Ecommerce Build

Ecommerce Website Design and Development

Written by Gulfam Haidar, Founder, GrowEventure. Last updated 27 August 2026.

We build and rebuild ecommerce stores on Shopify and WooCommerce, then keep them fast enough to convert. Most of our work starts with an existing store that loads slowly, leaks sales at checkout, or sits on code that a platform deadline has quietly made obsolete. We have worked in ecommerce since 2019.

A Shopify deadline passed yesterday

If you run a non Plus Shopify store with custom scripts on your thank you page or order status page, read this first.

Shopify has been retiring checkout.liquid in stages. The information, shipping and payment steps went first. Thank you and order status pages followed on 28 August 2025. Script tags on those pages ended for Plus stores on the same date, and for everyone else on 26 August 2026.

That last date was yesterday. Anything you had running through script tags on those pages, upsell widgets, review requests, analytics, loyalty prompts, has either stopped or is about to. The replacement is Shopify Extensions in Checkout, which is a rebuild rather than a find and replace.

What platform you should be on

We build on both, and the honest answer depends on where your risk sits.

That performance gap is the number worth sitting with. It comes from the 2025 Web Almanac, which measured real field data across the crawled web rather than lab scores. WooCommerce powers more ecommerce sites than anything else, 44% of detected stores on mobile against Shopify's 25%, but less than half as many of them pass Core Web Vitals.

That is not a flaw in WooCommerce. It is what happens when a platform lets you install anything. A well built Woo store beats a bloated Shopify theme. The difference is who carries the responsibility, and whether you have budgeted for it.

Speed, and what it is actually worth

Google measures three things at the 75th percentile of real visits, not in a lab.

First Input Delay is gone. Interaction to Next Paint replaced it in March 2024 and the migration closed that September. If a developer hands you an audit listing FID, the template is two years old.

On what speed is worth, we prefer the test to the correlation. Farfetch ran an A/B test on a 600 millisecond improvement to Largest Contentful Paint on product pages and measured a 1% to 5% lift in conversion. Vodafone Italy improved the same metric by 31% and reported 8% more sales. Those are first party results published with methodology attached.

Be wary of the older headline figures. The widely quoted study showing 8.4% more retail conversions from a 0.1 second gain is real, but it is from 2019, and anyone citing it as current is not saying so.

What we build

New stores

Theme selection or custom build, product taxonomy that supports faceted browsing without creating thousands of crawlable duplicates, payment and tax setup, shipping rules, and a checkout built on Shopify Extensions rather than the retired script approach.

Rebuilds and migrations

The common ones are Woo to Shopify, Shopify to Woo when transaction fees stop making sense at volume, and platform version upgrades. The part that decides whether a migration succeeds is the URL map. We build redirects before we move anything, because search equity lost at migration takes months to recover.

Performance work

Field data first through Chrome's real user dataset, since that is what Google scores. Image formats and sizing, render blocking scripts, third party tag audits, font loading, and layout stability on the templates that carry your revenue. We fix product and collection pages before we touch anything else.

Structured data

Product markup with merchant listing details, shipping policy and return policy, which still earns rich results and is where the return is for a store. We no longer implement FAQ or HowTo markup for rich results, because Google stopped showing both and removed the documentation in June 2026.

Where stores actually leak money

Redesigns usually start with how a site looks. The leaks are almost never there.

In the builds we have audited, the same five problems come up again and again, and none of them are visual.

• Layout shift on product pages. A price or an add to cart button that moves after load causes mistaps on mobile. It shows up as Cumulative Layout Shift and as an unexplained bounce.
• Third party tags nobody owns. Chat widgets, heat maps, abandoned test pixels. Every one blocks rendering, and most stores carry at least two that no current employee installed.
• Faceted navigation with no canonical logic. Filter combinations generate thousands of near identical URLs. Crawl budget goes to colour and size permutations instead of your products.
• Images served at the wrong size. A 2,400 pixel image scaled to 400 in the browser is the single most common cause of a failing Largest Contentful Paint score.
• Checkout steps that never get tested on a real phone. Not in a simulator, on an actual device on mobile data.

We look at those before we discuss a new look, because a repaint over a leak just costs more.

Accessibility is not a separate project

Most of what makes a store usable with a screen reader also makes it faster and more crawlable. Real alt text, correct heading order, form labels tied to inputs, visible focus states, and colour contrast that holds up in daylight. We build it in rather than quoting it as an add on, and it reduces legal exposure at the same time.

Where the platforms are heading

Both are building for AI agents, and it is worth knowing before you commit to a stack.

Shopify has launched an agentic commerce channel for AI shopping surfaces, charged at 2.9% plus 30 cents with no setup fee. WooCommerce shipped version 10.8 in May 2026 with a release headline naming GraphQL for agents alongside faster order storage and a leaner store API. Chrome's Lighthouse has added an experimental agentic browsing audit category.

None of this needs action from you this quarter. It does mean that a store built on clean structured product data and a fast, accessible front end is better positioned than one built on visual page builder output, whichever way agent shopping develops.

What this has produced

Four accounts we can point at, each with the detail on its own page.

• From zero to $6.2 million. A new brand taken from launch to eight figures of cumulative revenue.
• Advertising cost cut from 35% to 10% in six months.
• $13,000 in 25 days. A launch window, not a steady state figure.
• A brand built from $5,000.

Since 2019 we have handled more than $100 million in marketplace sales, and our profiles across freelancing platforms carry more than 300 reviews at a 5.0 average.

When you should not hire us

• You want a brochure site. We build stores. A general web design shop will serve you better and cost less.
• You want a redesign because the site looks dated. Look at your checkout completion rate first. A visual refresh that does not fix a leak is an expensive repaint.
• Your traffic is under a few thousand sessions a month. Performance work has little to optimise. Spend on getting visitors first.
• You want a headless build because you read that it is faster. It can be. It also moves every performance problem onto your team permanently. We will ask what you are actually trying to fix.

How a build runs

Week one is discovery and measurement. We pull your field performance data, map every URL, list the custom checkout code, and audit the third party tags. You get that document whether or not you continue.

Build runs in staging with the redirect map written first, not last. We test checkout on real devices on mobile data before launch, not in a desktop simulator. Launch happens on a low traffic day with the old URLs redirecting from minute one, and we watch field metrics for two weeks afterwards because real user data lags a deployment.

What this costs

A new store build starts at $3,500, scoped after we see your catalogue size and how much of the checkout is custom. Performance and maintenance work starts at $800 per month. Migrations are quoted individually, because the URL map and the volume of custom checkout code decide the effort, not the number of products. A technical audit is free and yours to keep.

Common questions

Our Guarantee

What we put in writing

What you always get

• One named account manager who knows your account, not a rotating pool
• A written report every month covering what we changed and why
• Every file, login and asset stays yours, handed over on request

What you never get

• No lock-in. Cancel any month, with no notice period
• No setup fee, and the audit before you start is free
• If we miss the scope we agreed in your first 30 days, that month is free

We do not promise a ranking, a Buy Box share or a sales figure, because those sit with the platform and not with us. We promise the work, the reporting and the terms above, and all three go in the contract.

Sources: Shopify, checkout.liquid sunset. Shopify pricing. Web Almanac 2025, ecommerce. web.dev, Web Vitals. Farfetch case study. Web Vitals business impact. WooCommerce 10.8 release. Google Search Central updates.