Launch with the machine already running.

Sometimes you should not. If you have a handful of products, no advertising planned and no intention of emailing anybody, a template store you set up over a weekend is a genuinely correct answer, and we would be an expensive way to arrive at the same place. What that price cannot include is the part that takes the time: the flows, the measurement, the feed, the imagery, and someone deciding how the thing should actually sell. Those are not add-ons we withheld — they are the work. The question worth asking a cheap quote is not what it costs, it is what happens on the day after launch.

Shopify unless there is a specific reason not to, and occasionally there is. It costs a monthly fee that WooCommerce appears not to, which is the argument people usually lead with — and it is the wrong one, because the hosting, the security patching and the plugin that breaks checkout during a sale are not free either, they are just billed in your time instead. We build custom only where the business genuinely does not fit a commerce platform. We will tell you which of those you are on the first call, including when the answer is the cheaper one.

You do, entirely, and it is all in your name from the first day rather than transferred at the end. The store, the domain, the analytics property, the ad accounts, the email platform and the customer list are yours, and we work inside them with our own access. Nothing we build depends on an account of ours staying switched on. If we part company you keep the store, the data and the flows exactly as they are running, which is worth checking with anyone you hire for this, because it is not the default in this market.

We look first and rebuild only where rebuilding is what the evidence supports. Plenty of underperforming stores are two or three specific problems wearing a redesign-shaped disguise: a checkout losing people on mobile, a site slow enough that a third of visitors leave before it paints, no email flows at all. Redesigning around those changes the wallpaper and not the number. Where a rebuild genuinely is the answer, the rankings and URLs you already have come with it — a redesign that silently drops the traffic you spent years earning is the most expensive kind of improvement.

That is the same build with the shop removed and the enquiry put in its place. A business website has exactly one job — turn a stranger into a conversation — and it is measured the same way a store is: how many arrive, how many get far enough to ask, how many turn into work. So it gets the same treatment. Structure and copy aimed at the enquiry, forms that land in your CRM with the source attached, tracking installed before launch rather than bolted on afterwards, and speed treated as a feature.

It is the usual starting point and it is workable, because a phone photograph of the real product contains more than people assume. We turn what you have into catalogue and campaign imagery — clean backgrounds, studio lighting, lifestyle settings, and versions cut for every placement the platforms want. Where it suits the brand, we can also run a single consistent face across the whole catalogue and every season, so a small shop reads as a brand rather than a spreadsheet with pictures. On that last one we are explicit about what it is: a brand model for your marketing, never presented as a photograph of a real customer.

Six to ten weeks for a first store, and the two things that move that are almost never design. They are product data and decisions. If the catalogue arrives as a clean file with real descriptions and photographs, and one named person on your side can approve things inside a week, it lands early. If the products are being written as we build and approvals need four people to agree, it does not, and no amount of effort on our side changes that. We would rather say it now than explain it in week seven.