Ecommerce development in Melbourne
Melbourne takes its coffee seriously, and a lot of the city's roasters now sell it by subscription. That brings a kind of ecommerce generic templates handle badly: deliveries timed to roast dates, customers pausing and skipping and changing their grind, failed card payments that need a polite retry, and a wholesale side selling to cafes on account at the same time.
We build subscription ecommerce that matches how a roaster works. Plans people can change without emailing you, roast and dispatch schedules that come from the roastery's real capacity, payment retries that recover revenue without annoying customers, and wholesale ordering alongside retail without two stock counts. Sometimes a well-configured Shopify store with a subscription app is enough; sometimes the roastery needs more. We will tell you which, and why.
Melbourne's software market is built on products rather than projects. SEEK, REA Group and MYOB run from the city, Culture Amp started here, and a generation of engineers learned their trade inside marketplaces and SaaS businesses that sell well beyond Australia. The SaaS companies we hear from have usually found their market and are now paying for early decisions: a data model that assumed one customer type, permissions that started as a role column, and infrastructure in a single region when their newest customers are in the US or Europe.
Health and education are the other two pillars. The Melbourne Biomedical Precinct around Parkville brings together hospitals, research institutes, biotech firms and universities, and they need registries, trial platforms, patient apps and operational tools that handle sensitive records carefully and still suit a busy clinician between patients. The universities (Melbourne, Monash, RMIT and the rest) run student systems, learning platforms and research data at a scale that rarely fits off-the-shelf software, and their students judge every portal against the apps on their phones. And the Port of Melbourne keeps a large freight and logistics industry busy, much of it still run on email and spreadsheets.
Hiring costs a little less than in Sydney. Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Melbourne at A$109,570, from 329 reported salaries, and the engineers who have already scaled a product are the ones every scale-up wants at the same time. A platform problem can sit on the roadmap for quarters while that hire is found. That is where we fit: senior engineers on a defined piece of work within days, with the code in your repositories from the first commit.
Our four hours of daily overlap land in your afternoon, and we move them to suit your team. Your morning stays with your own people, and the afternoon is when you talk to the engineer writing your code, in stand-ups, reviews and design decisions. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so the work stays readable long after the engagement ends.
We are the right fit for a platform problem your product team has no time for, a defined piece of work with a clear end, or the months before your own hires start. Senior engineers arrive within days, the first piece is a fixed-price two weeks, and agencies can put the work under their own name.
Four ways this arrives.
The ERP updates overnight, the store sells all day, and by morning the two do not match. We build the sync as a queue with retries and reconciliation, decide which system wins for each field, and alert on drift before a customer buys stock you do not have.
Or checkout slows until people give up. We cache what can be cached at the edge, keep live stock checks off the browsing path, load-test the shape of a real launch rather than a steady trickle, and queue anything that cannot scale.
Bundles, B2B price lists, subscriptions, delivery rules by postcode. We build it as a custom Shopify app or with Shopify Functions and checkout extensions so it survives platform updates, or tell you when you have outgrown the theme altogether.
Payment webhooks can arrive twice, late or out of order, and the handler trusts every one. We make order state follow the provider's record, process Stripe and Razorpay events idempotently, and reconcile daily so a mismatch is a report, not a complaint.
An hourly sync with a third-party system reachable only through its API, with values normalised at the boundary so unchanged records stop looking changed.
Read the write-up →Asked by Melbourne teams.
How do you work with teams in Melbourne?+
We are in Bengaluru, and four hours of every working day overlap with your afternoon, moved to suit your team. Stand-ups, code reviews and design calls happen live in that window, so your mornings stay with your own people. We work in your tools, whether that is Slack, GitHub or Linear, and the person on every call is the engineer who writes the code.
Do you build for Melbourne SaaS and marketplace companies?+
Yes, and it is the work Melbourne asks for most. We untangle data models that assumed one customer type, turn a role column into proper permissions, add single sign-on and a second region for the first large overseas customer, and tune search and messaging for marketplaces that have outgrown their first version. We work inside your codebase, alongside your product engineers, starting with whatever is slowing them down most.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Melbourne?+
Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Melbourne at around A$110,000. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum, or $5,400 a month for one embedded engineer. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and work can start within days of the call. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you can judge us on what ships.
Can you work white-label for a Melbourne agency?+
Yes. If your agency wins more build work than your developers can carry, we work under your name. Your client sees your team and your process, we join calls as your engineers, and the code goes into your client's repositories from the first commit. You keep the client relationship. An NDA is signed before you share anything specific, and the runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go.
Have you built a store like ours?+
We build stores from the parts of commerce that usually go wrong, and those are what we work on every day: syncing with a third-party system that only speaks through its API, handling webhooks that arrive twice, and background jobs that must not lose or repeat work. On a call we will walk you through how that applies to your store.
Shopify, headless, or fully custom?+
Start with Shopify if a theme and a few apps cover you; that is cheaper than anything we would build. Go headless when the storefront must do things a theme cannot, or share a front end with other products. Build on Medusa or commercetools when the catalogue, pricing or order flow is genuinely unusual. Most stores never need the third option, and we will say so.
Can you connect our ERP or warehouse system?+
Usually, if it has an API or can export files on a schedule. We start by agreeing which system owns each field, such as stock, price and order status, because most sync bugs come from two systems both believing they are the source of truth. Then we build the sync with retries, a log of every change, and a daily reconciliation report.
Which payment providers do you work with?+
Stripe, Razorpay, and Shopify Payments when the store runs on Shopify. Choose the one that suits your markets and fees; we earn nothing from any of them. The work that matters is the same for all three: treat the provider as the record of what was paid, handle every webhook idempotently, and test refunds and partial captures, not only the happy path.
How do you prepare for a sale or a launch?+
We load-test the whole journey, from landing page to paid order, at the traffic you expect and beyond it. We find what breaks first, which is usually a third-party script, an uncached page or the stock check, and fix it before the day. During the sale itself, the engineer who did that work is watching the dashboards with you.