Ecommerce website development

I plan online shop builds for UK retailers and see them through to launch, with the parts that decide whether a shop actually takes money set up before launch: UK card and wallet payments, delivery rates that match how you really ship, a product feed Google can read, and tracking that records every sale once, with cookie consent in place.

What a well-built shop changes

• Customers can pay the way they expect. Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal work on a phone, and the checkout asks for nothing it does not need.
• Delivery costs stop surprising people. Rates, cut-off times and the postcodes that cost more to reach are set once and shown before the basket, so fewer shoppers leave at the last step.
• Your products can appear in Google Shopping from day one. The catalogue is structured so a clean feed comes out of it, rather than being patched together months later.
• The numbers add up. Revenue in GA4, in your ad accounts and in the shop’s own orders report agree closely enough to make decisions with.

Who this suits, and who it does not

This suits UK businesses selling physical products to consumers: a retailer opening its first online shop, a maker who has outgrown a marketplace listing, or a brand whose current shop is slow, hard to edit or cannot produce a usable feed. It also suits shops that want selling and marketing planned together, because the way products, categories and variants are set up shapes your SEO and ads for years.

It is not the right service if you need a brochure website with no checkout, a marketplace with many sellers, or a large catalogue tied to an ERP or warehouse system that needs bespoke integration work. If your shop already works and only needs more visitors, ecommerce SEO for an existing shop is the better place to start.

Choosing a platform

For most small and mid-sized UK shops the choice is between Shopify and WooCommerce. This is my judgement from how each behaves, not a rule:

• Shopify suits owners who want hosting, security and checkout handled for them and are happy to pay a monthly subscription plus app fees. Its URL structure is fixed, which matters later for Shopify SEO.
• WooCommerce runs on WordPress. It suits shops that publish a lot of content, need unusual product options or want full control of the code, in exchange for looking after hosting, updates and speed. WooCommerce SEO depends heavily on how it is configured.

I would decide on the platform after we have mapped your products, delivery rules and the apps you need, not before.

What a shop build covers

How I run a shop build

1. Scoping call. What you sell, how many products, how you ship, who picks and packs, and what has gone wrong before.
2. Product and data plan. A spreadsheet of products, variants, prices, weights and GTINs. Gathering this data is usually the slowest part of any build.
3. Platform and structure. Platform choice, category structure and the URL for every category and key product, agreed in writing.
4. Design and build. Theme, page templates, payments, delivery rates, emails and legal pages, built on a staging copy you can click through.
5. Test orders. Real orders placed on a phone and a desktop with cards, wallets and discount codes, then refunded, while I check each sale lands once in GA4 and the ad platforms.
6. Launch. Domain, HTTPS, Merchant Center feed, sitemap submitted to Search Console, and search engine blocking removed.

If you are replacing an existing shop, the old product and category URLs are mapped to the new ones before launch so you keep what already ranks; that work is covered under website migration SEO.

Problems I see most often on UK online shops

• Delivery costs appear for the first time at the payment step, which loses sales and can fall foul of UK rules on hidden charges.
• Prices on product pages exclude VAT for consumers, or include it in one place and not another.
• The purchase event fires twice when the confirmation page is refreshed, so GA4 and the ad accounts overstate revenue.
• Advertising pixels load before the visitor has answered the cookie banner.
• Each colour or size is its own product, splitting reviews and producing duplicate pages.
• No GTINs or brand values in the catalogue, so Merchant Center limits or disapproves products.
• Large uncompressed product photos that make category pages slow on mobile data.
• Returns policy copied from another shop and promising terms the business does not offer.

What you receive

• A working shop on your own domain, with every account (platform, payments, Merchant Center, GA4, Tag Manager) owned by you.
• The product data spreadsheet, so you can bulk edit later.
• A record of the test orders and how each one appeared in GA4 and the ad platforms.
• A short written guide to adding products, changing delivery rates and processing refunds.
• A list of the apps or plugins installed, what each costs and why it is there.

After launch

A new shop starts with no reviews, few links and no sales history, so early traffic usually comes from paid channels and your existing customers. I would check the feed and tracking weekly for the first month, then decide where to spend: Google Shopping through Performance Max campaigns, Meta ads, or longer-term search work. The website launch SEO checklist lists the checks worth repeating after any major change.