[ For the shop a platform will not fit ]
Most shops should be on Shopify or WooCommerce, and we will say so. A custom build is for the ones whose pricing, catalogue or ordering rules a platform genuinely cannot express — and where fighting the platform costs more each year than owning the code.
Most shops should be on Shopify or WooCommerce, and we will say so. A custom build is for the ones whose pricing, catalogue or ordering rules a platform genuinely cannot express — and where fighting the platform costs more each year than owning the code.
Tell us what the platform could not doCustomer-specific rates, slabs, contract pricing, GST variations by state — the logic a platform makes you approximate with tags and apps.
Stock, ledger and dispatch stay in the system that already runs the business. The shop reads and writes to it rather than becoming a second source of truth.
Source, database and deployment handed over. No per-transaction cut, no plan that changes under you, no feature held behind an upgrade tier.
We work out what the platform version would cost in apps and workarounds first. If that number is lower, we tell you and build that instead.
Customer-specific catalogues and pricing, minimum order quantities, credit terms, quote-to-order and reorder from history — the things a retail platform was never shaped for.
Configurable products, units of measure, kits and bundles, made-to-order options and stock across several locations, modelled properly rather than approximated with tags.
The shop as one part of a working business: ERP, accounting, courier, warehouse and marketplace feeds, with retries, logs and somewhere for failures to go.
Your requirements against what Shopify and WooCommerce do natively and with apps, costed over three years. A custom build has to beat that number to be worth starting.
Variants, bundles, units of measure, minimum quantities, per-customer visibility. Catalogue modelling is where these projects are won, and where the platform usually broke.
Every rule, in order of precedence, with the edge cases named. Pricing that lives in three people's heads becomes three different answers in production.
Razorpay or Stripe, COD where it matters, partial payments and credit terms for B2B, with reconciliation that an accountant can follow.
ERP, inventory, courier and invoicing, with retries and an exception queue. This integration work is most of the build and most of the risk.
Tested at your peak-day traffic, migrated with redirects from the old URLs, and handed over with the source, the runbook and your team trained on it.
Nine shops in ten should be on a platform. Shopify and WooCommerce have absorbed a decade of edge cases — tax, shipping, payment, fraud, abandoned carts — that nobody should pay to rebuild. Our first job on any of these enquiries is to work out whether you are the tenth.
You usually are when the pricing is per-customer, the catalogue does not fit a product-and-variant shape, or the shop has to be a face on an ERP that already runs the business. At that point the platform version becomes a stack of apps and manual corrections, and the annual cost of that overtakes the cost of owning the code.
App subscriptions, transaction fees and the hours spent on workarounds, over three years, against the build. Whichever is lower is the recommendation.
Get the product model wrong and every screen after it is a compromise. This is the part we spend the most time on before writing code.
Source, database, deployment and documentation. If you want to move it to another team next year, nothing here stops you.
Splitting the front end from the platform buys real speed and real flexibility, and costs a second codebase to maintain. For most Indian mid-market shops it is not worth it, and we say so.
Razorpay and UPI made taking money simple. Matching settlements, refunds and COD remittances against orders is still where the finance team loses its week, and it belongs in the build.
Distributors and wholesalers now expect a portal with their own prices and their own history. That is the single most common reason a custom build is genuinely justified.
Slow product pages lose ranking and conversion together. Performance budgets are now part of the specification rather than a fix applied afterwards.
Use Shopify unless something specific makes it impossible. Custom is justified when pricing is per-customer or contract-based, when the catalogue does not fit a product-and-variant model, or when the shop must sit on top of an ERP. Techtaru Digital costs both routes over three years before recommending either, and most of the time the answer is the platform.
Let’s talk about your custom ecommerce project. No obligation, just a conversation.
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