A store built to be fast in year three.

Four things that pay for themselves: choosing the right platform, building a front end that stays fast under real conditions, fixing the cart and checkout where most revenue is lost, and moving an existing store without losing rankings or data. Around those sit the integrations — ERP, warehouse, subscriptions, loyalty, tax — and the ongoing release work that keeps a store shippable. The good version of this job leaves your team faster and better documented than it found them, not more dependent on the agency.

Fix, more often than brands expect, and we will tell you when that is the answer even though it is the smaller project. If the data model is sound and the problems are speed, app bloat and checkout friction, a focused engagement gets most of the value in weeks. Replatform when the platform genuinely blocks what you sell — pricing rules it cannot express, checkout it will not let you change, licence and hosting costs out of proportion to revenue — or when every change needs a developer because the theme has been patched past rescue.

It does not have to, and protecting that traffic is a planned workstream rather than a hope. We crawl the existing store completely, inventory every indexed URL including parameters and paginated collections, map a redirect for each one, carry metadata, structured data and internal linking across, and check the staging build against that inventory before launch. After go-live we monitor crawl stats, indexation and revenue by template daily for a fortnight, so if anything moves we know within a day. Our SEO team is in the project from the first week, not called in afterwards.

Frequently more than people expect. In Deloitte and Google's study of 37 retail, travel and lead-generation brands, a 0.1-second improvement in mobile load time was associated with an 8.4% lift in retail conversion rate and a 9.2% lift in average order value. On a typical store the biggest single lever is subtraction: apps and tags loading on pages that do not need them. We measure the millisecond cost of each one and give you the list, then set a budget per template so the gains do not quietly erode over the next year.

It is almost exactly the global average — Baymard's meta-analysis puts average cart abandonment at 70.19% — so the number itself is not the alarm. What matters is how much of yours is fixable, and the same research suggests plenty is: across the 344 leading stores they benchmark, only 35% have a decent-or-better checkout and 2% are rated good, with an average of 39 usability issues per flow. Shipping cost revealed late, forced account creation and validation that wipes a form are the usual suspects, and all three are engineering fixes.

Usually not, and it is the recommendation we most often argue against. Headless earns its extra cost and complexity when you have a genuinely content-heavy front end, several regions or brands sharing one commerce back end, native apps consuming the same APIs, or performance requirements a themed store cannot meet. It costs you the platform's built-in speed, its checkout, its app ecosystem and a chunk of your team's autonomy. We write the comparison out with running costs on both sides so the decision is made on numbers rather than on how modern it sounds.

Yes, and it is a good arrangement when the store is fundamentally sound. We work in your repository with your review process, document what we change, and keep implementations conventional so your team is not inheriting anything clever. Where a theme has been patched by several agencies we will map the debt honestly — what is worth refactoring, what to leave, what will bite at the next peak — and price the options separately so you can stage the work over quarters instead of committing to everything at once.

As first-class work with explicit failure handling, because integrations are where quiet revenue loss lives. Stock, pricing, orders, fulfilment, returns and invoices are mapped field by field with the edge cases written down: partial shipments, backorders, exchanges, tax exemptions, multi-currency rounding. Every job retries, logs and alerts rather than failing silently, and we build a reconciliation view so a mismatch is visible the same day. Where an ERP has no usable API we say so early rather than discovering it in week six.

Fixed-scope and quoted after the store review, so you approve a number rather than an hourly estimate that drifts: discovery, build, checkout work, migration, integrations and launch each priced as a line you can accept or defer. A focused performance-and-checkout engagement is a fraction of a full replatform and often the right first step. Ongoing development care is a monthly retainer scoped to the release cadence you want, and it is optional — the handover is complete either way.

We can, and it is often where a good build pays off fastest. Our conversion, paid social and email marketing teams work from the same tracking and the same definitions the build ships with, so the numbers agree from day one. It is equally fine to buy development alone and keep your existing agencies: we hand over documentation written for whoever comes next, because a store only one agency can maintain is a liability we would rather not create.