Use Shopify if you're selling your own products in a fairly standard way — it will be faster and cheaper than anything custom, and we'll say so. Custom becomes the right answer when you need multiple sellers, contract pricing, approval flows, or commerce inside a product that isn't a shop.

Two products, not one. The buyer side is the easy half; the seller side — onboarding, listings, inventory, commissions, payouts and disputes — is where most of the build goes. And a marketplace with one side full and the other empty doesn't work, so the launch plan matters as much as the code.

A headless storefront over an existing platform is a different order from a multi-vendor marketplace with payouts. Integrations — payment, tax, shipping, ERP — are usually the largest line. We scope after discovery and give a fixed number for a defined set of features.

Yes, and it's common. A Next.js storefront on your current Shopify or BigCommerce backend keeps the catalogue, orders and admin your team already knows, while removing the front-end limits. Nothing has to be migrated to start.

Payments are the easy part — Stripe, Adyen or a local provider. Payouts are where it gets real: splitting money between sellers, holding commission, handling refunds on a partial order, and getting tax right in more than one country. That's the part we scope carefully.

That's a different product from retail checkout. Prices depend on who's logged in, orders need someone's approval, and payment happens on terms rather than at the till. Retail platforms can be bent into this shape, but it's usually cheaper to build the parts that don't fit.

That's planned rather than hoped. We load-test the paths that carry revenue — search, cart, checkout — at several times expected traffic, and make sure the parts that can be cached are. The failure to avoid isn't a slow page; it's a checkout that takes payment and loses the order.