What does web and e-commerce development include?
Web and e-commerce development covers everything your business needs to sell and operate online: stores on VTEX or Shopify, custom headless e-commerce, corporate sites and campaign landing pages built to absorb massive traffic spikes. At Freshwork we have spent more than 10 years building for retail, education, tourism and airlines from Santiago, Chile — always against the same bar: measurable performance, technical SEO as the baseline, and no excuses when the traffic arrives.
If what you need is an internal system rather than a public site, see our custom software development service.
VTEX, Shopify or custom e-commerce?
It depends on your operation, and the honest answer is almost never "the biggest platform". Shopify is unbeatable on speed and cost when the catalog is simple and the team is small. VTEX makes sense for large retail operations with many integrations and complex commercial rules. Custom headless is justified when the shopping experience is your differentiator or you need things platforms won't allow — as we did for the e-commerce of the University of Chile.
We have shipped all three, so we have no platform to "defend": we recommend the one that works for you. If you sell in retail, also check how we approach the retail and e-commerce industry.
How much does a website or e-commerce build cost?
A platform-based store with focused integrations starts at around US$5,000, and a headless build with complex ERP, payment and logistics integrations can exceed US$50,000. A corporate site or campaign landing page usually sits at the low end of the range; what moves the price are integrations and traffic requirements, not page count. After the free discovery session you get a firm range — and if a US$500 template solves your problem, we will say so.
How do we make sure it survives a high-traffic campaign?
By designing for the peak from day one, not patching after the site already went down. We built the platform for a LAN Airlines campaign that registered 191,219 users in 5 days, with peaks of 2,580 concurrent users and zero downtime. The recipe is not magic: architecture sized for the expected traffic, properly configured caching and CDN, and load tests before launch — not after.
Why Freshwork
We are a small senior team: the same people who scope your project write the code. We measure before and after — a tourism e-commerce we built grew sign-ups by more than 80% in six months — and the code, accounts and credentials always stay under your name. Nearshore from Chile means we work on US East Coast hours, in English, with same-day answers. Want a second opinion on your current site or a proposal for a new one? Get in touch — we reply within one business day.
