Leaving Shopify Is a Decision, Not an Upgrade
We build custom storefronts, checkouts, subscriptions and marketplaces. We also tell a fair number of people that their existing platform is fine and the money is better spent elsewhere — because that is often true.
Justified, or Vanity
Shopify and WooCommerce are good software. Most UK sellers who think they have outgrown them have actually outgrown their theme, their agency, or their product data. Here is how we tell the difference on a first call.
Reasons that genuinely justify leaving
- Your price is not a number. Trade accounts, contract pricing, volume breaks per customer, or a quote that depends on measurements the buyer supplies
- The shop is a window onto something else — a live stock system, a made-to-order workshop, a hire fleet with availability dates — and the platform cannot model it
- You are the marketplace rather than the seller, with third-party vendors, split payments and payouts
- Checkout itself has to change in ways a hosted platform will not permit, such as a regulated eligibility step before payment
- Plugin licences, transaction fees and the contractor keeping thirteen extensions upright now cost more annually than a build would amortise
- Every change needs an agency because the theme has been modified beyond recognition and nobody dares touch it
Reasons that are vanity, and we will say so
- The site feels dated. That is a design and content project, and it costs a fraction of a re-platform
- The checkout converts badly. Fix the checkout you have first and find out whether the platform was ever the problem
- A competitor has a custom build. You cannot see their margin, their team or their maintenance bill
- You want to own the code. Understandable, but you will also own the security patches, the payment provider upgrades and the pager
- Nothing has sold yet. Prove demand on a platform that costs a few pounds a month before commissioning software
- Ten plugins would have done it. If the honest answer is a fortnight of configuration, we will tell you that and lose the work
What the move actually costs, beyond the build
The quote is the smaller number. Budget also for migrating product data that has drifted over five years, redirecting every indexed URL, re-establishing your payment provider and courier accounts against a new integration, retraining the people who pack the orders, and replacing the handful of apps you had forgotten were doing something important. We put all of that in the scope in writing, because the projects that go badly are the ones where it appeared later as a surprise.
The Pieces That Make Up a Store
Priced individually, because almost nobody needs all six at once.
Storefront and catalogue
Category structure, filters that reflect how your buyers actually search, variants, bundles, and a product data model that copes with the awkward cases rather than pretending they do not exist.
Checkout and payments
Card via Stripe, Adyen or Worldpay, Apple Pay and Google Pay, PayPal, Klarna or Clearpay, Direct Debit through GoCardless for account customers, and Open Banking where the basket value makes card fees hurt.
Subscriptions and recurring orders
Billing cycles, pauses, skips, card expiry chasing, failed payment retries and dunning emails. The unglamorous half of subscriptions is where the revenue actually leaks, so that is where the work goes.
Inventory and fulfilment
Stock held in one place and reflected everywhere, including the shop floor if you have multiple sites. Warehouse and third-party logistics integrations, purchase orders, goods-in, and the back-order rules nobody writes down.
Multi-vendor marketplaces
Vendor onboarding and identity checks, commission rules, split payments, payout schedules, held funds, and a dispute process. The listings are the easy part; the money movement is the project.
Performance work
Image handling, script budgets, server rendering of the pages that matter and removal of the marketing tags nobody has audited since 2021. Measured on a mid-range Android phone on 4G, not on your laptop.
The Paperwork That Decides Whether an Order Is Profitable
This is where UK stores most often carry hidden cost, and it is all software work rather than advice.
VAT, as the checkout has to implement it
- Standard, reduced and zero-rated goods sitting side by side in one basket, correctly totalled
- Digital services taxed where the buyer is, with location evidence captured and stored rather than assumed
- Prices shown including VAT to consumers and excluding VAT to trade accounts, from the same catalogue
- VAT recorded per order line at the rate that applied on that day, so a rate change does not rewrite history
- Invoices and credit notes that your accountant and, if it ever comes to it, HMRC will accept
Selling into the EU since Brexit
- Commodity codes and country of origin held against every product, not typed by hand at dispatch
- Your EORI number and commercial invoice generated with the label
- Delivered duty paid or delivered at place — a commercial decision, but the checkout has to reflect whichever you choose
- Duty and import VAT estimated at checkout when you absorb them, so the customer is not ambushed by the courier
- Returns from the EU, which have their own paperwork and are routinely forgotten until the first one arrives
We are software engineers, not tax advisers. Your accountant decides the registrations and the treatment; we make sure the store implements their answer consistently and can evidence it afterwards.
Stay Out of PCI Scope Rather Than Trying to Satisfy It
We do not store card numbers, and neither should you. The card fields on the checkout belong to the payment provider, rendered inside their own hosted fields, so the number never touches your server or your logs. What your system stores is a token, the last four digits and a card type, none of which are useful to anybody who steals them.
That choice is the difference between the lightest self-assessment questionnaire and a compliance programme that will consume more of your year than the store did. It also decides how a breach investigation goes, which is a conversation nobody wants to have twice.
Strong customer authentication is handled by the provider too, with the exemption logic left to them rather than reimplemented badly. Direct Debit for trade accounts runs through GoCardless, which keeps bank details out of your systems on the same principle.
How we build the services behind thisWhat Sits Inside a Fixed Price, and What Does Not
Written down before anyone signs, so the number does not drift once delivery starts.
Checkout, payments and order management
Basket, checkout, one card provider, VAT handling, order records, customer accounts, transactional email and the admin screens your team uses daily.
Migration and redirects
Products, customers and order history moved across, plus a permanent redirect for every indexed URL on the old store. This is not an optional extra we sell you later.
Second sales channel
Marketplace listings, a trade portal or an EPOS link. Designed for in the data model from the start, built once the main store is live and earning.
Additional payment methods and carriers
Each extra provider or courier is its own integration with its own testing. We quote them per item rather than burying them in a line called integrations.
Subscriptions and recurring billing
Worth doing properly or not at all. Dunning, pauses and card expiry chasing are most of the effort and all of the retained revenue.
Tax advice, photography and paid media
Your accountant advises on VAT and registrations, a photographer shoots the products, and an agency runs the advertising. We build the software and integrate with whatever they produce.
Every Extra Second Is Paid For at the Basket
Shoppers on a train with two bars of signal do not wait. Each stage below is somewhere a slow page quietly costs you an order.
Landing on a product page
A hero image that is four times larger than it needs to be is the single most common cause of a slow first paint on a UK retail site.
Browsing and filtering
Filters that re-request the whole page feel broken on mobile. Filtering should update in place and keep the position the shopper was at.
Adding to the basket
Third-party tags loaded before the basket script mean the button does nothing for a moment, and a proportion of people conclude it is broken.
Paying
Guest checkout, address lookup by postcode, wallet buttons at the top, and no field that asks for information you do not genuinely need.
Stages shown to illustrate where speed and friction bite. No figures here are drawn from a client store.
What UK Sellers Ask Us
Do we have to charge VAT on digital products sold to EU customers?
Digital services supplied to consumers are taxed where the customer is, which means the VAT rate follows the buyer country rather than yours. In practice that means capturing and storing evidence of where each buyer is, applying the right rate at checkout, and reporting through the non-Union One Stop Shop registration if you use one. The software side is the part we handle: rate lookup, evidence capture, storing what was charged and why, and producing the figures your accountant needs at quarter end. Which registrations you need is a question for your accountant, and we build to whatever they decide rather than guessing on their behalf.
What does the store need to do about customs paperwork for EU orders?
Since Brexit an EU order is an export, so every parcel needs a commercial invoice, a commodity code per line, the country of origin and your EORI number. The two decisions that matter commercially are whether you ship delivered duty paid, where you collect the charges at checkout and the customer gets a clean delivery, or delivered at place, where your customer gets an unexpected demand from the courier and often refuses the parcel. We wire commodity codes and country of origin into the product data, calculate duty at checkout where you choose to absorb it, and pass the right fields to your courier so labels and declarations are generated automatically rather than typed out.
Is offering Klarna or Clearpay worth the fee it costs us?
It depends almost entirely on your basket size. Buy now, pay later charges a meaningfully higher fee than a card, so on low-value baskets it eats margin for very little gain. Above roughly the price of a decent pair of boots UK shoppers increasingly expect to see it, and its absence costs more in abandoned baskets than the fee costs in margin. The practical approach is to add it, show it as an option rather than a default, and read your own numbers after a quarter. We build it so it can be switched off per product or per price band rather than being all or nothing.
Can you integrate Royal Mail and our courier accounts?
Yes, and it is usually one of the higher return pieces of work on the list because it removes daily manual effort rather than adding a feature. That means creating shipments against your own Royal Mail or courier account, printing labels in batches, feeding tracking numbers back into the order record and the dispatch email, offering collection points and click and collect where the carrier supports it, and handling the returns label. Every carrier does this differently and none of the interfaces are elegant, so we scope it by carrier rather than quoting it as a single line called shipping.
Will re-platforming damage our search rankings?
It can, and most of the horror stories come from the same avoidable cause: URLs changed without redirects. Before anything is migrated we export every indexed URL, map each old address to its new one, and put permanent redirects in place on day one. Structured data, page titles, canonical tags and the sitemap are rebuilt to match. Expect some movement in the first few weeks regardless, because search engines re-crawl at their own pace. What you should not expect is a permanent drop, and if the old site was slow the new one frequently ends up ahead.
Tell Us What You Sell and Who Buys It
Send the current store address, your order volume and the thing that is currently painful. You get a straight answer on whether you need a build at all, and if you do, a fixed scope and a sterling figure excluding VAT.