WooCommerce development, Mansfield

WooCommerce is the free shop software that runs inside WordPress. It turns an ordinary website into a shop with products, a basket, a checkout and customer accounts. The software costs nothing; what you pay for is the hosting, the card fees your payment provider charges, and any paid extensions you choose to add. My fee is for setting it all up properly, from £2,400, quoted as a fixed price once I know what you sell.

A shop is different from a brochure site. People are handing over money, so it has to load quickly, the checkout has to be obvious, and the tax and shipping rules have to be right. I build every shop myself, with 15+ years of WordPress behind it and nothing outsourced, and I hand it over so that adding a product or packing an order is a job you can do without ringing me. If you get stuck, I reply to most enquiries the same working day.

A shop is a lot more than a product page with a button. Here is what the build covers, so nothing turns up later as a surprise extra:

• Catalogue: categories, product pages, variations such as size and colour, and stock levels.
• Payments: card payments through a provider such as Stripe or PayPal, set up in your own account.
• Tax and VAT: prices and VAT set up the way your accountant expects, and shown correctly at checkout.
• Shipping: rates by weight, price or area, plus free-delivery thresholds and collection if you offer it.
• Emails: order confirmations and dispatch notices in your own wording and branding.
• Accounts: customers can log in, see past orders and reorder.

All of it is scoped up front, so the fixed price covers what we agreed. If you need something more unusual, such as trade pricing or subscriptions, we settle that at the scoping stage too, before you commit to anything, so the price you are quoted is the price you pay.

On a brochure site, a slow page is annoying. On a shop, it can cost you the sale. Shoppers are comparing you with other sellers, and a basket page that hangs is an easy reason to give up and go elsewhere.

Shops are also heavier to run than ordinary sites. Every product, price and stock check is a lookup, and the basket and checkout can’t simply be stored and replayed the way a normal page can. That is why the hosting and the way the shop is set up matter so much. I build with clean, purpose-built code rather than piling on plugins (small add-on programs), and I test the basket and checkout as carefully as the front page. The average page load across my sites is under 0.8 seconds, and I aim to keep a shop as close to that as its catalogue allows.

If you would like to know more about the hosting side, see my WordPress hosting plans.

If you already sell on another platform, the worry is usually the same: will I lose my customers and my place in Google? A careful move keeps both.

The important part is the web addresses. Each product and category page already has an address that Google knows about and that other sites may link to. When the shop moves, I match old addresses to the new ones with redirects, so anyone following an old link or search result lands on the right page rather than an error. I then check the new site in Google Search Console, the free tool that shows how Google sees your site.

Products, customers and order history can usually be brought across, depending on what the old platform lets me export, and large catalogues are imported in bulk rather than typed in by hand. I can’t promise your rankings will not move at all during a switch, because Google has the final say, but planning the move is what gives you the best chance of keeping them.

A shop only earns its keep if you are comfortable using it. Once it is live, I show you how to add and edit products, change prices, handle stock, process and refund orders and read your sales figures, by video call and in writing, so you have something to refer back to.

Behind the scenes, a live shop needs looking after: updates to WordPress and its plugins, security checks and backups. You can do that yourself, or hand it to me through website maintenance, from £45 a month. You keep ownership of your domain, your hosting account and your licences throughout, so there is no lock-in either way. Either way, you will always know who is looking after the shop and how to reach them.

If cash flow is tight at the start, the pay-monthly websites option may be worth a look, and you can see finished builds on my work page. When you are ready, tell me what you sell and I will scope it.