Ecommerce website design in Des Moines
Ecommerce website design for Des Moines businesses, built on WooCommerce, with the checkout, payments, shipping and tax set up properly. Scoped and quoted individually, because a store is not a page count.
Since 2011 · WooCommerce · You own the store and the data · Veteran-owned
Why most small ecommerce stores lose the sale at the checkout
The storefront is rarely the problem. The last three screens usually are.
Forced account creation, a shipping form before a total, six fields that could have been two. Every extra step is somewhere for a buyer to reconsider, and the ones who leave at the payment screen were the ones who had already decided to buy.
A total that changes at the final step is the single most common reason a full cart gets abandoned. If the postage is a surprise, the price the customer agreed to in their head was never the price you were going to charge.
Two hundred products in one long list with no filters. If a buyer cannot narrow by the thing they care about — size, material, price, availability — they will not scroll to find it.
Selling something you no longer have is worse than not selling it, and tax worked out manually is a rounding error that compounds every month. Both should be the software’s job.
What an online store build includes: checkout, payments and shipping
Ecommerce website design is mostly the transactional half. The storefront is the easy part.
- A WooCommerce store on WordPress, in your own hosting account
- Product catalog set up with categories, attributes and filters that match how people shop
- A checkout tested end to end, on a phone, with a real card
- Payment gateway connected — Stripe, PayPal or your existing merchant account
- Shipping rules: flat, weight-based, zone-based or live carrier rates
- Automatic sales-tax calculation for the states you are obliged to collect in
- Stock levels that decrement on sale, with low-stock and out-of-stock handling
- Order confirmation, shipping and abandoned-cart emails that actually send
- SSL, secure hosting and an admin your staff can run orders from
WooCommerce or Shopify: which is right for your store
A real comparison, including the case where the answer is not us.
Shopify is a hosted product. You pay a monthly fee plus a share of each transaction, and in exchange almost nothing is your problem — updates, security and uptime are handled. The trade is that you are renting the platform. You cannot move the store somewhere cheaper, the monthly cost rises with the features you need, and you are inside their rules for what you may sell.
WooCommerce runs on WordPress, on hosting in your own name. There is no monthly platform fee and no cut of your revenue — you pay your host and your payment processor and nothing to a platform in between. The trade is that updates and security are somebody’s responsibility, and that somebody is either you or whoever you pay to do it.
We build WooCommerce. Not because Shopify is bad — for a store with a lot of products, a lot of orders and nobody in-house to maintain anything, Shopify is frequently the better answer. If that is you, take it, and we are not the right shop for the job. We would rather say that now than build you the wrong thing.
Product catalogs, inventory and tax
The unglamorous half that decides whether the store is usable at 200 products.
A catalog is designed around how people actually shop, which is almost never by browsing everything. Products get attributes — size, color, material, price band, availability — and those attributes become the filters. Variations sit inside one product rather than sprawling into forty near-identical listings.
Inventory is tracked by the software, not by memory. Stock decrements on sale, low-stock thresholds warn you before you run out, and sold-out items either hide or say so rather than taking an order you cannot fill. If you sell in person as well, that is an integration and we will scope it.
Sales tax is calculated automatically for the states you are registered to collect in. To be plain about the boundary: we set up the calculation and the rules you tell us to apply. We are not accountants and we do not advise on where you have a nexus or what you owe — that is a question for yours.
Store security, PCI compliance and ongoing maintenance
A store holds other people’s money and details. It carries obligations a brochure site does not.
The single most useful thing about a modern store build is that card details never touch your server. Stripe and PayPal handle the card on their own infrastructure and hand your site a token. That keeps the vast majority of PCI obligation with the processor rather than with you, and it means a break-in on your site cannot leak card numbers you never held.
What is still yours: SSL on every page, an admin behind strong credentials with one account per person, updates applied before a known hole gets scanned for, and backups taken off the server and tested. Customer names, addresses and order history do live in your database, and they are worth protecting on their own terms.
Maintenance is not optional on a store the way it arguably is on a brochure site. A checkout that breaks after an update stops taking money immediately and silently. You can buy that from us or from anyone else — but budget for it with someone.
What an ecommerce website design build does not include
Said plainly, because a store has more moving parts than anything else we build.
- Shopify, BigCommerce, Squarespace or Wix stores — we build WooCommerce
- Tax, accounting or nexus advice — we implement the rules you or your accountant give us
- Product photography, or writing descriptions for a catalog beyond your quoted scope
- Warehouse, fulfillment or 3PL systems — connecting to one is an integration, quoted separately
- Merchant account applications or underwriting — you hold the account with the processor
- Ongoing marketing, email campaigns or paid advertising
- Payment processing fees, which you pay the processor directly
Every site is built by Elisabeth Samuels and the Salterra team — a company building websites since 2011. Not a reseller, not an offshore queue. The same person who scopes your project writes the pages and hands over the logins.
Those two answers are most of a store quote. You get a figure and a scope in writing — a store is never priced from a page count.
What ecommerce website design costs in Des Moines
Ecommerce is quoted individually — and here is exactly why that is not evasion.
A store is not priced from a page count, so it does not sit at the $499 tier and we are not going to pretend it might. Two stores with the same number of pages can be a fortnight apart in work depending on how many products there are, how they vary, how they ship and what the store has to talk to.
So an ecommerce build is scoped first and quoted second: you tell us what you sell and roughly how many products you carry, we come back with a written scope and a fixed figure, and nothing starts until you have both. The scope is the protection — it is the document that says what you are getting, so the number cannot quietly move later.
What moves the number
- Product count and how much they vary — twenty simple products and two thousand with size and color options are not the same build
- How you ship — one flat rate is a setting; live carrier rates, zones and free-shipping thresholds are a configuration job
- Whether the store has to talk to anything else — accounting, a point of sale, a warehouse or fulfillment system, a CRM
- Whether the product data exists — a clean spreadsheet is fast, four hundred products to be written and photographed is not
Frequently asked questions about ecommerce web design in Des Moines
What does ecommerce website design cost in Des Moines?
More than the $499 entry tier, and we would rather say so than let you find out later. Ecommerce website design is scoped and quoted individually because the work is not predictable from a page count — product count, variations, shipping rules and integrations move it far more than the number of pages does. You get a written scope and a fixed figure before anything starts.
Should I use WooCommerce or Shopify?
We build WooCommerce, so treat this as an interested answer. WooCommerce means no monthly platform fee, no cut of your revenue, and hosting in your own name — but somebody has to maintain it. Shopify means the maintenance is handled and you rent the platform for a monthly fee plus a slice of each sale. If you have a lot of products, a lot of orders and nobody to look after software, Shopify is often the better answer — and in that case we are not the right shop and you should go and use it.
Can you migrate my existing online store?
Usually. An ecommerce migration moves products, categories, customers and order history, and all of those can normally be exported from one platform and imported into another, and we map the old URLs to the new ones with redirects so existing product links keep working. What does not transfer is the platform’s own apps — anything you were renting from Shopify’s app store has a WooCommerce equivalent that has to be chosen and set up rather than copied.
Who handles payment processing and fees?
You hold the account with the processor — Stripe, PayPal or your existing merchant provider — and their fees are paid by you directly at their published rate. We connect the store to it. We do not sit between you and your money, and we take no share of your transactions.
Do you build stores that ship and calculate tax automatically?
Yes to both. Shipping can be flat, by weight, by zone, or quoted live from the carrier. Sales tax is calculated automatically for the states you tell us you are registered to collect in. To be clear on the boundary: we implement the rules, we do not advise on where you owe tax — that is your accountant’s call, not ours.
Who owns the store and the product data if I leave?
You do, and on a store that matters more than anywhere else. The domain and hosting are in your name, and your products, customers and order history live in a database you can export in full at any time. There is no platform holding your customer list hostage, because there is no platform between you and it.
Tell us what you sell. Get your number.
Send us what your business does and roughly how many pages you think you need. You will get the number and a timeline in writing.
Takes about a minute. No call, no obligation.
We reply to everything within one business day.