What’s Involved in Launching an E-commerce Website in 2025?
Launching an e-commerce website in 2025 offers exciting opportunities, but it also comes with an evolving list of moving parts. From platform selection to fulfilment and third-party integrations, getting from idea to order requires more than just a shopping cart.
At TSD, we’ve partnered with brands across the UK, Europe, Canada, and North America to help them launch and grow powerful, scalable e-commerce sites. Drawing on that experience, this article unpacks the essential decisions you’ll need to make—and how to get them right.
This post also kicks off our new e-commerce thought leadership series, where we’ll dive deeper into platform integrations, optimisation, and operational scaling. Let’s get started.
1. Choosing the Right Product (and Courier)
Your product and logistics setup will define much of your operational model. We always start e-commerce projects with these fundamentals.
Whether you’re launching a single DTC (Direct To Consumer) product or thousands of SKUs, your choice of courier will shape the customer experience. At TSD, we’ve helped brands evaluate courier partners based on price, reliability, care, and customer service quality—especially important when selling fragile, high-value, or perishable items.
For one customer, our team benchmarked multiple courier options, identifying cost differences and differences in claims processes, damage rates, and regional performance. This groundwork ensured fewer post-launch surprises—and a smoother customer experience.
2. Pricing Strategy and Shipping Models
A successful pricing strategy balances margin, marketing potential, and logistics.
At TSD, we work with clients to model pricing tiers, shipping thresholds, and bundling strategies that maximise profitability while driving conversion. Most e-commerce platforms today support dynamic promotions, coupon codes, and volume-based discounts, and we’ve implemented everything from simple BOGOF offers to complex tiered promotions based on cart value, time of day, or customer segment.
Shipping costs are another strategic lever. Will you subsidise delivery, charge real-time courier rates, or offer free shipping above a certain basket size? We are often asked to integrate directly with carrier APIs for real-time pricing but the reality is that in the majority of cases, weight-based shipping logic is most appropriate.
3. Choosing the Right E-commerce Platform
This is one of the most crucial decisions you’ll make. At TSD, we take a platform-first approach—not just in terms of features, but in ensuring the platform fits your operations, growth plans, and content needs.
While we work across several platforms, our core focus and deep expertise lies in:
🥇 Ucommerce
An enterprise-ready platform built for complex catalogues, flexible architecture, and rich integration. Paired with Umbraco CMS, Ucommerce lets you deliver exceptional commerce + content experiences. Integrating Umbraco Engage allows us to personalise offerings to customers. We often recommend it for businesses wanting complete control over the customer journey—and we’ve delivered everything from custom promotions to multi-market setups using Ucommerce.
🥈 DynamicWeb
A robust all-in-one solution combining CMS, e-commerce, PIM, and marketing. It's ideal for businesses needing tight operational integration and sophisticated digital experience management. TSD has helped clients leverage DynamicWeb for complex B2B setups, ERP synchronisation (especially Microsoft Business Central (BC)), and real-time pricing rules.
🥉 Umbraco Commerce
Simple, elegant, and tightly coupled with Umbraco CMS, this platform is ideal for mid-sized retailers or content-driven brands. We often deploy Umbraco Commerce for projects where storytelling, SEO, and performance matter as much as checkout flow.
⭐ Shopify
Still a strong contender, especially for lean startups or those who want fast deployment and minimal dev overhead. TSD supports Shopify for specific use cases, but often advises when and how to scale beyond it for more complex needs.
We also occasionally support Magento/Adobe Commerce, nopCommerce, BigCommerce, and Adobe Experience Cloud, but we typically recommend these only when the use case justifies the increased complexity and cost.
4. Integration with ERP, Marketing, and Back-office Tools
Integration is where many projects win or lose. From inventory accuracy to campaign automation, your ability to connect systems smoothly is mission-critical.
At TSD, we specialise in integrating e-commerce platforms with:
- ERP systems, especially Microsoft BC, where we’ve delivered everything from stock and price sync to multi-currency order handling and customer-specific pricing rules.
- Marketing platforms like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, and HubSpot —enabling remarketing, transactional flows, and segmentation.
- Accounting, PIM, and shipping providers, automating fulfilment and reducing manual admin.
In a recent project, we built a custom bridge between Ucommerce and Microsoft BC to handle real-time stock updates and synchronised customer records across regions—saving the client hours of reconciliation work weekly.
5. Performance, Stability, and Scalability
A site’s performance directly affects conversion. If your site’s slow, your revenue suffers.
We approach every build with performance in mind—from clean front-end markup and lazy-loaded assets to caching layers and CDN strategies. In one client’s case, we debugged a sluggish Ucommerce checkout and found a missing SQL index—fixing it resulted in a measurable lift in conversion rate over a key sales weekend.
TSD also conducts load testing and technical health checks before and after launch, ensuring the platform can scale with your success.
6. Content Matters: SEO and User Experience
Your site isn’t just a storefront—it’s also your salesperson, explainer, and brand ambassador. That’s why we always build with content and SEO in mind.
Our heritage in Umbraco CMS means we know how to structure pages, copy, and metadata to not just look good, but perform well in search and UX terms.
With platforms like Ucommerce and Umbraco Commerce, we help brands create seamless journeys—from a blog post to a product category, and from a customer testimonial to the checkout.
We also advise on structured data, product schema, and internal linking to support organic traffic growth.
7. Post-Launch Support and Growth Planning
The launch is only the beginning. Successful stores are optimised, analysed, and improved over time.
We work closely with our clients post-launch to:
- Track analytics and diagnose conversion drop-offs
- A/B test new features or layouts
- Add new product types or expand into new territories
- Optimise shipping or tax logic
- Integrate additional systems as operations scale
Many of our clients retain us long-term because we don’t just build—we evolve alongside their business.
Final Thoughts (and How TSD Can Help)
E-commerce in 2025 is about more than spinning up a storefront. It’s about strategy, systems, and scalability. With customers expecting more and margins being squeezed, the right tech partner makes all the difference.
TSD specialises in e-commerce strategy and delivery, with a sharp focus on Ucommerce, DynamicWeb, Umbraco Commerce, and Shopify. Whether you’re planning your first launch or replatforming for growth, we can help with:
✅ Platform selection and build
✅ ERP and marketing integrations
✅ Pricing and logistics modelling
✅ Performance tuning and optimisation
✅ Ongoing support and innovation
💬 Ready to take the next step? Get in touch with TSD to talk through your launch plans.
Stay tuned for the next post in our e-commerce series: Integrating Microsoft Business Central with your e-commerce stack—made simple.