Ecommerce website development

Ecommerce website development revolves around four choices: the platform you sell on, the party that builds, what the store must be able to do and how customers will find it. Zalm Partners guides all four, from the Groot Handelsgebouw in Rotterdam for businesses across the Netherlands and Belgium. We build the store and make it findable in Google and in AI search engines such as ChatGPT.

Something we notice in the requests that reach us: a platform is often named before anything is said about the customers or the catalogue. We deliberately reverse that order. First what you sell and to whom, only then what you sell it on, because the second question gets much easier once the first is answered.

For most small and mid-sized stores the choice narrows to Shopify or WooCommerce, with custom development as the third route for requirements no standard platform can carry. Shopify takes hosting, security and checkout off your hands; WooCommerce gives maximum freedom in exchange for doing your own maintenance. The full trade-off, including the cases where we recommend WooCommerce, sits in our comparison of Shopify versus WooCommerce.

Our own preference is no secret: we build the majority of our stores on Shopify, because our clients would rather spend their time selling than administering servers. But a platform chosen on the agency's preference is the world upside down; it should follow from your catalogue, your integrations and your team.

A web shop is not a website with a cart bolted on; it is a selling machine in which every part serves the till. This is the bar we set for every build.

• Fast loading, even on a phone with a weak connection
• Checkout with the local payment methods your customers expect
• A product structure that scales from fifty to five thousand items
• Integrations with inventory, point of sale or accounting where they save manual work
• Measurement that shows where visitors drop off and what they are worth
• Readable for search engines and for the AI models that recommend products

That last point is the youngest, and the most often forgotten. A growing share of purchases starts with a question to an AI assistant, and stores without machine-readable product data simply do not appear in those answers.

From first call to launch we work in fixed phases, each ending with a decision moment where you approve before we move on. Intake pins down catalogue, audience and integrations. Design shows the store on the pages that matter commercially. The build follows the approved design, and launch comes only after a test round in which the payment methods are genuinely walked through.

If you choose Shopify, the full process with timeline and deliverables is described under Shopify development. For custom builds and other platforms, our approach lives on the web development page. Either way, after delivery you own the store, the domain and the data.

The most expensive mistake with a new store is building first and chasing findability afterwards, because that is when the rebuilding starts. We bring search data into the very first design: the questions your customers ask help decide which categories exist and what the copy on them says. How that craft works, from category pages to AI answers, is explained under ecommerce SEO.

That this works for small players against big ones is shown by the web shop of Uitgeverij Wilde Haren: two people, yet number one in AI answers about children's books, above Bol.com and Bruna, with double the traffic from Google within the measurement period. The size of your store does not set your visibility; the quality of your data and answers does.

The price is driven by four factors: the size of your catalogue, the number of integrations with other systems, the amount of custom design and functionality, and whether data or findability from an existing store has to move along. The chosen platform adds its own line: Shopify charges a monthly fee per plan, while WooCommerce means paying for hosting and plugins.

Publishing amounts without knowing your situation would be false certainty. What we do promise: after one advice call you receive a proposal with a fixed price, a timeline and a defined scope, so you can compare providers on equal terms. Even if you end up building elsewhere.