Websites from $499 / You own everything, day one / Spokane & the Inland Northwest
Ecommerce website design for Spokane businesses
Selling online is a different build from a brochure site. There is a catalog to structure, a checkout to test with real money, shipping rules to set, and Washington sales tax to configure. So we quote stores individually instead of pricing them off a page count. You own the store, the domain and the hosting the day it goes live.
What a Spokane ecommerce build includes
No adjectives in this list. Every line is something that gets built and handed over.
A catalog structured the way you actually sell
Categories, product variants for size and color, stock counts, and a bulk import from your spreadsheet or existing store export, so you are not typing four hundred products in by hand. If your products have an awkward shape — kits, made-to-order items with options — that gets settled before the build. It is the part that is expensive to change afterwards.
A checkout tested with real transactions
Before launch we place live test orders end to end: card payment, confirmation email, order landing in your dashboard, refund processed back. Then again on a phone. A checkout that silently fails on one card type or one shipping zone is the costliest bug a store can ship, and the only way to find it is to buy something.
Payments, shipping and tax configured, not left on defaults
Payment gateway connected to your account, shipping zones and rates set to how you actually ship, and Washington sales tax set for destination-based rates. Defaults are where stores leak money — a flat rate that undercharges on heavy items, or tax collected at the wrong rate, cost more than the build did.
Product and category pages built to be found
Category pages written as real landing pages rather than bare grids, unique titles per product, product schema so prices and stock can show in search results, and internal links from your content to the products it mentions. That is standard SEO work applied to a catalog — the difference between a store people find and a store you have to buy ads for.
The store, the domain and the hosting in your name
Registered and billed to you, with your logins. Nothing needs migrating if you leave and nobody needs to hand anything over. Every file is sent on request, the same day.
Shopify, WooCommerce or a custom build for your store
Most stores we build run WooCommerce on WordPress. You own the software outright, no transaction fee is taken on top of card processing, and the store sits on the same site as the pages that bring people to it. The trade is that it needs maintaining — updates, backups, a security patch when one lands.
Shopify is the better answer when the catalog is large, the checkout has to be bulletproof from day one, or nobody on your side wants to think about updates. You pay monthly, give up a cut of each sale, and accept less control over the checkout. For plenty of Spokane retailers that is a reasonable trade, and we will say so rather than talk you out of it.
A custom build is a last resort, worth it only when your pricing logic, a configurator, or an inventory integration genuinely fits neither platform. If your store is a normal store, custom code is a cost with no return — worth hearing from the people who would be paid to write it.
Payments, shipping and Washington sales tax setup
Payments run through your own gateway account — Stripe, Square or PayPal, opened in your name so money lands in your bank without passing through us. Card fees are between you and the processor. We connect it, run test charges and a refund, and confirm receipts arrive.
Shipping is set to match how you actually get orders out: flat rates, weight bands, live carrier rates, or local pickup for Spokane customers. Local pickup is the option most e-commerce builds forget and the one Spokane shops use most.
Washington sales tax is destination-based, so the rate follows the buyer’s address rather than yours and varies across the county. The store is configured to calculate it that way. We set up the mechanics and the reporting; what you owe and where you have nexus is a question for your accountant, and we will say so rather than pretend otherwise.
Built for speed — why load time decides ecommerce sales
Load time is a revenue line on a store, not a polish item. Google’s own research puts the probability of a bounce up 32% as load time goes from one second to three, and on a store that bounce is a sale. Conversion rates fall as pages slow down, fastest on phone connections — which is where most store traffic arrives.
So speed is budgeted during the build rather than chased later: images compressed and served in modern formats at the size they are displayed, scripts limited to what the page needs, caching configured, platform bloat kept out, and a responsive layout designed from the phone up. Then we measure the real pages — a category page with forty products, a product page with a gallery — not the homepage. The homepage is always the fastest page on a store, and it is the one everyone tests.
Ecommerce website design pricing in Spokane
Brochure sites are priced by page count: from $499 up to 15 pages, $999 for 16 to 50, $1,499 for 51 or more. Stores are not, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise — the work scales with the catalog, the payment and shipping setup and the tax configuration. Send us roughly how many products you sell and how you ship them, and a written number and timeline comes back rather than an invitation to a call. Some Spokane agencies publish figures and a few start lower than ours. What matters either way is what the number covers and who owns the store at the end.
Spokane ecommerce questions, answered
How much does a bespoke website cost?
Nationally the range runs from a couple of thousand for a freelancer to well past ten thousand at an agency, and a store sits at the higher end of whatever range you are in because of the checkout, catalog and tax work. Our brochure tiers are published at $499, $999 and $1,499 by page count; stores are quoted individually, in writing, with a timeline, before any work starts.
What is ecommerce website design?
It is designing and building a website that takes orders and payment, rather than one that only describes what you sell. That adds a catalog, a cart, a checkout wired to a payment gateway, shipping rules, tax calculation and order management on top of a normal build. The design is judged differently too — a store page is measured on whether people finish the checkout, not on how it looks in a screenshot.
What are the 7 major steps to designing a website?
Roughly: decide what the site has to achieve, plan the pages and how they link, design the layout and get it approved, write the content, build it, test it, launch and maintain it. Ours compresses to four visible stages — scope, design approval, build, handover — because on a store, testing runs through the whole build rather than sitting at the end.
Who owns the store if we stop working together?
You do, and you did the whole time. The domain is in your name, the hosting is billed to you, the payment gateway is your account, and every file is handed over on request. You can move to another agency tomorrow without asking us for anything.
Do you do the product photography and the logo?
No. We build the store, and we will tell you honestly what your photography needs to look like to sell, but we do not shoot products and we do not do branding or logo design. If you already have branding we build to it. If you do not, sort that first — a store built around a logo you are about to change is work done twice.
More on ecommerce website design in Spokane
Secure your Spokane online store
Tell us what you sell and how you ship it, and we’ll come back with a price and a timeline. Every build is mobile responsive from the first draft, and we can walk you through our portfolio and case studies for anything that looks like your situation.