The design is the part everyone looks at. What decides whether the store makes money is underneath: inventory that agrees with itself, a checkout that survives a bad connection on a phone, and orders that reach fulfillment without anyone retyping them.
Most abandoned carts are not a pricing problem. They are a form that fights the keyboard, a payment step that reloads, or three seconds of waiting on a mediocre connection. This is the cheapest revenue in e-commerce and the most ignored.
The store, the warehouse and the marketplace each believing something different. You discover it when you oversell and have to send the apology email, which costs more than the order.
Variants, bundles, options that only exist for some products. Get this wrong at the start and every future feature fights it. It is the decision that quietly determines how hard everything else will be.
Rates calculated from real dimensions and real carrier data, not a flat guess. Surprise shipping at checkout is one of the most reliable ways to lose a sale that was already won.
Refunding is easy. Knowing which products come back, why, and what that costs across a season is what stops you from reordering the item that eats your margin.
Into accounting and fulfillment without a person retyping them. Nobody budgeted for that role and it grows with every good month you have.
We will say this before you ask, because it decides your budget: for most stores, keep the platform.
Shopify and its equivalents handle storefront, checkout, payments and PCI compliance better than a custom build will, and they absorb the maintenance of all three. Rebuilding that is expensive and buys you almost nothing.
Custom earns its place where the platform stops: operational logic that does not fit the template, pricing rules the platform cannot express, inventory reconciling across channels that each think they are authoritative, or an integration with a system that has no app.
The pattern that works for most brands is the platform doing what it is good at, with a custom layer alongside it doing the part that is actually yours. Full custom makes sense at real volume, or when the business model itself is unusual.
If you came here expecting us to recommend a rebuild, this is us telling you it is usually the wrong call. We would rather scope the smaller project.
Before anything is built. Every product, category and content URL gets a destination on the new platform. Stores that leave this for launch week routinely lose a third of their organic traffic.
The old store always has more customization than anyone remembers. Finding it during the build is normal; finding it after launch is what turns a migration into a crisis.
Products, variants, images, metadata, reviews and past orders. Reviews and order history are the two most commonly lost, and both are hard to recover afterwards.
Never in Q4, never during your season. The window is agreed in writing at the start, along with the rollback plan nobody expects to use.
Payments and PCI stay with your processor, which is where they belong. What we build is the layer that connects the store to how your business actually runs, and that is the work that keeps paying after the redesign stops being new.
Stay on Shopify for storefront, checkout and payments. It does those better and cheaper than a custom build, and it handles PCI compliance so you do not have to. Build custom for the operational logic Shopify does not cover: how inventory reconciles across your channels, how orders route, how your pricing rules actually work. The expensive mistake is replacing the parts the platform already does well.
Usually the problem is plugin accumulation rather than WooCommerce itself. We audit what each plugin is doing, how many are duplicating work, and what the update path looks like. Sometimes the answer is consolidating; sometimes it is moving to a platform with less surface area. We tell you which before quoting a migration.
Moving a catalog with a few hundred products, keeping URLs and search rankings intact, is usually four to eight weeks. The catalog itself is rarely the hard part. Redirect mapping, historical order data and anything customized on the old platform are what stretch timelines, so those get audited before we commit to a date.
This is where most migrations lose money. Every URL that changes needs a redirect, every product page needs its metadata carried over, and the structured data has to survive. We map redirects before the build starts, not after launch. Stores that skip this routinely lose a third of their organic traffic and take months to recover it.
Yes, and it is usually where the real savings are. Orders flowing into accounting without manual entry, inventory reflecting what the warehouse actually has, fulfillment status going back to the customer. The integration work is less visible than a redesign and pays back faster.
Optional monthly retainer covers monitoring, platform updates, performance and the small changes that come out of real traffic. Peak season gets a code freeze agreed in advance, because finding out your checkout breaks under load on Black Friday is not a lesson worth having.
Shipping heavy things out of the Mountain West.
Selling online from a state that closes for weather.
A banking town with a growing product economy.
Apparel, volume, and returns that decide the year.
A store that sells north and ships south.
Fulfillment is the easy part. Everything upstream is not.
Tell us what breaks or what you keep doing by hand. If the fix is a setting in your platform, we will tell you on the call instead of quoting a project.
Tell us what you need and we'll get back to you. No commitment, no sales pitch.
Salomon Web Services