ZAWATWhat We Build

Services · 05

E-Commerce Technology

Online stores engineered to sell — WooCommerce and Shopify builds with payments, subscriptions, and order management that convert visitors and scale with demand.

Choose the platform for the constraint, not the brand

WooCommerce and Shopify both work. The choice between them is decided by a small number of specifics rather than by which is better in general: how unusual your catalogue is, whether you need control over hosting and data location, how much you intend to customise the checkout, and who will maintain the store once it is live. A team with no technical staff and a conventional catalogue is served differently from a business with a complex product structure and a developer on hand. We make the recommendation against those constraints and say plainly which trade-off you are accepting.

Payments, and the part that breaks reconciliation

Taking a card payment is the easy half. The hard half is that every payment method settles on its own timetable, with its own fees, its own refund path and its own dispute process, and your accounts have to agree with all of them at month end. Cash on delivery is the sharpest version of this: the order is complete in the store and unpaid in reality, sometimes for days, sometimes never, and if the store and the finance system disagree about that state you will find out during a stock count. Designing for it up front is far cheaper than discovering it afterwards.

Everything after the order

Most stores are not lost at the checkout; they are lost afterwards. Stock that is accurate on the site but not in the warehouse, a return that nobody can process without a manager, a delivery status the customer has to phone to find out, an invoice that has to be typed again into the accounts. These are integration problems and they compound with volume. They are also where most of the operational cost of running a store actually sits, which is why we treat order management, stock synchronisation and the finance handoff as part of the build rather than as a later phase.

What's included

Common questions

WooCommerce or Shopify?
Whichever matches your constraints on customisation, hosting control, catalogue complexity and who maintains it afterwards. Anyone who answers that question before asking about your catalogue is describing their own preference rather than your situation.
Which payment methods can you integrate?
The practical answer depends on what your bank and your gateway support, how you want money to settle, and whether you need recurring billing. The integration method a provider offers matters as much as its pricing, and it is worth checking before you commit.
Can you handle cash on delivery properly?
Yes, and it needs deliberate handling. The order, the payment and the stock movement happen at different moments, so the store, the courier and the finance system have to share one definition of what state an order is in.

Further reading

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What We Build