Custom-Built Online Shops You Own Outright

As a rough estimate, most custom online shops we build cost between £5,000 and £12,000, but every shop is different, so treat that as a guide rather than a price. Where yours lands depends on how many products you sell and how you sell them (sets, bundles, made to order, trade prices), your shipping and currency rules, what the shop connects to, and whether we are moving an existing shop across. After a free 30-minute call we give you a fixed quote in writing, so you know the real figure before anything is built. Our UK website cost guide shows how that compares with other kinds of website.

Not always. For a small catalogue with standard pricing and shipping, Shopify is quick, reliable and cheap to start, and we will tell you so. A custom shop pays off when the way you sell doesn't fit Shopify's model: sets, bundles and made-to-order items, trade pricing, unusual shipping or integrations, or a stack of paid apps doing what the shop should do itself. It also ends the monthly plan, the app subscriptions and, unless you use Shopify Payments, the extra fee on every order. If the shop is one part of a bigger product, that is a web platform. Our Shopify vs custom ecommerce comparison works through the fees for an illustrative £250,000-a-year store.

As a rough estimate, four to eight weeks from go-ahead to taking orders, but the exact timeline depends on your shop and is confirmed in writing with your quote. A small catalogue with standard shipping sits at the shorter end; custom pricing rules, integrations or moving a large existing shop take longer. You can click through the shop on a staging site as it takes shape. Having product details and photos ready early keeps things moving, and our guide to planning a custom ecommerce website sets out what to prepare.

Yes. You get an admin area built around your shop, where you add and edit products, prices, photos and stock, and see and dispatch orders, with no code involved. It is set up for the way you sell, so sets and bundles are managed there too, not through add-on apps. Stamp and Bake adds new cutters and bundles in minutes. Anything you would rather hand over is covered by the hours in a maintenance plan, and a new way of selling is quoted as a small project.

Yes. We bring your products, customers and order history across, and redirect every old product, category and page address to its new home, so the rankings you have earned carry over. Your current shop keeps trading while the new one is built, and we plan the switch-over for a quiet time. Customers coming from Shopify set a new password the first time they sign in, because Shopify does not export passwords. After go-live we watch Search Console closely, fix anything that slipped through, and can carry on with SEO and paid ads once the shop has settled.

No platform subscription, no app fees and no cut of your sales: you pay card processing to your payment provider, plus hosting and upkeep if you want us to look after the shop. Card fees are close to what you would pay on Shopify, without a platform fee on top. A maintenance plan keeps the shop hosted, patched, backed up daily and monitored, with hours for changes each month. And the shop is yours: once the project is paid for, the code and all of your customer and order data belong to you, on open-source Django, so any Python developer can work on it if you ever move on.