---
title: "Shopify"
description: "The fastest path from idea to checkout, with Hydrogen for headless builds when storefront speed is the product."
language: "en"
canonical: "https://zapolu.com/services/shopify/"
---

# Shopify

[Shopify](https://www.shopify.com) is the right choice when
time-to-market and operational simplicity matter more than owning the
infrastructure. You trade some control for a platform that patches
and scales itself and removes the on-call burden from your team. For
most DTC brands that trade is worth taking, provided you know the
platform's limits before you reach them.

## When Shopify is the right choice

- DTC brands that need to ship and iterate fast
- Merchants who prefer not to operate infrastructure. PCI compliance,
  fraud, uptime, and scale are Shopify's responsibility, not yours.
- International rollouts via Shopify Markets
- Traffic spikes from drops and flash sales that would overwhelm a
  self-hosted stack

## Platform constraints

We point out these constraints before a project begins:

- **Checkout customization** below Plus is deliberately narrow. If your
  margin lives in checkout upsells or custom payment flows, the plan
  tier is a material decision.
- **App sprawl.** Each app adds a monthly fee and
  injects its own JavaScript; after thirty of them, the theme is slow
  and nobody remembers which app owns which behavior. Much of our
  theme work consists of reversing that accumulation.
- **Complex catalogs and B2B** (deep configurable products, contract
  pricing, approval chains) are a better fit for
  [Magento](/services/magento/). We work on both platforms
  precisely so the platform recommendation isn't self-serving.

## What we do

- **Theme development.** Custom Liquid themes without unnecessary
  code: fast Lighthouse scores that preserve the editor experience, and
  fewer apps by building the two or three features you actually use
  directly into the theme.
- **Headless storefronts on [Hydrogen](https://hydrogen.shopify.dev)**,
  for when stock themes cannot meet the performance requirements, or the
  storefront needs to live alongside a marketing site or content
  platform. This is where our
  [performance work](/services/performance-audit/) and Shopify work
  meet.
- **Custom apps**, from embedded admin apps and public app development
  to Shopify Functions and B2B for Shopify Plus.
- **[Integrations](/services/integrations/)** with ERP, PIM, and
  fulfillment systems, built to survive third-party outages.
- **[Migrations](/services/platform-migration/)** from Magento,
  WooCommerce, or legacy stacks, with a realistic plan for catalog
  mapping, redirects, and customer data.

## Problems we've solved on the platform

From Shopify Plus work in past years, without names:

- B2B customers with 0% VAT were shown 21% prices, because Shopify's
  B2B price lists don't inherit across markets. The fix was a
  fixed-price delta sync from the ERP, with circuit breakers so a bad
  feed can't mass-update the catalog.
- Carrier selection in checkout needed to know whether the cart
  physically fits the box, so we implemented 3D bin-packing inside
  Shopify Functions and optimized it to stay under the platform's
  instruction budget.
- One market had to launch while four others stayed hidden: a
  theme-level gate with per-domain allowlists, noindex on the gated
  markets, and a bypass cookie for the client's reviewers.
- A search-and-filter app reached its limits with localized titles and
  B2B prices. We documented those limits, then designed the custom
  search service that replaced it.

## How an engagement usually starts

For a live store, the [performance audit](/services/performance-audit/)
is the least expensive way to establish what your theme and app stack
cost you in performance. For a replatform, we start with a migration
assessment. Ongoing theme and app work runs as a monthly retainer,
scoped in writing before it starts.