Both can run excellent stores. We care more about the business model than winning a platform argument. We look at products and variants, catalogue complexity, content, shipping, payments, subscriptions, integrations, internal skills, ownership, future customisation and how much operational complexity the team wants to carry.

Shopify can be a strong fit when a managed commerce platform removes technical overhead. WooCommerce can be powerful when WordPress content flexibility, ownership or deeper customisation is important. Neither is automatically ‘better’.

Bring the products and how you want to sell them. We will help work out the recipe.

Yes — and that is often the first thing we would investigate. Existing stores may already have valuable product data, customer behaviour, search history and operational processes. Throwing that away can be more disruptive than fixing the real source of friction.

We look at navigation, product discovery, catalogue structure, metafields, theme behaviour, apps/plugins, speed, mobile experience, content, integrations and the path to purchase. Sometimes a relatively focused change unlocks more value than a full redesign.

If the platform has genuinely been outgrown, we can then plan a migration with a clear reason for doing it rather than rebuilding because ‘new’ sounds better.

Yes. Large migrations are data projects as much as design projects. Before moving anything, we inspect the shape and quality of the source data and map products, variants, categories or collections, images, attributes, metafields, URLs and integrations into the destination.

We also plan for what sits around the catalogue: redirects, search visibility, customer/account implications, analytics, feeds, shipping and any downstream systems that depend on product identifiers.

The goal is not merely to get thousands of rows imported. It is to arrive with a catalogue that is usable, findable and maintainable after the migration.

Often that is the ideal starting point. If a mature product already solves 80% of the requirement reliably, rebuilding that 80% from scratch just to own the code can be wasteful. We focus on the remaining gap and whether it can be extended cleanly.

That is the pattern behind work such as adapting established platforms to the real needs of an organisation: the plugin or third-party product provides the foundation, then custom thinking handles the workflow, presentation, integration or business rule it was never designed to know about.

We will also tell you when the final 20% is fighting the platform so hard that another approach is safer. Customisation should create leverage, not a maintenance trap.

Yes, potentially. ‘There is no plugin’ does not mean ‘there is no integration’. We look for APIs, webhooks, feeds, exports, authentication methods or other supported ways of exchanging data.

The important work is understanding what needs to move, in which direction, how often, which system is the source of truth and what should happen when the connection fails. The code that sends a request is usually only one small part of a reliable integration.

If the external system does not expose the data or actions required, we will be clear about that limitation and look at whether the workflow can be redesigned rather than pretending an unsupported connection will be robust.

We define the return around the reason for the project. For an online store that may be sales, conversion rate or average order value. For a lead-generation site it may be qualified enquiries. For an LMS it could be less administration, easier delivery or the ability to serve more learners. For an integration, saving staff hours every week may be the return.

That is why we ask what a win looks like before discussing a long feature list. There is little value in delivering every requested feature if none of them moves the underlying business problem.

Where measurement is possible, we want the foundations in place so the result can be reviewed after launch. Real client growth, efficiencies, failures and lessons are more useful than invented marketing numbers — and they help us improve the next recipe.