Websites · Online shop
A shop is above all the processes that run in the background: stock levels synchronised with a wholesaler or an ERP system, automatic order statuses and customer notifications, payment and courier integrations, invoices issued without retyping data, returns and complaints handled in one panel, and performance maintained with thousands of products. These are the parts I code and connect into one system, adding code where ready-made plugins fall short. I quote each shop individually after a conversation and a short brief.
Scope of work
These six areas are part of every shop I build. Customers see the first three when they buy, and the other three decide whether the shop stays fast as the range grows to several thousand products and whether it can sell in other countries.
Customers pay by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay or PayPal, and for more expensive products they can also pay in instalments or defer the payment. I connect the payment gateway to an account you open in your company’s name, so the fees go straight to the provider, with no intermediary. Before launch, I test every payment method with a real transaction.
I set up couriers, parcel lockers such as InPost with a map of pick-up points, and collection in person, along with a free shipping threshold and separate rates for bulky items. Integrations also save time at the packing stage. The shop creates shipping labels automatically, sends tracking updates to the customer and exports orders to your stock management software.
I set up sorting, product variants, bundles, related products and filters for the features that matter in your industry. With several thousand products, the default WooCommerce search is no longer enough, so I replace it with a search index that finds products by part of the name or by the manufacturer’s code.
A catalogue with hundreds of thumbnails is the most common reason for a slow shop. I set up automatic conversion to modern image formats and the right thumbnail sizes, and images load only as the visitor scrolls down. Then I check the effect on the product list, on a single product page and on the home page.
Selling abroad takes more than a translated interface, because each country needs its own prices, tax rates, terms and conditions and shipping methods. I build the shop so that another language means adding translations rather than building a second shop alongside the first.
The theme is rarely the reason a shop with thousands of products slows down. More often, the database tables are overloaded with abandoned carts, plugin logs and thousands of old post revisions. I clean them in batches, move orders to WooCommerce’s faster order storage (HPOS), tidy up the data loaded with every request (autoload) and add indexes where queries need them. You see the effect in the server response time, measured before and after the change.
Custom modules
Every industry has rules that plugin authors did not foresee. I built these six modules for my clients’ shops, and they show what code written for one specific process looks like when WooCommerce alone is not enough.
The plugin collects information about upcoming releases and shows it in its own section of the shop and on a separate page with the full list. Customers can see what comes out and when, and nobody has to keep that list up to date by hand in the admin panel.
A separate view of price reductions fills up automatically, with a date next to each item, so customers can see which products became cheaper in the last few days.
When a product is sold out, the customer leaves an email address and gets a message as soon as the stock is replenished. The empty product page then collects a list of people who are ready to buy.
A ranking built from the orders of the last 30 days, broken down by platform and category, replaces a list arranged by hand in the admin panel. The section updates itself and shows what customers are buying.
A new arrivals module works from the date each product was added, and sold-out items move to the end of the list automatically. All the modules share one settings panel, where you change the number of items, the date range and the categories without contacting a developer.
The shop reads the supplier’s file at regular intervals. It adds new items to the catalogue and updates the prices and stock levels of existing ones, and anything it could not match is listed in a report.
I also write plugins and connections to external systems for websites without a shop, and the WordPress plugins and API integrations page describes that work. If a shop is slow but does not need a rebuild yet, the right service is usually WordPress speed optimisation, which is free from the 2nd full month with OneNet Admin Shop Max in WooCommerce maintenance.
Process
The four stages always come in the same order. The first matters most, because the shop has to reflect the way your company works, and I describe that before anything gets built.
I start with how you take orders today, where your stock levels come from and what happens to the parcel and the invoice after a purchase. The result is a list of tasks worth automating and a second list, just as important, of tasks that are not worth automating.
WooCommerce is the base, and the rest depends on your process: the payment gateway, couriers, stock management software, invoicing software or a wholesaler with an XML file. I explain my recommendation with its annual cost, because in a shop most of the money goes on subscriptions for plugins that you use for a single feature.
You get a quote split into stages, with the basic shop, the integrations and the custom-coded modules priced separately. It shows what selling online costs and what the features specific to your industry cost. I usually take a 25% deposit at the start and the rest after launch. The price of every shop includes two rounds of corrections to the design and two to the finished shop, a 12-month guarantee on my work, and the first 3 months of OneNet Admin Shop Plus and OneNet SEO Plus.
Once you approve the design, I build the shop in a staging environment and send you its address. Before launch, I go through the whole purchase with every payment and shipping method, including cancellation and refund. When an existing shop moves over, I carry over its customer accounts and order history, and I redirect the old product addresses.
Project start
A shop launches when the data is ready. The two most common delays are the product file and legal documents that nobody ordered in time.
If your products are in stock management software or a wholesaler’s price list rather than in a file, I can import them from there. It often pays to connect the shop to the data source rather than retype several thousand products by hand as a one-off job.
Other services
A company website almost always goes with a shop, and an unusual process may need custom code.
Company websites, including multilingual ones, built with WordPress or as static sites. Design, development, go-live and transfer of the content from the old website. Quote after a short brief.
Custom plugins and connections between WordPress and other systems such as CRM, stock management or applicant tracking, with data import and synchronisation. Quote after a short brief.
Maintenance for static and custom-coded websites: hours of work for changes, monitoring, security updates and backups. From €100 net per month.
The shop is one of my website development services, alongside company websites and custom code. After launch, it can move to WooCommerce maintenance, with more frequent backups and a staging environment for updates. I describe moving an existing shop to another server on the WordPress migration page.
FAQ
Answers to what shop owners ask, usually after their first season on a subscription platform.
I quote every WooCommerce shop individually. The price depends on the number of products, the payment and shipping methods, integrations with stock management software or a wholesaler, and any custom-coded modules. After a conversation and a short brief, you get a quote in stages, with the basic shop, the integrations and the modules each priced separately and nothing left to be settled later. The price includes two rounds of corrections to the design and two to the finished shop, a 12-month guarantee on my work and the first 3 months of maintenance and SEO. All prices are net, excluding VAT. The offer is for businesses only.
Because the shop stays yours: the files, the database and your customers’ data are on your hosting rather than in an account that can be suspended. You pay no commission on your turnover and no subscription that grows with your sales, and any feature can be added instead of waiting for it to appear in the platform’s development plan. In return, you take on the upkeep: updates, backups and security. If you would rather not deal with that, you can choose a technical maintenance plan.
A shop with a catalogue of up to a few hundred products and standard payment and shipping methods usually takes 6 to 10 weeks. Integrations with stock management software or modules for a specific industry add further weeks. The longest part is usually preparing the data, which means the descriptions, the photos and a clear set of categories. Moving an existing shop can be quicker, because the product database already exists, as long as it can be exported.
Yes, and that is the most common reason clients come to me for a WooCommerce shop rather than a subscription platform. All six modules above started this way. Each took between half a day and a few days of work, and none of them meant rewriting the shop. Before I quote a feature like this, I check whether a plugin you already have solves the problem.
In most cases, a slow shop can be made faster without a rebuild. First I measure where the time goes, whether that is database queries, too many plugins, images of two megabytes each or hosting with no spare capacity. In large shops, the usual cause is unoptimised tables full of abandoned carts, security plugin logs and shopping sessions from years ago. A rebuild makes sense when the theme can no longer be maintained or the shop runs on a WooCommerce version several major releases behind.
You have a 12-month guarantee on my work, and for the first 3 months OneNet Admin Shop Plus and OneNet SEO Plus run at no extra cost. After that, you decide whether to continue working with me on SEO and the technical side. For shops, I usually suggest moving to WooCommerce maintenance, with more frequent backups, a staging environment for safe WooCommerce updates and a shorter response time, because every hour of downtime means lost orders. You can also run the shop yourself and come back to me with specific jobs.
