Ecommerce Websites,
Built to Sell

What a Real Online Shop Involves

Anyone can drop a “buy now” button on a page. A shop that genuinely works is a different thing. It needs a clean way for customers to pay, sensible shipping, stock management that updates itself with every sale, the right VAT handling for where you sell, and the speed to hold a shopper’s attention long enough to buy. I build all of that on WooCommerce, the selling engine built into WordPress, so it sits inside your own WordPress site rather than on a platform you rent by the month. You own the shop, the customer list and the sales data, and one person, me, builds it and looks after it afterwards.

Built on WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the part that turns a WordPress website into a shop. It’s a free, open-source add-on for WordPress, and it’s the most widely used way to sell online anywhere. More than a third of the world’s online shops run on it, millions of stores in total. When that many businesses trade on something, it’s dependable, well supported, and it isn’t going away.

Because it’s WordPress underneath, your shop is just your website with a till added, not a separate system stitched on. Out of the box it handles the real work of selling, card payments, digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, shipping rules, and stock that counts itself down as orders come in. And when the business needs more, whether that’s subscriptions, bookings, trade pricing or product bundles, it’s there to grow into. You start with what you need now and add the rest when the time comes, without rebuilding.

You Own Your Shop, You Don’t Rent It

This is the part worth slowing down for, because it’s the one that costs people later.

Hosted platforms like Shopify, SquareSpace, Webflow and Wix are genuinely quick to get going on, and for someone who wants zero technical involvement I understand the appeal. But you’re renting. You pay every month to keep the shop open, and on top of that some plans take a small cut of every sale unless you use the platform’s own payment system. Worse, when you decide to leave, much of what you’ve built stays behind.

A WooCommerce shop works the other way round. There’s no monthly platform fee and no cut taken from your sales, you pay only your payment provider’s normal card rate, the same as any shop does. More importantly, you own the whole thing, the shop, your product catalogue, your customer list, your sales history. It’s open source and it runs on your own hosting, so you can move it anywhere and take everything with you. If a supplier puts their prices up, you’re free to shop around rather than stuck paying because your business lives on their platform.

It comes down to a simple question. Do you want to own the shop your business trades from, or rent it from a landlord who holds the only key? I build it, you own it.

Set Up to Sell in Ireland

An online shop has to work for where your customers actually are, and most of mine start with Ireland and sell out from there.

Getting paid. I set your shop up with Stripe, the payment provider most Irish shops use, so customers can pay by card, Link, Apple Pay or Google Pay with no fuss. You pay only the standard card fees every business pays, with no extra platform cut on top. You may also want to payments to go directly to the same account as your POS, luckily most now offer Woocommerce integration. If you’d rather add PayPal or another option, that’s easily done, there are dozens of them.

Shipping. I set up shipping zones that match how you sell, so Ireland, the EU and the rest of the world can each have their own rates, or free shipping over a certain spend, or click-and-collect if you have a premises. Parcel Tracking can also be added. As you grow, live rates from the couriers can slot in too.

VAT and selling across the EU. The shop is set up to handle Irish VAT, and if you sell into other EU countries it can be configured for the One-Stop-Shop scheme, so you report EU VAT through Revenue instead of registering country by country. I’ll set it up correctly for how you sell. I’m not your accountant, mind, so anything tax-specific is worth a word with them, but the shop will be built to do the right thing.

Fully Managed, After Launch Too

A shop is never really finished, and that’s the honest trade-off with owning rather than renting, someone has to keep it running. On a WooCommerce shop, that someone is me.

A site that takes payments and holds customer details needs looking after properly, updates, backups, security, the occasional check-up, so it stays safe and keeps selling. That’s not extra worry landing on you. It’s the part I take care of, the same one-contact, fully-managed service I give every client, applied to a shop. When you want to add a new product line, change a payment option, or run a sale, you call me, not a help desk in another time zone. The person who built your shop is the person who answers. Alternatively you may choose to manage the online store by yourself. For this I’ll provide training to get you off to a good start.

What It Costs

An online shop sits at the fuller end of what I build, because there’s simply more to it than a brochure site. Payments, shipping, stock and testing all take real work to get right. As a guide, ecommerce website design starts from around €1,900, and the final figure depends on a few sensible things, how many products you’re selling, how involved the payment and shipping need to be, and whether it has to talk to anything else like a stock or accounts system. A clear product list and good photos keep it all moving.

There’s a full breakdown on my pricing page, and every job gets a fixed-price quote after a quick chat, so you’re never guessing.

Why Me for This

I’m one person, Paul Doyle, with 30 years in this industry, and you deal with me from the first conversation onwards. For a shop that handles your customers’ money, that matters more than usual. The person who builds it is the person who looks after it, so nothing falls down a gap between departments, because there are none.

Building lean, fast sites is a reflex after three decades, and a fast shop is a shop that sells, every second of load time is a customer drifting off. I build shops to be quick, solid and easy for you to run, and then I stay on to keep them that way.