Shopify

Shopify 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. 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, 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 and Shopify work meet.
• Custom apps, from embedded admin apps and public app development to Shopify Functions and B2B for Shopify Plus.
• Integrations with ERP, PIM, and fulfillment systems, built to survive third-party outages.
• Migrations 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 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.