I build bespoke WooCommerce stores for small UK businesses. Conversion-led, fast, and easy to manage — from product schema to Core Web Vitals.
I work with small businesses across West and South-West London. Bespoke from the first wireframe, scoped and agreed in a clear written proposal before anything starts, and joined-up across the disciplines I deliver.
Ecommerce design is user experience applied to the moment money changes hands — where every extra field, unclear delivery cost or moment of doubt is a customer lost at the till. We design checkouts the way a good shopkeeper arranges a counter. It’s one moment in the journey we map across user experience at every level.
How we design and build an ecommerce website
Every store we build follows the same milestone-led process we use across the studio, which means the work is broken into stages that each end in something working that you can click through and sign off, rather than weeks of design you can only look at, and for a typical WooCommerce build it runs roughly like this.
- Discovery and scope. We start by understanding how the shop actually runs day to day, from how products are organised and how orders are picked, packed and shipped to the questions customers keep asking, because a store that fits the realities of the business saves time behind the counter as well as winning sales in front of it, and we agree it all in a clear written proposal before anything starts.
- A working storefront on staging. The homepage, core navigation and your brand are applied on a private staging site that is real and clickable on a phone as well as a desktop, so the overall direction is settled early and everything after it builds on something you have already seen.
- Products, payments and delivery. We set up the product catalogue with editable product content, connect payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal, and configure shipping and tax, then test the whole journey from basket to confirmation before a customer ever sees it.
- Search and speed. Product schema, on-page SEO foundations and Core Web Vitals work go in before launch, so the store loads quickly and your products have a fair chance of being found.
- Launch and handover. Final testing, the move to your live domain, training on managing products and orders, and support for the first couple of weeks while the store settles in.
Most ecommerce builds take between eight and twelve weeks from kick-off, depending on the size of the catalogue and how quickly content and decisions come back from your side, and throughout the project you will always know what we are working on that week and what we need from you.
Ecommerce websites we have designed
Our ecommerce work ranges from specialist retail to food businesses that wanted to take orders online, and two examples give a good sense of it: for Allstar Uhlmann UK, who bring two of the best-known fencing brands together under one roof, we moved the shop onto WordPress and rebuilt the product list around the realities of a busy shop so that assembling and shipping orders took less time, while for The Bread Basket Bakery we added ecommerce to a refreshed website so that the offices, cafés and restaurants they already supplied could order online rather than by phone and email. If you would like to read more about what tends to make a store sell, our article on what actually drives sales in ecommerce website design goes into it in more depth.
Ecommerce website design FAQs
Which platform do you build ecommerce websites on?
We build bespoke stores on WooCommerce, which runs on WordPress, because it gives you a shop that sits on a site you own and can manage yourself alongside the rest of your content, with room to grow from a handful of products to a full catalogue without having to change platform, and it works comfortably with the payment, shipping and search tools a small business usually needs.
How long does it take to design and build an online shop?
Most of our ecommerce builds take between eight and twelve weeks from kick-off, and where a project lands in that range usually depends on the size of the catalogue, how much the store has to connect to, and how quickly product content, photography and decisions come back from your side, which is why we agree the scope and the milestones in writing before anything starts.
Will I be able to add products and manage orders myself?
Yes, and that is built into the way we hand a store over, because product content is set up so it can be edited without touching any code and every build includes training on managing products and orders, so the day-to-day running of the shop stays in your hands and you only need us for the bigger pieces of work.
How do you help a new online store get found on Google?
Search is part of the build rather than an afterthought, so every store launches with product schema, on-page SEO foundations and attention to Core Web Vitals, which gives your products a fair chance of appearing properly in search results, and if you would like ongoing help growing that traffic our SEO service picks up where the build leaves off.
Can you look after the store once it is live?
Yes, the first couple of weeks after launch are covered by post-launch support while the store settles in, and after that you can keep it on one of our website maintenance plans, which take care of updates, backups and security and performance monitoring, with our Complete plan designed with smaller ecommerce sites in mind.
