E-commerce stores for teams where every hour of downtime costs money.

We build commerce stores that do more than sell. They integrate with the rest of your business, hold up under real load, and give your team the tools to operate at the pace of the product.

Three ways to work with us.

E-commerce engagements usually start as one of these, and often shift shape as trust builds.

01

Fixed-scope build.

You have a defined scope: a new store, a re-platform, a custom integration. We scope, design, build, and ship against the deadline you bring us.

Best forDefined projects with clear scope
02

Extended partnership.

We handle your store's ongoing needs across product launches, seasonal updates, integration work, and performance optimization. Your team focuses on merchandising and operations; we stay focused on shipping.

Best forStores with continuous development work
03

Launch plus retainer.

We build the initial store, then stay on retainer to handle iteration, new features, and the integration work that comes up as the business scales.

Best forStores that will need ongoing engineering after launch

The e-commerce work we do.

A representative sample. Most of our e-commerce engagements fall into one of these shapes.

New store launches.

Businesses going online for the first time, or launching a new storefront alongside existing channels. We handle the full build: product catalog setup, payment integration, shipping logic, tax configuration, and the operational scaffolding that makes the store actually runnable by your team.

Re-platforming.

Moving from one e-commerce platform to another, Shopify to headless, WooCommerce to Shopify, Magento to something more modern. We handle the data migration, the redirects, the SEO preservation, and the cutover so the business keeps running through the transition.

Custom checkout and payment work.

Subscription billing with complex trial logic. Multi-party payment flows. B2B invoicing. International tax and currency handling. The kind of checkout work that goes beyond what platforms handle out of the box.

Post-launch optimization and integration work.

Performance optimization, conversion rate work, and the integrations that connect commerce to the rest of the business. ERP sync, CRM integration, custom API work between systems that weren't designed to talk to each other.

B2B e-commerce is a different job from a consumer store, because the buyer usually has an account, a negotiated price and a purchasing process of their own. Most distributor and manufacturer stores need to show each customer their own pricing, put a quote path next to the checkout, accept purchase orders, offer net terms, and stay in sync with the ERP that already holds inventory and pricing. Some buyers won't order through your checkout at all: their purchasing team browses your catalog through a punchout from a procurement system like SAP Ariba or Coupa. If your largest accounts buy that way, it's a requirement to plan for before the platform is chosen.

Whichever way they order, the ERP stays the system of record for prices and stock. The store should get both from it, synced or read live, rather than keep a second copy that someone updates by hand.

Platform choice comes up early in a B2B project, and we've ranked the best B2B e-commerce platforms for established manufacturers and distributors, from Adobe Commerce and OroCommerce for the deepest native B2B features to BigCommerce B2B Edition and Shopify.

How we build.

Three things that shape how we approach e-commerce work.

01

Custom integrations are where most of the real work lives.

An e-commerce store by itself is the easy part. Making it talk to your ERP, your CRM, your inventory system, your fulfillment provider, your analytics stack, and the other tools your business runs on, that's where the work actually gets hard. We've built custom integrations across the major e-commerce platforms and connected them to systems that weren't designed to work together. For Halo Products, we integrated a complex review platform into their commerce stack. For other clients we can't name publicly, we've done similar work connecting commerce to the rest of the business.

02

We match the platform to the project.

Shopify, Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, headless commerce on Next.js or Hydrogen, we've shipped production stores on all of them. Each has tradeoffs. Instead of defaulting to a preferred platform, we recommend based on your operational complexity, your team's capabilities, and what you need the store to do in three years, not just at launch.

03

Performance is revenue.

Every second of load time costs conversion. Every checkout error is a lost sale. Every integration that fails silently is money that quietly stops working. We build e-commerce stores with performance, reliability, and error handling treated as first-class concerns, not post-launch afterthoughts.

In their own words.

“
We needed a partner to help us integrate a very complex review platform for our e-commerce business. We really didn't know what we needed, but Alkali was able to unpack it and deliver.
McKenna Twyman
Creative Director · Halo Products
How long does a typical e-commerce project take?

It depends on scope and complexity. Re-platforming projects can run longer depending on data migration and integration complexity. Custom checkout or subscription work adds time depending on what's involved. We give you a specific timeline once we've scoped the project on our intro call.

What platform do you recommend?

Whatever fits the project. We've built on Shopify, Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and headless commerce on Next.js and Hydrogen. We recommend based on your operational complexity, your team's technical capabilities, and how you plan to run the store after launch. Platform decisions get made in conversation with you, not handed down from us.

Can you migrate our existing store to a new platform?

Yes. Re-platforming is one of the most common engagements we handle. We migrate products, customer data, order history, and content; set up proper redirects so you don't lose SEO; and handle the cutover so the business keeps running through the transition.

How do you handle complex payment flows, subscriptions, marketplaces, B2B invoicing?

This is a significant part of what we do. We've built subscription billing with trial logic, multi-party payment flows using Stripe Connect, B2B invoicing with net terms, and international checkout with tax and currency handling. When off-the-shelf platform features don't cover what you need, we build custom on top.

Can our team manage products and content after launch?

Yes. Every store we build is set up so your team can manage products, collections, content, promotions, and inventory through the platform's native admin interface. No custom tools you need us to maintain, no developer-only workflows.

Do you do design, or just development?

Both. Some clients come with designs already in hand, others engage us for the full design-and-build scope. E-commerce design has specific disciplines (product photography treatment, cart and checkout flow design, inventory-aware templates) that we handle when it's in scope.

How do you handle integrations with our ERP, CRM, or other systems?

This is the work we do most often. We've built custom integrations between commerce platforms and ERPs (NetSuite, SAP, custom), CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot), fulfillment providers, analytics stacks, and internal systems. The specific approach depends on what's available (native integrations, APIs, middleware), but the goal is always the same: the store works with the rest of your business, not in a silo.

What should we look for in a B2B e-commerce agency?

Start with where prices and stock will come from. Ask which of them the store will read from the ERP live and which it will copy on a scheduled sync, and what a buyer sees when the store and the ERP disagree, such as a price that changed after the last sync. The answer changes how the store gets built, so a good agency will ask how your accounts are priced and how fast your stock moves before it gives one.

Other services.

Not quite what you're looking for? Here are the other ways we can help.

Something else in mind? Most of our work starts with a conversation.
Book an intro call and tell us what you’re trying to build.

Let's build something together.

A 30-minute call. We'll listen, dig into the details, and tell you honestly whether we're the right partner, or point you to someone who is.

Book Intro Call ↗