CMS, commerce and platform engineering
Seven platforms sit under this heading, and they are not one kind of thing. Some hold your content, some take the money, and two you connect to rather than build on. The choice is rarely technical: it is who carries hosting and upgrades, who runs it day to day, and what is too specific to hand over.
01Capabilities
One heading, four different kinds of project
Four projects arrive under one heading, and the platform is rarely the interesting part. All four run as web development and platforms development and integration.
Storefronts, and the order lifecycle behind them
The storefront is rarely the hard part. On e-commerce work the difficulty sits in the product data model, the stock boundary, and what happens to an order when an integration fails.
Content platforms editors can actually run
WordPress publishes well, and usually ends up doing four other jobs too. We build the plugins and integrations that keep it maintainable, fix estates that have become risky to change, and migrate off when it becomes the constraint.
The seam between a platform and your own software
Salesforce and HubSpot hold the customer record, and your product or your billing has to stay in step. We build the software on your side of that line, and the sync that survives an outage.
Learning platforms, and the reporting behind them
Courses, enrolment, assessment, and the evidence an auditor will ask for. Moodle already covers that ground, and we say plainly when a bespoke build wins instead. See LMS development.
02Stack
Which of these seven we would put you on
One row per platform page, and the middle column is our verdict. It is deliberately not the same for all seven, and the whole row is the link.
| Platform | What that means in practice |
|---|---|
| WordPress | EditorialNothing we would write from scratch beats it for weekly publishing. We extend it, harden it, and move you off when it becomes the constraint.WordPress engineeringOr book a meeting |
| Moodle | Course adminCourses, enrolment, assessment and audit reporting, with two decades of standards work behind it. Bespoke wins only where the learning experience is what you sell.Moodle developmentOr book a meeting |
| Shopify | Hosted checkoutThe platform owns hosting, checkout and card-payment compliance, which is most of what makes a storefront expensive to run. Your budget goes to the catalogue instead.Shopify engineeringOr book a meeting |
| Magento and Adobe Commerce | Catalogue depthIt earns its operational weight when a deep catalogue and per-buyer contract pricing are the product. If you cannot name the requirement that needs it, go lighter.Magento engineeringOr book a meeting |
| WooCommerce | Content firstThe right call when WordPress already brings the traffic and the catalogue is modest. Once orders become the revenue, the plugins holding the money paths need choosing deliberately.WooCommerce workOr book a meeting |
| Salesforce | IntegrationOur work starts where configuration stops: the software on your side of the boundary, and the sync that keeps both sides honest after an outage.Salesforce integrationOr book a meeting |
| HubSpot | IntegrationIt is easy to change, which is why so much of a business ends up inside it. We build the events, the sync, and the logic that should never have been a workflow.HubSpot integrationOr book a meeting |
03Fit
When to build on a platform, and when to build your own
Platform decisions get made on feature comparisons and then regretted on operations. What matters is who runs it, which system owns which fact, and whether you are buying the part that makes you money. Seven situations follow, and in three of them the answer sits outside this cluster.
| Your situation | What we recommend |
|---|---|
| Editors publish every week and the site is mostly content | WordPressRebuilding an editing experience from scratch is money spent to end up with something worse. |
| Selling online, and the question is who carries hosting, checkout and card security | Buy the checkoutShopify when you want all three off your plate. Magento when a deep catalogue and per-buyer pricing are the product. WooCommerce when your content already brings the traffic. If nobody on your side operates a platform, rule out the self-hosted two. |
| Formal courses, enrolment, assessment and audit reporting | MoodleNone of that administration is worth rewriting from scratch. Build bespoke only where the learning experience is itself the product. See LMS development. |
| Your sales system holds the customer record, and your product needs the same facts | Split the factsKeep pricing, entitlement and anything with an audit obligation in your own service, and let the sales system display it. Logic inside it is code with no repository, no review and no deploy history. |
| A sales or service process that configuration can express | Configure itConfiguration expresses that process inside the platform. Our engineering starts on the other side of that boundary, with the software and the sync on your side. |
| The logic is the product: pricing, matching, workflow, a regulated calculation | Your own softwareBuild it as an application and leave the platform holding the content. A content system used as an application framework becomes a database with strong opinions. See custom software development. |
| Five pages, one person updating them once a month | A site builderA hosted site builder does this well and costs almost nothing to run. Engineering earns its place once publishing turns weekly or the site takes on real logic, which is where the rows above begin. |
Scope
What we own is the boundary and its consequences: which logic lives inside the platform, which we keep outside it, and how the whole thing behaves when an integration is down. That decision carries a five-year cost and usually gets fifteen minutes. Our read follows your operation, so where a lighter platform fits, that is the one we recommend. We work to ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 9001:2015, audited by Quay Audit UK.
Choosing a platform means choosing who carries hosting, upgrades and security patches. A hosted platform such as Shopify carries them for you. Self-hosted Magento or WooCommerce, or your own build, gives you more control, and we agree up front who operates it.
Yaroslav HavrylivSenior Engineering Manager, unicrew04Delivery
The four questions, and why the first two decide it
Four questions, in this order. The first two settle most cases, and neither is technical.
- Separate what is genuinely yours from what is table stakesCheckout, enrolment, contact records and content editing are solved problems, and rebuilding them buys no product outcome. Your pricing logic, your workflow and whatever customers pay you for are not solved, and they do not belong in a vendor's configuration screen.
- Find out who will operate it, honestlyAnything you host yourself carries updates, backups and a security position somebody has to hold. If that is nobody, or one person with another job, it eliminates options before the requirements get a vote. This step gets answered optimistically and proved on a Sunday.
- Write down which system owns which factAlmost every integration problem we are shown traces back to this decision never being made. Two systems disagreeing about a customer produces a monthly ritual of manual corrections nobody budgeted. Field ownership first, then the mechanism, which is platforms and integration work.
- Draw the line, and keep the differentiator outside the platformWe write down what stays in, what stays out and why, so the next team can read the reasoning. Where the platform is one client of your own service, you can change platforms later without changing your business. Under an agency's brand, this is white label web development.
05Trust
Catalogue size is where a platform choice shows
A European manufacturer, and the catalogue that made the platform decision hard.
- 10,000-plusProducts manufacturedJewelCandle, in the storefront case study below
06Case studies
Two builds, and what each platform had to carry
eCommerceEcommerce software development for JewelCandleJewelCandle, a mid-size European manufacturer of scented products, sells across seven EU countries (B2B and B2C) via online shops.10,000-plusProducts manufactured
SportSports app development for Triathlon associationunicrew engineers modernized the sports website and built a mobile app for better membership management and race planning.
07Client voices
Five reviews, and the platform under nearly all of them is WordPress
Artelogic anticipates our needs and meets them before we even identify them. My team lead wants to keep both of Artelogic’s developers on the project until the product’s release. We have a backlog of 40 big projects, so I only see Artelogic’s involvement increasing.
We’ve had a lot of compliments on the site, claiming that it’s clean, easy to navigate, and responsive. They gave value-added feedback when they thought I was asking for something that was not necessarily the best solution. That’s all I can ask of an outsourced relationship. It feels like a joint project much more than just commissioning somebody to do what you’ve told them to do.
The website has over 100 pages, so it was a big project to launch in the timeframe we had. The metric we were most concerned with was our SEO ranking. We didn’t want to lose the rank of our previous site, and Artelogic accomplished that goal. Our organic traffic has grown since the launch. Their thoroughness in helping me reach our launch goals was amazing.
Artelogic actually launched the site a week early, so we would have enough time to go over it, and make some minor tweaks. All we can ask for from a development team is to do exactly what we want, on time and on budget. This is what Artelogic did, for every little feature we wanted. The cost remained the same, so there was no extra charge for my pickiness.
Our website’s overall functionality has been improved both in frontend possibilities and user experience as well as backend aspects of website management and financial monitoring. These are not easily qualitfiable but there has been a net gain in available staff hours for alternative projects as a result of improved website abilities reducing workload.
08Questions
What buyers ask before committing to a platform
The dividing line is whether administration is the problem or the experience is the product. If you need standard capability run well, orders and checkout, content and editors, a platform gets you there faster than anything we would write. If what your customers pay for is the logic itself, that belongs in your own software. Often it is both, and the boundary is the interesting engineering.
They are not competing on features. They compete on who carries which burden. Shopify when you want hosting, checkout, payments and card compliance owned by the platform. Magento when a deep catalogue or per-buyer pricing is genuinely the product, because that freedom justifies its weight. WooCommerce when WordPress already runs your content and the catalogue is modest.
Our engineers can join your team, and that works when your side owns the product decisions. What we hold onto is the architecture, because the expensive mistakes here are boundary mistakes: logic buried in a plugin, a customisation that blocks every upgrade, money paths with no tests. An architect outside the delivery team reviews the design, and the work goes through our own QA practice. Team extension is managed teams.
A scoping call with an engineer. We want to know what the platform does today, who administers it, what is already connected to it, and which parts of the process you consider genuinely yours. You get back a written recommendation, including the version where the platform stays and only the boundary moves. Work usually starts two to four weeks after we agree scope.
Services we deliver in CMS & Platforms
All servicesNot sure whether this belongs on a platform?
Tell us what you are selling, publishing or teaching, and who will operate it day to day. You will get a straight recommendation, including the version where the platform stays and only the boundary moves.