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. Apps can customize the Thank you and Order status pages from the Basic plan up, but the information, shipping, and payment steps of checkout are Plus only. If your margin lives in checkout upsells or custom payment flows, the plan tier is a material decision.
• B2B has plan tiers. Company accounts, catalogs, and net payment terms run from the Basic plan up. Assigning a catalog directly to a company or one of its locations, which is how customer-specific pricing is done, requires Plus.
• 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.

The two plan-tier constraints above were checked against Shopify’s own documentation on 13 July 2026. Both have changed before.

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.
• 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 the decade of engineering behind the practice, anonymized:

• B2B customers with 0% VAT were shown 21% prices, because the B2B price list did not carry into the market they were buying in. 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.