E-Commerce Development

E-commerce development is the engineering work of building an online store: the catalog data model, the storefront, the checkout, the integrations with back-office systems, and the measurement layer that ad platforms depend on. It is a different discipline from corporate website development, because a store is a transactional application with inventory, money and operational consequences when something fails quietly.

Moon Workshop builds and rebuilds online stores from Antalya, Türkiye, for businesses selling domestically and into markets including Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the United States.

Hosted platform or custom build?

This is the first decision and it deserves an honest answer rather than a sales one.

The last row matters. Replatforming is frequently proposed as a solution to a conversion problem it will not fix. If the store converts at 0.5 percent because product pages lack information and shipping costs surprise people at checkout, a new platform changes nothing.

The catalog data model sets the ceiling

Most store problems that surface years later trace back to catalog modeling done hastily at the start.

We model explicitly:

• Products and variants, including which attributes create variants and which are informational
• Attributes and their types, so filtering works without string matching
• Category structure, separating navigation hierarchy from merchandising collections
• Pricing rules — customer groups, quantity breaks, market-specific prices, campaign pricing
• Stock sources, including multiple warehouses or supplier-fulfilled items
• Feed requirements, so Merchant Center and catalog fields exist as real data rather than being derived by fragile scripts

A catalog modeled correctly supports faceted filtering, on-site search and advertising feeds without workarounds. A catalog modeled hastily requires a workaround for each.

Performance on category pages

Category pages with filtering are usually the heaviest pages on a store and the most commonly landed on from advertising. We treat their performance as a hard budget:

1. Server-side rendering or static generation for the initial view
2. Filter and facet queries served from indexed structures, not full table scans
3. Images sized per breakpoint in modern formats
4. Pagination or incremental loading rather than rendering hundreds of products at once
5. Search backed by a proper index when the catalog size justifies it

Checkout: where revenue actually leaks

Checkout is short, boring and responsible for a large share of lost revenue. Our principles:

• Guest checkout available. Forcing account creation costs orders.
• Shipping cost visible early, never revealed as a surprise on the final step.
• Minimum viable fields. Every optional field removed is a small conversion gain.
• Multiple payment methods, including the ones people in each target market actually use.
• Real error handling. Declined payments, expired sessions and validation failures must explain what happened and preserve the cart.
• Mobile-first input. Correct keyboard types, autofill support, tap targets sized properly.
• Instrumentation. Every step tracked so abandonment points are visible in data rather than guessed at.

We test checkout with live payment methods before launch, including failure paths. A checkout that works only on the happy path is not finished.

Integrations built to fail loudly

Silent integration failures are the most expensive bugs in e-commerce. Stock stops syncing on a Friday, oversold orders accumulate through the weekend, and nobody knows until customer service is overwhelmed.

Every integration we build includes retry logic with backoff, an audit log of what synced and when, alerting when a sync has not completed within its expected window, and a manual re-run path for operators. Typical integrations cover ERP or accounting systems, shipping carriers, payment gateways, invoicing, and marketing feeds.

Measurement built in, not bolted on

The e-commerce data layer is part of the build, not a task for the marketing agency afterward. We implement view_item, add_to_cart, begin_checkout, purchase and refund events with correct values, variants and currency, plus server-side event delivery where browser restrictions distort the picture.

Product feeds for Google Merchant Center and Meta catalogs are generated from the catalog model with the attributes those platforms require, including custom labels for margin tiers and stock depth.

Multi-market stores

Selling into several countries means modeling market differences rather than converting prices at display time. We handle per-market pricing, VAT and duty presentation, shipping options and delivery estimates, payment method availability, language content, and returns policy text. Inaccurate totals at checkout are among the largest causes of cart abandonment in cross-border retail, and they are entirely preventable.

How projects run

Work is delivered in slices — catalog, product detail, cart and checkout, integrations — each demonstrated on staging as it completes. You see progress continuously rather than at a single reveal. After launch there is a defined stabilization window with error monitoring and funnel verification, followed by an agreed maintenance scope. You own the code and the infrastructure accounts.

Last updated: August 2026.