Online Store Development for Niche and Large Catalogs

The answer comes from your catalog and sales model, and popularity has little to do with it. We work most often with OpenCart because it handles large catalogs well and allows deep customization; WooCommerce makes sense when the store is part of a content site; a custom platform is worth it when the sales logic is so unusual that an off-the-shelf solution would have to be broken to fit. In the review we tell you what suits your case, and why the alternatives don't.

Yes, large catalogs are a distinct part of our work: the largest of the live stores has 115,456 items. But size changes the approach: you need faceted filters, well-planned page URLs, and work on speed. A store with two hundred products and one with a hundred thousand are different projects, even if they look the same from the outside.

The main risk of a migration is losing URLs rather than losing data. So migration starts with a list of existing pages and a redirect map: every old URL has to lead to its matching new one. That way rankings are mostly preserved, though a dip lasting a few weeks is possible, and promising there won't be one at all would be untrue.

Yes, and it's a common request. On your own site you don't pay a commission per order, you can work freely on search, and you don't depend on the platform's rules. The difficulty isn't moving the products. Part of the traffic on the marketplace belongs to the marketplace, not to you, and that part will have to be built up again.

Yes, through a separate account area with its own prices, minimum order quantities, and payment terms. But this has to be planned from the start: adding a full B2B mode to a finished retail store usually costs more than building it in from day one. If wholesale is in your plans, mention it during the review.

A niche store with a few hundred items takes a few weeks; a large catalog with data exchange and several sales channels takes months. We count the timeline in business days from the moment we have access, products, and materials. The most common cause of delays is waiting for the catalog from the client, more often than development itself.

Usually the client, or it's agreed separately. If you have supplier price lists, we set up the import and ongoing stock updates, which is cheaper and more reliable than manual entry. But if the data has no SKUs or attributes, it needs to be cleaned up first: on a catalog like that, neither filters nor marketplace exports will work.

A catalog with a category structure and filters, a product page, cart and checkout, payment and shipping through ready-made modules, an admin area for orders, product import if your products are in price lists, basic technical preparation for search, and deployment to your hosting. We run the project from the review to launch, while the domain, hosting, and service accounts are registered in your name. Product descriptions and photos, promotion, advertising, and an exchange with your accounting system are discussed separately. We write the boundaries into the contract before we start.

With your product range and where the product data comes from: your own warehouse, supplier price lists, or dropshipping. That determines how prices and stock will be updated, which in turn decides the platform and how much manual work there will be every day. Next come payment, shipping, and your business registration details (FOP or TOV) for the payment provider: connecting takes time, and without it the store can't accept money. Design comes after that. During the free catalog review we'll tell you what can be transferred automatically and what will have to be done by hand.

Whoever you choose: us, you yourself, or another contractor. The access and accounts are yours, so switching isn't complicated. What matters more is laying the groundwork during development: a category structure built around search queries, clean URLs without duplicates, filters that don't spawn thousands of identical pages, and a feed for shopping campaigns. Fixing these after launch costs more than getting them right at the start. Promotion itself, SEO or advertising, is separate work and isn't part of development.