Custom E-commerce
You stop renting
your own shop.
A store coded around how you actually sell, with your own discounts, specials and email marketing built in. Not rented from Shopify by the month, not held together with a dozen plugins, and not taxed on every single sale you make.
A real conversation, not a sales call. If a custom store is not worth it yet, we will say so.
“Do you own your shop, or rent it?”
Most stores are quietly rented, not owned. There is a real difference.
On Shopify you pay every month to keep the doors open, and a slice of every sale on top of that.
Stop paying and the shop closes, because you never owned it, you were leasing it. On WooCommerce you own it, but you hold together a dozen plugins that fight, break and slow it down.
A coded store is a third road, and it is the one nobody sells you: it is yours outright, no rent, no per-sale cut, and no plugin pile waiting to break.
If your store is doing real numbers, the monthly fee and the per-sale cut stop being small. The thing that fixes it is not another app bolted on. It is a store coded around your business, that you own, with the discounts, specials and email marketing built into it instead of rented by the month.
What we actually build.
Not a theme with ten plugins stacked on top. A real store, coded around how you sell, with the parts you usually rent as separate apps built right in.
A checkout that is yours
A fast, coded checkout with your own payment gateway, so there is no per-sale cut to a platform and nobody standing between you and the money your store takes.
Discounts and specials
Coupons, bundles, member prices and timed specials, built into the store instead of rented as another monthly app, and running exactly the way your promotions actually work.
Your own email marketing
Newsletters, abandoned-cart emails and win-back campaigns sent from inside your own store, to your own list, with no per-contact fee to a separate mailing platform.
Our own CRM built in
Every customer, order and conversation in one place you own, so you can see who buys what, reward the regulars, and market to them without exporting to anyone.
Stock and orders, coded
Inventory, orders, shipping and refunds handled in one coded system, no plugin juggling, so stock stays right and an order never falls between two apps that do not talk.
Customer accounts
Shoppers log in, reorder in a tap, track deliveries and manage returns themselves, so the store quietly does the work your inbox used to do all day.
Product shops, bookings, vouchers, and whatever you sell.
This is where most people arrive certain their store is unusual, and it almost never is. Product shops, subscription boxes, booking and voucher sales, restaurant ordering, guesthouse packages, lead-generation storefronts, it is the same handful of shapes underneath. Truly, anything you sell, we can code the store for it. If yours is not listed, that means nothing. Ask.
Lead generation
Platforms that turn searches into enquiries, and enquiries into money.
If you can sell it,
we can build the store.
That is not a slogan, it is the actual answer. There is only whether a custom store earns its keep yet, and that is a conversation, not a category. Most of what we build is a familiar kind of store, coded properly and owned outright, which is usually why someone came looking.
Tell us your idea →“Can’t I just build
my own store?”
You can build something. We would be lying if we said otherwise, and we are the last people who would be sniffy about AI or Shopify, because our whole business runs on AI. Spin up a Shopify or point an AI store builder at your products and you will have a shop that looks open by this evening. It is genuinely impressive, and for testing whether people will buy, it is the right tool.
They make something that looks found. The ninety percent that gets it ranking and keeps the margin is missing.
The storefront looks done. A storefront that looks done still ranks for nothing and sells to nobody.
You have to know what you’re looking at.
To lean on a builder or an AI store well, you have to spot when it has shipped you a pretty shell with no SEO, no schema and no structure, that quietly ranks for nothing while the per-sale fees add up. The AI won’t tell you. It’s confident either way. A business owner has no way to know, and shouldn’t have to.
We use the exact same AI. The difference is that someone who has built stores a hundred times is holding it, baking in the SEO and the schema, and answering for whether it actually sells.
A pretty shop was never the hard part. Being found was.
A minute to build, and it looks done. That’s the problem.
The AI website builders advertised everywhere produce a beautiful site in a minute, with no real SEO, no schema, no structure underneath. It sits there looking lovely, ranks for nothing, converts nobody, and brings you not one lead.
Our builder is the other kind on purpose: the SEO, the schema and the structure are baked in, because people who understand them built the engine.
A pretty website with no backbone isn’t cheap. It’s an expensive way to be invisible.
A real shop’s whole engine,
owned, not rented.
To show you the ceiling, here is the shape of one we have built, a shop that used to run on Shopify plus a stack of paid apps for discounts, email, reviews and loyalty. This is what replaced the lot, all coded, all owned by them.
The customer buys once, and every order after that already knows who they are, what they bought and what they are owed, no re-typing, no lost carts, no friction before the next sale. That is what you only get when the store is coded around the business, instead of a theme with a discount app, an email app and a loyalty app that never quite talk.
No single app does all of this, and no stack of them stays cheap or stable for long. The storefront can stay WordPress because that is the right tool for a fast, editable, rankable shop. Everything that runs the selling is coded, on its own hosting, wearing their brand, and the customer never sees the join.
The shopfront and the engine do not
sit in one bucket.
This is the part most people miss. A fast, editable shopfront and the coded engine that runs the selling are two different kinds of thing, and they belong on two different kinds of hosting, so that is exactly how we set them up.
Your shopfront and your email sit on fast managed WordPress hosting, where they run quick and cheap. The application coded store engine sits on hosting built for applications, where the checkout and the orders get the resources and reliability they need. Two homes, each right for what it holds, and you never have to think about which is which.
The shopfront, on WordPress
Your shopfront and your mailboxes live on fast, managed cPanel hosting. It is the right home for a rankable, editable storefront, and it keeps that part simple and cheap.
The store engine, on app hosting
The coded checkout, the CRM and the orders run on infrastructure built for applications, properly resourced, kept up to date, and never sharing a crowded box with a hundred brochure websites.
One shop, one bill
You never juggle the two. Both show up in a single client area, on one login, on one invoice, the shopfront, the store engine, the usage, the lot.
“Why not just use
Shopify or Woo?”
Often you should, and we will tell you when. If Shopify does the job, costs a few dollars a month and gets you selling this week, that is the right answer for a small shop and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
The trouble starts when it almost does the job. So you add a paid app for proper discounts. Then one for email. Then one for reviews, one for loyalty, one for upsells, each with its own monthly fee. Six app subscriptions, a monthly platform fee, and a cut of every single sale, on top of a shop you will still never actually own.
That is the moment a coded store becomes cheaper, and it is usually long after the point where it would have been simpler.
If Shopify genuinely fits, use Shopify. We would rather tell you that than take your money.
“So what is this
going to cost me?”
Every agency page you’ve read today has dodged this. Here’s the honest version.
Nobody can quote a store from a paragraph, in the same way nobody can quote a building from the word shop. But the ranges are real, we know them, and the maths against a monthly fee plus a per-sale cut is usually simpler than people expect.
One store, done properly. A clean catalogue, a fast coded checkout, your own payment gateway, and the discounts and email built in instead of rented as apps.
Weeks, not months. This is where a growing shop should start, and almost nobody does.
A full store with accounts, a CRM, discounts, email marketing, stock and orders. The shop your business runs on, replacing Shopify and six paid apps.
A couple of months. The commonest build, and the one that pays for itself fastest.
Thousands of orders, subscriptions, wholesale and retail pricing, a mobile app on top. This is not a shop plugged into your business, it is your business.
Longer, and staged. We build it in pieces, and each piece works before the next one starts.
Not the theme. Not the number of products. It is how many rules your selling has. “Show the price” is simple. “Show the price, unless they are a member, unless it is on special, unless they bought three, in which case bundle it, and add the right shipping and the right tax”, that is where the time goes, and every shop has a dozen pricing rules like it they have never written down.
So the first thing we do is write them down. Not to bill you for a document, but because the ones nobody mentioned are the ones that blow up a project.
Nobody disappears
for three months.
The classic way store projects fail is that everyone agrees on a design, then nothing is seen again until it is finished and wrong. We build in pieces you can actually click through and buy from.
We work out what it must do
A real conversation about how you actually sell, the pricing, the discounts, the shipping, the awkward exceptions. We write the rules down, and tell you honestly what it takes.
We build the spine first
The catalogue and the checkout, working, in front of you, early. You place a test order before it is finished, and change your mind while that is cheap.
We hand it over properly
The code is yours, the customer list is yours, and all of it is documented. You are not locked to a platform, and any competent developer can continue without us.
When you shouldn’t
build a store.
Everyone rents you a shop.
We will tell you when to just use Shopify.
If you are selling three products and testing whether anyone wants them, do not build a custom store, use Shopify and find out. A coded store earns its keep once the monthly fees and the per-sale cut have grown into real money, not before.
If Shopify does 90% of what you need and the last 10% is a mild irritation, live with it for now. If you are pre-revenue and hoping a fancy store will create demand, it will not, a store serves demand you already have. And if you want custom only because it sounds better, wait until the numbers actually say so, and we will be the ones to tell you when they do.
Ecommerce development,
in your market.
We build for businesses across seven markets, and we research each one before we write a line of code, because what sells in Tauranga is not what sells in London, right down to the payment gateway your customers trust. Pick your country and we will show you the cities we work in.
On a city page, this section becomes “Everything we do in [City]”, linking to every service we offer there.
The questions people ask
before they build.
Real questions, from people weighing a coded store against another year of platform fees, and quite reasonably not sure yet.
“How much does a custom ecommerce website cost?”
More than a Shopify theme and less than people fear, and the honest comparison is not the build price, it is the build price against years of monthly fees plus a cut of every sale. A small coded store starts modestly. A full one, with a CRM, discounts and email built in, costs more and pays for itself the moment those fees would have. The only way to know is to write your selling rules down, which takes an hour, not a paid discovery phase.
“Custom, Shopify or WooCommerce, which is right?”
It depends on your numbers, and we will tell you honestly. A brand-new shop testing demand belongs on Shopify, simple and cheap. A store doing steady volume gets quietly eaten by the monthly fee, the per-sale cut and a stack of paid apps, and that is when coded wins. WooCommerce sits in between: you own it, but you also own a dozen plugins that fight and break. Custom is the answer once you have the sales to justify owning the lot outright.
“How much does Shopify actually take from each sale?”
More than the sticker price suggests. There is the monthly plan, then a transaction fee on every sale unless you use their own payments, then a slice again inside most of the paid apps you end up adding. On real order volume it becomes a number that surprises people. None of it is hidden exactly, but nobody adds it all up until the store is doing well, which is precisely when it hurts most. A coded store with your own gateway takes none of it.
“Can I just build my own store?”
You can, and it is worth doing to test whether people buy. Spin up a Shopify or point an AI store builder at your products and you will have a shop that looks open tonight. Where it falls down is everything after the storefront: the SEO, the schema, the speed, the real checkout, and actually owning it rather than renting it by the month. The pretty shop is the easy part. Being found, and keeping your margin, is the part we do.
“What are the disadvantages of WooCommerce?”
Nothing, until it grows. WooCommerce is free and you own it, which is genuinely good. The catch is that every real feature is a separate plugin, and a busy store ends up running fifteen of them, from fifteen developers, updating on their own schedules and occasionally breaking each other. It gets slow, and slow shops rank worse and sell less. It is a fine place to start and an awkward place to stay, and the fix is not a sixteenth plugin, it is coding the parts that matter into the store itself.
“Do I need a Ltd to sell online?”
To take payments as a proper business, most gateways and platforms do want you registered, and it keeps your personal details and your liability where they belong. You can start as a sole trader or an individual on many platforms, but a registered business looks the part and unlocks better payment terms. It is a short admin job, not a wall, and we will point you at exactly what your country and your gateway need, so it never holds the store up.
“Is Shopify still worth it in 2026?”
For a lot of shops, yes, and we will say so plainly. If you are starting out, or your volume is modest, Shopify is fast, safe and cheap enough, and building custom would waste your money. It stops being worth it at the point where the monthly fee, the per-sale cut and the pile of paid apps add up to more than owning a coded store would, and where being locked to their platform starts to cost you. We will tell you honestly which side of that line you are on.
“Will AI replace ecommerce?”
No, and it will not replace stores either, but it is changing how people find them. Shoppers increasingly ask an AI what to buy, and it answers from sites it can actually read, ones with real structure, schema and content. A pretty storefront that AI and Google cannot parse simply will not be in the answer. That is the whole reason we bake SEO and schema into the store from the start, so you are found in the new way of searching, not just the old one.
Still wondering.
How long does it take to build an online store?
+Do I have to leave Shopify or WooCommerce?
+Do you build the storefront by hand?
+Will my products actually rank on Google?
+Do you charge a fee on my sales?
+Is the discount and email marketing really built in?
+Who owns the store and the customer list?
+Can it handle a big catalogue and busy sales?
+Is this the same as your AI website builder?
+What is the first step?
+Have more questions?
Ask the AI chat, it knows everything on this page. Rather talk to a person? It hands you straight over.
Tell us what you actually sell.
We will tell you whether to code it or just use Shopify, what it takes, and what it costs.