How to build an ecommerce website.

DIY subscription services: Shopify, Wix, Squarespace.

Subscription-based services are a genuinely good way to try out ecommerce before making a realistic budgetary commitment to a properly built website. Many clients who come to Futurestore have already spent time on one of these platforms, and that's no bad thing. They arrive with a clear understanding of what selling online actually involves.

The trade-off is this: you do everything yourself, and that's a lot to take on when you're also trying to run a business. The platforms are also less flexible than they appear. If the function you need doesn't exist as a built-in option or a plugin, you almost certainly can't have it.

A good way to try ecommerce before committing, but if the business grows, you'll likely outgrow the platform too.

A designer using subscription tools.

Some people move quickly into web design by offering to build websites on the subscription services described above. This can reduce upfront project costs, but you inherit the same limitations as building it yourself, and you're now paying someone else to do it on a platform that still charges you monthly and takes a cut of sales.

It also isn't always made clear by the designer that they're building on one of these services. Ask the question directly before committing. If they're using Shopify or Squarespace as the foundation, you need to factor that into your long-term cost calculations.

Always ask what the site is being built on. The answer affects your costs and flexibility for years to come.

Specialist software: WooCommerce, Magento.

Specialised ecommerce software like WooCommerce (a WordPress plugin) or Magento offers considerably more flexibility than hosted subscription services. You'll need an experienced developer to build and configure the site, but the software itself won't hold you back, only the developer's abilities will.

The main thing to be clear about before starting: get an accurate price and a realistic timescale in writing. Costs can vary enormously from one developer to the next, and “we'll work it out as we go” is a sentence that has ended many project relationships badly.

The software won't limit you, but finding a developer with genuine depth of experience is the real challenge.

Our own software. 26 years of it.

Futurestore sits in the same category as Route 2A, but with one significant difference. We didn't adopt someone else's platform. We built our own ecommerce software, have been developing and improving it since 2000, and use it for every site we build.

That means we know it completely. When something needs to be adapted or extended for a specific client's requirements, we can do it, and we can tell you honestly whether it's possible, how long it'll take, and what it'll cost.

We offer two clearly priced packages, so you know your costs before a line of code is written. The support line is a phone number that reaches the people who built your site. We've been doing this since 1997 and we're still here.

Fixed prices. Our own software. The same people from start to finish. That's the whole pitch.

Fully bespoke: built from scratch.

The fully bespoke route, where a site is engineered from the ground up with completely custom code, is nowadays really only considered by household-name businesses, well-funded start-ups, or websites with genuinely novel functionality that no existing platform can provide.

It's the most powerful option and by far the most expensive. If you're asking about it, you almost certainly already have a technical team or a budget that puts you in a different conversation than most people reading this page. If it's the kind of challenge you have in mind, take a look at our bespoke development.