Ecommerce website design for shops that sell online and in person

The online store most local businesses need is modest. A gift shop selling a few hundred products and gift cards. A bakery taking holiday pre-orders. A boutique posting new arrivals.

For stores like those, a custom ecommerce website on WordPress with WooCommerce does the job without a monthly platform fee. It sits on the same site as the rest of your business, with the same local SEO foundation, so your store pages can rank for your town too.

A business with thousands of products and warehouse fulfillment needs a different kind of project. I’ll tell you that on the first call rather than quote it.

94 of my Upwork jobs have been WordPress and Divi work, and some of those were stores. I handled weekly edits and WooCommerce updates for an art gallery’s store from 2019 to 2023. I sped up a training company’s site and built its custom WooCommerce product page template in 2018. A dive gear retailer hired me in 2019 to debug and support its group of WordPress and WooCommerce sites. The Marathon Watersports site I built sells jet ski tours and kayak, paddleboard, boat and bike rentals online, so visitors pay before they show up.

Shopify is a hosted platform. You pay a monthly subscription and Shopify runs the servers, security and updates. It’s a good fit if you want a store and very little else, plan to sell mostly online, or already use Shopify’s own register in your shop. The costs to watch are the monthly plan, transaction fees and the paid apps most stores end up adding.

WooCommerce is a free store plugin for WordPress. You pay for hosting and for any paid extensions you need, and someone has to keep it updated. It fits if your store is part of a bigger local business site, or you don’t want a platform fee growing with your sales. You own it all.

I build on WooCommerce. If Shopify suits you better, I’ll say so. More on the platform underneath is on my WordPress website design page.

A product page should answer every question a customer would ask at your counter: what is it, what does it cost, is it in stock, and how do I get it.

Photos. Real photos of the real item, from several angles, beat the manufacturer’s stock shot.

Descriptions in your own words. If you copy the manufacturer’s description, your page is one of hundreds with identical text, and Google has no reason to pick yours. A few honest sentences of your own set you apart.

Product SEO. Each product and category gets a title and description written the way people search, like “women’s waterproof hiking boots” rather than a model number. I add structured data, the code that tells Google a page is a product with a price and availability, so it can show those details in search results.

Local pickup. WooCommerce has it built in. Customers pay online and collect at your counter.

Shipping. Flat rate, free over a set amount, or calculated by weight and distance. I set up the rules that match how you actually ship, plus local delivery zones if you deliver nearby.

Payments. Card payments run through a processor like Stripe, Square or PayPal, which charges a fee per sale.

Your in-store register. If you already sell over the counter, the hard part is keeping stock counts right in both places. Some point-of-sale systems, Square among them, can connect to WooCommerce so one sale updates both. Others can’t. I check which yours can do before quoting.