Web and ecommerce platforms

Customer facing software, where the edge cases are public.

Internal tools embarrass you privately. A storefront or a portal fails in front of the person you were trying to sell to, at the exact moment they were reaching for a card. That difference is worth designing for rather than discovering.

Start with a complimentary 20-minute fit call Start with the blueprint

Hosted platforms are extremely good, and often the answer. If you sell a modest catalogue through a conventional checkout, a hosted storefront will beat anything custom on cost, reliability and time. Custom earns its place where the requirement is genuinely unusual.

What this line covers

Storefronts, portals and applications your customers use.

The interesting work in this line is rarely the pages. It is catalogue structure, pricing rules, identity, payment handling, and what the customer can see and do about their own account without calling you.

Commerce experiences where the catalogue, pricing or purchase flow does not fit what hosted platforms assume.
Customer portals over billing, orders, documents or service records, with real access control.
Customer facing applications that carry a workflow rather than brochure pages.
Payment handling arranged so card details are entered on the payment provider's pages and never on yours.
Multi site platforms sharing one catalogue, one checkout and one set of operational tooling.

Signals you are in this line

Your pricing depends on the customer, the contract or the quantity in ways a standard cart cannot express.
Customers call to ask questions your own systems could answer for them.
You run several brands or sites that duplicate the same catalogue by hand.
The purchase is a conversation followed by a payment, not a checkout.

The first and the last of these are the usual reasons a hosted platform stops fitting.

The kinds of systems we build

Work the team has taken on in this line.

Including the platform this site belongs to, which is a multi site build sharing one catalogue and one billing service across many brands.

Multi site commerce platforms

Many storefronts on shared infrastructure: one catalogue, one checkout, one operational tool set, with each site keeping its own identity and its own domain.

Customer portals

Authenticated views over billing and service records, so customers can answer their own questions instead of joining a support queue.

Purchase flows that are not carts

Quote, approval and payment link flows for businesses that sell through a conversation, where a public cart would be the wrong instrument entirely.

What we would talk you out of

When custom is the wrong tool for a public facing system.

Rebuilding what a hosted platform gives you for a monthly fee is one of the more reliable ways to spend a lot of money badly. These are the findings we write most often here.

A hosted platform fits

Conventional catalogue, conventional checkout, conventional shipping. Take the platform, spend the difference on the parts of the business that are actually yours.

A theme, not a build

Sometimes the requirement is design and content rather than software. That is a smaller and faster piece of work, and it should be described as one.

The catalogue is not decided

Products, pricing rules and entitlements that are still in flux will be rebuilt twice if you encode them now. The blueprint will say to settle them first.

Inside the blueprint

What the five days settle before a storefront is priced.

Public facing work carries obligations that internal tools do not. The blueprint gets them onto the page early.

ItemWhat the blueprint settles for this kind of work

Catalogue and pricing structure. How products, options, entitlements and prices are modelled, which is the decision the rest of the build is shaped around.

Identity and access. Who signs in, what they can see, and how account access is granted, changed and taken away.

Payment handling. Which provider, which flow, and confirmation that card details are entered on the provider's pages rather than on yours.

Hosted against custom. An honest comparison against the platforms that already do most of this, with the reasons for going custom written down.

Content and operations. Who updates what after launch, and through which tool, since a platform nobody can change is a platform that ages badly.

A fixed price for Phase 1. Against a scope that names the pages, the flows and the exclusions rather than gesturing at a website.

The other three lines

Most projects touch more than one.

Work rarely arrives in a single category. The blueprint is where we decide how much of each one your project actually needs.

Custom business software

Line of business applications, internal tools, dashboards and workflow systems.

Integrations and automation

Making systems talk: APIs, data sync, billing and operations plumbing.

AI and agent systems

Assistants, document and ticket automation, retrieval, agent workflows.

Book the call

Tell us what your customers are trying to do.

Twenty minutes, no charge. Describe the purchase or the account experience you have in mind, and we will tell you whether it needs a build, a hosted platform, or a much smaller piece of work than you were expecting.

Start with a complimentary 20-minute fit call Read the blueprint in full