Shopify development
Storefronts built to convert
Shopify handles the hard, boring, regulated parts — checkout, payments, tax, fraud — better than anything you would assemble yourself. What it does not do is make your product pages persuasive or stop you installing twenty apps that each add a second to load. That part is the work.
- Architecture
- Online Store 2.0 sections
- Content
- Metafields, not hard-coding
- Apps
- Audited, justified, minimised
The problem
The theme was the easy part, the apps were not
A typical store starts with a purchased theme and grows by installation. Reviews app, upsell app, bundles app, popup app, loyalty app, three analytics scripts. Each injects JavaScript into every page, and the cumulative cost lands on exactly the page where hesitation is most expensive: the product page on a phone.
Meanwhile the parts that actually move revenue — how the product is explained, what proof sits beside the price, how variants and shipping information are presented, what happens in the cart — are left as whatever the theme shipped with.
What we usually find
- Twenty-plus apps, several doing overlapping jobs
- Product pages that list specifications but never answer the buyer’s objection
- A collection page with no useful filtering on a catalogue of hundreds
- Mobile product images that take seconds to appear over cellular
- Discount popups firing before the page has finished rendering
- No post-purchase thinking at all — the thank-you page is the default one
What is included
What a Shopify build covers
Theme and architecture
- Custom theme or a deeply customised base, built on 2.0 sections
- Sections and blocks your merchandising team can rearrange safely
- Metafields and metaobjects for structured product content
- Liquid written to be read by the next developer
Product pages that sell
- Image, variant and price hierarchy designed for mobile first
- The objection-handling content buyers actually look for
- Reviews, trust and shipping information placed near the decision
- Size, spec and compatibility data structured, not pasted into a description
Browse and search
- Collection filtering that matches how people actually narrow a catalogue
- Search tuned for your vocabulary and your synonyms
- Merchandising rules for sold-out, new and seasonal items
- Internal linking between collections for organic visibility
Cart and checkout
- Cart experience designed rather than inherited from the theme
- Shipping thresholds and incentives communicated before the cart
- Checkout extensions where the plan supports them
- Post-purchase and thank-you page treated as part of the design
The app audit
- Every installed app listed with its monthly cost and its page-weight cost
- Overlapping apps consolidated or replaced with theme code
- Leftover scripts from uninstalled apps removed from the theme
- A standing rule for what justifies a new app
Launch and measurement
- Analytics and ecommerce events verified against real test orders
- Product, Offer and Breadcrumb structured data
- Core Web Vitals checked on the product and collection templates
- Staff training on merchandising the sections without a developer
The hidden cost
Every app has a second price
The monthly subscription is the visible cost. The page weight is the one that shows up in your conversion rate.
Apps inject scripts, usually everywhere
Most Shopify apps add their JavaScript through the theme or a script tag that loads on every page, not only the page where the feature appears. A reviews widget needed on product pages often loads on your homepage, your blog and your cart as well.
- We measure each app's byte cost and main-thread cost before and after removal
- Where an app is needed on one template, we load it only there
- Features we can implement in Liquid in a day do not become a monthly dependency
Uninstalling does not always clean up
Shopify apps frequently leave snippets, script tags and theme edits behind when removed. Stores that have been running for a few years commonly carry code from apps nobody has paid for in a long time.
- Theme diff against a clean base to find orphaned app code
- Script tag audit through the admin API
- Removal verified against a real page load, not just the file list
Overlapping apps are the common case
Upsell, bundle and volume-discount apps frequently overlap, as do popup, email-capture and loyalty apps. Consolidating to one well-chosen tool per job usually cuts both the subscription bill and the page weight.
The ones worth keeping
This is not an argument against apps. Reviews, subscriptions, advanced search and ERP integrations are real engineering that you should not rebuild. The test is whether the app earns its cost on both axes — and whether anyone has checked since it was installed.
Our process
How a store comes together
Understand needs
Understand the catalogue and the buyer
How people choose in your category, what they compare, what stops them. Plus the practical shape of the catalogue: variants, bundles, subscriptions, shipping rules.
You get: Catalogue model and buyer-objection map
Strategize
Plan the content model and the app list
Which product attributes become metafields, which pages are sections, and which apps earn their place before anything is built.
You get: Content model and justified app list
Create & build
Build the theme on a development store
Theme, sections, metafields and templates built and reviewed against real products rather than placeholder data.
You get: Development store with real catalogue data
Optimize & grow
Launch, then improve the funnel
Once real orders are flowing there is data to work with: where people drop, which collections convert, which product pages stall.
You get: Live store, instrumented, with a test backlog
Honest scoping
When Shopify is the right platform
A good fit if
- You sell physical products and want checkout to be somebody else’s problem
- You need the operational side — inventory, fulfilment, tax, payments — to just work
- Your team will merchandise regularly and should not need a developer to do it
- You are on WooCommerce and spending more time maintaining it than selling
- You want to launch quickly on solid foundations rather than build commerce from scratch
Look elsewhere if
- You sell three products and your real constraint is that nobody knows you exist — content and SEO will do more than a new store
- You need complex B2B pricing, quoting or approval workflows beyond what Shopify supports on your plan
- You are mainly a content business with a small shop attached — WordPress with commerce bolted on may be cheaper to run
- You want the platform to be fully custom; the trade-off for Shopify’s reliability is its opinions
Selected work
Projects that used Shopify Development
Questions
Before you ask us
The things people ask about Shopify Development before they get in touch. If yours is not here, ask directly — you will get a straight answer rather than a brochure.
Ask a questionShould I use a premium theme or a custom build?
A well-chosen premium theme, customised properly, is the right answer for a lot of stores and we will say so. A custom build earns its cost when your merchandising is unusual, your catalogue has structure a stock theme cannot express, or the brand has to look like nobody else. We will tell you which case you are in before quoting.
Can you move my store from WooCommerce?
Yes — products, variants, customers, orders and content, with a redirect map for every existing URL so you keep your search visibility. The migration is scoped separately from the design work because the volume of data largely determines the effort.
Will you work with the apps I already have?
We will audit them and tell you what each one costs you in page weight as well as in subscription. Some stay, some get consolidated, some get replaced with a few lines of theme code. You make the final call with real numbers in front of you.
Can a Shopify store be genuinely fast?
Yes, within limits. Shopify's infrastructure handles the server side well, so your performance is mostly determined by theme quality, image discipline and app count. Shopify Scripts and checkout are outside your control, which is usually a benefit. Stores we build are held to the same budget as the rest of our work.
Do you handle product photography and copy?
Not photography. Product copy structure and templates, yes — we will define what each product page needs to say and in what order, and write the first set as examples. Populating a large catalogue is usually more economical for your team to do against that template.
What does a Shopify project cost?
Theme customisation and custom builds start at $2,700, driven mainly by how many unique templates you need and how complex the catalogue structure is. Migration from another platform is quoted on top. Current ranges are on the pricing page.
Send us your app list
A screenshot of your installed apps and a link to your best-selling product page. We will come back with what is costing you speed and what is costing you conversions.