Selling online sounds like one job: put the products on a website. It is actually three. You have to get the products in, organize them so a customer can find the one part they need, and take money without the checkout falling over. Most stores that struggle are fine on the first one and broken on the other two.
I just finished one of these, so instead of talking in generalities, here is a real build and what each part of it actually involved.
The store: 565 parts for tractors built before 1940
Rice Equipment sells new old-stock parts for vintage Farmall and McCormick-Deering tractors, the kind built between 1921 and 1939. Their old site was dated and, more importantly, the checkout did not work. People who wanted to buy could not.
The rebuild is live now at riceequipmentinc.com: 565 products across 46 categories, and a checkout that takes a card without making the customer create an account with a payment company first. You can see it alongside my other builds on the work page.
The hard part is not the design, it is the organizing
Here is the thing nobody tells you about a product catalog. Somebody restoring a Farmall F-12 does not browse. They need one specific governor spring, and if they cannot find it in about thirty seconds they leave and call someone on the phone.
So the catalog got organized three different ways, because customers arrive knowing three different things:
- By tractor. They know they have an F-14, or a Farmall Cub, or a W-30. That is the most common way in.
- By system. They know it is an ignition problem, or a fuel system part, or brakes, but not the part number.
- By brand. They only know it is a McCormick-Deering.
Same 565 products, three paths in. That is most of the work on an ecommerce build, and it is invisible when it is done right. It is also the difference between a store that sells and a catalog that just sits there.
Checkout is where the money actually leaks
A broken or awkward checkout undoes everything upstream. The most common version I see is a store that forces the customer to create an account with a third-party payment service before they can pay. A lot of people, especially older customers, simply stop there.
Rice's store now says it plainly at the top of every page: pay by card at checkout, no extra account needed. That one sentence exists because it removes the exact objection that was costing them orders.
What ecommerce costs, honestly
An online store is more work than a brochure site, and the price should reflect that, but not by as much as agencies suggest. A real store with a product catalog is commonly quoted at $5,000 and up around here. I price by what the job actually takes, which mostly comes down to how many products there are and what shape your product data is in. If you already have a clean spreadsheet of your inventory, you are most of the way there. If it lives in a filing cabinet, that is the real cost.
My current rates are on the pricing page, and the fuller breakdown of what any small business site should cost in 2026 is here.
Do you actually need a store?
Plenty of businesses ask for ecommerce and do not need it. If you sell services, or a handful of items you mostly discuss on the phone first, a good regular website and an easy way to contact you will outperform a store you have to maintain. Ecommerce earns its keep when you have real inventory, repeat buyers, and orders you would rather not take by phone one at a time.
That is the honest filter. If you have a catalog and customers who already know what they want, a store pays for itself. If you do not, it is overhead pretending to be growth.
If you are in Pittsburgh and weighing this
I build these here, and I will tell you straight whether you need one. If the answer is that a simpler site serves you better, I will say so, even though the store is the bigger project. See web design in Pittsburgh for how I work, or just send me what you sell and I will tell you what it would take.