Independent Retailers
Shops with a physical presence in Bridgend, Cardiff or Swansea that want to sell beyond the door without handing a percentage to a marketplace.
eCommerce Website Design — Cardiff, Swansea, Newport and South Wales
Online Shops That Are Yours, Not Rented
A proper online shop with secure payments, real stock control and no monthly platform fee attached to the site itself.
We build online shops for independent retailers across South Wales — from a single-product store to a full catalogue with variants, stock levels and delivery zones. Payments run through Stripe or PayPal, so card data never touches your site and you are not liable for storing it.
The important difference from a hosted platform is ownership. A Shopify or Wix shop is rented: the subscription never ends, the apps are billed separately, and you cannot move the shop elsewhere. What we build is yours — the code, the domain, the hosting account — with no compulsory monthly fee for the site to keep existing.
That trade-off is not right for everyone. If you are selling a handful of items and want to be live this week, a hosted platform is genuinely the better answer and we will tell you so. Custom pays back when the shop is a real sales channel, when you need it to look like nobody else's, or when it has to talk to stock or accounting systems you already run.
What an Online Shop Includes
Everything needed to take money safely and fulfil an order.
- Product catalogue with categories, variants, images and search
- Secure checkout through Stripe or PayPal — no card data stored on your site
- Stock tracking, with low-stock and out-of-stock handling
- Delivery zones, postage rules and collection options
- Order confirmation and dispatch emails to you and the customer
- VAT handling and downloadable order records for your bookkeeping
- Product schema markup so items can appear in Google Shopping results
- Mobile-first checkout — most abandoned baskets are a phone problem
Who Buys This
The shops we build most often.
Makers and Small Producers
Bakers, brewers, craftspeople and small food producers selling a focused range, often with local delivery or collection windows.
Trade Suppliers
Businesses selling to other businesses, where accounts, trade pricing tiers and repeat ordering matter more than a pretty storefront.
Anyone Outgrowing a Hosted Platform
Shops paying for a stack of platform apps to work around limitations, where the monthly total has quietly passed what a custom build would have cost.
What an Online Shop Costs
Online shops are quoted individually rather than priced from a list, because a ten-product shop and a two-hundred-product shop are genuinely different jobs. The variables are catalogue size, how many product options each item has, what has to integrate with your stock or accounts, and whether product photography and descriptions need writing. You get a fixed written quote before any work starts.
Questions About Online Shops
What retailers ask us before committing.
Is a custom shop cheaper than Shopify or Wix in the long run?
It depends how long you run it and how many add-ons you need. A hosted platform costs roughly £20 to £100 a month once you include apps, and that never stops. A custom shop costs more up front and then only hosting, which for a static-fronted shop is a few pounds a month. Most shops break even somewhere in years two to four. If you expect to trade for a season, rent. If this is the business, own it.
Can I manage products myself without touching code?
Yes. You get an admin area for adding and editing products, prices, stock levels and images. If your catalogue lives somewhere else already — a spreadsheet, an EPOS system, an accounting package — we can often import from it or sync with it instead of asking you to retype everything.
How are card payments kept secure?
Card details are entered directly into Stripe or PayPal's own hosted checkout, so they never pass through or get stored on your site. That keeps you out of scope for the strictest parts of PCI DSS compliance. Your site only ever sees whether a payment succeeded and what was ordered.
Will my products show up in Google Shopping?
We add Product structured data to every item — price, availability, images, description — which is what Google reads to build a shopping result. That makes eligibility possible; it does not guarantee placement, and paid Shopping campaigns are a separate thing we do not run for you.
What about postage, VAT and returns?
Postage rules, delivery zones and collection options are set up as part of the build, so a Cardiff customer and a customer in Inverness can be charged differently. VAT is handled correctly on invoices. Returns policy wording is yours to decide, but we will make sure it is published where UK consumer law requires it to be.
Ready to Get Your Business Online?
Based in Bridgend and serving businesses across South Wales. Get a free, no-obligation quote today with clear and honest advice.