E-commerce & Online Shops
Which means we have made the expensive mistakes at our own expense rather than at yours. SmartGiftShop is ours — personalisation, multiple suppliers, payments and more than 25,000 verified customer reviews — and everything on this page comes out of running it.
The question worth asking first
Often the honest answer is no, and we would rather say it now than three months into a build. Here is how we actually decide.
If you sell a finite catalogue of ordinary things, Shopify or WooCommerce will do it well and cheaply, and we will tell you so. Paying us to rebuild what you can rent for a few pounds a month is a bad use of your money.
The moment the product is personalised, made to order, priced differently per customer, or assembled from several suppliers, platforms start fighting you. That fight is expensive in workarounds, plugins and staff time, and it never ends.
A per-sale fee is charged on every order for as long as you trade, and it grows precisely as you succeed. A build costs once. Somewhere between those two lines is a crossover, and it is worth working out where yours is before deciding.
What we build
Capturing what the customer wants, validating it before it reaches production, and showing them something honest about the result. Most disputes in personalised goods start with a customer who saw one thing and received another.
One order, several makers, different lead times and file requirements, and a single coherent answer when the customer rings. This is the hardest part of the operation and the least visible from the front of the shop.
Different customers on different terms, in one catalogue, without either seeing the other's prices. Trade accounts are where most off-the-shelf shops start needing plugins that fight each other.
Payment providers, authentication rules and tax requirements all change underneath a live shop. Payment integration is not a feature you finish; it is one you maintain.
Real reviews, displayed with no ability to hide an unflattering one. Filtering by topic is legitimate; filtering by sentiment is an offence under the DMCC Act 2024, enforceable at up to 10% of global turnover.
Made-to-order businesses do not have stock in the way platforms assume. Modelling that honestly avoids a great deal of nonsense about inventory levels for things that do not exist yet.
How it runs
Not the website — the operation. Who makes it, how long they take, what they need from you, and what happens when they get it wrong. The shop is downstream of all of that.
Products, options, prices, terms, tax and delivery rules written down before anything is built. This is where a shop is actually designed.
Built to the fixed price agreed, then run end to end with real orders through to real suppliers before a customer ever sees it.
The first weeks of a new shop always surface something. We watch it properly rather than handing over and hoping.
More than a brochure site, and it depends almost entirely on how complicated the products and the fulfilment are rather than on how many of them there are. A shop selling two hundred simple items is easier than one selling four personalised ones. Fixed price against a written scope, always.
Quite possibly, and we will say so. If you sell a fixed catalogue of ordinary items, Shopify is good and cheap and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The case for building starts when personalisation, trade pricing or multi-supplier fulfilment make you fight the platform every day.
No. We charge for the work and then it is finished. A percentage of your sales is a fee that grows as you succeed, which aligns nobody's interests with yours except ours.
Usually yes, and the important part is the data — products, customers, orders and history — plus a redirect map so the search rankings you have built up survive the move. That migration planning is where most replatforming projects quietly go wrong.
Yes, and there is a legal line worth knowing. Showing reviews filtered by topic is fine. Filtering them by sentiment — quietly hiding the bad ones — is a banned practice under the DMCC Act 2024, enforceable by the CMA at up to 10% of global turnover. We will not build the second version, and plenty will without mentioning it.
Fifteen years, personalisation, multi-supplier fulfilment and 25,000+ verified reviews. Everything on this page comes out of running it.
Read the case studyIf what you need is a site that informs rather than one that sells, start here instead.
Read moreWhen the shop is really a system — subscriptions, accounts, bookings, or something nobody has built before.
See what we buildThat second half is the part that decides everything, and it is the part most quotes never ask about. We will tell you honestly whether this is a build or a platform.