Shopify & Shopify Plus Development

Shopify is easy to start on. It is also easy to make slow, costly and hard to fix if you use the App Store instead of real 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 work on every template, and blocks can be reordered by the store owner. Content is kept in metafields and metaobjects, not hard-coded into Liquid. In practice, your marketing team can run the store itself. It can add new landing sections, reorder content or change a campaign layout without a developer for each change. The theme stays easy to read, so the next change is cheap. A theme stuffed with app embeds and inline scripts is the opposite: weak, slow, and tied to us forever. That is not a business we want.

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

On standard Shopify the checkout is mostly fixed. That fixed, hosted checkout is a good thing, because it is PCI-safe and Shopify keeps testing it to help people buy. When a seller really needs to change it, that is a Shopify Plus talk. Checkout Extensibility replaced the old editable checkout.liquid with app blocks, custom fields and UI extensions. It also adds Shopify Functions to change discounts, shipping and payments, and these run on Shopify's own systems. It is safe to keep through updates by design, which the old way never was. We change the checkout this way or not at all. A checkout hack that breaks on the next platform update is a risk with a timer on it.

Apps: buy the commodity, build the differentiator

Reviews, email, loyalty and subscriptions are usually best bought from a well-kept App Store app. We build a custom app when the rules are special to your business. We also build one when three years of a subscription app's fees cost more than a build, or when you need something the App Store does not sell. Custom apps use the same Admin and Storefront GraphQL APIs, webhooks and Functions. They stay private to your store, and they do not add a marketing script to every page. The biggest speed problem we are asked to fix on Shopify is too many apps, each adding weight. The fix is removing things as much as writing 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 shop engine. It is the right choice when the storefront is what makes you stand out, or must share a codebase with a bigger React product. It is the wrong choice when a 2.0 theme would do. Going headless means you now own and look after a front end, and you lose the theme editor your team used. We make that choice on the facts, at the start, and we are happy to talk you out of it.