Start with the platform, not the developer
Most store owners ask “who should build this?” before “what should this be built on?”. That is the wrong order, because the platform decides the running costs, the monthly admin, and how much a developer can change later. Get the platform right and the rest of the decision gets much simpler.
WordPress
WordPress on its own is a content platform. It suits businesses whose website mainly has to explain, rank and generate enquiries — service businesses, trades, clinics, professional firms. If you are not taking payments, you may not need a store platform at all, and adding one just adds maintenance.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce turns WordPress into a store. Its strength is control: complex pricing, trade accounts, freight rules, bundles, local pickup, unusual tax treatment. Because it sits on your own hosting, you are responsible for updates, backups and security — which is fine when someone is actually doing that work, and a liability when nobody is.
Shopify
Shopify hosts the store for you and handles payments, PCI compliance, updates and uptime. You trade some flexibility for far less maintenance. It suits businesses that want to sell reliably without owning the plumbing, and it is usually the faster path to a working store.
There is no universally better option. A store doing a hundred simple orders a week and a store quoting freight on pallets have genuinely different needs, and the honest answer depends on which one you are.
The five questions that actually separate developers
1. Who owns the code, the data and the accounts?
Ask directly. You should own the domain, the hosting account, the store admin and the customer data, and you should be able to leave with your site intact. If any of that sits inside an agency account you cannot access, you are renting your own business.
2. How is it hosted and secured?
For WooCommerce, ask where it is hosted, how often it is backed up, how quickly a backup can be restored, who applies plugin and core updates, and what monitoring is in place. For Shopify, most of this is handled, so the question shifts to app choices and who reviews them.
3. How is the checkout tested?
Checkout is where revenue is won or lost, and it is the least tested part of most stores. A developer should be able to tell you how they test a real card payment, a failed payment, a guest checkout, a discount code, a shipping edge case and a mobile completion, before launch and after every significant change.
4. What happens after launch?
A store is not a project that ends. Plugins update, payment gateways change their rules, themes break, and traffic patterns shift. Ask what ongoing care looks like, what it costs, what response times apply, and what is explicitly not included.
5. Can they show you a store like yours that is still running?
Not a screenshot from three years ago — a live store, in a comparable category, that still works well today. Ask what it was like before, what changed, and what the owner would say if you rang them.
Where stores usually leak money
Across the stores we see, the same handful of problems account for most of the lost revenue, and almost none of them are design problems.
- A checkout that quietly fails on mobile. Often a payment gateway or SSL configuration issue that only shows up on certain devices, so the owner never sees it.
- Forcing account creation. Guest checkout almost always lifts completion. Ask for it unless you have a specific reason not to.
- Thin product information. Product pages with one photo and a single line of description cannot answer the questions that decide a purchase — sizing, materials, delivery times, compatibility, returns.
- Shipping revealed too late. Freight costs disclosed at the final step are a leading cause of abandoned carts. Show them earlier, or build them in.
- No usable search. On a store with more than a few dozen products, search is a primary navigation tool. If it returns nothing for an obvious synonym, it is costing you sales.
- Slow category pages. Oversized images and too many apps are the usual culprits. Speed matters most on the pages where people browse.
Moving between platforms without losing what works
Replatforming is normal — WooCommerce to Shopify to reduce maintenance, or Shopify to WooCommerce to gain control. The risk is not the products; it is the URLs. If your product and category pages already rank, those addresses carry value, and a migration that changes them without redirects resets your search visibility.
A safe migration maps every old URL to its closest new equivalent, redirects them permanently, keeps the page content substantively intact, and is checked with a crawl afterwards to catch anything that broke. Ask any developer to describe that process before you commit.
A short brief beats a long specification
You do not need a technical document. You need to be clear about six things: what you sell, how customers decide, how orders are fulfilled, what your pricing and freight rules actually are, what your current site gets wrong, and what success would look like in twelve months. A developer who asks about fulfilment and freight before talking about colours is usually the one worth hiring.