E-commerce development · Tampa Bay
Most e-commerce website problems aren't design problems — they're a checkout that stalls on a phone, a payment step that fails silently, or product pages that take eight seconds to load. Tampa Forge does online store development for Tampa Bay businesses the unglamorous way: a WooCommerce developer who sets up your products, payments, and shipping properly, tests checkout on the phone your customers actually use, and hands you a store you own outright. From new store builds in Tampa and St. Petersburg to rescuing stores that have run aground — quoted at a fixed price before we start.
Whether you sell twelve products or twelve hundred, the jobs are the same: get the store built right, get the money flowing without friction, and keep it that way. Here's what that looks like in practice.
WooCommerce on WordPress is our default for most Tampa Bay stores: you get a real catalog, an editing dashboard your staff can use, and no monthly platform tax on every sale. We handle the parts DIY setups skip — clean product setup with variations and categories, tax configuration, shipping rules that match how you actually ship, and a theme built for your products instead of a demo store's.
Checkout is where stores leak sales, and most leaks are invisible from the owner's desk. We integrate Stripe or Square properly, cut the checkout to the fewest steps that still collect what you need, and test the whole run on a mid-range phone over cell data — because that's where most of your Tampa and St. Petersburg customers are buying, and where sloppy checkouts quietly die.
WooCommerce isn't always the answer, and we'll say so. If you want a hands-off hosted store and standard products, Shopify may serve you fine — our Shopify DIY vs. developer guide gives that the honest treatment. And if your store needs custom logic — wholesale pricing tiers, inventory synced to other systems, quoting workflows — that's custom Laravel commerce territory. We build all three, so the recommendation isn't a sales pitch.
Plenty of our e-commerce work starts with a store someone else built: product pages that crawl, a checkout that broke after an update nobody remembers, a plugin stack abandoned by its last developer. We audit what's there, fix what's leaking sales first, and thin the plugin pile down to what the store actually needs — usually without a rebuild.
WooCommerce when you want ownership and flexibility: no per-month platform fee, no percentage skimmed beyond normal card processing, and freedom to customize anything — in exchange for a site that needs maintenance like any WordPress install. Shopify when you want the platform to handle hosting and updates and your products fit its standard mold — in exchange for monthly fees and the platform's rules. If you already run WordPress, WooCommerce is usually the shorter road. We'll tell you which fits before quoting anything.
Typical ranges, not quotes: adding a WooCommerce store to an existing WordPress site usually lands in the mid four figures and up; a full store build — site, catalog, payments, shipping — runs higher, moving with catalog size and features like subscriptions, wholesale pricing, or inventory integrations. Every project gets a written fixed price before work starts, and that price is the price.
Usually, yes — and we'd rather. Slow product pages, broken checkout steps, failed payment webhooks, and plugin conflicts are mostly repairable problems. We start with an audit of what's actually wrong, then quote the fix. We only recommend a rebuild when repair would genuinely cost more than starting clean, and we'll show you the reasoning either way.
Yes — the store, the code, the hosting account, the Stripe or Square account, the product data, all of it, in your name from day one. If we part ways, you sail off with the whole ship. No hostage websites, ever.
Tell us what you sell and where the store stands — napkin sketch, half-built cart, or a live shop that's leaking sales. We'll reply within one business day with honest next steps and a fixed-price quote, including "your current store is fixable" if it is.
No ransom required. First consultation is free.
Tampa Forge