Ecommerce Agency UK: Ecommerce Web Design and Development That Sells on Every Channel

An ecommerce agency is a team that designs, builds and looks after online stores. Some only do design, some only do marketing, and a full-service ecommerce agency does strategy, platform choice, design, development, integrations, migration and support after launch. FactoryJet sits on the build side: we design and develop the store, connect it to your systems, and stay on to support it, and you own everything we build.

There is no single number, because a five-product DTC launch and a two-thousand-SKU B2B catalogue with ERP integration are different jobs. SKU means stock keeping unit, one sellable product or variant. What sets the scope is product count, the platform, how many systems you integrate (payments, stock, CRM), and how custom the design is. We scope every project after a call, so you know the shape of the investment before you commit to anything.

A platform store with a custom theme takes 3 to 5 weeks. An advanced store with subscriptions, B2B pricing or a migration takes 5 to 8 weeks. Headless builds and custom platforms run 8 to 14 weeks, depending on catalogue size, integrations and migration needs. The biggest delays are usually late product data and slow sign-off, not the code.

For well-run stores, yes. The Office for National Statistics reported that online sales were 28.8 percent of all Great Britain retail sales in August 2026, so close to three in every ten retail pounds are spent online. Profit comes from margins, delivery costs, returns and repeat customers, not from having a store at all. A fast store with a clear checkout and honest delivery costs protects those margins.

Yes, completely. When we hand a project over, you get the full codebase, admin access, and every credential involved, with no dependency on us to keep running. That is different from agencies that build on a locked template or keep hosting and code access under their own account. If you ever want to move to another developer, you can, because it is genuinely yours.

Yes. B2B commerce needs things a DTC template does not have: account-based pricing, bulk ordering, quote requests, and sometimes a login wall before customers see prices at all. DTC means direct to consumer, selling straight to shoppers. We build the B2B logic properly on Shopify Plus, Magento, or a custom stack, rather than bolting a password page onto a normal storefront and calling it B2B.

Yes, and it is some of our favourite work. UK manufacturers usually need trade accounts, customer-specific price lists, minimum order quantities, spec sheets and CAD downloads, and a live link to their ERP so stock and pricing stay correct. We build those features on Shopify Plus, Magento or a custom stack, and we keep the retail side separate if you also sell direct to consumers.

Both, and redesigns are more than half of what we do. Most UK brands come to us with a store that already takes orders but leaks them: slow on mobile, an awkward checkout, or a theme patched so many times nobody wants to touch it. We map what is already ranking and converting before we change anything, so the redesign buys you speed and sales without costing you the search traffic you have.

Agencies that show up often in UK ecommerce searches include Cake in the West Midlands, Unified in Richmond, designbox in Southend-on-Sea, Chilliapple, Charle and Propeller in London, and FactoryJet. Each has a different centre of gravity: some lead with Shopify Plus, some with Magento or bespoke software, some with marketing. The best one is the agency whose platform strength and team size match your store, not the one at the top of a list.

Ask to see stores they built on your platform and at your size, and check they are still live and fast on a phone. Ask who writes the code, who owns the code and hosting accounts at the end, how they handle redirects on a migration, and what support looks like after launch. Get the timeline in weeks with named milestones. An agency that is vague on any of those will be vague on the build too.

A freelancer suits small, well-defined jobs like theme tweaks or one app setup. An in-house developer makes sense once you have a steady stream of work every week and someone senior to manage them. An ecommerce agency fits a new build, a replatform or anything touching design, development, SEO and integrations at once, because you get several specialists and cover when someone is off. Many brands mix them over time.

You do not need an ecommerce agency in London to get a London-quality build. We work with brands in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and across the UK, remotely, with regular video calls, shared boards and the same senior team whatever your postcode. What matters is that the agency understands UK shoppers, UK delivery and UK consumer rules, not whether they can walk to your office.

A written scope listing pages, features and integrations; the platform and why; who does the work; a timeline in weeks with milestones and sign-off points; how data and URLs move if you are migrating; what testing happens before launch; what is handed over at the end; and what support looks like afterwards. If a proposal only has a design mood board and a total, ask for the rest before you sign.

It depends on your catalogue and your team. Shopify suits most DTC and growing brands who want less to manage. WooCommerce fits businesses already built around WordPress. Magento, now sold as Adobe Commerce, earns its keep with large, multi-store or B2B catalogues. Custom or headless is for business logic that does not fit any of the three. We recommend based on your situation, not on which platform we prefer building.

For most brands, yes. Shopify keeps investing in checkout, international selling, and AI-era shopping features faster than most alternatives, and the app ecosystem covers almost anything you need to bolt on. It stops being the right call once your catalogue, pricing logic, or integrations get complex enough that a template platform starts fighting you, which is when Magento or a custom build takes over.

Yes, both. Shopify Plus makes sense once a standard Shopify plan starts limiting you on checkout customisation, wholesale, or the volume of orders you process. Headless commerce, where the front end is decoupled from the commerce engine, suits brands that need a fully custom experience or want to publish the same catalogue across a website, an app, and other channels from one source.

Yes. Every build connects to the systems that already run your business: payment providers like Stripe or Shopify Payments, stock and inventory tools, and whatever CRM or email platform your team uses day to day. CRM means customer relationship management, where your customer records live. We would rather connect your existing tools properly than force you onto new ones just because they are easier for us to set up.

AI tools and website builders can put a basic store online quickly, and for testing an idea that can be enough. They struggle with the parts that decide whether a store makes money: clean product data, integrations with your stock and accounts, migrations that keep your rankings, UK consumer rules, and speed on a real phone. We use AI inside our own build process, but people still design, check and own every decision.

On Shopify, hosting is part of the platform, so there is nothing extra to manage. For WooCommerce, Magento and custom builds we set up hosting in your name with a UK or EU provider that suits your traffic, and we can look after updates and security patches for you. Either way the account belongs to you, so you are never stuck if you change agency.

Design decides what a shopper sees and trusts: the layout, the product photography, the order information appears in, and how the checkout feels to use. Development is the code underneath that makes it fast, connects payments and stock, and keeps it standing when traffic spikes. A design nobody can build is just a picture. A build nobody designed usually converts badly. We do both together, so neither gets blamed for the other.

A good ecommerce website design answers a buyer's questions before they have to ask them. Clear pricing and delivery cost up front, honest stock status, real photography from the angles people actually want, and a checkout with nothing in it that does not need to be there. It loads fast on a phone. It looks like your brand rather than the theme it started life as. Everything else is decoration.

That is the standard, not an add-on. Most ecommerce traffic now arrives on a phone, so we design and test for mobile first and target genuinely fast Core Web Vitals, which are Google's measures of loading speed, responsiveness and layout stability. We check them on real devices rather than trusting a score that only holds up in a lab. A slow store loses sales quietly, one abandoned cart at a time.

Under UK distance selling rules you must show your business name, contact details and address, clear prices including taxes and delivery, how to cancel, and the 14-day right to cancel after goods arrive. You also need a privacy notice and a cookie banner that gives a real choice. We build these into checkout, order emails and footer pages, but you should still have terms checked by a solicitor.

Yes, and this is where a lot of DIY migrations go wrong. We map every URL to its new address with a single permanent redirect, keep your product and category pages structured the way search engines already trust, carry structured data across, and test the new store thoroughly before it goes live. Then we watch rankings and traffic for the weeks after launch so anything that slips gets fixed early.

Yes, and we build it in rather than treating it as an add-on. Category and product pages get structured to rank from the start: clean URLs, proper internal linking, schema, and content that answers what a buyer is actually searching for. A store built without SEO in mind almost always needs rework later to fix it. For ongoing work after launch, see our ecommerce SEO service.

That depends on more than good code, but the technical foundation has to be right first. We structure product and category pages with clean schema and clear, factual descriptions that AI crawlers can actually read, which is what makes a product eligible to be recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, or a Google AI Overview in the first place. Nobody can guarantee a specific mention, but we build for it deliberately rather than by accident.

Senior engineers, not a rotating cast of juniors billed at a senior rate. The founder, Bhavesh Barot, is involved in scoping every project and stays close through the build, rather than handing you off entirely to an account manager after the sales call. That is deliberate. It is how the same standard holds whether the project is small or large.

We stay close for the first weeks after launch, when real customers on real devices surface things a test environment never does. After that you choose the shape that fits: ad-hoc fixes when you need them, a monthly support plan covering updates, security patches and small improvements, or planned growth sprints for new features. Because you own the code, you can also take it in-house or to another team at any time.

Yes. We build on platforms with a proper admin, Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, or a custom CMS, so you can add products, edit copy, and update pages yourself without calling us for every small change. We walk your team through it at handover, record the session, and write it up so it still makes sense three months later.

Send your name and work email through the form on this page. The founder replies within 24 hours to book a short call, where we look at your catalogue, your current store if you have one, and what platform actually fits. That first conversation is useful whether or not we end up working together.