Custom Ecommerce Development

The Problem With Most Ecommerce Builds

Most ecommerce builds go one of two ways. Either a business picks a Shopify or WooCommerce template, loads it with plugins until it barely loads, and calls it a store — or they commission a fully custom build that takes 18 months, costs three times the original quote, and still doesn't quite do what they needed.

I've inherited both kinds of projects. The pattern with WooCommerce sites is usually the same: 14 active plugins, three of them conflict with each other, the checkout takes 8 seconds to load on mobile, and the product data is a mess because the import method changed three times during setup. The pattern with over-engineered custom builds is simpler — someone tried to build Amazon from scratch when a well-structured Laravel store would have done the job.

What I try to do is match the technology to the actual business requirements. Not every ecommerce project needs micro-services and a React frontend. Not every business should be on Shopify. The right answer depends on how many products you have, how your pricing and fulfilment work, what integrations you need, and how the store needs to grow.

Ecommerce Projects I Build

The types of ecommerce work I take on:

What Makes a Good Ecommerce Build

Having built and maintained ecommerce platforms at scale — including Tejar.com, which runs on Magento and serves a global user base — I've seen what separates a store that grows from one that creates technical debt the moment traffic increases.

The things that matter most aren't the ones that appear in agency pitch decks. They're operational details:

• Checkout performance — Every second of checkout load time measurably reduces conversion. I optimise the checkout flow from the first render to the payment confirmation, including database query efficiency and cache strategy.
• Product data architecture — Before building anything, I design the product model. Attributes, variants, bundles, subscriptions — the data structure has to be right from the start or you'll be patching it forever.
• Order management — What happens to an order after payment? Status changes, fulfilment routing, customer notifications, returns. A store that can't reliably manage orders at volume is a support problem waiting to happen.
• Inventory accuracy — Overselling is a customer trust problem. Underselling is a revenue problem. I build stock management with proper locking to prevent race conditions on popular products.
• SEO from the structure up — Clean URLs, proper canonical tags, structured data for products, fast page loads. Not bolted on as an afterthought.
• Tax and compliance — VAT handling for UK businesses, GST for Canada, state tax for US — configured properly in the data model, not added via a plugin that breaks every time you update it.

The Tejar.com Project

At Arctern Digital, I spent several years working on and eventually maintaining Tejar.com — a global ecommerce platform built on Magento. The platform serves users across multiple markets and handles a large product catalogue from hundreds of retailers.

My specific contributions included:

• Building an automated product data pipeline that pulled, cleaned, and staged catalogue data from 550+ retailer feeds — reducing manual data entry by 40% and keeping the product catalogue current
• Performance optimisation across caching layers, database indexing, and queue workers to handle high-traffic periods without degraded response times
• Custom Magento module development for pricing rules, promotional logic, and seller-specific configurations
• Zero-downtime deployment procedures using CI/CD pipelines

This experience informs how I approach ecommerce builds now. I've seen what breaks at scale and I design accordingly from the start.

Custom Ecommerce vs Shopify vs WooCommerce

This is a question I get asked often and I'll give you an honest answer rather than a sales pitch for my own services.

Shopify is genuinely a good choice for straightforward product-based businesses. If you sell a hundred SKUs, need a reliable checkout, and don't have unusual pricing or fulfilment requirements — Shopify works and you should use it. The per-transaction fees are annoying but the total cost of ownership is lower than a custom build for simple use cases.

WooCommerce is appropriate for businesses that are already on WordPress and have simple catalogue needs. The moment you start stacking plugins for subscription billing, multi-currency, wholesale pricing, or complex fulfilment, WooCommerce starts to struggle — performance, maintenance costs, and plugin conflicts all compound over time.

A custom Laravel ecommerce build makes sense when you have business logic that doesn't fit a standard template. That means: complex pricing rules (volume discounts, customer-specific pricing, subscription tiers), custom checkout flows (multi-step, with product configuration), unusual fulfilment requirements (multiple warehouses, dropshipping with complex routing), multi-vendor functionality, or serious performance requirements. For those cases, a custom build is actually cheaper in the long run because you're not paying for workarounds indefinitely.

Technical Stack

How I Work With Ecommerce Clients

Ecommerce projects need more upfront planning than most web projects because the data model is foundational. Changing how products are structured or how orders flow mid-build is expensive. Getting it right at the start is not.

Before scoping a project I'll ask you to walk me through your product catalogue, your pricing logic, your fulfilment process, and what integrations you currently have or need. From that conversation I'll put together a written technical specification that maps every feature to an implementation approach, along with a realistic delivery timeline and fixed-price quote or hourly estimate.

Milestones typically go: catalogue and product management → order flow and payment → admin and reporting → integrations → testing and launch. You'll see working software at each milestone, not a finished product that arrives all at once at the end.

Frequently Asked Questions