WooCommerce Development

WooCommerce built for the rules you actually trade by.

Custom WooCommerce development for stores that have outgrown the defaults — trade pricing, subscriptions, product configurators, ERP and fulfilment integrations, and the performance work that keeps a large catalogue fast. Builds from £8,000.

PlatformWooCommerce
Lighthouse95+

The work that starts where plugins stop.

Most WooCommerce problems are not solved by another extension. They are solved by writing the thing your business actually does.

Custom Checkouts

Fields, validation, shipping logic and payment flows built for how you actually sell — not bent into shape around a checkout plugin.

Subscriptions & Memberships

Recurring billing, renewals, dunning, gated content and the failure cases — expired cards, mid-term upgrades, partial refunds.

Product Configurators

Made-to-order, dimension-based and dependency-driven products, priced correctly at every combination.

ERP & Inventory Integration

Stock, pricing and orders kept in step with the system that is actually in charge — built to fail loudly rather than silently.

B2B & Trade

Customer-group pricing, quantity breaks, quote requests, credit terms, tax exemption and account-specific catalogues.

Performance

Large catalogues, faceted filtering and category pages that stay fast on a phone — where most WooCommerce stores quietly lose money.

When WooCommerce Is Right

Choose it for control, not to save money.

WooCommerce is often pitched as the cheap alternative to Shopify. That is the wrong reason to pick it and usually ends badly — a store assembled from twenty extensions, each with its own update cycle, none of which quite does what the business needs.

The real argument is ownership. You control the checkout, the data, the hosting and the roadmap. Nobody takes a percentage of your revenue. When your business has a rule that does not fit standard retail — trade accounts, unusual tax treatment, configurable products, an ERP that is the source of truth — you can implement it exactly rather than approximate it.

The cost of that is real: you are responsible for hosting, security, updates and performance. That responsibility is worth taking when the control buys you something specific. If you sell standard products to consumers and nothing about your operation is unusual, Shopify is very likely the better answer, and we will tell you so — we build on both, so the recommendation costs us nothing either way. Our ecommerce development page covers the comparison in full.

Platform fitWe build all three
NeedHostedSelf-hosted
Standard retailBestWorks
Trade & tiered pricingLimitedBest
Configurable productsLimitedBest
ERP as source of truthVia appsNative
Checkout controlFixedFull
You maintain itNoYes
Inherited Stores

If your store is slow, fragile, or nobody will touch it.

A large share of our WooCommerce work is rescue rather than greenfield. The pattern is consistent: a store built quickly, extended repeatedly, and now slow enough to lose sales and fragile enough that nobody wants to change anything before a busy period.

  • Plugin audit — most stores carry several extensions doing overlapping work, and a few doing nothing at all. Removing them is usually the fastest performance gain available.
  • Database health — bloated options tables, orphaned metadata and unindexed queries. This is why the admin is slow, and it is fixable.
  • Front-end performance — category and search pages under real catalogue size, on a real phone, on a real connection.
  • Checkout integrity — the failure paths nobody tests: declined cards, stock changing mid-checkout, duplicate orders on a double submit.
  • Update path — getting a store that is three years behind back onto current WooCommerce without losing a day of trading.

We start with a paid audit rather than a quote. Committing to a number before reading an unfamiliar codebase is how agencies end up quoting figures they cannot honour — and occasionally the honest finding is that a rebuild costs less than the rescue.

Audit → Fixed in the codebaseSame week
Render-blocking assets — fixed in template
Competing canonical tags — removed at source
!11 plugins doing 40 lines of work — replaced
Schema moved into the theme
Internal linking built into templates
Core Web Vitals — LCP 1.4s

WooCommerce pricing.

The budget goes on business logic — tax, shipping, inventory, payments, fulfilment — not on the storefront design.

Standard store — from £8,000

Custom design and theme, clean catalogue structure, standard payments and shipping, performance work included.

Complex commerce — £15,000+

Subscriptions, configurators, trade pricing, multi-currency, or an ERP integration that has to hold.

Replatform — up to £45,000

Moving from Shopify, Magento or a legacy store. Data integrity and URL continuity are the work; the storefront is the easy part.

Support retainers

From £150/month for updates, monitoring, backups and priority fixes. Team augmentation at £900 per day.

The catalogue conversation comes first.

Storefront design is the visible part and rarely the hard part. What decides the budget is how your products, pricing and stock actually behave.

01
Catalogue & rules audit

Product structure, variations, pricing rules, tax, shipping and which system genuinely owns stock.

02
Architecture

Product types, attributes and taxonomy modelled properly. Getting this wrong is the single most common cause of a WooCommerce rebuild.

03
Design

Category, product and checkout designed against your real catalogue — long names, missing images, hundreds of variations.

04
Build

Custom theme, custom checkout where needed, and bespoke logic instead of another extension.

05
Integrate & migrate

ERP, inventory and fulfilment connections with alerting. Data migrated, URLs mapped, redirects written.

06
Launch & watch

Away from a peak window, with order and revenue monitoring for the first two weeks.

Are We a Fit?

When WooCommerce and when not.

We build on Shopify as well, so this is advice rather than a pitch. Choosing the wrong platform is the most expensive mistake available in ecommerce.

You are probably a good fit if:

  • Your pricing has rules. Trade tiers, quantity breaks, contract pricing, regional variation or tax treatment that hosted platforms will not do.
  • Products are configurable. Made-to-order, dimension-priced, or with dependencies between options.
  • Another system owns your data. An ERP or inventory platform is the source of truth and the store has to follow it.
  • You want the checkout. Full control of fields, validation, flow and what happens on failure.
  • Content matters as much as catalogue. If you publish seriously alongside selling, WordPress is a genuine advantage.

We are probably the wrong choice if:

  • Standard products, standard rules. Shopify removes hosting, PCI and checkout reliability from your life. Take that deal if you can.
  • Nobody will own maintenance. WooCommerce is yours, and that includes updates, security and performance. Without an owner it degrades.
  • You need it live in weeks with no budget for integrations. A hosted platform will get you trading faster.
  • You are chasing the cheaper option. WooCommerce is not cheaper — it is more controllable. Choosing it to save money is how stores end up with twenty conflicting extensions.

If you are unsure, describe the two or three rules that make your business unusual. That conversation settles the platform question faster than a feature comparison ever does.

Good fit Clear commercial goal A decision-maker Values maintainability Wants the builders
× Not a fit Lowest price wins Approval by committee Needs on-site presence Below minimum scope

Common questions.

From £8,000 for a custom-designed store with a clean catalogue and standard payments and shipping. Complex commerce — subscriptions, configurators, trade pricing, ERP integration — typically runs £15,000 and up. Replatforms reach £45,000 at the top end. The variable is almost never the number of products; it is how many of your business rules have to be implemented rather than approximated.
Neither is better in general; they are better at different things. Shopify is the stronger default for standard retail — hosting, PCI compliance and checkout reliability stop being your problem, at the cost of fees and a checkout you cannot fully control. WooCommerce wins when you need control: unusual pricing rules, subscriptions, configurable products, or an ERP as the source of truth. We build both, so ask us and you will get an answer that is not a sales position.
Yes, with planning. Product and category URLs change shape between platforms, so every existing URL is mapped to its new equivalent before launch and 301s are written for anything that cannot be preserved. Structured data, canonical tags and internal linking are carried across. Done properly a migration costs a short dip and recovers within weeks; done carelessly it costs a year of rankings and a lot of revenue.
Usually, and usually faster than expected. The common causes are consistent: too many extensions doing overlapping work, an options table that has been growing unchecked for years, unoptimised images, missing database indexes and no caching strategy. An audit and a focused fix typically moves a store from the forties into the nineties on Lighthouse without touching the design at all.
Yes — including the parts that are genuinely hard rather than just the happy path. Renewals and cancellations are straightforward; failed payment recovery, mid-term upgrades and downgrades with proration, pausing, and partial refunds are where subscription implementations usually break. Those failure cases are worth specifying properly at the start, because each one is simultaneously a revenue problem and a trust problem.
Yes, and this is often what determines the budget. We have connected WooCommerce to ERPs, inventory platforms, fulfilment providers and accounting software. The critical design decision is failure behaviour: a stock sync that breaks silently will oversell for weeks before anyone notices, so we build integrations to alert someone the moment they stop working.
Retainers start at £150/month covering WooCommerce and plugin updates, security monitoring, backups and priority fixes. Commerce sites need this more than brochure sites do — an update that breaks a checkout on a Friday is a different category of problem from one that breaks an about page, and it should not wait until Monday.
Yes, and it is one of the strongest reasons to choose WooCommerce over a hosted platform. Customer-group pricing, quantity breaks, quote requests, purchase orders, credit terms, tax exemption and account-specific catalogues are all straightforward when you own the platform and awkward when you do not.
More than a brochure site, and this is where a lot of stores are quietly handicapped. WooCommerce runs uncached queries on cart, checkout and account pages by necessity, so shared hosting struggles the moment traffic and catalogue size grow together. We generally recommend managed WordPress hosting with proper object caching and a CDN. We have no hosting affiliate arrangements, so the recommendation costs us nothing either way.
Yes, and commerce SEO has its own failure modes that general advice misses: product variants generating near-duplicate URLs, faceted filtering creating an effectively infinite crawl space, out-of-stock products being deleted rather than handled properly, and category pages with no content at all. Because we are also a WordPress development studio, we implement the fixes rather than handing you a list — see our SEO services for how that works.
We do, and we talk most clients out of it. Decoupling a storefront means rebuilding cart, checkout and account flows that WooCommerce already provides and has tested against edge cases for a decade. It is worth it when you are serving several front ends from one catalogue, or when the storefront is genuinely an application. For a normal store it roughly doubles the build cost to solve a problem that better hosting and a well-built theme usually solve for less.
Yes. We are comfortable taking a defined workstream — a checkout rebuild, an ERP integration, a performance project — while your developer keeps the day-to-day. We document what we build and hand it over cleanly, because leaving behind code only we understand would make us a dependency rather than a supplier.
On staging first, always. WooCommerce and its extensions ship breaking changes more often than core WordPress, and a store that updates automatically in production will eventually break a checkout on a Friday evening. Our retainers run updates on a staging clone, test the critical paths — add to cart, checkout, payment, order confirmation — and only then deploy. It is slower and it is the difference between maintenance and gambling.

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