Retail & ecommerce

Ecommerce built to sell. Systems built to scale.

We build and rebuild online shops around the commercial reality of the business behind them — the products, the customers, the payments, the delivery rules, the repeat orders and the admin nobody enjoys. The storefront is the part people see. It is rarely the part that decides whether the business works.

Discuss Your Ecommerce Project See What We Build

WooCommerceEcommerce rebuildsCatalogue systemsStripe & checkoutRetentionAutomationIntegrationsOngoing support

Built by Central Systems

lomondfurniture.co.uk

Live WooCommerce build

The real problem

An online shop is only one part of the system.

Most ecommerce businesses did not choose their stack. It accumulated. A plugin for delivery rules, a second one for discounts, a spreadsheet the supplier sends every month, a payment tool, an email platform, an analytics account nobody opens, and a person who re-types the same product information into three of them.

Individually each piece works. Together they do not. That gap is where margin quietly goes — in admin hours, in orders that stall, in products that never get listed properly, and in customers who buy once and are never contacted again.

We look at the whole operation before touching the design, because the storefront is usually not the thing that is broken.

Supplier spreadsheetsRe-keyed by hand every time a price or a range changes.Manual

Six plugins doing five jobsOverlapping, each with its own settings screen and its own update risk.Fragile

Delivery rules that do not fitPriced per item when the business charges per order, or the other way round.Costly

A customer list nobody usesEvery order captured, and no reason ever sent for the second one.Idle

Analytics that answer nothingInstalled, never configured for ecommerce, so no one can say what actually sells.Blind

The work is usually in the joins. Not in any one of these tools, but in the fact that none of them speaks to the next one.

What we build

Six things, and the website is the first two

Websites and rebuilds are the offer. Everything after them exists because an online shop that nobody finds, nobody completes a checkout on, or nobody returns to is an expensive catalogue — not because we are trying to sell six things at once.

Primary

Ecommerce websites

WooCommerce shops built around how people actually buy the thing you sell — findable products, product pages that answer the question that stops the sale, and a checkout that does not lose people at the last step.

WordPress + WooCommerce
Product discovery
Conversion-led PDPs
Mobile-first

Primary

Ecommerce rebuilds

Dated, slow or poorly converting shops rebuilt properly — without blindly reproducing the old structure, and without throwing away the URLs, content and search visibility that already earn you money.

Migration planning
URL & SEO protection
Speed
Checkout repair

Catalogue

Product & catalogue systems

Large ranges, deep category trees, variable products, supplier data and the specification detail furniture, equipment and considered purchases actually need before somebody will commit.

Variable products
Supplier data
Specifications
Bulk operations

Money

Payments & checkout

Stripe, card and flexible-payment options, customer accounts, and a purchase flow measured on completion rather than on how it looks in a design file.

Stripe
Customer accounts
Basket UX
VAT & pricing logic

Retention

Retention & growth

The second order is cheaper than the first and most shops never go after it. Rewards, wishlists, recommendations, bundles and newsletters — built where they suit the product, not because a plugin exists.

Rewards
Wishlists
Recommendations
Newsletter

Operations

Ecommerce automation

Supplier workflows, integrations and operational tooling for the parts where the standard plugin genuinely does not fit — and an honest answer when it does.

Integrations
Supplier feeds
Custom functionality
Internal tools

Storefront vs system

The storefront is what the customer sees. The system behind it is what makes the business work.

This is one product page from a shop we built. Almost everything on it is a decision about the operation behind the shop, not a decision about layout.

lomondfurniture.co.uk/product/topline-black-wardrobe-with-3-doors

A WooCommerce product page for a black three-door wardrobe on Lomond Furniture, showing the product code, price, flexible payment options, delivery and assembly detail, carton count and an add-to-basket button.

Lomond Furniture & Homeware — a live product page. Every element numbered opposite is driven by data or logic in the system, not typed in by hand per product.

1
Product identity from supplier dataProduct code, category and specification carried through from the supplier record rather than re-keyed for each listing.
2
Flexible payment at checkoutCard payments through Stripe, with instalment options surfaced on the page where the basket qualifies.
3
Delivery answered before the basketAssembly requirement and carton count shown up front, because for furniture those are the questions that stop a sale.
4
Rewards earned per orderPoints calculated from the order value and held against the customer account, to make the second purchase cheaper to win.
5
Returns and cancellation stated plainlyCollection charges and the statutory cancellation window published on the page, not buried in a policy nobody opens.

Real project

Building the ecommerce operation behind Lomond Furniture & Homeware

A furniture and homeware retailer selling online across mainland UK. Central Systems built the shop and the systems around it — the catalogue, the payments, the delivery logic, the customer accounts and the reporting — and continues to develop it as the range grows.

lomondfurniture.co.uk WordPressWooCommerceStripeMulti-supplierLive Visit the live shop

lomondfurniture.co.uk/bedroom-furniture

Lomond Furniture homepage section presenting the bedroom range, with quick links through to bed frames, bedside tables and wardrobes.

The same Lomond Furniture product page shown on a mobile phone, with the image gallery, price and add-to-basket button stacked for a narrow screen.

Furniture is an awkward thing to sell online. The items are large, the delivery is expensive and rule-bound, the customer needs dimensions and carton counts before they will commit, and the catalogue arrives from suppliers as spreadsheets rather than as a feed. Almost none of that is a design problem.

So the build went wider than a storefront. Supplier data drives the product records. Delivery is priced by a set of rules the business can actually explain, charged once per order rather than per item, with a free-delivery threshold above it. Payments run through Stripe with flexible-payment options at checkout. Customers get accounts, a wishlist and a rewards balance, so a second order costs less to win than the first.

Underneath, the shop is set up to be found and to be measured — category and product architecture built for search, ecommerce analytics configured properly, and a product feed prepared for Google Shopping. It is designed to keep taking suppliers and ranges without a rebuild each time.

lomondfurniture.co.uk/delivery

Lomond Furniture delivery page showing four delivery price tiers, a free delivery threshold and an explanation that delivery is charged once per order.

Delivery, made explainable. Four tiers, one charge per order, matched to the furniture in the basket — published as a page a customer can read rather than a surprise at checkout.

200+Products live across a growing multi-supplier catalogue

8Top-level departments, from beds and mattresses to home office

4Delivery tiers plus a free-delivery threshold, priced per order

OngoingSuppliers, ranges and features added without a rebuild

What is shown here is the live site, as it is today.

The screenshots on this page are unedited captures of lomondfurniture.co.uk. We have not published revenue, conversion or traffic figures for this project, and we do not intend to invent any — the catalogue size and the delivery structure above are simply what is on the site and can be checked in a browser.

Working with what exists

You do not need to start again.

A full replatform is occasionally the right answer and usually is not. Most of the shops we are asked to look at have something worth keeping — a domain with history, a catalogue that took years to build, customers who already know the URL. The work is to fix what is losing money and leave the rest alone.

Rebuild an existing shopOn the same domain, keeping the URLs and the search visibility already earned.

Improve WooCommerceUntangle the plugin stack, remove what overlaps, replace what is fragile.

Redesign the pages that matterCategory, product and basket first. They are where the money is won and lost.

Repair mobile shoppingWhere most of the traffic is, and usually where the conversion rate collapses.

Simplify the checkoutFewer steps, fewer required fields, and payment options that suit the basket size.

Add the missing functionalityRewards, wishlists, bundles, recommendations — where the product range justifies them.

Integrate what you already runAccounts, stock, email or supplier systems — checked before it is quoted, never after.

Retire the manual processesGradually, one at a time, starting with whichever costs the most hours each month.

Set up measurement properlyEcommerce tracking that reports what sells, so the next decision is not a guess.

We will tell you which of these you actually need.

Often it is two or three of them rather than all nine, and occasionally the honest answer is that the shop is fine and the problem is upstream in how products get listed. That conversation happens before the quote, and the first one costs nothing. To see where your shop stands before committing to anything, start with the free website audit.

Secondary capability

When plugins stop being enough, we build the missing piece.

Every ecommerce business eventually hits something the plugin directory does not cover, because it is specific to how that business runs. We can build it. This is not a product we are selling you — it is the reason we can keep going when a normal web agency stops.

Supplier managementInternal product toolsCRM functionalityCustomer-service systemsWorkflow automationOrder & fulfilment dashboardsReportingCustom admin toolsIntegrations

Standard tools first, custom only where it pays for itself.

WooCommerce and its ecosystem cover most of what most shops need, and where a well-maintained plugin does the job we will tell you to use it. Custom development earns its keep only when a real operational problem has no packaged solution behind it — priced against an agreed specification, never sold as a licence.

More on this kind of work: CRM & business systems, software built for an industry, and AI integrations.

How it goes

Six stages, and the build is the fourth

Most of the value is decided before anybody opens a design tool. This is consultative work — we are not asking you to pick a template.

01Understand the businessWhat you sell, to whom, at what margin, and which parts of the operation cost the most time each week.

02Find what is holding it backWhere visitors leave, where orders stall, where staff are re-typing things a system should already know.

03Design the customer journeyHow somebody finds a product, gets the answer that decides the purchase, and completes a checkout without friction.

04Build or rebuild the platformThe shop itself — catalogue, product pages, basket and checkout — reviewed on staging as it is finished, not described to you at the end.

05Connect the surrounding systemsPayments, delivery rules, supplier data, email, analytics and anything else the business already runs on.

06Measure, improve and growProper ecommerce tracking, then a steady programme of changes based on what it shows. Ongoing care exists for this stage.

Next step

Your ecommerce website should be doing more than taking orders.

We can rebuild the storefront, improve the customer journey and develop the systems behind it. Tell us what you sell and which part of the operation is creaking; you will get a candid assessment of the change worth making first.

Discuss Your Ecommerce Project Run Your Free Website Audit

The opening conversation is free of charge, and costs are fixed in writing before development begins.

All industriesOther sectors we work in Website redesignRebuilding what you have Business automationThe admin between orders Bespoke systemsSoftware built to order