Shopify & Shopify Plus Development

Shopify is easy to start on and easy to make slow, expensive and unmaintainable if you treat the App Store as a substitute for engineering. Here is how we build a store that stays fast and stays yours to change.

Online Store 2.0 is the foundation, metafields are the flexibility

Every theme we build is Online Store 2.0: sections available on every template, blocks the merchant can reorder, and content modelled in metafields and metaobjects rather than hard-coded into Liquid. The practical effect is that your marketing team merchandises the store — new landing sections, reordered content, a campaign layout — without a developer in the loop for each change, and the theme stays legible enough that the next change is cheap. A theme stuffed with app embeds and inline scripts is the opposite: fragile, slow, and dependent on us forever, which is not a business we want.

The checkout is the honest constraint, and Extensibility is the answer

On standard Shopify the checkout is largely fixed — and that fixed, hosted checkout is a feature, because it is PCI-scoped and relentlessly conversion-tested by Shopify. When a merchant genuinely needs to change it, that is a Shopify Plus conversation. Checkout Extensibility replaced the old editable checkout.liquid with app blocks, custom fields and UI extensions, plus Shopify Functions for discount, shipping and payment customisation that run on Shopify's infrastructure. It is upgrade-safe by design, which the old approach never was. We build checkout customisation this way or not at all, because a checkout hack that breaks on the next platform update is a liability with a timer on it.

Apps: buy the commodity, build the differentiator

Reviews, email, loyalty and subscriptions are usually best bought from a well-maintained App Store app. We build a custom app when the logic is specific to your business, when three years of a subscription app's fees exceed a build, or when you need something the ecosystem does not sell. Custom apps use the same Admin and Storefront GraphQL APIs, webhooks and Functions, stay private to your store, and do not inject a marketing script into every page load. The single biggest performance problem we are asked to fix on Shopify is app sprawl — a dozen apps each adding weight — and the fix is subtraction as much as code.

Headless with Hydrogen, only when it earns the cost

Shopify's Storefront API and its Hydrogen framework (React on Remix, hosted on Oxygen) let you put a fully custom front end on top of Shopify's commerce engine. It is the right call when the storefront is a real differentiator or must share a codebase with a wider React product — and the wrong call when a 2.0 theme would do, because going headless means you now own and maintain a front end and you lose the theme editor your team relied on. We take that decision on the merits, in discovery, and we are comfortable talking you out of it.