Online shops
A shop that takes the money properly.
A shop is not a website with a basket bolted on. Most of it is the part customers never see: payments, stock, delivery rules, tax, and all of it has to keep working on a Sunday when you are not looking.
What’s included, and where it stops
Up to twenty-five products loaded, one payment provider set up and tested, and normal UK delivery rules: flat rate, free over a certain amount, or priced by weight. That covers most shops that are starting out.
More products than that, or anything that has to talk to your till or your accounts, and I will quote it separately. Capping it and saying so beats a number that quietly grows.
Why it costs more than a normal website
A shop has roughly as many pages as any other small site. The difference is configuration, and configuration has to be checked one case at a time.
Every payment route, every delivery rule, every tax case, every email that has to go out when somebody orders. That is where the work is, and it is the part that does not get faster however good the tools are.
What happens when something breaks
When a normal website breaks you miss a phone call. When a shop breaks you lose the takings, and quite often nobody notices until somebody checks.
In one week last summer a WooCommerce update broke the Stripe payment gateway and had to be patched the next day; a fortnight later another patch fixed a VAT bug in the checkout. A separate release quietly emptied customers’ baskets when they logged out: no error, no warning, just fewer orders than there should have been.
So every shop I build goes onto a plan where updates are tested on a copy before they touch the live site. It is the difference between a bad update being a half-hour job and a bad weekend.
Paying for it, and owning it
From £4,000, split three ways across the build, so the payments follow the work rather than landing ahead of it. You own it outright from the first payment, and the domain is in your name from the first day.
Taking card payments puts a few obligations on you rather than on me. I will set the shop up so it meets them, and tell you plainly which parts stay yours to keep on top of.
The questions people actually ask
Before you ring.
Shopify or WooCommerce?
For most small shops, WooCommerce – you own it outright, nobody takes a cut of every sale, and the running costs are a few hundred a year rather than a few thousand. Shopify is genuinely easier if what you want is to never think about it, and if that is the better fit for you I will say so rather than sell you the thing I prefer.
What if I have more than twenty-five products?
Then we price the loading separately, or you load the rest once I have shown you how – which for a lot of people is the sensible answer, because you know your own products better than I do. The twenty-five is about my time, not a limit on the shop.
Do I have to be on a care plan?
For a shop, yes – Standard at least. A shop is a bigger and more complicated thing than a brochure site, and Standard is where updates get tested on a copy before they reach your checkout. Prefer to host it yourself? I will still build it and hand the whole thing over.
How long does it take?
Six to eight weeks, and the hold-up is almost always product photographs and descriptions rather than anything technical. If you have those ready it is quicker.
Getting started
Thinking about selling online?
Tell me what you sell and roughly how many of them there are. I’ll come back with what it would cost and what I’d leave out to begin with – the shops that work usually start smaller than people expect.
Or just ring me. That works too. 07891 492388