Commerce engineering for retail brands

Shopify, Magento and Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, and headless storefronts on Next.js. We choose by catalogue size, your business to business and consumer mix, and where the roadmap is heading rather than by preference. As a rough guide, Shopify suits teams who want to merchandise without engineering help, while Magento earns its cost once you need complex pricing, multiple storefronts or a real B2B model. If your requirements are met by the simpler platform we will say so, because the cheaper build is frequently the correct one and it leaves budget for merchandising and performance work that actually moves revenue.

Yes. We build AI powered search, product recommendations and merchandising assistants that help shoppers find items faster and lift average order value. The honest framing matters here: recommendations only work when they have enough behavioural and catalogue data to learn from, so a small store with a short history will see less benefit than a large one. We would rather set that expectation up front than sell a personalisation engine that quietly recommends bestsellers to everyone. Where data is thin, better search relevance and clearer merchandising usually return more than a model does.

Yes, including ERP, point of sale, payment gateways, shipping carriers and marketplace systems, so inventory, orders and returns stay in step without anyone re-keying data. The engineering that matters is in the failure cases rather than the happy path: webhooks are made idempotent so a repeated delivery cannot duplicate an order, failed syncs can be replayed rather than lost, and reconciliation reports surface drift between systems. A one way push that assumes the other end is always available will eventually lose orders silently, and silently is the part that damages a business.

Yes, and we treat them as one problem because they are. We build against Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, measured at the 75th percentile of real visitors. Google and Deloitte measured a 0.1 second load improvement lifting retail conversion by 8.4 percent and average order value by 9.2 percent. Most of the practical gain comes from image handling, reducing JavaScript and fixing what is broken on mobile rather than from redesigning buttons.

You do, completely. You receive clean, documented and well structured code, and ownership of everything we build is yours from the first commit rather than transferred at the end. Source lives in your repositories, so you are never waiting on a handover to access your own work. There is no proprietary framework you can only maintain through us and no licensing arrangement where you keep paying to use what you commissioned. If you later move the work in house or to another agency, you should be able to do that without asking our permission.

A focused store typically takes four to eight weeks. A custom, headless or multi store build runs eight to sixteen weeks depending on how many systems it has to talk to. Integrations drive the timeline far more than the visible page count does, because that work sits inside someone else’s API and on their release schedule. We work in weekly sprints with live demos, so you see progress continuously rather than waiting for one reveal at the end, and so scope problems surface in week three when they are still cheap to fix.

It depends on scope, and we scope to your budget and priorities rather than selling a fixed package. After a short discovery call you get a clear itemised proposal with fixed milestones, so there are no surprise costs midway through. The largest variable is nearly always integrations: connecting an ERP or a bespoke pricing system can cost more than the storefront it sits behind. We will tell you when a requirement is disproportionately expensive relative to its value, because the useful conversation is about what to leave out, not only what to include.

That is the goal every time, and the method decides the outcome. We map every existing URL to its destination as a one to one redirect plan rather than pointing old pages at the homepage, preserve titles, descriptions and structured data, reissue hreflang where several regions are involved, and migrate customer and order data with reconciliation rather than a raw dump. Then we watch Search Console daily for the first thirty days. A brief dip around a migration is normal; lasting damage comes from unmapped URLs and content quietly dropped in the rebuild.

Yes. Company accounts, customer specific pricing, shared catalogues, requisition lists and quote workflows, plus the ERP integration that makes them worth having. Which platform suits depends on how much of this you need: on Adobe Commerce the B2B suite is built in and is the clearest case for paying the licence, while on Shopify or WooCommerce the same capability is assembled from apps and custom work. Switching those features on without connecting your pricing and stock systems produces a demonstration rather than a working wholesale channel, so we scope the integration first.

Yes. Everything we build is designed mobile first and tuned against the Core Web Vitals thresholds, because most storefront traffic now arrives on a phone and often on a slow connection. That means images sized and served appropriately, layout that does not shift as things load, and keeping JavaScript off pages that do not need it. We also test the actual purchase journey on real devices rather than only in a desktop browser at a narrow width, since the problems that cost orders tend to appear in checkout on a mid range phone.

Yes. Every build includes thirty days of post launch support covering the issues real traffic surfaces and no staging environment will. Beyond that, ongoing maintenance covers monitoring, security patching, performance work and new features, delivered by the same senior team that built the store rather than passed to someone unfamiliar with it. For Magento and Adobe Commerce stores, patching on a schedule matters more than most teams assume: Sansec found roughly 75 percent of stores still unpatched a week after the CosmicSting fix, CVE-2024-34102, was published.

Yes. We work with brands, retailers and marketplaces worldwide and adapt to your market, time zone and communication preferences, with a senior strategist responding within 24 hours. Practically, cross border work usually raises questions beyond the build itself: which currencies and payment methods to support, how tax and duties are displayed, whether hreflang and regional URLs are needed, and where the store should be hosted for acceptable latency. We would rather raise those at the scoping stage than have them surface after launch, because several of them affect the architecture.