The short answer
A custom online store is an eCommerce site built as software rather than assembled from a platform theme and apps. It suits businesses whose pricing, product configuration or stock rules can't be expressed in Shopify or WooCommerce. AR Digital Solutions builds them in house and hosts them in Sydney.
What a custom build covers
A data model that matches your business.
Customers, rate cards, product options, branches and hire periods modelled properly, not forced into variants.
The pricing engine.
Your rules written once and applied across the catalogue, cart, quote and invoice.
Checkout and payments.
Stripe, Braintree or your existing gateway, with GST, purchase orders and account terms for trade customers.
Integrations.
ERP, accounting, freight or the industry system nobody has built an app for. See custom integrations.
An admin your staff can use.
Built around the jobs your team does daily, not a dashboard nobody opens.
Hosting, monitoring and patching.
AWS certified team, Sydney hosting, support in 1 to 3 hours.
Most people asking for a custom store should not build one
We'll start with the part that costs us work. Of the businesses who come to us asking for a custom store, most don't need one, and we say so before quoting.
There are four situations where a platform genuinely will not do the job.
Customer specific pricing.
Trade customer A is on 32% off list. Customer B has fixed prices on 40 lines and list on the rest. Neither sees the other's numbers, and nobody sees a price before logging in. Shopify's B2B features and the WooCommerce pricing plugins handle a simple version of this. They fall over when rate cards run to thousands of lines, change quarterly, and live in an ERP that owns the truth.
Products configured rather than selected.
Made to measure blinds, printed signage, steel cut to length. The customer isn't picking a SKU, they're building one, and price comes from a formula involving dimensions, material, finish and quantity breaks. Eight options across forty sizes is a variant count no platform will let you create.
Stock logic across locations or time.
Hire businesses don't have stock, they have availability. An item is free between the 14th and the 19th, a booking blocks it plus a turnaround day, and a damaged return leaves the pool without the product being deleted. Multi branch retail has the same shape: in Rocklea today, three days from Melbourne, not at all in Perth.
Integration with a system that has no app.
If your pricing, stock or customer accounts live in an ERP or an industry system with an API but no marketplace app, or a nightly CSV on an FTP server, you're building middleware either way.
Everything else is usually a configuration problem.
The far more common case is a merchant on a theme nobody configured, with fourteen apps arguing with each other, a catalogue with no structured attributes so filtering can't work, and metafields never set up. That store performs badly for reasons a rebuild would fix by accident and a better configured platform would fix for a fraction of the money.
So before quoting custom, we check whether native B2B features, two well chosen apps and a structured catalogue would do it. Usually they would. Going custom means you own the security patching, the PCI scope and the gateway upgrades for as long as the store exists. Worth paying only when the alternative is bending a platform out of shape permanently.
If the reason for custom is that you don't like how the theme looks, that's a design job. Start at eCommerce website design.
How a custom build runs
We map the rules
Pricing, stock, approvals, tax, freight. Written down before anyone designs a screen, because this is where custom projects go wrong.
We scope it in stages
The first release covers what earns money. Everything else goes on a list with a number next to it.
We build in sprints you can see
Working software on a staging URL every fortnight, not a status report.
We run it after launch
Hosting, monitoring, patching and a roadmap, with your account manager on the same number.
Who this suits, and who it doesn't
Wholesalers with trade pricing. Manufacturers selling configured products. Hire businesses. Operators running a marketplace with multiple sellers, covered on multi vendor marketplace development.
It isn't for a store with 300 standard products and normal shipping. That's a Shopify or WooCommerce job.
Why people pick us for this
Actual developers, in house.
The people who write the software also run the servers it sits on. More on our apps and software work.
We'll talk you out of it when it's the wrong call.
The discovery call ends with a recommendation, and sometimes that's a platform build costing a fraction of what you came in asking for.
"What happens if you disappear?"
Source code, repository and hosting account are in your name, and the build uses standard frameworks rather than anything only we can read.