E-Commerce
E-Commerce Development for Direct-to-Consumer Brands
Most D2C brands outgrow Shopify before they realise it. The signs are consistent: SEO traffic stagnates despite publishing effort, conversion rates plateau because checkout customisation requires Shopify Plus, and the monthly cost comparison against a custom build starts looking unfavourable. When that happens, a custom e-commerce build stops being a luxury and becomes a financial decision.
The Shopify SEO problem at scale
Shopify's SEO limitations are architectural — you can't solve them with apps or theme customisation. Product pages must live at /products/product-name. Collection pages at /collections/collection-name. The word 'blogs' and 'news' are hardcoded into blog URLs. For a brand building organic search as a primary acquisition channel, these constraints mean working against the platform from day one.
Shopify also generates significant duplicate content by default: variant filtering creates indexable URL permutations, pagination creates shallow-content pages, and product syndication across collections produces canonical tag management problems that require constant maintenance.
Transaction fees compound with revenue. Shopify charges 0.5–2% on sales through third-party payment gateways. At £1m annual revenue, a 1% fee is £10,000/year that simply doesn't exist on a custom build.
What a custom D2C build gives you
A custom Next.js e-commerce build gives you complete control over URL structure, so your product catalogue is organised for SEO from the start. Internal linking between products and categories flows authority where you intend it to. Core Web Vitals consistently outperform template-based Shopify — which matters because Google uses page experience as a ranking signal, and a slow checkout loses customers before they pay.
We integrate Stripe for payment processing (no per-transaction fees beyond Stripe's standard rates), build custom checkout flows that match your brand experience rather than Shopify's constraints, and implement full e-commerce structured data: ProductGroup, AggregateOffer, and Review schemas that create rich results in Google search.
The build cost is higher upfront. The three-year total cost of ownership is consistently lower for brands above £300k annual revenue — and the asset is owned, not rented.
When to make the switch
The decision framework is straightforward: if SEO is a primary acquisition channel, if revenue is above £300k/year, or if you need checkout flows or product logic that Shopify Plus would require at £2,000/month — a custom build is the right financial decision.
For brands below those thresholds that want to future-proof, our Online Store package starts at £2,500 and is built to scale. We design the architecture with growth in mind, so switching isn't a rebuild — it's an evolution.
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