We show you real backends. WooCommerce’s product manager with 500 SKUs and variant dropdowns, not a 3-product demo. You see where you’ll spend your time.

The big question: WooCommerce or Shopify? With WooCommerce, you own everything. Your store, your data, your customer list. Cancel hosting, move providers, export everything—it’s yours. Shopify owns the platform. They raised prices 34% in 2024 (Basic went $29 to $39/month), can change terms anytime. You’re renting.

Plugin costs matter. WooCommerce Subscriptions: $199/year. Bookings: $249/year. Selling subscription boxes monthly? That’s $199/year recurring. Marketplace with multiple vendors? Dokan starts at $149/year, WCFM Marketplace has a strong free version. We document every license and renewal before starting.

Payment gateways: Stripe handles cards directly on your site. PayPal adds buyer protection—customers trust it for disputes and it reduces cart abandonment. We recommend both.

Visual direction first. Luxury brands use oversized product photography with generous white space. Mass-market retailers cram dense grids with promotional badges. Niche players go editorial with layouts that tell stories. You pick which direction fits your positioning and pricing, we build staging within 48 hours. Competing stores across the spectrum help establish visual direction—no guessing, no endless mockup revisions.

Filters make or break catalog usability. AJAX refreshes the grid instantly—customers slide price ranges, check categories, select attributes without that annoying page reload. Quick-view modals let them compare three products without losing their place in the catalog. We configure based on your inventory size and actual customer behavior, not just dump every filter because we can.

WhatsApp keeps it moving. You spot something wrong, send a screenshot or voice note. We adjust same day. Six months post-launch support handles unlimited revisions, content updates, bug fixes, performance optimization. Divi or Elementor depending on project needs and who maintains the site after handover.

Real data from live sources. Kampot Resort rooms pulled from Booking.com with availability calendars intact. Autolocsmc fleet imported from Turo with vehicle specs and pricing. Asiamint’s 2000 products migrated from old marketplace keeping reviews and sales history. We handle imports, not hand you CSV files hoping you figure it out.

Technical stack matches business model. VikRental plus Adventure theme for car rental operations. VikBooking under Divi for hotel and accommodation bookings. Dokan with Elementor for multi-vendor marketplaces. WooCommerce Subscriptions for recurring billing. We’ve deployed these combinations, we know which plugins conflict and where performance breaks under real traffic.

Staging updates continuously. Monday you review booking flow, spot mobile date picker issue. Tuesday morning it’s fixed, you test again. Wednesday payment processing runs through calendar sync. No two-week milestone gates where you wait for “Phase 2 delivery”—construction happens real-time while you watch and correct immediately.

Payment testing before going live. Test cards complete full booking cycles through actual checkout flow. You verify every step works before connecting real merchant accounts. When payment fails at final step, you catch it with test credentials before actual customer revenue hits risk.

Performance optimization before going live. LiteSpeed cache configured with Redis for database queries. Imagify converts all images to WebP format, reducing load times by 40-60%. CSS/JS minification, lazy loading enabled, CDN configured if needed.

Analytics tracking from day one. Google Analytics configured before launch, conversion events firing correctly, product performance visible in real-time. You know which products sell, which pages bounce, where traffic drops off. No post-launch scramble trying to install tracking pixels while losing data.

24/7 support, human responses. Bug fixes, content updates, performance optimization, plugin conflicts resolved. Autolocsmc needed vehicle availability calendar adjusted two weeks after launch—fixed same day. No bots, no ticket queues waiting 72 hours. WhatsApp messages answered around the clock.