Some businesses run on commerce logic Shopify and WooCommerce simply cannot model — dynamic pricing engines, complex B2B procurement, multi-vendor marketplaces, configurable products with hundreds of variants, regulated industries, ERP-coupled inventory. For those, we engineer custom platforms from the database up.
SaaS commerce platforms are brilliant — until your business logic doesn't fit the box they ship in. Here are the patterns we see when off-the-shelf has hit its ceiling.
Quantity-tier pricing, customer-group pricing, contract pricing, dynamic rules based on currency-of-record, volume rebates on monthly aggregates. The "Price" field on a Shopify variant can't hold this. You end up with thirty plugins fighting each other, or a R200k/year Shopify Plus retainer to maintain a Frankenstein.
Configurable industrial parts with 14 attribute axes. Insurance quotes generated by risk engines. Bookings of physical assets across time. Subscription bundles with mid-cycle upgrades and proration. SaaS commerce platforms model "things in a cart" — they don't model your domain.
Sage, SAP B1, SYSPRO, Pastel, Microsoft NAV, custom warehouse management, SARS-integrated invoicing. The "Shopify connector" exists but loses data on edge cases, and a single sync gap puts your stock out by 40 units mid-Black-Friday.
At R8M+ GMV, Shopify Plus is R30k+/mo plus 0.15% transaction fees. WooCommerce on top-tier hosting is cheaper but the engineering team to make it scale costs you elsewhere. At a certain scale, custom is actually cheaper — and you stop paying for features you don't use.
If 3 or more of these describe your business, custom is probably the right answer. If 1 or 0 do — Shopify or WooCommerce will serve you better, and we'll tell you so.
Below R10M GMV, the SaaS rental fee is rounding error. Above it, the equation flips and a bespoke platform pays itself back inside 18 months.
If your sales team uses Excel to quote because the website can't, you have a domain mismatch the SaaS box can't fix without compromise.
Multi-vendor, vendor onboarding, commissions, payouts, vendor-specific catalogues and dashboards. SaaS marketplaces exist; they all model their idea of a marketplace, not yours.
If stock, pricing, and customer data really live in Sage / SAP / SYSPRO and the website is a viewer of that data, a custom build with native integration is dramatically cleaner than constant sync battles.
Pharmaceuticals, financial services, alcohol, age-restricted, FICA / KYC at checkout, region-locked inventory. Compliance flows are the build, not a plugin you bolt on.
If your operations are part of your competitive advantage, you don't want to run them on the same platform every other player rents. Custom is a moat with code in it.
We build commerce platforms as a layered, service-oriented system. Each layer has a clear responsibility, can be deployed independently, and can be swapped without rebuilding the rest.
The features that prompted you to look for custom in the first place. We've shipped versions of each of these on bespoke SA platforms.
Quantity tiers, contract pricing, customer-group rules, currency-of-record, dynamic discounts, channel-specific pricing, time-bound promos, volume rebates — all composable.
Variant matrices with 10+ attribute axes, dependent rules, sub-component selection, CAD-driven configurators, on-the-fly SKU generation.
Vendor onboarding, KYC, vendor-specific catalogues + branding, commissions, payouts (Yoco Split / PayFast SplitPay / custom), vendor analytics.
Quote-to-order, RFQ flows, net-30/60/90 invoicing, approval chains, requisition workflows, fleet pricing, contract repositories.
Plan tiers, mid-cycle upgrades with proration, dunning, scheduled bundles, dynamic gift-with-purchase, "build-a-box" subscriptions.
Calendar-based inventory, conflict detection, deposits, partial payments, rental return + condition workflows, calendar sync.
Sales-rep impersonation, telephonic-order entry, draft orders, internal-only promotions, opportunity → order flows tied to your CRM.
Algolia / Meilisearch / OpenSearch, faceted filters with custom attributes, merchandising rules, synonym tuning, query suggestions, "boost & bury" controls.
Warehouse pipeline (BigQuery / Snowflake / Postgres BI), Metabase / Superset dashboards, customer-lifetime-value modelling, cohort analysis.
We make boring, well-understood tech choices — because at this price point, you're hiring engineering, not novelty.
Not just running software — the documentation, observability, and operability that make it actually maintainable by your team or any other competent agency.
Every line of code MIT-licensed and pushed to your own repository. Branching strategy, PR conventions, and code-review playbook included.
Terraform modules for every AWS resource, environment-specific configs, secrets in AWS Secrets Manager, full disaster-recovery runbook.
C4-model architecture diagrams, ADRs (architecture decision records) for every major choice, OpenAPI schemas, ERDs — all in the repo, versioned with the code.
Sentry error tracking, Datadog APM, CloudWatch dashboards, structured logs to a queryable store, SLO dashboards with alerts to your on-call.
Domain unit tests, integration tests against real DB/Redis, end-to-end tests on Playwright, with CI gates that prevent shipping when tests fail.
Every defect we ship, we fix free for 3 months. We pair-program with your engineering team, run code reviews on their PRs, and exit only when you're confident running the platform alone.
Custom platforms are real engineering projects, not website builds. Here's how we run them — phased, with explicit go/no-go gates between each phase.
Workshops with your business stakeholders, your existing systems audit, integration mapping, risk & compliance review. We produce a domain model, ADRs, and an architecture document before code is written.
Repo scaffolding, CI/CD, AWS infrastructure provisioned via Terraform, auth, observability, the API gateway, and a "tracer bullet" feature end-to-end to de-risk the architecture.
The domain core — catalog, pricing, cart, checkout, order lifecycle, payments, basic admin. 2-week sprints with reviewable demos every Friday.
ERP / WMS / accounting integrations. The riskiest phase — we treat external systems as untrusted, build idempotent connectors, run parallel-run tests against your real data.
Your team runs UAT against staging. We instrument load tests, security review, penetration test, performance tune until SLOs are met. POPIA review & data-flow documentation.
Phased cutover (often by region, customer-segment, or shadow-mode), 90-day defect warranty, weekly check-ins with your engineering team, deliberate hand-off.
Indicative figures from recent SA bespoke commerce builds, measured 6–12 months after launch. Custom isn't always cheaper than SaaS — but where the fit is right, the ROI is unambiguous.
Custom builds are always estimated bottom-up after discovery, but here are the bands we typically see. 30% on signature, 30% on phase-3 demo, 30% on UAT, 10% on launch.
Honest answers about cost, ownership, risk, and how to know if custom is genuinely the right call.
Send us a paragraph on your business model, current platform, the friction you're hitting. We'll come back with a 45-minute architecture call, a recommended tier, and an indicative budget — no obligation, no pitch deck.