You've come to me for a steer, so this is exactly that — straight advice on what building this properly involves, where we'd come in (branding and the infrastructure underneath), and where it goes beyond us. No sales pitch.
You've sent the lot over — 30-plus ranges: the wood planks, herringbone, chevron, vinyl, laminate, the heritage and luxury lines. Good. That's exactly what we build from.
But let me be straight with you about what we're actually building here, because it's bigger — and better — than a website.
A shop-front site is a few nice pages — who you are, some photos, a contact form. Looks good, then it just sits there. Plenty of people will happily build you one.
What you're describing is a different animal: a proper online store that markets itself — every range as a real product with its specs and price, your floors shown in real rooms, sample requests, and an engine that keeps it all up to date as your stock changes. Something that goes and gets you customers, not just sits there looking nice. That's the honest size of what you're taking on.
A brochure site tells people you exist. This is built to go and win you the work.
And your pricing isn't a sticker — it's per m², fitted or supply-only, with wastage and underlay on top. So every range needs a proper online estimate tool a customer can actually get a price from, not a number on a page. That alone is the difference between a shop-front and the real thing.
Here's the bit most people don't see. You've already got most of the catalogue together — that's a real head start. The work is turning what you've got into a proper product database: every range structured, priced, and its imagery done to a consistent standard for the site.
Nothing else works without it. The store, the room visualiser, the "drop a photo and it updates itself" automation — all of it runs off that database. Get this right and everything after it is quick and clean.
It's the unglamorous bit — and it's the bit that makes the whole thing work.
In plain terms — the path from your folders to a live store that runs itself:
This is the bit that sells. Instead of flat swatches, we put your actual floors into realistic rooms — living rooms, kitchens, hallways — so someone sees the floor in a home, not on a shelf.
To do it justice we'd want around five room scenes per flooring type, built right into the site. It's the difference between "nice floor" and "I want that in my lounge."
The visualiser itself we can build in-house (about a week), or wire in a third-party tool instead — a call on cost versus control.
Worth clearing this up, because it's a fair assumption. AI doesn't do this on its own. It's a power tool in skilled hands — it speeds up the heavy lifting, but every stage is still real, hands-on work. Here's what actually goes in:
The AI is why this takes weeks instead of months. But it's still weeks of proper work — there's no version of this that's a button you press.
You've sent 30-plus ranges. Even with the AI doing the donkey work, someone still goes through every single one — figure around two hours a range just for the images (sorting, processing, quality-checking), and closer to half a day a range once you add the data, the specs and the room scenes. Across 30+, that on its own is real time.
Roughly how it breaks down — and what the AI saves:
All in, the AI roughly halves it — from a few months by hand down to around six weeks. That's the saving working for you. The AI brings it down; it doesn't make it free — someone still builds, checks and ships every bit of it.
And worth being upfront: those times include the testing, not just the building. With anything handling payments and live data — the checkout, the estimate tool — the testing and fixing often takes as long as the build itself, sometimes longer. Nothing goes live until it's properly checked. That's not padding — it's the difference between a site that just works and one that lets you down in front of a customer.
Quick word on what the work actually buys you, because it's the opposite of throwaway. A shop-front site is tired in two or three years — you pay again and start over.
This is an asset that grows with you. The catalogue and the engine mean new ranges go up themselves, the store keeps itself current, and it sells your floors while you get on with the business. You're not buying a website — you're buying something that scales.
Build it once, properly, and it grows with you — instead of replacing it every couple of years.
You've told me where you want this to go: fully SEO'd on Google, an AI sales voice, an AI front desk fielding enquiries, social marketing — the works. All of that's doable, and a lot of it can run on autopilot in time.
Straight with you on what's ours and what isn't: SEO and ongoing marketing aren't our game — that's a specialist job, yours or someone you bring in. What we do is the branding and the infrastructure underneath — and that's the bit that decides whether any of the rest is even possible.
Because here's the catch: none of those clever bits bolts onto a shop-front. The AI voice, the front desk, the social feeds — they all have to pull from the same clean catalogue and run on the same layer. Build that layer right, with the ports to plug things into, and each upgrade slots in cleanly when you're ready. Skip it and every new feature is a fight.
And it's not just talk — we've already made a start. There's a trial chatbot wired onto the site, and the basic "see it in your own room" visualiser is in place too.
Be realistic, though: to deliver that layer properly — the foundation plus the ports to plug each future upgrade into — you'd want to budget at least a few thousand. That's the groundwork that makes everything after it quick to bolt on, rather than a rebuild every time.
We build the brand and the foundation; the SEO, the marketing and the rest then plug into it — you, us down the line, or a specialist.
Not my number — JR will talk you through that side separately. But it's worth knowing what the work is actually worth, so you can see this clearly.
Out there, a proper data-backed store like this — with the estimate tool, the room visualiser and the self-updating engine — runs comfortably £20,000–40,000 at an agency, before you even get to the catalogue work on 30+ ranges. And most of them won't build the clever parts at all; you'd get the shop-front and a shrug.
That's the going rate for the real thing. Where you land against it is a conversation for you and JR.
You don't need to take on the whole thing to see it working. The simplest first move is a basic test:
We take three of your ranges and put them up on a simple page — real products, real prices, the look and feel — enough for you to click around and get a proper sense of where it's heading. A shop-style site can hold that for now; it's the quick taster, not the full system.
That's a solid 2–3 days' work — somewhere around £400–600 — and it gets something real in front of you fast, without committing to the big build.
Then the proper build — the catalogue, the estimate tool, and the layer all the clever stuff hangs off — is the real thing, and JR will sort that side out with you.