You sell online and your platform is starting to work against you. Every customer sees the same price, except the fifteen who should not. Your real stock lives in the ERP, not in the shop. And the last feature you wanted turned out to be “not possible on our platform”.
That is not a shop problem. It is a foundation problem.
We do shop development on Magento 2 with Hyvä. More than 200 live shops run on our Hyvä stack today, so this is not our first project. You can open one yourself: our demo shop is at nl.retail-showcase.baldwin.agency, with the same modules and the same performance work you would get in your own shop.
When Magento pays off
For simple B2C there are excellent SaaS platforms, and then Magento is heavy artillery. A Magento 2 shop only starts to pay off when commerce is a large and complex part of your business. Six signals we see come back every time:
- Customer-specific prices and terms.Not every customer sees the same price, discount, catalogue or payment terms.
- A large or fast-changing catalogue.Many products, attributes, categories, languages, markets, or product information that comes from other systems.
- Complex stock and delivery logic.Multiple warehouses, suppliers, backorders, pick-up locations, or rules that decide where an order is fulfilled from.
- Deep ERP and PIM integrations.Prices, stock, customers, products and orders live outside the shop and have to keep travelling back and forth.
- B2B commerce.Company accounts, multiple users per customer, approval flows, quote requests, tiered prices and customer-specific agreements. B2B commerce
- Multiple countries or sales models.Different languages, currencies, catalogues, prices and rules from one commerce platform.
The more of these you recognise, the more that flexibility pays off. If you only recognise one, you are better off calling someone else.
When Shopify is the better fit
If you sell fairly standard B2C, every customer sees the same price, and you can solve your connections with existing apps? Then Shopify is simpler, you go live faster, and someone else handles hosting, security and platform maintenance.
We do not build Shopify shops ourselves, so we have no interest in steering you that way. If SaaS fits your situation better, we would rather say so now than after kick-off. Strategy goes deeper into that choice.
You don’t rent Magento
A Magento shop is software you control. The shop runs on infrastructure you choose, you have the code, you switch hosting partner when you want, and another Magento partner can take it over. If a feature does not exist, we build it.
On a SaaS platform you trade that for convenience. The vendor takes the technical work and, in return, decides what the platform can do, which APIs you get, what you pay, and where the product goes in the coming years. For a lot of shops that is a perfectly good trade.
But if your shop is a sales channel you will invest in for years, this question is worth asking: do you want to rent that software, or do you want to own the foundation you keep building on?
Ownership means maintenance
Ownership means maintenance. Magento ships security patches, but someone has to install them, and you have to stay on a supported version — the same for PHP, Hyvä, your modules and your connections.
Every Magento shop we build comes with an SLA from 40 hours a year, for security updates and one platform upgrade. That is not an extra on top of the shop. It is the bill that comes with control. Ownership and continuity explains how we organise that.
Why Hyvä
Magento is strong at the back. The classic front end was the opposite for years: heavy, a lot of JavaScript, and slow to maintain.
Hyvä clears that out, and we build on it with our own Hyvä base and modules. That saves load time and the hours front-end work costs, which you see on your invoice.
We aim for green Core Web Vitals with an LCP under 2.5 seconds and design for performance from the start. Fair warning: hosting, catalogue size, images and external scripts decide as much about that as we do. Magento and Hyvä goes much deeper into it.
What’s in a shop project
A shop is more to us than catalogue plus checkout.
- UX, UI and a design system.We design the main commerce flows and build reusable components the shop can grow with later. Design
- Magento 2 with Hyvä.A back end that can handle complex catalogues, prices and orders, with a light front end on top.
- Integrations.ERP, PIM, CRM, payments, logistics and everything your shop has to talk to. Integrations
- SEO and migration.On an existing shop we look at URLs, rankings, redirects and content that already has value, before go-live. Growth
- Accessibility.WCAG is our starting point during design and development. Since June 2025 that is simply mandatory for many shops.
- Technical maintenance.Through the SLA we follow up security, updates and upgrades after your shop is live.
AI cuts the hours, not the quality
AI is a standard part of our development workflow. Our developers use it to understand existing Magento code, build faster, write tests, prepare refactoring and set up documentation. Together with Hyvä, our components and years of Magento experience, we build faster than a few years ago — and you pay that in hours.
AI can also sit in the shop itself. Enriching product data. Search that understands what someone means. Classifying large catalogues. Internal processes that are still handwork today.
Not every shop needs that, and we do not push it in so we can say we did. But commerce is one of the domains where AI will, over the coming years, firmly change both how we build and what we build.
The shop is rarely the source of truth
In more complex commerce you rarely manage products, stock, prices and customers all in Magento. Product information comes from your PIM, stock and prices from the ERP, customers from CRM. After checkout, orders have to go back, and your warehouse or carrier has to know what is leaving the door.
A large part of the complexity sits behind the shop. We decide per kind of data which system is in charge and make sure Magento gets the right information, so nobody has to keep the same data in two places. Integrations goes deeper into that.
Migrating an existing shop
Most of our Magento projects do not start from zero. A shop has become slow, sits on dated technology, the connections have grown into each other over the years, or the platform blocks what you want to do next.
Two things decide whether a move like that goes well: your data, which is always messier than the documentation promises, and your URLs, because without a redirect plan you throw away years of built-up SEO value. Magento and Hyvä covers that in detail, including the jump from Magento 1. Growth
What it costs
A Magento/Hyvä shop typically starts from €7,500. Integrations, migrations, custom work, B2B logic, catalogue complexity, design and multiple countries determine how far above that you go. For a shop with an ERP connection, count on roughly double that starting figure.
We work at a single rate of €95 an hour and invoice monthly according to progress. Hosting, Magento extensions and other third-party software you take out directly with the supplier where possible, because we take no margin on that. Pricing gives the full picture.
How long it takes
A contained shop we can sometimes build in a few weeks, thanks to Hyvä, our components and AI. More complex projects with migrations, ERP integrations, B2B logic or multiple countries need more: count on 2 to 12 weeks of building, depending on scope.
If your scope is clear, we estimate directly. If it is not, we use discovery to get data, integrations and architecture sharp first. That is cheaper than discovering halfway through that it is different.
After go-live
A Magento shop keeps moving. Magento, Hyvä, PHP and modules get new versions, security patches have to go on, payment providers change their rules, and your own commerce processes do not stand still either.
We combine technical maintenance through the SLA with further development when you need it. For many of our clients the shop is not a project that disappears into an archive after go-live, but a sales channel we keep working on for years.
Questions we get a lot
Magento or Shopify: which should we choose? For relatively simple B2C, Shopify can be the better choice. Magento gets more interesting once prices, catalogue, stock, B2B, integrations or order flows get more complex, and when you want more control over your commerce platform.
How much does it cost to have you build a shop? From €7,500 for a contained Magento/Hyvä shop, roughly double with an ERP connection, at €95 an hour. Pricing
What do you mean by ownership of a shop? Magento is open software that runs on infrastructure of your choice. You have the code, you switch hosting or development partner when you want, and you are not tied to one SaaS vendor’s roadmap. Ownership brings maintenance and security as a responsibility.
Why Hyvä? Because it gives a much lighter and simpler Magento front end than the traditional stack. That helps your load time and the hours development and maintenance cost. Magento and Hyvä
Can you migrate our existing shop without losing our rankings? Nobody can guarantee rankings. What we do: map existing URLs and organic traffic in advance and make a redirect and migration plan. Every old URL gets a decision before launch, not after. Growth
How fast will our new shop be? We aim for green Core Web Vitals with an LCP under 2.5 seconds and design for performance from the start. Hosting, catalogue, images and external scripts decide the end result too. Our demo shop is public, so you can measure it yourself.
Do we have to take an SLA? On the shops we build: yes. From 40 hours a year, for security updates and one platform upgrade. Ownership and continuity explains why we do not deviate from that.
What if our product data is a mess? It almost always is. On migrations and complex integrations we look at your real data early, so cleaning and mapping sit in the scope instead of in a surprise two weeks before go-live.
Can other developers take over our Magento shop later? Yes, and that is one of the reasons for this choice. We work with standard technology, you have access to the code, and on exit we hand over repository and documentation. Ownership and continuity