E-Commerce Website Design Agency

WBD is a small e-commerce website design agency in Oxford, working with independent brands across the UK and well beyond it. We make complete shops — the strategy, the words, the design and the build, one job in the same hands. This page sets out what that work involves: what e-commerce design actually is once you look past the visuals, how we choose platforms, what a UK build costs and how long it runs, what we measure once a site is live — and, if you're starting out, how to choose between a theme, a freelancer and an agency.

Most e-commerce sites aren't designed so much as assembled. A theme is chosen, a logo dropped in, products loaded — and the result works, in the narrow sense that it takes money. What it doesn't do is make anyone feel anything about the brand doing the selling. That harder job is the one we care about, and it's the real subject of this page: the difference between an agency that designs and a shop that configures.

Visual design is the part everyone sees, so it's the part everyone asks about. It matters — and it's perhaps a quarter of the job. A store that sells well is running several quieter systems underneath.

The words. How a product is described is part of how it's designed. On the new Pegoretti site, the layout, the photography and the rhythm of the pages were all chosen to carry the workshop's character — the site is the brand for anyone who hasn't stood in it. That's writing and structure doing design work, made alongside the pages rather than poured in after.

The route to the sale. How a customer moves from landing to buying — and whether the standard route is even the right one. For Pegoretti we built the Color Wall, a drawer that gathers paint finishes as you browse, because that sale isn't an add-to-cart: it's a conversation that ends in a frame being commissioned.

Everything after the sale. Accounts, confirmations, returns — the rooms a returning customer actually lives in, and the ones most stores leave unfurnished. We care enough about this to have written a whole Note on account areas.

The parts that never render. Speed, structure, and what the CMS feels like to run after we've gone. A site the team can't update doesn't fail on launch day; it fails quietly across the year that follows. What these foundations earn in search has its own chapters: SEO Services for Small Business, and for a store that already exists, E-Commerce SEO Services.

Template thinking stops at the first item. To a customer, all four arrive as a single impression — so we treat them as a single design.

There's no house platform here, and we'd be wary of an agency that has one. The platform follows the brand and the operation, not the other way round — and our starting position, argued at length across this site, is that the mainstream option well built beats the fashionable option most of the time.

Shopify is where most independent brands belong, and where most should stay. When brands come to us wanting out, the trouble is usually craft, copy or brand wearing a platform costume — the full argument is When (Not) to Leave Shopify — and a replatform is the most expensive way there is to find that out. If you're at the other end of the road, commissioning a first build, Building a Shopify Website lays out the routes and the costs. And if you're arriving from somewhere else entirely — Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce — the move itself has its own chapter: Shopify Migration Agency.

Shopify Plus rewards operational complexity, not ambition. The tier-by-tier numbers live at Shopify vs Shopify Plus; the fuller conversation — including why our first move is usually to talk a brand out of it — at Shopify Plus Agency.

Headless is where our best work lives, and it has one test: is the site a product? If character, content and craft are what you sell, build it as one — Next.js and Sanity, designed from nothing. The industry's numbers say three in four brands who ask are better off on a theme, and our reading is that they were asking for the wrong reasons; the Manual's Shopify Headless Commerce chapter has both the numbers and the test. Pegoretti runs headless — Next.js, Sanity, a commission flow built in-house — because nothing about Pegoretti is off the shelf, including the checkout. There isn't one. Blind John's Guitars passed the same test the same way this autumn: guitars made one at a time, a site made the way the guitars are.

Choose well and the platform disappears. A customer should come away feeling the brand, never the software.

Three phases, then we stay in the mix — the same shape as everything we make.

Listen. The first stretch is spent in your world rather than ours: the brand, the customers, the market, the thing that's actually stuck. Strategy happens here, inside the project — not as a separate document with its own invoice.

Design. Words, structure, look and motion worked out together, because a customer meets them together. This is where the micro-decisions get made — a margin, the order of a page, whether the cart should even behave like a cart.

Deliver. The build, on whichever platform the first two phases pointed at, finished properly and handed over genuinely runnable — documented, editable, yours.

After launch, the small ongoing decisions are where a site drifts or holds its line — so someone should keep making them with the whole picture in mind. That's the staying-in-the-mix part, and it isn't an upsell; it's how the work survives contact with year two.

Being in Oxford matters less for the geography than for the shape of the arrangement. The people who work out what your brand is are the same people writing the product pages and the same people in the code, on your hours, reachable directly for as long as the project runs. There's no account layer in between, and after launch we're still around rather than closing the file.

The UK part is practical. VAT settings, delivery rates and the trading detail a British shop has to get right are things we've set up many times over — first on a shop of our own, then on other people's. Most of the work happens over calls and shared screens wherever the brand is — our clients are in Verona, Tempe, Squamish and Suffolk as well as at home — so distance from Oxford isn't a factor. If you were searching for an e-commerce web design agency in London, or one near you: an hour on a train, or no train at all, changes nothing about how the work runs. You deal directly with the people designing and building the site, and the first conversation is a twenty-minute call at no cost. If you are nearby, the coffee's on us.

We're pointed at brands where someone makes a physical thing and the site has to carry the explanation: cycling first, then guitars and amps, pro audio and makers of most kinds.

What a full build includes. With somewhere to check each line:

Conversion rate is the number everyone leads with, and we do watch it — with a healthy suspicion of how easily it's gamed. Every merchant's inbox fills with pitches promising uplift from a moved button; we've written about that industry testing sites into oblivion. Optimisation compounds only on a site with real traffic and something true to say.

Conversion, in context. Read against where the traffic comes from, and whether there's enough of it for the percentages to mean anything at all.

Order value and repeat rate. For considered, higher-value products these are usually the bigger levers — a customer who returns beats a button that converts fractionally better.

Quality of enquiry. For a brand like Pegoretti, the win isn't a completed checkout; it's the right conversation started. Some of the best commerce sites are measured in conversations.

How it runs. Whether the team can update, extend and live with the site. No dashboard has a column for it, and it decides more than most numbers that do.

Both are legitimate ways to get a store — they're just different purchases, and a freelancer sits between them. If you're starting out, with no catalogue to show anyone yet and no settled idea of what design even buys, this is the table to read before any price list: the four systems from the top of this page, set against the three ways of getting a store built, and who ends up holding each.

The right-hand column isn't the right answer for everyone. If you're testing an idea with overheads near zero, a theme is the right first move — and if that's what we think, a Sketch will say so. The trade is a fair one: a theme shop is faster and cheaper. What a template can't do is make the site feel like you. And if it doesn't feel like you, it won't make your customers feel much either.