Custom E-Commerce Store Development

Emicode builds custom online stores for Canadian and US businesses from $8,000 CAD, fixed quote after discovery. Every store ships with secure Canadian payment gateways, inventory that updates in real time, and enough speed to stay fast when a promotion sends traffic through the roof. We're a Winnipeg web development studio, and a senior engineer builds your store to carry real sales volume — not a template that chokes the moment it gets busy.

Who E-Commerce Development Is For?

Custom e-commerce is for businesses that have outgrown an off-the-shelf store, or can see the day coming. It fits you if you:

• Sell enough that a slow page or an hour of downtime shows up in the revenue
• Need checkout, pricing, or product logic a template just won't do
• Want inventory that stays in sync across your sales channels or a warehouse
• Depend on specific integrations — ERP, accounting, shipping, a CRM
• Get traffic spikes from launches, promos, or seasonal peaks and can't have the site buckle under them

What's Included

• A storefront designed and built from scratch, and built to load fast
• Secure Canadian payment gateways that support the methods your customers actually reach for
• Real-time inventory that stays accurate as orders come in and channels update
• Performance built to hold under peak traffic instead of folding when it counts
• Integrations for accounting, shipping, ERP, or a CRM, as your setup needs them
• Product and category pages with clean markup and structured data, ready to be indexed

How the Process Works

1. Discovery (1–2 weeks). Kickoff, catalog and checkout requirements, integration mapping. You get a written brief and a fixed quote.
2. Design (1–2 weeks). Storefront and the key flows designed and signed off before anyone writes store code.
3. Build (4–8 weeks). A hand-coded store with payment and inventory integrations, on a staging environment from day one.
4. Launch (3–5 days). Full checkout testing, payment verification, DNS, SSL, analytics, monitoring.
5. Warranty (30 days). Any bug we ship, we fix, free.

Where a hosted store stops making sense

Shopify is good software. The problem shows up in the fee stack, not the features — and it shows up as a percentage of what you sell, which means it grows exactly as fast as you do.

No transaction surcharge, ever. If you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds 0.6% to 2% on top of your gateway's own fees. On $50,000 a month through a third-party gateway on Basic, that surcharge alone is $1,000. We build against your payment provider directly. You pay your processor and nobody else.

Your catalogue logic isn't constrained by app compatibility. Complex pricing rules, B2B tiers, bundle logic, unusual inventory arrangements — these are the things that turn into three overlapping apps on a hosted platform, each with its own monthly fee and its own habit of breaking after a platform update. On a custom build they're code in one place.

Customer and order data lives in your database. Not in a vendor's cloud console you rent access to.

Search that scales without a rewrite. MySQL full-text to start; Elasticsearch when the catalogue grows. Same application code either way — the search layer is driver-based, so switching is configuration, not a project.

Available integrations

For a store, the integrations that matter are the ones touching money, stock and fulfilment. Getting those wrong is expensive in a way customers notice.

Multi-province tax handling and Canadian carrier rates are the two that hosted platforms usually solve with paid apps. On a custom build they're part of the checkout logic.

Cost comparison

Three-year total for a store at $50,000 USD monthly revenue, third-party gateway.

What Drives the Price

E-commerce development starts at $8,000 CAD, fixed after discovery. What moves the number: how big and complex the catalog is, whether you need custom checkout or pricing logic, how many integrations you're wiring in and how deep they go (payments, shipping, ERP, accounting), and how much custom design work the storefront needs.

FAQ