Ecommerce and Shopify in Hamilton.
Most Hamilton brands we meet already sell three ways at once: in person, by message, and online. The website is not the business. It is one till, and its hardest job is making the stock count true across all of them.
Hamilton produces a particular kind of seller. Somebody who started at a market or in a kitchen, got good at it, and now sells in three or four places at once without any of those places agreeing with each other.
Stock is counted in a notebook, in a spreadsheet, in the till at the shop and on the website, and all four are wrong by Saturday afternoon. Orders arrive by direct message and get served out of the same box as the wholesale account. The website is treated as the business when it is really one till among several, and the till that is hardest to keep honest.
That is the problem we are usually hired to fix here, and it is an engineering problem rather than a design one.
One stock pool, four places to sell
Start with the only question that matters in a multi-channel business: when something sells, what else stops being available.
If the answer involves a person remembering to update a spreadsheet, you are going to oversell, and overselling costs you the customer you worked hardest to get. The version that works puts one inventory pool behind every channel. A sale at the Hamilton Farmers' Market reduces what the website can sell before you have finished wrapping it. A wholesale order draws from the same count as a retail one. Point of sale and storefront read the same number because it is the same number.
Getting there is mostly unglamorous data work: a product structure that matches how you actually sell, variants that reflect real units rather than a tidy catalogue, and a decision about which channel gets priority when stock runs short. None of it shows up in a design review. All of it decides whether the store is a relief or another job.
The maker, the shop and the feed
Three channels, three completely different jobs for the website, and most sites here are only built for one.
A seller with a stall is selling to somebody standing in front of them. The website's job is the second order, which means a card on the table with a short domain, a product page that confirms what they tasted or held, and a reorder that takes thirty seconds.
A seller with a shop on James Street North or a unit off Ottawa Street has walk-in trade and an events calendar. The website is confirming you exist, proving you are open, showing the real room, and taking an order for collection. Hours that disagree with Google cost you more than any design decision.
A seller trading mostly through a feed has the opposite problem. Attention is abundant and records are nonexistent. Every message answered manually is a sale that could have happened without you, and the first real win from a store is usually the hours it gives back.
Amalgamation is a delivery problem here, not a search one
The city has absorbed its neighbours and a store feels that differently than a trade does. Nobody buying a jar of something is searching for the name of their former municipality. They are deciding whether collecting is easier than paying for shipping.
So the geography shows up in fulfilment. A delivery radius drawn around an address in the lower city reaches across the harbour, up the escarpment and into Burlington, and charges all of them the same. Driving time in this city has nothing to do with distance, because the access routes up and down the mountain decide everything. Zones built on postal codes, priced against the actual drive, are the only version that survives a winter.
The same thinking applies to pickup. A collection point with real hours, selectable windows and a notification that fires when the order is genuinely ready converts far better than a vague promise, and those orders carry no courier cost at all. For a seller in Dundas or Stoney Creek with a local customer base, pickup and local delivery are frequently the most profitable lines in the store.
Moving off what you are on now
Most Hamilton projects we take on are migrations rather than new stores, usually off Square, Wix, Etsy or a WooCommerce install nobody has updated since the pandemic.
The theme is the easy part. The project is everything attached to it. A redirect map built from a crawl of the live site rather than from somebody's memory of it, so every product and collection address that earned a ranking lands somewhere sensible. Order history imported so your repeat customers are still recognizable. Customer accounts carried across, which in practice means an invitation to re-set a password, because passwords do not transfer. Reviews re-collected where the old platform will not release them, and that includes Etsy. Subscriptions re-signed rather than moved, because payment tokens rarely travel cleanly between platforms, and anybody promising otherwise has not done it.
Planned properly, rankings hold and the dip is measured in days. Rushed, it is measured in quarters, and the business that absorbs it is yours.
Why we argue with you about discounts
We run a store of our own, which is the only credential on this page worth weighing.
We co-founded Northern Raised, which ships Ontario meat to households on Shopify, and we built Simply Meats in the same category for somebody else. The useful part for you is not the sector. It is that we have watched our own numbers move after a badly set shipping threshold and after a discount that taught good customers to wait for the next one. We argue about those decisions because they have cost us money, not because they are in a playbook.
Both stores are on our work page.
Cost, timeline and what we would do first
Store builds start at $10,000, fixed in writing, billed per phase as each ships. Reckon on a week and a half to three and a half weeks of build, with any migration priced on its own and honestly. Point of sale, subscriptions and account pricing each add real work, and we would rather tell you which of them to defer than quote all three.
If you are not sure where to start, the sequence we would normally recommend is: get the inventory truthful across channels, fix shipping and pickup so the margin is real, then spend money on design. Doing those in the other order is how a beautiful store ends up overselling stock it does not have.
Send us what you are running now, including the platform and the monthly numbers, and you will get a straight read on whether a rebuild or a tune-up is the better spend. The service in full is on our ecommerce page, and Shopify versus WooCommerce covers the platform question before anybody tries to sell you one.
To stop losing the orders you cannot answer. Messages do not scale, they have no record, and half of them arrive while you are serving somebody. A store takes payment at two in the morning, remembers what people bought, and gives you a list you own.
Yes, and it is usually the main reason to rebuild. Shopify's point of sale works off the same inventory as the storefront, so a sale at a market reduces what the website can sell. Done properly it ends the oversold order and the manual spreadsheet both.
Handled properly, the rankings hold and the history comes with you. The work is a redirect map built from a crawl rather than from memory, order and customer imports, and reviews re-collected where the old platform will not release them. Rushed migrations are what lose rankings.
Yes, and in this city they need drawing by postal code rather than by radius. A circle around a shop on Ottawa Street takes in the lake, the escarpment and half of Burlington. Zones built on real driving time charge Dundas and Stoney Creek sensibly.
Builds start at $10,000 with a fixed written quote and phase billing. Point of sale, a subscription program, bundle logic or a migration from another platform each add genuine work. A theme tune-up or a conversion sprint on an existing store scopes considerably smaller.
Yes, though it is a different build. Account pricing, minimum quantities, purchase orders and freight quoting replace a consumer checkout, and the site is judged on reorder speed rather than on browsing. Tell us which of the two you are and the quote changes accordingly.