United Kingdom · Ecommerce

An ecommerce development agency UK retailers can outgrow us with.

Stores on WooCommerce, Shopify and custom builds — including a British furniture retailer running their own catalogue since launch. We start by telling you which platform you should be on, including when it is the one you already have.

Get a free store teardownFree teardown
4
Commerce platforms shipped
14+
Stores published
2 days
Fastest store live
84
Products, DK Lighting

Where the money actually leaks

Almost nobody's problem is the store's appearance.

Retailers arrive asking for a redesign. The teardown usually finds the loss somewhere else entirely, and in three places more often than anywhere else.

The phone experience nobody tested on a phone

Most British ecommerce traffic is mobile, a good share of it on a moving train with two bars of signal. Stores are designed on a 27-inch monitor and signed off on one. The gap between those two experiences is where the conversion rate goes: a hero image at four times the size it displays, a cookie banner covering the add-to-basket button, a filter panel that needs three taps to close. Good ecommerce website development UK retailers pay for starts on the worst device, not the best one.

The checkout you have never completed yourself

Buy something from your own store, with a real card, on a phone, while standing up. Almost everyone who does this finds something — a required field that should not be, a delivery option that does not explain when it arrives, a total that changes at the last step. That last one is the single largest cause of abandonment and it is usually a delivery cost revealed too late rather than a delivery cost that is too high.

Nobody owns the boring half of retail

Returns, exchanges, out-of-stock behaviour, back-in-stock notifications, and what a customer sees when they order the last one at the same moment as somebody else. None of it is glamorous, all of it happens weekly, and it is almost never in a build scope. The first January after launch is when a retailer discovers whether their agency thought about returns.

Delivered

Four platforms, real catalogues.

Calesce — WordPress Development · Build
32

Calesce

products, client-managed

Team Concept Sports — Shopify Development · Build
3 weeks

Team Concept Sports

design → launch

DK Lighting — Custom Web Development · Build
2 weeks

DK Lighting

concept to launch

Organic Origin — Shopify Development · Build
4.9★

Organic Origin

1,000+ reviews

Shahida Couture — WordPress Development · Build
5 days

Shahida Couture

design → launch

Menpapper — WordPress Development · Build
3 days

Menpapper

design → launch

What we can prove, and what we cannot

This page is answerable in two halves, and only one of them is currently backed by published evidence. Being clear about which is which is more useful to you than a page that blurs them.

The build half, which is checkable

Fourteen published stores across four platforms. Calesce is a British WooCommerce furniture retailer whose catalogue has grown to 32 products since handover without us touching it. Team Concept is Shopify, in the United States. DK Lighting is a custom React storefront with dual retail and wholesale pricing, a guest quote builder for contractors and an admin panel the client runs it from — 84 products, 126 indexable pages, two weeks. Organic Origin carries a 4.9-star rating. All of them are openable and none of them is a mockup.

The growth half, which is not

An ecommerce growth agency UK retailers hire on results should be able to show you those results. Ours are not published: every campaign write-up in our library is still in draft, and the decision has been to leave them there rather than activate a stack of four-sentence stubs to inflate a count. So this page does not claim campaign outcomes it cannot link to. What it offers instead is the account teardown — free, written, 48 hours — which reads your actual store and ad accounts and tells you what is leaking. That is checkable in a way a case study you cannot verify is not.

Choosing a platform, honestly

Shopify if you want the hard parts rented and your catalogue is conventional. WooCommerce if you want to own it and someone will keep it patched. A custom build almost never, and only when your commercial model does not fit either — DK Lighting needed retail and wholesale pricing on every product with a guest quote flow for contractors, which is genuinely awkward on both platforms. Any ecommerce development agency in the UK or elsewhere that opens with a platform recommendation before reading your catalogue is selling what they already know.

Go deeper

By platform.

Shopify

Theme and section work, app reduction, and the honest note about British references.

WooCommerce and WordPress

Where the British store proof is — and what Calesce says about handover.

Something bespoke

For commercial models neither platform expresses well, like retail and wholesale on one catalogue.

A shopping app

When repeat purchase frequency genuinely justifies one — and the honest test for whether yours does.

How it runs

The teardown comes first.

01

Store teardown

Free, written, inside 48 hours. Where the funnel leaks, on a real phone, with the specific offenders named.

02

Scope and fixed price

Platform decision, every template, the returns and stock behaviour written down — and what is out.

03

Build without closing the shop

Work happens on staging or a duplicate theme. Your live store keeps selling throughout.

04

Launch and hand over

Redirects mapped, admin and hosting in your name, and a walkthrough for whoever runs the catalogue.

Money

How we quote store work.

New store, fixed scope

Platform, templates, catalogue structure and launch. One written scope, one price in pounds, sent inside 48 hours of the teardown call.

  • ✓Platform recommended, not assumed
  • ✓Returns and stock behaviour scoped
  • ✓Full handover

Fix the funnel

A store that gets traffic and does not convert. Scoped from the free teardown as a fixed piece of work against named problems.

  • ✓Measured before and after
  • ✓Named offenders, not a report
  • ✓No retainer required

Replatform

Moving between systems. Quoted after we have read your catalogue, because product structure is what makes a migration easy or awful.

  • ✓Redirect map as a deliverable
  • ✓Order and customer history moved
  • ✓Live store keeps trading

No figures on this site, in any currency. A store quote turns on how unusual your product structure is and how much merchandising needs custom work — both knowable only after the teardown, which is free and yours whether or not you hire us.

FAQ

Straight answers.

Who is the best ecommerce agency UK retailers can hire?
Nobody answering that about themselves is a reliable source, so use a test instead. Ask three agencies to buy something from your store on a phone and tell you what annoyed them. The ones who come back with specific friction — a field, an image, a delivery message — have looked. The ones who come back with a proposal for a discovery workshop have not. It costs you nothing and it works on us too.
Should I use an ecommerce agency London based instead, given you are not?
If you want people in a room, or your buyers expect a British supplier on paper, then yes — those are real reasons. What you would give up is scope for the budget, which for a store rebuild is usually substantial. What you would gain is same-timezone support and someone who has probably solved your exact delivery-options question for a competitor down the road. We would rather you weigh that honestly than find out about the overlap in week three.
Do you also run the marketing, as an ecommerce marketing agency UK stores use for both?
We do run search and paid campaigns, and we will not point you at published results for them, because there are none — the campaign write-ups in our library are all still drafts and we have chosen not to activate stubs to make a portfolio look fuller. What we will do is a free teardown of your actual ad accounts and analytics, which tells you more about whether we know what we are doing than a case study would. Judge us on that.
How long does a store build take?
The published projects give real numbers rather than a brochure range. Elodie was live in two days as a straightforward Shopify build. DK Lighting — 84 products, dual pricing, a quote engine and a custom admin panel — was two weeks. A large replatform with unusual product structures runs longer, and the teardown gives you a figure for yours before you commit to anything.
What happens to our search rankings if we rebuild?
They are at risk, and the risk is almost entirely about URLs. A rebuild that changes product and category addresses without mapping every old one to its new equivalent discards years of accumulated visibility on launch day, and it does not recover on its own. We treat the redirect map as a deliverable with a sign-off rather than a task at the end of the list. Ask any agency you are considering how they handle it; the vagueness of the answer is informative.
Can our team run the catalogue afterwards?
That is the design goal and Calesce is the evidence. Products, prices, collections, content and campaigns should be yours to change without raising a ticket, and the catalogue there has grown by the client's own hand since we handed it over. What we recommend leaving alone is structural — templates and checkout — because those are where a small edit closes a shop.

Have us buy something from your store.

A free written teardown inside 48 hours: we go through your funnel on a real phone and tell you exactly where it leaks. Yours whether or not you hire us.

Get my free store teardownSee the UK market page

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