Ecommerce development for US merchants

Choosing a platform for a US store

The right platform depends on your catalog, team and growth plan, not on what is fashionable. We would rather spend the first call on this choice than build on the wrong base.

If Shopify is the answer, our Shopify development page for the US covers the checkout details. The general ecommerce solutions page lists deliverables across platforms.

Payments, fraud and card data

US shoppers expect cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal, and many like installments through Affirm, Klarna or Afterpay on bigger baskets. Stripe and the platform's own payment tools cover most of this. We use hosted or tokenized checkout so card numbers never touch your server, which keeps your PCI DSS scope small. If you use a custom payment form, scope grows and so does the compliance work.

Chargebacks and card-testing attacks are real for online stores. We turn on the processor's fraud tools, add rate limits to the checkout and set up address and security-code checks. Rules stay adjustable so that you do not block good customers by mistake.

US rules that change what the store must do

• Sales tax. Since the 2018 Wayfair decision, states can require out-of-state sellers to collect tax once they pass a sales threshold, and each state sets its own. A handful of states have no state sales tax at all. Marketplaces such as Amazon collect tax on your behalf in many states, but not for sales from your own site. We configure the cart and tax tool to match your registrations.
• Proposition 65. Products sold to California shoppers may need a warning for listed chemicals. Whether your products do is a question for your lawyer or supplier, and we add the notice fields in the product data.
• Subscriptions. California's automatic renewal law and similar state rules set requirements for disclosing terms and cancelling. If you sell subscriptions, we design the sign-up and the cancel path with your counsel's wording.
• Privacy. State laws including CCPA and CPRA may give shoppers rights over data and ad tracking. We add the policy and opt-out links your lawyer requests and test that tracking stops when a visitor opts out.
• Accessibility. Online stores are a frequent target for ADA claims, so we build to WCAG 2.2 AA and test the checkout with a keyboard and screen reader.

These are prompts for your lawyer and accountant, not advice. We make the technical side easy to change when they answer.

Shipping, returns and back-office links

American shoppers compare delivery promises and return terms before they pay. We set up rates for USPS, UPS or FedEx, free-shipping thresholds, pickup options if you have a shop, and a returns flow that creates a label. If a third-party warehouse ships your orders, we connect it so stock levels and tracking numbers flow back to the store. Accounting links to QuickBooks or a similar tool are built so that orders, fees and tax post in a way your bookkeeper can reconcile.

Holiday trading drives the calendar. With Black Friday on 27 November and Cyber Monday on 30 November in 2026, we plan any new store launch to be live and tested before early November, or after the sale period.

Project plan and price

1. Decide and scopePlatform, catalog size, payments and integrations are agreed on a call and written down.
2. Design and buildTemplates for home, collection, product, cart and checkout first, with mobile layouts approved before extra pages.
3. Load the catalogProducts, variants, images and redirects from any old store are imported and sampled.
4. Test ordersWe place orders with each wallet, shipping zone and tax case, and test refunds.
5. LaunchDomain cut-over at a quiet hour for you, plus daily checks in the first week.

Projects start at $1,500, and our rate is $30 an hour. Catalog size, custom features, integrations and migration scope move the quote; a fixed price follows a short call within one working day. Calls take place in your morning, which is our evening: 9:00 a.m. Eastern is 19:30 in India in winter. The ecommerce website cost guide shows the typical drivers.