Ecommerce development in Sydney
For a Sydney online retailer, the hard part of ecommerce is often everything after the checkout. Australia is a big country with a small population spread along its coasts, so delivery promises, carrier choice, click and collect, and returns decide whether a customer in Perth or regional Queensland buys again. The storefront gets the attention; the fulfilment logic behind it gets a spreadsheet.
We work on the logic that decides the margin: delivery estimates that come from real carrier data rather than a fixed promise, stock that is right across stores, warehouse and marketplaces, returns that flow back into sellable stock quickly, and order data that reconciles with the 3PL and the payment provider. Whether that means a better Shopify setup or a headless build, we will say which and why.
Sydney is where Australian money keeps its head office. Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and Macquarie run their groups from the city, the large insurers are here, and around them sits a dense fintech sector in payments, lending and wealth. The software these firms need is rarely a brand-new product. It is the work around the core: payment flows that settle in seconds, onboarding and lending journeys customers actually finish, reports that agree with each other, and the internal tools that keep claims and complaints moving.
Real-time payments have raised the bar. On the New Payments Platform money moves in seconds, and PayTo lets a business take agreed payments straight from a customer's account, so a lender or fintech built around overnight batch files now needs instant confirmations and a ledger that never records the same payment twice. Sydney is also where Atlassian and Canva started, so its buyers have been trained by good software built down the road. A clunky internal tool or a slow sign-up flow is noticed here in a way it might not be elsewhere. Beyond finance, the city has a large property and strata sector, online retailers shipping across a very big country, and a startup scene around Tech Central.
Hiring reflects all of that. Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Sydney at A$119,602, from 526 reported salaries, and experienced engineers are contested by the banks, the big product companies and every well-funded startup at once. A team that needs a payments engineer or an extra pair of senior hands for a quarter can wait a long time for the right hire. That is where we are useful: a defined piece of work, started 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; 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 whoever joins your team next inherits work they can read.
We are the right fit when you have a defined piece of work and want senior engineers on it within days, or when the Sydney hire you need is months away and the roadmap keeps moving. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on the output. 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 Sydney teams.
How do you work with teams in Sydney?+
We are in Bengaluru and share four hours of live overlap with you every day, in your afternoon, moved to suit your team. That is when we join stand-ups, review pull requests and take design calls. 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. Between calls, progress is in your tracker and your repositories.
Do you build for Sydney banks, insurers and fintechs?+
Yes, and that is most of what Sydney asks us for. We build payment backends that handle NPP and PayTo without recording a payment twice, sign-up and lending journeys customers finish on their phone, complaint and claims tools that take the reading off skilled staff, and data pipelines that make finance and risk reports agree. We work inside your codebase and your cloud, starting with the one flow that matters most.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Sydney?+
Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Sydney at around A$120,000. 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 starts within days of the call. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you judge us on what ships.
Can you take over an app another team built?+
Yes. It is a common starting point for Sydney products whose agency or founding engineers have moved on. We read the code, run it, and write down how it fits together and where the risks sit. The first fixed-price two-week piece is usually one real fix or feature, so you see the handover working while the architecture notes build up. The code stays in your repositories throughout, as it always would.
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.