Hybrid e-commerce development
You manage the catalogue where you're already used to, but shoppers see a store that loads in an instant. Those two worlds don't have to be mutually exclusive.
from €2,500/year — Ballpark for a 6-page store with hosting, professional email and domain.
Hybrid architecture
You manage the catalogue from a panel you already know, but the pages customers see are generated as static files. Convenience on one side, speed on the other.
You run the store
Products, prices, variants, stock and orders update when you say so, without going through me and without waiting for me to have half an hour free.
The speed that sells
Every extra second of waiting is a basket that never opens. Product pages are the first thing I optimise, because that's where the purchase gets decided.
Listings that make it onto Google
Structured data for product, price and availability, so your listings can show up in results as a full card instead of two lines of text.
Payments and shipping ready
Payment methods, couriers, shipping bands and automated emails configured and tested. The store launches working, not needing finishing over the weekend.
The right numbers from day one
E-commerce tracking set up properly from the start, so you know where orders come from and which channel is actually worth the money you put in.
The panel's convenience, or the site's speed
Behind a typical product page there are often thirty plugins running together. The server takes half a second to process them, before the browser even starts drawing anything. Running a catalogue from a simple panel means trading convenience for load time.
Subscription platforms solve speed from the other direction. In exchange, you keep paying the platform a fixed fee and a cut of every sale for as long as the store exists.
Hybrid architecture holds both pieces together. The catalogue stays in the panel you already know, where you update products, prices, variants, and orders the way you always have. Next.js generates the pages customers see in advance and serves them as static files. They load in a fraction of a second.
Building this architecture takes more work than a standard install. For a small catalogue, or when speed barely affects your sales, a traditional install stays the simpler choice. For a store where every second of load time affects orders, the extra complexity pays for itself quickly.
Where orders actually get lost
Not at the checkout, which is what almost everyone assumes. Much earlier:
On slow product pages. People arriving from an ad or from social have very little patience, and every delay is a tab closed without regret.
In the information that isn't there. What shipping costs, when it arrives, what happens if I want to send it back. Those are the three doubts that stop a purchase, and they're also the three easiest to fix: just write them down.
In an internal search that doesn't work. If you have more than a few dozen products and someone looking for a specific thing can't find it, you've lost a customer who had already decided to buy. Which is the stupidest way there is to lose one.
A real case
Il Pinocchietto sells Montessori and Pikler wooden toys, and it's built exactly this way: hybrid Next.js and WordPress architecture, with catalogue management left to the person who works in it every day and the storefront generated statically.
The client already used WordPress for catalogue and orders. Asking her to throw all that away and learn a new platform would have added an obstacle to her work, not removed one. So WordPress stayed where it was useful and I rebuilt the rest from scratch. The site went from over five seconds of load time to under one, and the first order came in a few hours after launch.
You'll find the project below, with the detail of the technical choices.
Let's talk
If you have an online store that's dragging, or you're thinking about opening one and don't know where to start, drop me a line. The first consultation is free, I reply within 48 working hours, and if the conversation shows a subscription platform suits you better, I'll happily say so.
We have a chat
How many products, how many variants, who touches the stock and how you ship. They sound like boring questions, but they're the ones that decide the architecture of everything else.
Price, structure and platform
Fixed cost, catalogue organisation and the choice of admin system, decided on your real numbers and not on the habits of whoever's building it.
I build storefront and checkout
I put together pages, product listings and the purchase flow, then connect payments, shipping and automated emails.
Test orders, then we open
Before publishing we run fake orders end to end, payment included. You don't open a shop without having tried buying something in it.
How much does a custom e-commerce site cost?
A store with six pages, a management panel and advanced SEO starts at around €1,500 for the first year, with development, hosting and support included. From there it comes down almost entirely to the catalogue: products with many variants, differentiated price lists or an external system to connect will push the quote up — and in that case I'll tell you beforehand rather than discovering it mid-build.
Why not Shopify?
Shopify is a great thing if you want to open tomorrow and you're fine paying a monthly fee plus a percentage of every sale. I have no problem recommending it: if you're starting from zero and don't yet know whether the product works, spending little to find out is the right move. A custom e-commerce costs more up front and less over time, and leaves you holding the controls. It's a decision that depends on volume, not ideology, and I'll tell you honestly at quote stage.
Can I upload products myself?
Yes, and it's exactly why I use the hybrid architecture. You manage the catalogue from a panel where you publish products, prices, variants and stock just as you would on any online store. What changes is the part the customer sees, which stays very fast because it's generated in advance instead of being assembled on every visit.
How long does it take to open?
Four to eight weeks, depending on how many products there are to upload and photograph. The bottleneck is almost always the material: photos, descriptions, specs. If you already have the catalogue tidied up in a file, the timeline shortens a lot. If you still have two hundred items to photograph, that's the long part and it's better to know now.
Do you handle electronic invoicing too?
The store connects to the services that handle it, but it doesn't replace your accountant or a tax system, and I don't want to imply otherwise. I configure the integration with whatever you already use; if you don't have anything, we'll pick something sized to the order volume you expect.
What it costs
Ballpark for a 6-page store with hosting, professional email and domain.
The Work together page has a configurator: set pages, languages and extras and watch the estimate update, side by side with what an agency would charge for the same project.
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