Online shops
Ecommerce website design, priced up front and live in weeks
We build online shops for small businesses, starting at £1,250. That covers the design, the product setup, payments, postage rules and the VAT settings, plus the analytics that tell you which products actually earn their place. Most shops go live in four to six weeks.
- From £1,250
- Live in 4–6 weeks
- You own it outright
What an ecommerce build actually includes
An online shop is a website with a warehouse attached, and the difference is almost entirely in the parts a customer never sees. Anyone can put a product grid on a page. Making the stock number right, the postage sensible, the VAT correct and the order arriving somewhere useful is the job.
So a build with us covers the shopfront and the machinery behind it: product and variant setup, a payment provider connected and tested with real transactions, postage rules that reflect what you actually charge rather than a flat guess, tax settings checked against how you are registered, and order notifications going wherever your team already works.
The starting price is £1,250 for a shop with a manageable catalogue. Larger catalogues, unusual variant structures and integrations with a system you already run are quoted on top, and quoted before we start rather than discovered halfway through.
The general case for a site that earns its keep is on our main page about web design in Nottinghamshire.
Included in every shop we build
Whether the catalogue is twelve products or twelve hundred.
- Product, category and variant setup, with your first batch loaded rather than left as an empty template
- A payment provider connected and tested end to end with real card transactions before launch
- Postage and delivery rules that match what you charge, including collection and zone pricing where you use them
- VAT configured against how you are actually registered, including zero-rated and mixed baskets
- Abandoned basket recovery, because a meaningful share of orders are recoverable with one email
- Order confirmations, dispatch notices and stock alerts routed to the people who act on them
- Analytics with ecommerce tracking, so you can see revenue per product rather than only visitors
- Training for whoever adds products, priced into the build rather than sold afterwards
- Fast UK hosting with SSL, included for the first year
Where small online shops usually lose money
Almost nobody loses sales because the shop looks wrong. They lose them at the checkout, on a phone, on a patchy signal, at the point where the postage cost appears and turns out to be a surprise.
The other common leak is stock. A shop showing an item as available when it is not produces a refund, an apology and a customer who does not come back, and it happens whenever the website and the place you actually count stock are two separate systems that nobody reconciles.
- Postage shown early rather than revealed at the last step
- A checkout that works one-handed on a phone
- Stock counted in one place, not two
- Guest checkout, because forcing an account costs orders
When a shop should really be software
A good share of the ecommerce enquiries we take are not really shops. They are trade customers with agreed pricing, or a product configured to order, or a business that needs the order to trigger something on a workshop floor rather than a picking list.
Standard ecommerce platforms handle those badly, and the usual outcome is three plugins fighting each other and a monthly bill that grows every year. Being developers rather than a design shop means we can tell you when the honest answer is a piece of software with a shop attached, what that would cost, and when it is genuinely not worth it.
Most of the time the answer is that the standard build is right and the clever version is a waste of money. We would rather say that at the quoting stage than three months in.
Where a shop really needs to be a system, that work sits under custom software development.
Already selling and unhappy with the platform?
Migrating a shop is a normal job rather than a special one. Products, customers, order history and URLs all move, and the redirects matter more than anything else because a shop that changes every product URL without redirecting them loses the rankings that were bringing the orders in.
Tell us what you are on now and roughly how many products you have, and we will tell you what a move looks like and what it costs before you commit to anything.
Get in touch
Talk to us about ecommerce
A few lines is enough. We will tell you straight whether we can help, what it would cost and how quickly we can be there. No hard sell, and no follow-up sequence if you decide against it.
- We reply within one working day
- A straight answer, including when it is no
- Free process review available, before any money changes hands
Would rather just ring? 01623 354250, Mon–Fri, 9am–5:30pm.
Frequently asked questions
If the answer is not here, ask us. You will get a straight one, from someone who does the work.
Mon–Fri, 9am–5:30pm
How much does an ecommerce website cost?
Our online shops start at £1,250 for a build with a manageable catalogue, and that is a fixed price agreed before we start rather than an estimate that moves. Larger catalogues, complex variants and integrations with a system you already run are quoted on top, with the number given up front.
How long does an online shop take to build?
Four to six weeks for most shops. The variable is almost never the build. It is how quickly we get product data, photography and sign-off, and we will tell you at the start which of those is likely to be the constraint.
Do I own the shop or am I renting it?
You own it. The build is a one-off price and the site is yours, including the code and the content. Hosting and support are separate and optional, and you can take the site elsewhere whenever you want without asking us for permission.
Can you connect the shop to my stock or accounts system?
Usually yes, and it is one of the more valuable things we do. Whether it is worth it depends on how many orders you take and how much of the double entry is actually costing you. We will do that arithmetic with you rather than selling the integration by default.
What happens about payments and card fees?
You hold the account with the payment provider directly, so the fees are yours and transparent rather than marked up through us. We connect it, test it with real transactions before launch, and hand over the login.
Do you handle product photography?
We arrange it where it is needed and price it separately so you can see what it costs. For a lot of small catalogues, consistent photographs taken properly are the single biggest improvement available, and it is worth doing before launch rather than after.
