Build, ecommerce

Online stores
that sell.

We build ecommerce stores that respect the visitor's time, the operator's margins, and the planet's bandwidth. Shopify, WooCommerce, headless. Whichever one earns the right answer for your catalogue.

200+

Stores shipped since 2007

£180M+

GMV running on our builds

Shopify Plus

Certified partner since 2019

The honest version

Six things every store owner already suspects.

We have rebuilt enough stores to know where the revenue actually hides. Here is what the data says, written without the agency varnish.

01

Traffic is the smallest part of the problem.

Most stores have plenty of visitors. They lose them at the product page, the cart, and the checkout. Pouring more paid traffic into a leaky funnel is the most expensive mistake in ecommerce. Fix the funnel first, then turn the taps back on.

02

Mobile is the store. Desktop is the office.

Sixty to seventy percent of sessions are on a phone, yet most stores are still designed at 1440 pixels wide on a Mac and resized down. We design mobile first because that is where the money is, then scale up for desktop, not the other way around.

03

Speed is not a vanity metric. It is revenue.

A one-second improvement in mobile load time correlates with a 7% lift in conversion. We ship pages that hit Largest Contentful Paint under 1.5 seconds on a mid-tier Android over 4G. Anything slower is leaving money on the table, measurably.

04

Checkout is the most expensive screen you own.

Baymard puts checkout abandonment at 70%. Half of that is friction we put there ourselves: required accounts, address fields the autocomplete should fill, payment methods nobody uses. We cut checkout to the smallest set of fields that legally clears a transaction.

05

The second order is worth more than the first.

Acquiring a customer is the most expensive thing you will do this quarter. Getting them back costs nothing and converts at 3 to 5x the cold rate. We build the email and SMS flows, the unboxing moments, and the post-purchase touchpoints that turn one purchase into seven.

06

Platform is a tactic, not a strategy.

Shopify, WooCommerce, headless on Medusa or Saleor. They are all fine. The right one depends on your catalogue size, your CMS politics, and your team. We pick based on your reality, not on which vendor pays for the conference.

Platform decision

Pick the platform that fits the catalogue, not the conference.

The honest comparison. Strengths, weaknesses, time to launch, total cost of ownership. We use all three and have opinions about when each is right.

Shopify / Shopify Plus

Most stores, most of the time.

Sweet spot

£0 to £20M GMV, off-the-shelf integrations, fast launch.

Cost

From $39 / month, Plus from $2,300 / month

Launch

3 to 6 weeks

Strengths

  • +Best-in-class checkout (Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay built in)
  • +App ecosystem covers 95% of needs without custom code
  • +PCI compliance handled, no infra to manage
  • +Shopify Markets handles multi-currency and tax

Trade-offs

  • Theme customisation has limits, complex logic gets ugly
  • Transaction fees if you bypass Shopify Payments
  • Locked into Liquid for templating, no React on the storefront unless you go headless

WooCommerce

WordPress-native operations and content-heavy stores.

Sweet spot

Editorial commerce, blog-led acquisition, full CMS control.

Cost

Hosting from $20 / month + plugins

Launch

4 to 8 weeks

Strengths

  • +Total ownership, your code, your server, your data
  • +Best when content is the acquisition channel (recipes, guides, reviews)
  • +No platform tax, only what you pay for plugins and hosting
  • +Easy to extend with PHP if you have a developer on call

Trade-offs

  • You own the security, the updates, the PCI scope, the backups
  • Performance is on you, default WooCommerce is slow under load
  • Plugin stack management is a job, not a one-off

Headless / Custom

Catalogues over 10k SKUs, complex B2B logic, or unique UX.

Sweet spot

Enterprise spend, in-house dev team, brand-specific commerce.

Cost

Build from £80k, ongoing infra from £2k / month

Launch

12 to 24 weeks

Strengths

  • +Storefront on Next.js or similar, backend on Medusa, Saleor, Shopify Storefront API, or BigCommerce
  • +Page-by-page performance ceiling is whatever your team can engineer
  • +Composable: swap search, swap PIM, swap checkout, swap CMS
  • +Right answer for differentiated UX and global multi-brand operations

Trade-offs

  • You need the engineering bench to maintain it, in-house or partnered
  • Capability gain is real, complexity tax is also real
  • Total cost of ownership is 5 to 10x a Shopify build

We are not platform-tied. We have shipped on all three this year. Tell us what you are selling, who is buying it, and what you already pay your CMS, and we will tell you which one we would use if it were our money.

Product page anatomy

Six blocks. In this order. Every time.

The shape of a high-converting product page is solved. The variation is in the writing, the photography, and the speed at which it loads. We anchor every PDP to the same six blocks and tune the content inside.

  1. 01

    Above the fold

    Hero image at 1:1 on mobile, gallery scrubbed on swipe. Price, stock state, and add to cart visible before the first scroll. Save-the-product moment within 800 ms of LCP.

  2. 02

    Social proof, immediately

    Review count and average score stitched right under the title. Photo reviews above written reviews, because they convert harder. Aggregate rating in JSON-LD so Google shows the stars in the SERP.

  3. 03

    The friction-killer block

    Free returns, shipping ETA, payment methods. Three lines, not a tab. Removes the second-tab Google search that loses 20% of the visitors who do it.

  4. 04

    Sticky add to cart

    After 600 px of scroll, the buy button rides along at the bottom of the screen on mobile. Standard pattern. Standard 12 to 18% mobile conversion lift.

  5. 05

    PDP cross-sell

    "Complete the look" or "frequently bought together" carousel below the fold. Real recommendations, not a random shuffle. Drives 8 to 12% AOV lift on launch.

  6. 06

    Trust footer

    Returns policy, contact, FAQ, in that order. Last-chance objections get answered before the visitor leaves to Google them.

The maths

What is one percentage point worth to you?

Slide your real numbers in. We will show you what closing the gap to 3%, 4%, and 5% is worth in your currency. No login, no email gate, no fake urgency.

50,000
1k250k500k1M
1.8%

Global ecommerce average sits at 2.0% (Littledata, 2026). Fashion runs 1.5%, beauty 3.0%, electronics 1.2%.

$85

Today, you are running

$918,000

per year, at 1.8% conversion.

If we closed the gap to

3% conversionSolid

$127,500 / month, $1,530,000 / year

Extra revenue

+$612,000

4% conversionStrong

$170,000 / month, $2,040,000 / year

Extra revenue

+$1,122,000

5% conversionTop decile

$212,500 / month, $2,550,000 / year

Extra revenue

+$1,632,000

Math is transparent: sessions x CR x AOV x 12. No fees subtracted, no discount stacking. The lift is what flows in before COGS. Returns will eat 5 to 15% depending on category.

Checkout audit

The checkout most stores ship vs the checkout we ship.

Same payment processor. Same product. Different recovery rate. The gap between these two columns is usually 8 to 15 percentage points of completed purchases.

What most stores ship

  • Email, first name, last name, company, address line 1, address line 2, city, county, postcode, country, phone
  • Create an account, password, confirm password
  • Card-only payment, no Apple Pay, no Shop Pay
  • Discount code field that timed out
  • Shipping methods loaded after submit
  • Total recalculated three times on screen

Average cart abandonment: 68 to 72%.

What we ship

  • Email first, magic link login if returning, no password ever
  • Address autocomplete fills nine fields from one tap
  • Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay, Klarna, card. Wallet methods on top
  • Discount applied automatically from URL, no field to type into
  • Shipping options pre-loaded with ETAs in local time
  • Total locked from step one, no surprise recalculation

Typical cart abandonment after rebuild: 52 to 58%.

After the buy button

The forty-five days that actually pay for the marketing.

Acquisition is rented attention. Retention is owned attention. Here is the post-purchase flow we wire into every Klaviyo or Postscript account on launch day.

  1. Hour 0

    99% open rate

    Order confirmation, signed and on-brand. Order tracking link included, not a Mailchimp template.

  2. Hour 2

    40 to 55% open rate

    Education flow starts: how to use the product, what to expect, what to do if anything is off.

  3. Day 3

    35% open, 6% revisit

    Pre-arrival anticipation message. "Your package is two days out, here is what to do with it on day one."

  4. Day 7

    12 to 18% review-rate

    Review request, photo-led. Incentivised with a £5 / 10 AED credit toward order two.

  5. Day 14

    8 to 14% repeat rate

    First-purchase replenishment or upgrade flow. Personalised on what they actually bought, not a category blast.

  6. Day 45

    4 to 7% incremental revenue

    Win-back if they have not bought again. Subject line tests every quarter. SMS layer for opted-in customers.

The stack

The tools we install, on purpose.

The category gets crowded. These are the ones that pull their weight in production, not on the conference stage. We are picky.

Platform

Shopify, Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, Medusa, Saleor, BigCommerce

Payments

Shopify Payments, Stripe, Adyen, Mollie, Klarna, Afterpay, Tabby (MENA)

Email / SMS

Klaviyo, Postscript, Sendlane, Attentive

Search & merchandising

Algolia, Klevu, Searchspring, Boost AI Search

Reviews & UGC

Yotpo, Loox, Stamped, Junip

Subscriptions

Recharge, Loop Subscriptions, Skio

Returns & post-purchase

Loop Returns, Aftership, ReturnGO

Support

Gorgias, Zendesk, Reamaze, plus our own WhatsApp AI for first response

Analytics

GA4, Triple Whale, Northbeam, Lucky Orange, FullStory

CMS layer

Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok, Hygraph for headless builds

The cadence

Six weeks. Mapped to the day.

The path most clients walk. Quicker if your scope is tight, longer for headless or migrations. Every week ends with something visible to your team.

  1. Week 0

    Audit + brief

    We pull two weeks of analytics, watch 30 session recordings, list every leak in priority order. You see the audit before we send a quote.

  2. Week 1 to 2

    Design

    Mobile-first comps for the home, collection, product, cart, and checkout. Real product, real prices, real reviews stitched in. Two rounds of feedback.

  3. Week 2 to 4

    Build

    Storefront builds in Shopify Liquid, WooCommerce blocks, or Next.js headless depending on the call from week 0. Staging URL from day three, live to your team.

  4. Week 4

    Integrations

    Klaviyo flows, search, reviews, subscriptions, returns, analytics. Each one tested with real test orders, no manual SQL fixes after launch.

  5. Week 5

    QA + speed

    Lighthouse passes above 90 on the four core templates. Cross-device check on iOS 17, Android 14, iPadOS, desktop. Accessibility scan against WCAG 2.2 AA.

  6. Week 6

    Launch + watch

    DNS cut over outside peak hours. We sit on Slack for 48 hours after launch monitoring orders, errors, and abandonment. Bug-fix retainer included for the first 30 days.

Receipts

Numbers from builds we shipped this year.

Real metrics, real verticals, real time horizons. We name the vertical and the comparison period, not vanity averages.

+47%

mobile conversion lift

on a Shopify replatform from BigCommerce, fashion vertical, three months post-launch

£2.1M

incremental annual revenue

from one Klaviyo flow rebuild on a £8M GMV beauty brand

0.9s

mobile LCP

on the home and product templates of an electronics store moving from Magento to Shopify Plus

+22%

AOV

after introducing a frequently-bought-together carousel on PDPs, supplements vertical

70 → 38%

checkout abandonment

after replacing the default Shopify checkout flow with a one-page accelerated checkout, six weeks A/B tested

The second questions

Answers to the things operators actually ask.

Should I be on Shopify or WooCommerce?

Shopify if you sell physical product, do not have a dev team in-house, and want to focus on marketing, not infrastructure. WooCommerce if WordPress is already your content backbone and the editorial team would revolt at losing the CMS. Headless if you are over £10M GMV and your differentiation is genuinely in the UX. Most operators we meet should be on Shopify.

How long does a typical ecommerce build take?

A clean Shopify rebuild on an existing brand: 6 weeks. A migration from WooCommerce to Shopify with redirects and data integrity checks: 8 to 10 weeks. A headless Next.js storefront on Shopify Storefront API: 16 to 20 weeks. Edge cases (massive catalogues, B2B portals, multi-brand) sit at 24 weeks plus.

Will my SEO survive the migration?

Yes, if you do it properly. We map every URL on the old site to its new equivalent, 301 the lot in the migration, and submit a fresh sitemap. We hold the meta titles, descriptions, and structured data from the old site unless we have a reason to rewrite. Most clients see a 10 to 30% short-term dip, recovered within 6 to 10 weeks. The ones that crater are the ones who ship without the redirect map.

Can you migrate without taking the store down?

Yes. We build the new store on a staging domain, sync inventory and orders via the platform API, and cut the DNS at a quiet hour. The visible downtime is usually under five minutes. If you have a large product catalogue or live abandoned-cart flows, we run a parallel period where the old store accepts orders and the new one is read-only, then swap when sync is clean.

Do you handle ongoing optimisation after launch?

Yes. We offer a retainer that covers CRO experiments (we propose, you approve, we ship), Klaviyo flow tuning, paid landing pages, and quarterly reviews of the analytics. Retainer pricing scales with your traffic, not with hours. Most clients land between £4k and £15k a month.

What if my brief does not match any of your standard timelines?

Brief us anyway. The form on this page goes to a senior on the ecommerce team, not a sales rep. If your scope is genuinely odd (B2B portals, marketplaces, multi-region inventory with localised tax), we will tell you whether it fits in our wheelhouse and refer you elsewhere if not.

Brief us

Tell us where the leak is.

One of our ecommerce leads replies within one working day. The reply is not a calendar link, it is a scoped recommendation with three options, three timelines, and three price brackets, written by a human who has read your brief.

  • Free 30-minute audit of your current store if you want one
  • Migration paths between Shopify, WooCommerce, and headless
  • CRO retainer or one-off build, your call
  • Klaviyo, Postscript, Recharge, Algolia setup included
No obligationReply in 1 working day

Start your ecommerce brief

Three minutes to fill in, one working day to reply. Replies are written by a human who has read every word.

By submitting this form, you consent to Ikaroa contacting you via the email, phone, or other details you provide, in line with our terms and privacy policy. You can reply STOP, unsubscribe, or ask us to remove your details at any time.