Abu Huraira S.

Most people who want to start an e-commerce business think they need five different people: a designer, a developer, an SEO person, a marketer, and someone to handle ads. I’ve been all five for my clients for years now, and honestly it works better that way. When one person understands the whole picture, nothing falls through the gaps. I started out at an agency in Karachi. That’s where I really learned how ecommerce works not just the website part, but everything around it. I was running Meta ads for an apparel brand, monitoring performance, optimizing the store, watching what the numbers were saying. It was messy and fast, and I learned more in that environment than I could have sitting with tutorials. Eventually I moved to Upwork and started working directly with international clients in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. That’s been my world for a while now. I have worked across D2C and B2B sometimes both at once. One of my recent projects was a salon supply business where D2C customers, B2B buyers, and distributors were all coming to the same store with different needs. Building something that serves all three types of customers cleanly is a different kind of challenge than a straightforward consumer store, and I enjoyed figuring it out. The way I work with clients usually starts before the website even exists. A US client recently came to me with three competitor websites and said I want to build something that competes with these. So that’s what we did. I researched each one properly, understood what they were doing well, where the gaps were, what their pricing and positioning looked like, and then we built his entire ecosystem around that. Website, product selection, positioning, the whole thing. He’s not just copying them he’s competing with them. That’s a different mindset and it’s how I approach every new project. Another US client wanted to launch a supplement brand from scratch. Before we touched a theme or wrote a product description, I researched the market: what was selling, what had real demand, what the competition looked like. He listed 10 products I recommended. They’re selling well. The Shopify store is live; I built and designed it, and I still manage it. Once the research is done, I handle the design and the build. I design in Figma first so the client can see exactly what they’re getting before any code is written. Then I build it on Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce, Webflow- whatever fits the project. Full custom builds, not template-dependent work where everything looks the same. I work directly in Liquid, Elementor, and write clean code that the next developer can actually understand if they ever need to. After the site is live, SEO is next. Not the kind where someone submits your sitemap and sends you a report. The kind where I go through the technical issues, fix what’s slowing the site down, restructure pages to actually rank, and monitor Search Console properly. I have taken sites from a PageSpeed score of 34 to 96. It takes time, but it holds. For advertising, I have run Meta campaigns for an apparel brand: setup, creative direction, monitoring- the whole thing. I currently support a US client with TikTok ads. One thing I have learned is that ads and the store have to work together. You can’t fix a bad landing page with a good ad budget. And then there’s customer support, which most developers don’t touch. One of my current clients runs a floral business. When her customers reach out with questions, I respond. Fast, accurate, on-brand. She doesn’t have to think about it. I use Claude and ChatGPT as part of how I work every day, not to replace thinking, but to move faster and catch things I would otherwise miss. It’s made a real difference in how quickly I can deliver without cutting corners. The clients who stay with me long-term are the ones who figured out early that having one person across the whole operation is just simpler. No miscommunication between a designer and a developer. No SEO person who doesn’t know what the store looks like. Just one person who knows everything and can move fast. If you have a competitor in mind and you want to build something that goes up against them properly tell me who they are. That’s exactly where I like to start.