Gateways, WooCommerce and bespoke carts
From payment gateways to WooCommerce, Statamic and fully bespoke carts — picking the right foundation for an online shop.
Heads up This piece was written in 2015, and it shows in a couple of places — the sales figure is a decade old, and the platform line-up has moved on. The fundamentals (merchant accounts, gateways, plugin vs. bespoke) still hold; the dated specifics are corrected in the callouts below. Most notably, any 2026 shortlist has to include Shopify, which the original didn't mention.
These days, vast portions of the internet are dedicated to online shopping and financial transactions. It wasn't always this way though. Back when sites like Amazon.co.uk were beginning to sell books online, making purchases over the internet was a brand new and unexplored territory.
Now though, setting up an online shop with secure payment facilities is relatively straightforward, with a lot of the hard work taken on by payment gateways and merchant accounts.
The services which do the heavy lifting when it comes to taking online payments are the merchant accounts and the payment gateways.
A merchant account can usually be obtained through your own bank, normally requiring no significantly complex set up.
The payment gateway is the service which provides the communication between your website & shopping cart software and your acquiring bank's merchant account, checking with the relevant credit or debit card providers along the way (e.g. Visa, Mastercard etc).
Popular payment gateways include Worldpay and Stripe.
All of the transactions take place over secure connections, and in such a way that you aren't personally responsible for ensuring the safety of your customer's credit card details.
This process takes only seconds, and once complete, if the transaction is successful, your website's shopping cart software will record the sale, notify the customer of their purchase via email, notify yourself via email of this new order and redirect the customer to a landing page of your choosing.
2026 update Stripe has become the default gateway for most builds — it bundles the merchant side too, so for many small shops you no longer need a separate merchant account from your bank at all. For higher-volume or international sellers, Adyen is the other serious contender, and on WooCommerce specifically, WooPayments (Woo's own Stripe-backed gateway) is now the path of least resistance. PayPal and Apple Pay / Google Pay round out what customers expect to see at checkout.
The software which powers the shop itself too, has evolved dramatically since the early days of online shopping. It used to be that e-commerce software was complex and required a great deal of work to tailor to your requirements.
If your site runs on WordPress, a popular choice of e-commerce platform is WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a highly capable and robust online shopping cart provided as a WordPress plugin, to enhance and complement the core WordPress functionality.
Online sales in Europe in 2015 totalled £156 billion, an 18% increase over the year before [1]
It's a very thorough system, and can provide a range of options for products, from dynamic variable products, downloadable products, virtual products (e.g. services & consultation) etc.
As well as being a plugin itself, there are additional further plugins that can enhance WooCommerce's own core functionality, adding on the potential for different payment providers, shipping companies, extra functionality and more.
Heads up That £156 billion figure is a 2015 number and shouldn't be read as current — European e-commerce has roughly tripled since. There's also been a big change under the hood: WooCommerce now ships a block-based Cart and Checkout (the old shortcode checkout is legacy). If you're building or auditing a Woo store in 2026, use the block checkout — it's faster, and it's where new payment and express-checkout features land first.
Statamic also has a capable, yet simpler e-commerce solution named Bison. This may be of interest for smaller shops with fewer complex product requirements, and like WordPress/WooCommerce, Bison integrates fully with the core website code, providing a seamless and enjoyable online shopping experience for your visitors.
Heads up "Bison" doesn't map to a current Statamic e-commerce product and looks to be an out-of-date (or misremembered) name. On modern Statamic (v5), the e-commerce options to look at are Simple Commerce and Runway paired with a payment gateway, or building a bespoke cart on top of Statamic's flat-file content. The original point stands — Statamic suits smaller, simpler shops — just under different addon names.
For e-commerce projects with very specific requirements, there's also the option to build completely bespoke shopping cart functionality on top of a framework such as Laravel (see my companion article for an outline of frameworks vs. CMSs) – meaning that you aren't tied into a specific e-commerce solution's structure or process.
If you'd like to discuss e-commerce requirements in more detail, or if you already have an idea or outline for your project, get in touch and we can talk further.
2026 update A bespoke framework build is still the right answer for genuinely unusual requirements, but for most stores that want to "just sell things," Shopify is now the obvious hosted option — it handles hosting, PCI compliance, payments and checkout out of the box, and headless setups (Shopify's Storefront API behind an Astro or Next.js front end) give you custom presentation without owning the payment plumbing. The build-it-yourself route earns its keep when your logic genuinely doesn't fit any off-the-shelf cart.
[1] source: http://www.retailresearch.org/onlineretailing.php
All articlesI help content-rich organisations understand their data and pull it back into one place. Tell me what specific problems you're having and I'll be happy to talk solutions with you.
Tell me what specific problems you’re having and I’ll be happy to talk solutions with you.