Stores don't lose sales mysteriously. Friction is measurable.
Custom e-commerce development the evaluation-led way: headless, custom, or Shopify-based — chosen by your economics — with speed, trust, and checkout friction measured before we build and re-graded after.
100% in-house development · Oregon & California, USA · 25+ years building production systems
The funnel — illustrationDiagnose yours: free grade
The short answer
Updated July 2026
Houtos Labs builds e-commerce that's measured, not guessed. Custom storefronts, headless builds, and Shopify-based platforms — plus high-conversion redesigns, subscription programs, B2B stores, and marketplaces. The platform choice follows your economics, and every engagement is graded before and after, so the conversion story is documented rather than claimed.
Store leaking sales right now? Start with the free grade — it reads speed, mobile experience, trust signals, and findability, and it's the same baseline we'd open your project with. (Plain-language diagnosis: why stores don't sell.) Going on-chain? The web3 commerce practice.
The checkout friction meter
Most abandoned carts are design decisions wearing a disguise. Flip the decisions and feel the friction move — these six are the ones we fix most often.
Design the checkout
Five good decisions to turn on, one classic mistake to avoid. Watch what each does to the meter.
The default store. Nothing broken, everything heavy — this is where most checkouts live, and where most carts die.
- Friction score62 / 100
- Heaviest stepaccount wall
- Mobile penaltysevere
Simplified demonstration model — real projects measure your actual funnel.
The reading is free: grade your store.
What our e-commerce development covers
Platform chosen by your economics — including when the honest answer is "stay put and fix the checkout."
Custom & headless storefronts
Storefront freedom with commerce-grade plumbing: catalog architecture, product pages that answer objections, and speed budgets that survive launch. Headless when it earns its complexity — not because it's fashionable.
Shopify & Shopify Plus builds
Deep customization on the platform your team can actually run: theme architecture done properly, apps chosen skeptically, checkout extensibility used where it pays.
High-conversion redesigns
Grade the store, attack what's measurably leaking — surprise costs, account walls, slow product pages, weak trust — then re-grade and show the lift. The before-and-after is the deliverable.
Subscriptions, B2B & marketplaces
Subscription programs with honest pause-and-skip, B2B quoting and tiered pricing, multi-vendor marketplaces with split payouts — the non-standard models where custom engineering earns its keep. Token-gated or on-chain commerce? The web3 practice.
Every step, counted.
Visit → product → cart → checkout → order — each leak is a design decision
Proof, honestly
The standing rule: no invented conversion percentages, no borrowed store screenshots. The friction meter is labeled a model because it is one; your store's real numbers come from a real reading — and the instrument that takes it is free to run right now.
Point it at your store
Speed, trust, findability, security — the free baseline every project starts with.
The Deep ReportWhat our reading looks like
Measured vs Estimated on every number, findings in plain English.
The MethodThe rubric, published
Six lenses, 26 metrics — public, so our judgment can be checked.
The Design StudioThe page that proves the craft
Live design exhibits and the Measurement Engine — operable right now.
Fair questions
What is custom e-commerce development?
Building a store around your products, margins, and customers instead of forcing them into a theme: the catalog architecture, product pages that answer real objections, a checkout tuned to your buyers, the integrations (payments, shipping, tax, email), and the speed that keeps mobile shoppers from leaving. Custom can mean fully bespoke, headless on a commerce backend, or a deeply customized Shopify build — the scope says which fits your economics.
Should we go headless, custom, or Shopify?
Follow the economics, not the trend. Shopify (including Plus) wins when standard commerce fits and speed-to-market matters. Headless earns its complexity when you need storefront freedom, multiple surfaces, or performance beyond what themes allow. Fully custom is for genuinely non-standard models — marketplaces, unusual B2B pricing, regulated products. We'll tell you which we'd choose and why in writing, including when the honest answer is "stay where you are and fix the checkout."
What makes an e-commerce redesign actually increase conversion?
Starting from evidence instead of aesthetics. We grade the current store first — speed, mobile experience, checkout friction, trust signals, findability — so the redesign attacks what's measurably costing sales: surprise costs at checkout, forced account creation, slow product pages, weak trust signals. Then we re-grade after launch. If a number didn't move, you'll see that too.
Do you build subscriptions, B2B, and marketplace stores?
Yes — commerce beyond the standard cart is most of the interesting work: subscription programs with honest pause-and-skip flows, B2B stores with quoting, tiered pricing and approval workflows, and multi-vendor marketplaces with split payouts. Each has its own failure modes, and each gets the same measured treatment: baseline, build, re-grade.
Sell like the numbers are watching.
Tell us about the store you're building or the one that's leaking — the reply is a reading of your funnel, not a pitch.
100% in-house development · Oregon & California, USA · 25+ years building production systems
platform by economics · friction by measurement · nothing stored on this site — privacy