Custom Ecommerce Development in Sydney

Custom online stores, checkouts, B2B ordering portals and the integrations behind them, built in Sydney for businesses whose selling has outgrown a platform template.

Doodle illustration of a shopfront with price tags, parcels, a cart and payment icons bursting out of an open delivery box

What do we build for ecommerce?

From a store written from scratch to a Shopify or WooCommerce site connected to the warehouse and the accounts, this is the ecommerce work we do.

Custom Online Stores

Stores written from the ground up for products, pricing or processes a platform template cannot handle, with an admin built around how your team takes and fulfils orders. Where one catalogue has to feed a website, an app and a trade portal, the front end can run headless on a commerce engine.

Custom Checkout & Quoting

Checkouts that handle what a standard one cannot: a quote instead of a price, deposits and part payments, delivery rules by postcode, or a product configured step by step before it goes in the cart.

B2B Portals & Trade Pricing

Account customers log in to their own prices, credit terms, order history and reorder lists. A builder reordering the same forty items every month should be able to do it in two clicks, from a phone on site.

Integrations

Connecting the store to the ERP, the accounting package, the warehouse or 3PL and the product information system, so stock, prices and orders are entered once and agree everywhere, instead of someone exporting a spreadsheet every morning.

Subscriptions & Memberships

Recurring orders, member pricing and gated content, with the billing, pausing and failed-payment handling that keeps them working after the first month.

Marketplaces

Platforms where other people sell: multiple vendors, split payments, commissions, and the admin tools that keep payouts and disputes in order.

Shopify & WooCommerce

When an established platform suits the business, we build on it properly: a theme made for your brand, as few apps and plugins as the job allows, and custom pieces added where the platform falls short. We also take over stores that have picked up an app for every problem and bring them back under control.

Performance & SEO

Page speed, structured product data, clean URLs, and the redirect and migration work that keeps rankings when a store moves platform.

Support & Hosting

Hosting, security patches, platform and plugin updates, and the steady stream of small changes a store needs once it is trading.

The First Question

Custom or Platform?

Custom Built

A custom store. When the way you sell is part of what makes the business different, a platform template gets in the way: trade customers with their own price lists, products configured or quoted rather than picked from a shelf, or stock held in a warehouse system the store has to respect. A store written for that keeps the logic in one place you own, instead of spread across apps that each charge monthly and update on their own schedule.

A platform with custom work around it. Shopify or WooCommerce runs the catalogue and the checkout, and code written for the job does the rest: middleware that keeps orders and stock in step with the ERP and accounting, a trade portal beside the store, or a custom checkout step. You keep the platform’s payments and hosting, and the parts particular to your business get code written for them instead of an app that nearly fits.

Off the Shelf

For a catalogue of products sold at list prices to the public, Shopify or WooCommerce set up well may be all a store needs. The monthly fee buys hosting, security and a checkout that already works on every phone, and plenty of developers know each one, so you are not tied to one supplier.

It is also the route most often assumed before anyone has asked how the business sells, which is how a store ends up running twenty apps to do work the platform was never designed for. The right route comes out of scoping, once we know the pricing rules, the systems the store has to agree with, and where the business expects to be in three years. How that decision gets made is in Pick the Problem Before You Pick the Platform, and what you give up by depending on a platform is in Building on Someone Else’s Land.

How Does an Ecommerce Project Run?

The same four stages as every project we run, with the risks particular to a store handled where they belong.

Scoping

A short first phase pins down the catalogue, the pricing rules, the systems the store must talk to, and what has to come across from the old store. It produces a technical approach and a realistic estimate, and it is where the platform-or-custom call actually gets made.

Design and Build

The store arrives in stages you can click through and place test orders on, so feedback lands while acting on it is still cheap. Checkout and integrations are built early, because they carry the most risk.

Testing

Our own testers check every stage, including real payment flows in the gateway’s test mode and the awkward cases: a card declined halfway, stock running out between cart and checkout, a postcode outside the delivery area. A store takes money and holds personal information, so we scope independent penetration testing before launch.

Launch and Support

Cutover is planned so no order is lost between the old store and the new one, with a redirect for every old product URL. After launch comes hosting, patches, platform updates and the small changes a trading store asks for every week.

What Drives the Cost?

A number given before anyone has looked at the catalogue and the pricing rules is a guess. These four things move an ecommerce estimate most, and once they are clear we are comfortable working to a fixed price.

Pricing Rules: How many ways a price can change: customer group, quantity, promotion, currency, or a quote instead.

Connections: How many other systems the store has to agree with: accounting, warehouse, ERP, shipping, marketing.

Catalogue and Data: How many products and variants there are, how clean the data is, and how much history comes across from the old store.

Compliance: Payment security, privacy and accessibility obligations, which sit with the store owner whether or not the platform mentions them.

Why an Australian Studio

About Code Brewery

We are based in Sydney and build for organisations across Australia. Our working day overlaps with every Australian business day, so when a payment gateway misbehaves at nine on a Monday morning, someone who built the store is already at work.

Our team covers the whole job: senior developers, project managers, quality assurance testers and digital designers, so a store does not need to be stitched together from separate suppliers. We work for businesses that come to us directly, and as the production team behind a number of creative and digital agencies.

Government and enterprise buyers can check the paperwork before the first meeting. Code Brewery is an Advanced supplier on the NSW Government ICT Services Scheme (SCM0020), and is rated Very Strong on the ProcessUnity Risk Index, the highest of its five ratings.

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