Online shops for Irish businesses, built in our own code

The shop is written for your catalogue rather than configured around somebody else's template. In practice that means four things.

The admin area matches how you actually work. If your products have sizes and finishes, the admin has sizes and finishes, not a plugin bolted onto a field that was designed for something else.

There is no subscription and no percentage of turnover going to the platform. You still pay for hosting, for the domain and for the card processor, and those are the only running costs that scale with the shop.

Nothing is locked. The code, the database, the product data, the customer records and the domain are yours, and they can be moved to another supplier without asking us for permission.

You can add what the business needs next year without waiting for an extension to exist. A trade price list for logged in customers, a delivery rule for one county, a quote request on products that are never sold at a fixed price.

Where a rented platform is the better answer: a first shop with twenty products, a budget under the entry figure for a custom build, or a business testing whether it wants to sell online at all. We will say so rather than sell you something larger.

Card payments run through a provider you hold the contract with, Stripe being the usual choice for a shop selling in euro. The money moves between the processor and your account, never through us, and the card details never touch your server.

Three things to settle before the build rather than during it: which currencies you accept, whether you sell to consumers or to businesses or both, and what happens to an order that fails authentication on the card. Strong customer authentication makes the third one common enough to design for.

Delivery is where Irish shops need more configuration than most. Deliveries within the Republic of Ireland are the simple case. Northern Ireland and Britain are separate: the carrier options differ, the rates differ, and Britain is outside the EU customs territory, so parcels going there need customs documentation and can attract charges at the destination that the buyer sees and you get asked about. That has to be stated on the page before checkout, not discovered by a customer afterwards.

Returns are a legal requirement before they are a feature. A consumer buying online in Ireland has a cooling off period under EU and Irish consumer law, and the shop has to explain it, provide the form, and handle the refund inside the deadline. We build the mechanism, the pages and the emails around it.

The stock figure on the product page has to be the stock in the building. That sounds obvious until a shop sells the same last item three times in an afternoon and somebody has to ring two customers.

So stock is held in one place and everything else reads from it. If you also sell in a shop, on a marketplace or through a wholesaler, that synchronisation is part of the build rather than a manual export somebody does on Mondays.

The product feed is the second half of the same job. Google Shopping and the comparison sites read a structured file, and most feed rejections come from the same handful of causes: a missing identifier, a price on the page that disagrees with the price in the feed, availability that is out of date, a product description written for people but not filled in for machines, or delivery and returns policies that the merchant account requires and the site does not publish.

We generate the feed from the same data the site shows, which removes the whole category of errors where two sources disagree. Product structured data goes on the page as well, so the listing in ordinary search results carries the price and the availability.

We do not build shops on Shopify or WooCommerce. We move businesses off them, which is a different job and one we do regularly.

The reason a move gets considered is usually arithmetic. A platform subscription plus paid extensions plus a percentage of turnover is a cost that rises with success, and at some volume the annual figure passes what a custom build would have cost once.

The move itself is a data project more than a design project. Products, variants, images, categories, customers, order history and every existing URL are inventoried first, because the addresses your products already hold are what search results and other people's links point at. Every one of them gets a destination in a redirect map before anything is switched.

Then the build runs in parallel on a test address while the current shop keeps trading, so you compare the two rather than discover the new one at launch. The switch is scheduled with you at a quiet hour, with the previous setup left available until the new shop is confirmed taking orders.

What a move does not fix on its own: thin product descriptions, photographs that do not show the product, and a catalogue nobody has tidied in four years. Those travel with you unless they are dealt with.

The question behind most Dublin enquiries is whether a shop can be built properly by a team that is not in the city. It can. The build, the product import, the payment integration and the testing all happen in a browser, and the shop goes live at a test address you open on your own phone before anything is switched.

What you do not get from us is a visit. There is no Dublin office and nobody to call round to the warehouse, so if your project needs someone on site, say so at the start and we will tell you honestly whether it fits. Everything else, from the first brief to the launch and the support after it, runs on video calls and written notes.

The one Irish site in our portfolio, CJM Bathrooms, is a bathroom renovation business rather than a shop. We say that plainly. Our ecommerce work, Zelviro with more than thirteen thousand products and marketplace feeds, Modena and ZooFood, was built for clients elsewhere, and all three are in the portfolio to open and check.

Our online shops start at €59 a month on DCL Site Business, and at €119 a month with marketplaces on Pro. The one-time setup has a fixed quote, depending on the catalogue, the integrations and how much content we produce rather than receive.

That is the figure we invoice and the figure you pay. Nothing is added afterwards, and there is no monthly platform fee attached to the build.

What moves a quote inside that range: the number of products and the number of variants each one carries, whether stock has to synchronise with another system, whether you need trade prices or customer accounts, how many delivery rules apply, and whether product text and photography come from you or from us.

Running costs sit outside the build price: hosting, the domain, the card processor's own fees, and maintenance if you take it. Those are set out with the rest of the budget question at what a website costs in Ireland.

A shop with thirty products and a shop with thirteen thousand look identical from the outside and are different projects underneath.

At scale the work moves to the listing pages. Filters that query the database sensibly rather than loading everything and discarding most of it. Pagination that search engines can follow. Images generated at the sizes actually displayed, in modern formats, loaded as the customer scrolls rather than all at once. Caching on the pages that do not change between visitors, and no caching on the cart.

Search inside the shop matters more than the homepage once the catalogue is large. Customers who use the search box are closer to buying than customers browsing categories, and a search that returns nothing for a common misspelling loses those orders quietly.

None of this is visible in a screenshot, which is why it is worth asking a prospective supplier how they handle a catalogue the size of yours before comparing quotes.

These are projects delivered in Romania, not in Ireland. Our one Irish project is a brochure site rather than a shop, and we would rather say that than blur it.

Zelviro is an online store with over 13,000 products, with marketplace integrations and automatic stock and order synchronisation, plus performance work aimed at conversion. It is the reference for what happens when the catalogue is large.

Modena is an online store with full payment integration, including card payments and instalments through the finance providers used in that market.

ZooFood is a specialty pet food shop built on a custom engine, with a parallel version on a newer stack.

Evo Construct began as a presentation site and became a custom commerce platform over a long partnership, which is the other common route: start smaller, extend when the demand is real.