accounts, subscriptions, deep content alongside the catalogue. You own it outright. Detail lives on our WooCommerce development in London page.
- Shopify — when you want the commerce plumbing to be somebody else's problem and your requirements sit inside what it does well. Genuinely the right call more often than WordPress agencies admit.
- Custom — when the commerce is really an application: configurators, quote-to-order, complex B2B pricing tiers. Rare, expensive, and occasionally unavoidable.
We build all three, which is the only reason our recommendation is worth anything. The platform comparison, without the London framing, sits on the e-commerce development pillar.
What an e-commerce build actually includes.
The storefront is the visible fifth of the work. What decides whether the project succeeds is the part nobody demos.
- Catalogue architecture — variants, bundles, trade pricing and the taxonomy your team can maintain
- Checkout and payments — Stripe, PayPal, Klarna, Apple and Google Pay, with 3DS handled properly
- Tax, shipping and fulfilment rules, including post-Brexit EU shipping if you sell across the Channel
- Stock and ERP integration, with monitoring that surfaces a broken feed the same day
- Migration from an existing store, preserving URLs, rankings and order history
- Analytics and consent that survive a real cookie banner rather than breaking under it
Storefront visual design is bespoke web design; getting the catalogue found is SEO. Both are quoted separately so you can see what you are paying for.
What is actually different about trading here.
Most of e-commerce is the same everywhere. A few things genuinely are not, and they change what we build.
- Delivery expectation is compressed. London customers assume next-day as a floor and same-day as available. That is a fulfilment decision before it is a website one, but the site has to represent it honestly — a promise the warehouse cannot keep costs more in refunds and reviews than it wins in conversions.
- Local delivery zones are a real feature. Independent retailers and food brands here often run their own vans or couriers inside a postcode radius. Off-the-shelf shipping settings model that badly, and it is one of the most common reasons a London store needs custom work rather than a theme.
- Click-and-collect actually gets used. With a physical shop and dense public transport, collection is a genuine channel rather than a checkbox — which means stock has to be honest between the till and the site, in close to real time.
- Rents make the margin conversation different. A London retailer with a shop is usually carrying a cost base that makes online margin scrutiny sharper. It changes which integrations are worth building and which are a nice idea you should decline.
- The audience arrives on a phone, on a poor connection. Underground, buses, crowded networks. We budget performance against that, not against office wifi.
None of this requires us to be within walking distance of you. It requires having built for it before, which we have — and where a project genuinely needs someone physically present for a shoot or a stocktake, we will say so early rather than bill for the travel.
Where the sales are actually being lost.
When a store underperforms, the instinct is to redesign it. In our experience the redesign is rarely the fix, and it is the most expensive place to start looking. The order we work through is deliberately unglamorous.
- Unexpected costs at checkout. The single largest cause of abandonment, and the cheapest to fix. Show delivery cost on the product page, not three steps later.
- Forced account creation. Guest checkout converts better and always has. Ask for the account after the money, not before it.
- Speed on the product page. Every second of load time on mobile costs conversions measurably. This is engineering work, not design work.
- Product information that does not answer the objection. Sizing, materials, delivery timing, returns. Most product pages describe; the ones that convert reassure.
- Trust signals in the wrong place. Reviews, returns policy and contact details need to be where the doubt occurs, which is usually the basket rather than the homepage.
We instrument this rather than guess at it — funnel tracking that shows where people actually leave, then fixes ranked by what the data says is costing most. Deeper research and journey work is UX design and quoted separately.
Six phases, and you see the store from week one.
There is a staging URL early and you watch the catalogue fill up. No long silence followed by a reveal.
Discovery
Catalogue, margins, fulfilment, integrations and the trading rules nobody put in the brief. Ends with fixed scope and fixed price.
Data model
Products, variants, bundles, pricing tiers and taxonomy decided before code. This phase determines whether year three is cheap or expensive.
Design
Storefront, product page and the whole checkout, designed at mobile and desktop together and signed off before build.
Build & integrate
Hand-coded on a staging URL, with payments, tax, shipping and stock wired to the real systems rather than mocked.
Migration & QA
Redirect mapping, order history, test transactions across every payment method, accessibility and Lighthouse work.
Launch & watch
Search Console verification, funnel tracking live from day one, and a fortnight of close monitoring while real orders flow.
When the store has to know who is logged in.
A large share of London commerce work is not consumer retail at all. It is wholesalers, suppliers and trade counters who need the site to behave differently depending on the account looking at it — and that is where standard platform features stop being enough.
- Customer-specific pricing, negotiated rates and volume breaks
- Trade account applications, credit terms and approval workflows
- Quote-to-order, where the basket becomes a proposal rather than a payment
- Purchase-order checkout alongside card payment
- Reordering from history, which is the feature trade customers actually use daily
- ERP as the source of truth, with the store reading from it rather than duplicating it
This is the work most likely to justify a custom build over a platform, and also the work most likely to be over-specified. We will push back on requirements that will not earn their cost — a bespoke approval workflow for eleven trade accounts is a spreadsheet with extra steps.
Stores and retail brands we have built for.
Commerce and retail-adjacent projects across London and beyond.
That's So Cheesy
A London food brand with ordering, seasonal ranges and an Instagram audience that arrives all at once.
Sofreh Restaurant
Menus and bookings designed for one-handed phone use, which is how the majority actually arrive.
WorldEx
Logistics — the fulfilment side of commerce, and where most store integrations actually break.
All case studies
The full portfolio, including the projects that were harder than they looked.
Published, because hiding it wastes both our time.
Starting points, not quotes. What moves the number is integrations and catalogue complexity — almost never the number of pages.
Store build — from £15,000
Custom design and build on WooCommerce or Shopify, with payments, shipping, tax and a catalogue your team can run without us.
Replatform or migration
Quoted after an audit. Preserving URLs, rankings and order history is most of the work, and skipping it is how businesses lose a quarter of their traffic overnight.
B2B & applications — £25,000+
Trade accounts, tiered pricing, quote-to-order and configurators, where the business logic lives in the store rather than beside it.
Care & support — from £150/mo
Updates, security, backups and monitoring. Commerce sites carry more risk than brochure sites and should not run unattended.
This page is about building stores in London.
If you are outside London, nothing here changes but the postcode — we work with retailers across the UK, and a store is specified, built and launched the same way wherever you trade from. The version of this page without the geography is our e-commerce development pillar.
If you already know you want WooCommerce specifically, go straight to WooCommerce development in London — it is the more detailed page and it is where that work is described properly. If your project is a WordPress site with a small shop attached rather than a commerce business, our WordPress agency page is the better starting point.