What an E-commerce Build Involves

The shop is the visible tenth

Clients budget for a storefront and receive a quote covering an operation. The catalogue and checkout are perhaps a third of the work; the rest is everything that has to be true for an order to be fulfilled correctly.

• Payments, including failures, refunds and reconciliation
• Tax by destination, which is genuinely complicated across borders
• Shipping rules: weight, zones, thresholds, carriers
• Stock accuracy across every channel you sell on
• Returns, which everyone defers and everyone needs
• The connection to accounting, so the books reconcile

Stock is the thing that decides everything

One number has to be right: how many you actually have. If it is wrong, every channel amplifies the error into oversells, apologies and credit notes.

Adding a sales channel before your stock figure is trustworthy does not add revenue. It multiplies an existing inaccuracy.

So on multi-channel builds we start with stock: one master, everything else subscribing, with a nightly reconciliation that reports differences before a customer finds them.

Platform or custom

The great majority of businesses should use a platform. The exceptions are real — complex B2B pricing, configurable products, unusual fulfilment — and they are exceptions.

B2B is a different product

Trade customers need account-specific pricing, credit terms, purchase orders, approval workflows, quick reorder and quotes. Most consumer platforms handle these badly or through expensive extensions.

If more than a third of your revenue is trade, scope it as a B2B project from the start rather than a consumer store with adaptations.

What to build in phase one

1. The catalogue and checkout for your best-selling range only
2. One payment provider, one shipping arrangement
3. Stock connected to your master system
4. Order data flowing into accounting
5. A returns process, even a manual one

Everything else — loyalty, subscriptions, marketplaces, personalisation — is phase two, and it should be chosen based on what the first three months of real orders show you.

Frequently asked questions