Where most SMB storefronts quietly lose the sale
An online store has exactly one job, and most fall down on it at the last step. The traffic arrives, the product is good, the price is fair — and then the customer hits a product page that takes six seconds to paint, a cart that forgets what they added, or a checkout that asks for the same information twice. They leave. The analytics call it a "bounce." It was a sale.
The pattern we see on almost every storefront audit:
- Product and listing pages load in five to eight seconds on mobile. Most commerce traffic is mobile, and most mobile shoppers will not wait. Google's Core Web Vitals penalize it; your conversion rate punishes it harder.
- Checkout has more steps than it needs. Every extra field, every forced account creation, every surprise shipping cost on the final screen is a place the customer reconsiders.
- Products are invisible in search. No
Productschema, no review markup, no clean category structure — so the storefront never earns a rich result and competes on paid traffic alone. - The theme was built for a different store. A marketplace template stretched over a brand it was never designed for, with three abandoned apps slowing every page.
A storefront engineered for speed, conversion, and search fixes all four. That is what we build.
What a Naxdor storefront does differently
Before any visual polish, a store we ship is engineered to a measurable floor:
- Sub-two-second Largest Contentful Paint on product pages (PDPs) and listing pages (PLPs), on a real mobile device, enforced in CI on every commit.
- A checkout designed to close — minimal steps, guest checkout by default, shipping and tax shown early, and the payment, fulfilment, and tax integrations configured and tested against real orders.
- Commerce structured data —
Product,Offer,AggregateRating, andBreadcrumbListmarkup validated in Google's Rich Results Test, so your products are eligible for rich results instead of fighting for paid clicks.
These are the floor. The work above the floor — merchandising, post-purchase flows, subscription logic — is where the engagement earns its keep.
What you get at the starting price
Refer to the price card on this page for the included scope at USD $6,500 starting. In short: a Shopify or custom build with real theme work, checkout customization, product templates, the payment and shipping and tax integrations wired and tested, performance budgets enforced, and 30 days of post-launch support.
Two things worth setting straight about that scope:
- It is not a theme with your logo dropped in. We design and build the storefront around your catalog and your brand. Where Shopify is the right platform, we do serious theme work on it — not a five-minute reskin.
- Catalog size and integration depth move the price. A focused catalog with standard payment and shipping is the starting point. ERP sync, subscriptions, multi-currency, or a headless front end are real engineering and priced accordingly — we tell you which bucket you are in on the first call.
Shopify, custom, or headless — what you actually choose
The biggest decision in an e-commerce build is the platform, and the honest framing is a trade between control and overhead:
| Approach | Best for | The trade |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify (themed) | Most SMBs — standard catalog, fast launch, proven checkout | Platform fees and app limits; you live within Shopify's model |
| Headless Shopify | Brands wanting a custom front end on Shopify's commerce engine | More upfront engineering; best-in-class performance and design freedom |
| Fully custom | Unusual catalogs, complex pricing, or deep ERP integration | Highest cost and ownership; total control, no platform constraints |
Most SMBs should be on Shopify, and we will say so plainly even though a custom build bills more. Shopify's checkout converts, its payment and fraud tooling is mature, and it stays patched without you thinking about it. We reach for headless or fully custom only when the brand experience or the integration requirements genuinely outgrow what a themed store can do.
How we build a Naxdor storefront
The four-stage process maps onto every project. For commerce, here is what each stage produces.
Discover (1–2 weeks)
We map the catalog, the customer journey from ad or search to confirmed order, and the systems the store has to talk to — inventory, fulfilment, accounting, email. We pressure-test the platform choice against your real requirements, not the platform we feel like building this month. You leave with a scope document, a fixed-fee proposal, and a target launch date.
Design (2–3 weeks)
Information architecture and the key flows first — category structure, PDP layout, cart, and checkout — because those decide both conversion and SEO. Then visual design in working sessions you attend live. Engineering pairs in throughout, so the design we hand off is already built against the component system we will ship.
Build (3–6 weeks)
The store is in your hands from day one via preview URLs. Every commit runs performance, accessibility, and SEO budgets in CI; we do not merge work that breaks them. The week before launch is a full QA pass — every product, every variant, real test orders through payment and shipping, structured data validated, sitemap submitted to Search Console.
Grow (ongoing)
Thirty days of post-launch support is included. After that, optional retainers keep the store earning — Maintenance for the platform and dependencies, SEO for organic rankings, and conversion work on the flows that move the needle.
Migrating from WooCommerce, Wix, or Etsy
If you are outgrowing a templated platform or moving off a marketplace, the migration is the riskiest part — and the part most worth doing carefully. We inventory every product, URL, and review that carries equity, map old URLs to new ones with 301 redirects, preserve the rankings you have already earned, and verify in Search Console before launch. Done well, a migration keeps your traffic and improves your conversion; done carelessly, it resets six months of ranking work to zero.
What we don't build
Honesty about scope is half the value of a service page. For Naxdor e-commerce, the most common asks we do not take at the starting price:
- Product photography and copywriting. A great storefront needs both, and specialists do them better than we would — we will recommend people we trust.
- Paid-media setup and ongoing ads management. We build the asset that paid traffic lands on; we are not your media buyer.
- Marketplace storefronts (Amazon, Etsy) as the primary channel. We build your owned store. If a marketplace is your main channel, we will tell you that on the call.
Where to next
If you are scoping a real store, the right next step is a 30-minute discovery call. We learn what you are selling and to whom, you learn whether we are the right partner, and within three business days you get either a written scope or an honest referral to someone better suited.
If you are earlier in the decision and want to know what we would change about your current store, request a free 30-minute SEO and Core Web Vitals audit — a Loom walkthrough plus a one-page PDF of prioritized findings, no pitch attached.
Either way, see the rest of what we ship, with starting prices, on the pricing page.