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What We Build · Web Apps

Web App Development For Products People Log In To

A web app is software your customers or staff log in to and use in a browser, such as a marketplace, a portal or an ordering system. We build them in React, Next.js and Rails, from Cercle’s fashion rentals to Autobuffy’s 100,000-part store.

Reviewed by Azmat Rana, CEO & Founder · Updated

What Our Web Apps Do

Most web apps exist so customers or staff can get something done without calling you: book, buy, file, track or approve.

Core capability

Marketplaces and stores

Listings, carts, checkout and payouts. Cinekit rents camera gear across the UK, Europe and the US, with Stripe holding security deposits.

Portals and dashboards

Logged-in views for customers or staff. NPTAAS cut a client review process from weeks to days with automated audit scoring and reports.

Guided forms and workflows

Step-by-step questions that turn plain answers into the exact format a process needs. LegalAtoms prepares court-ready filings this way.

Integrations behind the screen

Payments, shipping, email and inventory feeds. Autobuffy connects Stripe, PayPal, UPS, USPS, FedEx and AfterShip.

Speed on large catalogs

Caching, background jobs and Elasticsearch where search has to stay fast across thousands of products or records.

Project story · Cercle

Building a fashion rental marketplace that keeps up with demand

Cercle is a UK marketplace for renting high-end fashion. Lenders list luxury clothing and accessories to earn from them, and renters wear them for a fraction of the retail price. It had to be fast, handle payments and returns reliably, and sell through social channels as well as the site.

Team
2 engineers
Effort
2,112 hours
Payments
Stripe and store credits
Stack
Ruby on Rails, Solidus, Next.js, PostgreSQL

The problem

Slow pages raised bounce rates and cost sales. Checkout had no store credit, so refunds and cancellations were clumsy. Shoppers expected to buy from social channels too, worn items needed cleaning and repair before they could be rented again, and bugs left delivery and payment statuses wrong.

What we changed

  1. 01Sped up product data handling and image caching, and moved heavy work into Sidekiq background jobs so pages stay responsive.
  2. 02Built a wallet and store-credit flow for refunds and cancellations, with encryption and secure tokenisation.
  3. 03Integrated the Facebook commerce APIs, so the catalog, inventory and orders stay in sync between the site and Facebook.
  4. 04Connected Advanced Clothing Solutions, so used items ship from the renter, get cleaned and repaired, and return to stock.
  5. 05Fixed the Solidus admin configuration so delivery and payment statuses stay accurate.

Where it stands

Faster pages cut bounce rates and supported higher sales, renting and returning became smoother, and store credits kept refunds on the platform. Most web app work looks like this: speed, payments and the integrations behind the screen decide whether people come back.

Read the full Cercle case study

From Concept To Launch

A web app is built in small, working pieces, so you can use it and change course before it is finished.

Discover

Map The Journeys

We list who uses the app, what each person needs to get done and which systems it must connect to.

Develop

Build In Weekly Steps

You see working screens in a weekly demo, checked against the milestones agreed at the start.

Launch

Launch And Measure

We test on staging, launch, then watch speed, errors and drop-off and fix what they show.

Technology Behind Our Websites

The frameworks behind the web apps in our portfolio. We choose per project, based on the team that will maintain it.

reactReact
nextdotjsNext.js
nodedotjsNode.js
pythonPython
dotnet.NET
wordpressWordPress
shopifyShopify
postgresqlPostgreSQL
mongodbMongoDB
AWS
Azure
googleGoogle Cloud
graphqlGraphQL

Website, Web App Or Both?

A marketing website and a web application solve different problems, and many businesses need both. This is how we tell them apart.

A website informs

It explains what you offer, ranks in search and turns visitors into enquiries. Content and speed matter most.

A web app does work

Customers log in to buy, book, rent, track or manage something. Accounts, data and reliability matter most.

Search needs server rendering

Pages that should rank, such as product and category pages, need server-side rendering. Autobuffy gained search visibility after we added it.

Speed is a feature

Slow pages on Cercle were costing sales until heavy work moved into background jobs and images were cached.

Payments shape the build

Subscriptions, deposits, store credit, refunds and payouts all need planning in the data model before checkout is designed.

Plan the integrations

Most of the hard work sits behind the screen: inventory feeds, shipping, social catalogs and accounting.

Web Projects In Action

Web apps from our portfolio and what each one was built to do.

Related services

Projects like this one usually involve these as well.

Further reading: Your React app is slow. It’s probably not React.

Prefer to add engineers to your own team?

Hire full-time developers in the stacks we use for this work.

Website Development FAQs

What buyers ask before they commission a web app.

Design, front end, backend, database, integrations, testing and hosting, plus the admin tools your team uses to run it day to day.

A website explains what you offer and wins enquiries. A web application is something people log in to and use. Many businesses need both, often on the same domain.

Yes. Autobuffy sells more than 100,000 auto parts, Cercle runs fashion rentals with store credits and returns, and Cad Cam Masters is a B2B dental marketplace.

Yes. Cercle syncs its catalog and orders with Facebook and works with a clothing-renewal partner, and Autobuffy pulls vendor inventory through its own microservice.

Usually, yes. We profile first, then fix what is slow: background jobs and image caching on Cercle, Elasticsearch for part search on Autobuffy.

You do. Everything we build for you, including the source code and the intellectual property in it, belongs to you.

Have A Web App In Mind?

Tell us who will use it and what they need to get done. We reply within one business day to set up a discovery call.

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