Ecommerce website design in Wollongong.

Not unless you need to rebuild the checkout. Plus starts around $3,700 a month, and the checkout is the one page you can't fully customise below it. Even Advanced only pays for itself at serious volume or when you need live carrier shipping rates. Until then, a well-built Shopify store on a standard plan does the job.

Card fees, a gateway surcharge and apps. On Shopify's Australian pricing, card processing starts at 1.75% plus 30c on Basic, and using anyone else's payment gateway adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Each app costs $10 or $20 a month and nobody cancels anything, so a year later the app bill quietly rivals the plan. Here's the full Shopify cost breakdown.

You own the domain, the content and the brand, but not the platform underneath. Shopify is a subscription to someone else's infrastructure, not an asset you own. Whatever you build on, the domain and every login should sit in your name, not the agency's. Here's what to check before you hire anyone to build it.

Yes, because you own the upkeep. Hosting, updates, backups and security are yours on WooCommerce, where Shopify bundles them into the monthly fee. The payoff is control, better publishing tools and lower running costs if it's managed well, and maintenance packages mean you never have to touch a thing. Here's Shopify vs WordPress, side by side.

Yes, if the site underneath is sound. WooCommerce turns WordPress into a fully customisable store, so a brochure site can start selling without starting over. When the old theme is the problem, we rebuild instead, as we did for Best Buys Furniture, whose stiff template had no ecommerce function at all. Here's how a WordPress website build works.

Yes, and it's the most common site project we take on. Moving a business off a builder it has outgrown is a rescue more than a redesign. Hosted builders keep your content and design inside their platform, so moving off usually means rebuilding the store properly on Shopify or WordPress. Here's how the website builders compare.

Everything the store needs to take orders, not just the pages. Payment gateways, product uploads, clean categories, filters and shipping rules get set up alongside the design, copy and tracking. Every project wraps with recorded video training, so your team can run the store themselves. Here's what that looked like for Best Buys Furniture.

Not if the old pages are mapped to the new ones. A move that changes your URLs without redirects can wipe out rankings you spent years earning. So the old product and collection addresses get redirected before launch, not after the traffic drops. Here's how to redesign without losing what works.

Five to seven top-level items, with filters and breadcrumbs doing the rest. Vague categories and menus three levels deep lose shoppers before they reach a product, and if they can't find it, they can't buy it. Search that actually works covers anyone who already knows what they want. Here's the usability issues that cost stores sales.

Sharp images, a unique description, specs, benefits and real reviews. Uncertainty kills the sale, and vague copy, pixelated photos and an empty reviews section create plenty of it. Product schema then tells Google the price, availability and reviews, which can earn rich results in search. Here's how product and collection pages rank.

Yes, from day one. GA4 and the ad pixels you need go in at the build, with consent sorted before any data is collected. Merchant Center needs clear returns and refund policies, accurate contact details and prices that match your site exactly, so those get built too. Here's what Google checks before your products can show.

Make the checkout shorter and the total clearer. Baymard Institute puts average cart abandonment at 70.22%, and nearly 1 in 5 of those shoppers leave over a checkout that's too long or complicated. Guest checkout, fewer steps, a progress bar and total costs shown early fix most of it. Here's how conversion rate optimisation finds the leaks.

Like it was designed there first, because a phone is where most shopping now happens. Responsive layouts, real-device testing and thumb-friendly buttons are the baseline. Speed matters as much as layout: Google found 53% of mobile visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than three seconds to load. Here's how custom builds compare with templates.

Proof, clarity and policies they can find. Real reviews, accurate contact details and a returns policy answer the doubts that stop a first order. Stanford's web credibility research found people judge a site's credibility on visual design alone, so a dated store loses trust before anyone reads a word. Here's how trust signals lift conversions.

Five: welcome, post-purchase, browse abandonment, abandoned cart and winback. Welcome is your highest-converting message, and flows like welcome and abandoned cart can earn from the first subscribers who hit them. Most Shopify brands run them on Klaviyo, and every flow ends with a click back to your store. Here's the five Shopify flows, set up properly.