Offshore web and eCommerce development for Manchester
Manchester has the strongest retail and eCommerce base outside London and a fraction of the agency saturation. On a competition-to-opportunity basis it is the best UK city we serve, and most of the work is storefront engineering rather than greenfield build.
Manchester businesses are markedly more direct about budget than London ones, which we prefer. The conversation tends to start with what the problem is and what it will cost to fix, rather than with a discovery process. That suits a supplier who publishes rates.
The dominant sector is retail and eCommerce. Greater Manchester supports a large independent retail base, a substantial online-only cohort, and the logistics and fulfilment operations behind them. What that produces, consistently, is stores that have outgrown the platform they launched on and are now losing money in ways nobody has instrumented well enough to see.
There is also a significant media and broadcast cluster around MediaCityUK, a large property and regeneration sector, and the manufacturing base across the wider North West. The work differs by sector but the pattern is the same: established businesses with systems that worked at a smaller scale and no longer do.
The Manchester sectors we work in
Manchester businesses are markedly more direct about budget than London ones, which we prefer. Retail and eCommerce dominate, so most of the work is storefront performance, catalogue scale and integration with warehouse and accounting systems rather than greenfield product build.
Areas and precincts we serve
Remote delivery, so geography inside Greater Manchester makes no difference to what we can do. Listed because buyers ask.
Storefront engineering, which is most of the work
The recurring Manchester eCommerce problem is scale-related degradation, and it is an engineering problem rather than a design one. This is why a store can look excellent and still underperform commercially, and why a redesign frequently fails to fix it.
Category pages that rendered acceptably at four hundred products take six seconds at four thousand, usually because the query behind them was never designed for that cardinality and nothing is cached at the right layer. Faceted navigation that works on a single filter collapses when a customer combines three, because each facet triggers its own count query. Stock that is accurate in the warehouse system and wrong on the storefront, because the sync runs nightly and the store sells items that are already gone.
Checkout is the other consistent finding. Most stores we audit have never instrumented the checkout properly, so abandonment is known as a number and not as a cause. Adding step-level instrumentation usually identifies the problem within a fortnight, and it is often something small: a postcode lookup that fails silently on certain formats, a delivery option that does not appear for some regions, a payment method timing out without a message.
We quote this work against the measured commercial effect rather than as a general improvement, and we insist on establishing the baseline first. If category rendering goes from six seconds to under a second and mobile conversion moves half a percentage point, the arithmetic is straightforward. If it will not move, we say so.
In practice
Every engagement starts with a conversation, not a proposal template.
Thirty minutes with a senior engineer. You leave with an architecture sketch and an honest cost range, whether or not you hire us.
Replatforming without losing the rankings
The second common Manchester engagement is a move between platforms: Magento to Shopify, WooCommerce to something that will scale, or an ageing bespoke store to a maintained platform.
The technical migration is well understood. The part that damages businesses is search: the two platforms organise product and category URLs differently, and without careful redirect mapping you lose the rankings that have been accumulating for years. We have been called in to repair this more than once and it is far more expensive to fix afterwards than to do correctly.
Our approach is to inventory every existing URL with its traffic and ranking data before anything moves, map each to its destination, keep the URLs that carry equity wherever the new platform permits it, implement 301 redirects for the rest, and monitor Search Console daily through the transition rather than checking a month later.
Assume the catalogue data is worse than you think. Every migration we have run has surfaced duplicate products, inconsistent attribute naming, missing images and prices stored as text, none of which anyone had noticed because the store was working. That cleanup is real work and we scope it separately rather than absorbing it and then explaining an overrun.
Every engagement starts with a conversation, not a proposal template.
Thirty minutes with a senior engineer. You leave with an architecture sketch and an honest cost range, whether or not you hire us.
The overlap, and why it suits developer-to-developer work
India is five and a half hours ahead of the UK, four and a half under British Summer Time, so our working day covers your morning and early afternoon. About five hours of overlap.
For eCommerce work specifically this is more valuable than it might appear, because storefront problems are frequently urgent. A checkout failure or a stock sync error is losing money by the hour, and a supplier who cannot be reached until tomorrow is a genuine commercial exposure. With five hours of overlap plus our afternoon covering your early morning, most incidents get attention within the working day.
It also means the routine work is genuinely collaborative. Pull request review happens live, a question about an edge case is a two-minute call rather than a day of latency, and your own developers can work alongside ours rather than handing over and waiting.
Every engagement starts with a conversation, not a proposal template.
Thirty minutes with a senior engineer. You leave with an architecture sketch and an honest cost range, whether or not you hire us.
What we cost
Manchester agency rates are meaningfully below London but still substantial. Indicative bands for original work with us.
Start with the audit
For an existing store, the sensible first engagement is a performance and conversion audit with the fixes implemented, priced small. It tells you whether we can actually find and fix what is costing you money, and it usually pays for itself before the larger project starts. If we audit and conclude the store is fine, we will tell you that and bill only the audit.
| Project | Manchester agency | With us |
|---|---|---|
| eCommerce performance audit and fixes | GBP 8,000 - 30,000 | GBP 600 - 3,000 |
| Shopify or WooCommerce build | GBP 15,000 - 60,000 | GBP 1,000 - 5,000 |
| Replatform with redirect mapping | GBP 25,000 - 90,000 | GBP 1,800 - 9,000 |
| Corporate site with CMS | GBP 15,000 - 45,000 | GBP 1,200 - 3,800 |
| Ongoing storefront support | GBP 800 - 2,500/mo | GBP 100 - 400/mo |
5 hours a day where we are both at a desk
This is the easiest major market we work with on scheduling. Our 09:30–19:30 IST day covers 04:00–14:00 GMT, so your entire morning and the start of your afternoon overlap with our working day — about five hours, four and a half under British Summer Time. A UK client can raise something at nine in the morning and have an answer before lunch.
UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018
India does not hold a UK adequacy decision, so transfers to us require an appropriate safeguard — in practice the International Data Transfer Agreement, or the UK Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses, plus a transfer risk assessment. We sign the IDTA as a matter of course and will complete your TRA questionnaire. Where data genuinely should not leave the UK, we architect for that instead and say so early.
Regulator: Information Commissioner's Office
What Manchester buyers ask
We will tell you in the first conversation if we are a poor fit for what you are describing, including when the time difference makes us the wrong choice.
Almost always because the query behind them was designed for a smaller catalogue and nothing is cached at the right layer, compounded by faceted navigation that issues its own count query per facet. It is an engineering problem rather than a design one, which is why redesigns rarely fix it. Partitioning, query redesign and correct caching typically take category rendering from several seconds to under one.
Yes, and it is a specific discipline rather than an afterthought. We inventory every existing URL with its traffic and ranking data before anything moves, map each to a destination, keep URLs that carry equity where the new platform allows, implement 301 redirects for the rest, and monitor Search Console daily through the transition. Ranking loss during migration is caused by silently dropping URLs, not by the new platform.
A Shopify or WooCommerce build is typically 15,000 to 60,000 pounds from a Manchester agency and 1,000 to 5,000 with us. A replatform with proper redirect mapping is 25,000 to 90,000 locally against 1,800 to 9,000. We would usually suggest starting with a performance and conversion audit priced small, since it establishes whether we can find what is costing you money.
Our working day covers your morning and early afternoon, roughly five hours of overlap, and our afternoon covers your early morning. In practice most incidents raised during a UK working day get attention the same day. For stores where downtime is materially expensive we agree response commitments in the support contract rather than leaving it to goodwill.
Yes, on the same terms as London: you keep the client, the brief and the commercial relationship, we work in your repository to your conventions under your brand, and the non-solicitation is contractual. For Manchester studios the demand is most often storefront engineering behind a design the studio has already sold.
Elsewhere in United Kingdom
Tell us what is slowing your business down.
A 30-minute call with a senior engineer — not a salesperson. You leave with an architecture sketch and an honest cost range, whether or not you hire us.
Direct line
+91 70033 91355Mon–Sat · 9:30 AM – 7:30 PM IST · Sealdah, Kolkata