E-commerce design and development

Selling online is not putting a cart on a website. It's building a system: catalogue, payments, shipping, stock, order emails, customer support. When one piece jams, your customer notices before you do — and buys somewhere else. We design and build stores on WooCommerce, Shopify and custom platforms, and we stay for the whole journey: from the first product upload to the first sale.

We work from Sardinia with physical shops opening their online channel, makers and producers selling beyond the island, and brands born digital. Since 2018 we've delivered over 200 projects, and e-commerce has taught us one thing worth more than any technology: the platform matters less than the sales model. First we understand how you sell — margins, volumes, who ships, who answers customers — then we choose the tool. Never the other way around.

What's included

An e-commerce project covers everything it takes to sell, not just the part people see.

Sales model analysis. How many products, how many variants, what margins, who packs the boxes, how returns work. It looks like paperwork; it is the project. Every answer changes the platform, the catalogue structure and your future running costs.

Store design and product pages. Not a bought theme with your logo on it: a store that looks like your brand. The product page is the page that sells — photos, variants, description, availability, shipping times and costs, return conditions. Every unanswered question there is a sale that stops there.

Payments. Stripe and PayPal as the baseline: cards, digital wallets, plus bank transfer and cash on delivery where they make sense. Fast checkout, 3-D Secure, automatic receipts. Payment is the moment of maximum distrust — it has to be the cleanest step on the site.

Shipping and inventory. Carriers and rates by zone, weight and order value — with a free-shipping threshold if your margins can carry it. Tracking sent automatically, stock updated on every order, alerts when a product runs low.

E-commerce SEO. Product and category pages optimised for search, Product structured data showing price and availability in Google results, clean URLs, lightweight images. Ongoing SEO can come later; the foundations go in from day one.

Migration from other systems. Already selling on PrestaShop, Magento, an old WooCommerce or a closed platform? We move products, customers and order history across, and set 301 redirects on every product and category page. A store that migrates without a redirect map loses years of rankings in a week.

Training and handover. In the end, the store is yours: a hands-on session covering products, orders, discounts and content, plus written documentation. We don't keep clients hostage.

Shopify, WooCommerce or custom?

It's the first question in every project, and the honest answer is: it depends on how you sell and who runs the store day to day.

Shopify is the simple option. Hosting included, automatic updates, a tidy admin, payments ready out of the box: whoever runs the store thinks about products and orders, not the tech. In exchange you pay the platform a monthly fee and accept its limits — deep customisation goes through third-party apps, each with its own cost. We recommend it if you're starting out, have a straightforward catalogue, or don't want to deal with maintenance.

WooCommerce lives inside WordPress and is the flexible option. No platform fee, full control over content and features, a huge ecosystem of extensions. The flip side: hosting, updates and security are your responsibility — or ours, with monthly maintenance from €80. We recommend it when the store shares a site with rich editorial content, when you need unusual pricing or catalogue logic, or when you want to own every piece.

Custom is for sales models that don't fit the mould. Product configurators, on-demand production, multi-vendor marketplaces, sales tied to availability and calendars: when the purchase flow is the heart of the business, bending a template costs more than building the right platform. We develop on Next.js and React, with payments on Stripe. It costs more and takes longer, but the store does exactly what the model requires — no stacked plugins.

How we work

A complete e-commerce build takes 6–10 weeks. The path is always the same, whatever the platform.

01 — Sales model. A working session on numbers and processes: catalogue, margins, logistics, returns, who does what after launch. This is where the platform choice and the final quote come from.

02 — Catalogue architecture. Categories, attributes, variants, filters. The invisible part that decides whether a customer finds the product in three clicks or leaves — we design it before drawing a single screen.

03 — Design and build. Product pages, listings, cart, checkout, service pages. Mobile-first, because most purchases start on a phone: if the checkout doesn't flow under one thumb, it isn't ready.

04 — Integrations and testing. Payments in test mode, shipping with real rates, transactional emails, invoicing. Before launch we run complete test orders: we buy, we pay, we return. Every problem caught here is a customer not lost later.

05 — Launch, training, iteration. We go live, train you on daily management, and read the first data together: where visits come from, where carts stall, what to fix. An e-commerce store isn't delivered — it's started.

Tools and stack

On Shopify we build custom themes without piling on apps that slow the store down and multiply monthly fees. On WooCommerce we pick a few solid extensions and keep everything current through monthly maintenance. Custom projects run on Next.js and React — the same stack as this site — with Stripe for payments and server-side rendering, so product pages are readable by Google from the first byte.

Around the store: Google Analytics 4 with e-commerce tracking to read carts and conversions, Search Console for the searches that bring traffic, and transactional emails treated with the same care as the pages — the order confirmation is the most-opened email you'll ever send. When it's time to push sales, the store connects to Google Ads campaigns with conversion tracking already in place.

The mistakes that block sales

We've watched these repeat for years, even on well-built stores.

Opening and waiting. A store with no traffic is a warehouse with the shutter down. Organic visibility and campaigns get planned with the store, not "later, if there's budget left".

Copy-pasted product pages. The supplier's description, identical on a hundred sites, doesn't rank and doesn't convince anyone. Writing original product copy takes time — the best-spent time in the whole project.

Surprise shipping costs. The number-one cause of abandoned carts: a cost nobody mentioned appears at checkout. Times and costs belong on the product page, before the cart exists.

Obstacle-course checkouts. Forced registration, pointless fields, steps that restart on the first error. Every extra field is a percentage of orders lost: a checkout is designed to be finished, not to harvest data.

Real stores, different models

The e-commerce project that best represents us is Fionard, a sustainable Made-in-Italy streetwear brand: t-shirts, sweatshirts and hoodies in GOTS-certified organic cotton, printed on demand with DTG/DTF technology only after the order — zero unsold stock, zero waste. A model like that doesn't fit a template: we built the colour/size configurator handling oversize and regular fits of the same garment, filters by category, size, colour, collection and fabric, on-demand printing wired into the order flow, and an AI assistant covering customer support inside the shop. The collections — Love It, Wear It, Remix It — organise the catalogue by identity, not just category.

When online selling grows past a single store, the problem changes scale. For AVOY we built a tourism marketplace for Sardinia — stays, experiences and activities at zero commission — with a channel manager synced with Airbnb and Booking and an AI concierge working in 12 languages. Not a classic e-commerce site, but the substance is the same: transactions, real-time availability, trust between seller and buyer. And with hoopit, transactions move into hospitality: ordering and takeaway at zero commission for venues.

Different models, one method: understand how you sell, then build the tool.

What it costs

Prices from our catalogue, no asterisks. A WooCommerce or Shopify store starts at €4,500: design, development, payment and shipping integration, SEO foundations and training. A custom platform starts at €7,500, with a dedicated quote based on flows and integrations. Around the store: monthly maintenance from €80, migration from another system from €400, an extra language with SEO from €600, email marketing and newsletter setup from €350.

If the number feels high, compare it with the cost of a store that doesn't sell: you pay that one every month, forever. Tell us about your catalogue, model and goals in the quote configurator: you'll get a written proposal, free and with no obligation, with a recommended platform and a real timeline.