Shopify design and development
Shopify stores that don’t stop at the checkout
The storefront is the part your customer sees. Behind it, an order has to reach whoever packs it, your stock has to stay honest across every channel you sell on, and the money has to land somewhere your accountant can use. Most of what makes a store good or exhausting to run happens after the buy button.
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The part after the sale
Four things nobody demos
Every storefront looks good in a screenshot. These are the parts that decide how much of your week the store takes back.
The stock number disagrees with itself
The store says four, the shop floor says one, and the marketplace listing sold two of them yesterday. Every channel keeps its own count until something makes them agree, and the first time a customer finds out is a refund and an apology.
Every order gets handled twice
It arrives in Shopify, and then somebody moves it — into the fulfilment system, into the accounting file, into a spreadsheet that exists because the other two never spoke. The second handling is where the typos and the missed orders live.
Shipping is priced by guess
A flat rate loses money on anything heavy and overcharges on anything light, and both cost you: one out of margin, the other out of conversion. Real rates need real dimensions, real origins and a carrier account wired in.
The payouts do not reconcile
Shopify pays out net of fees, refunds and chargebacks, on its own schedule, which is why the deposit almost never matches the orders it came from. Somebody reconciles that by hand every month until it is wired into the books properly.
Where it has to fit
The rest of your operation
Shopify is good at being a store and makes no attempt to be your warehouse, your ledger or your carrier. The work is getting it to agree with whatever is already doing those jobs.
- Accounting
- QuickBooks, Xero
- Shipping
- ShipStation, Shippo, EasyPost, carrier accounts
- Inventory
- Cin7, Katana, Inventory Planner
- Point of sale
- Shopify POS, Square
- Email and SMS
- Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Postscript
- Marketplaces
- Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Faire
- Subscriptions
- Recharge, Loop
- Fulfilment
- 3PL portals, and a fair number of warehouses that only speak CSV
If yours is missing from this list, the only thing that decides it is whether the system exposes an API and documents it honestly. Name it and you will hear quickly whether it is realistic, and what it would add to the build.
The build
Five opinions about building on Shopify
Yes, it is a theme
Every Shopify store is a theme, a custom one included — that is how the platform works, and anyone drawing a hard line between “custom” and “theme” is selling a distinction that does not exist. What actually varies is how much of it was built around your catalogue instead of around a demo store selling sunglasses.
Apps are not the enemy
A store with a real marketing programme runs apps and should: your email platform, your reviews, your subscriptions are all doing work nobody sensible would rebuild. App count tracks how complicated your business is, not how well the store was built. The only question worth asking is narrower — whether a specific thing you pay for monthly is doing something the theme could do once.
Built where Shopify wants to be built
Sections, blocks and metafields, so the things you will want to change are editable by you in the admin rather than by me for a fee. A store that needs a developer to move a banner was built for the developer.
Nothing I build ever sees a card number
Card details go straight to Shopify's checkout and never pass through anything I build, which is why the PCI burden sits with them instead of with you. Access tokens are scoped to the single thing they exist for, webhook payloads are verified before they are trusted, and nothing sensitive is ever committed to a repository.
Search traffic is part of the build
Redirects, URL structure, structured data and page speed are decided while the store is being built, not bolted on after the rankings move. The person building it is the person who has to explain the traffic afterwards, which is a useful incentive.
Check it yourself
The part that goes wrong, and a tool that checks it
Shopify forces its own URL structure, so moving onto it changes the address of nearly every page you have. Miss the mapping and you lose what those pages ranked for, usually a few weeks after launch when it is hardest to connect the two events.
URL inventory checker
Point it at a store and it works out what the site is running, walks the sitemap, then follows the old product and category addresses to see where each one ends up today. Free, no sign-up, and it is the check that has to happen before any replatform.
Platform migrations
What moving off a specific platform involves, written per platform rather than in general, because the data export and the URL shape are different on every one of them.
Scope
What a build actually covers
Everything below is agreed in writing before a number is attached to it. If something has to change halfway through, you hear about it while there is still a choice to make, rather than on the final invoice.
- Shopify theme built around your catalogue, editable in the admin
- Product, collection and variant structure set up to be navigated, not just stored
- Checkout, payments and tax configured and tested end to end
- Real carrier shipping rates, zones and packaging profiles
- The integrations your operation actually needs, wired and monitored
- Redirects and URL structure handled before launch, not after
- Structured data for products, collections and reviews
- A staging store you can click through before anything goes live
- Training on the parts you will touch, and documentation for the parts you will not
An honest caveat
Plenty of businesses do not need a store at all
If you sell three things alongside a service business, a full storefront is usually more machinery than the problem deserves, and it brings a monthly fee, a checkout to maintain and a catalogue to keep current. A payment link on a well-built page often does the same job for nothing.
If that sounds closer to your situation, the web design page is the right one, and it is a cheaper and faster piece of work.
Either way the same person builds it, hosts it and answers the phone afterwards. More about that.
Questions first
What people ask before they commit
Because doing one platform properly beats doing three adequately. Shopify hosts the store, carries the PCI scope for checkout, and keeps working when you get a traffic spike — none of which a small business should be paying somebody to babysit. The trade is real: you pay a monthly fee and you live inside their checkout. For almost every small business selling physical products, that is the better end of the deal.
No. WooCommerce means you own a WordPress installation, its plugins, its hosting and its security patches, and for most small merchants that is a part-time job nobody signed up for. Moving off WooCommerce onto Shopify is work I do take, and it is a common reason people get in touch.
Between $5,000 and $15,000 for most builds, and the range is wide because catalogues are. What moves the number is how much structure your products need, how many systems the store has to agree with, and how much of your existing data has to be cleaned before it can be imported. Substantial integration work beyond the store itself is scoped and quoted separately. Nothing is priced before the work is written down.
Shopify's own plans run $39 a month for Basic, $105 for Grow and $399 for Advanced, with roughly a quarter off if you pay annually. The detail that catches people out is the third-party gateway surcharge: use a payment processor other than Shopify Payments and Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced, on top of whatever your processor charges. If you are choosing a plan, that surcharge usually matters more than the monthly fee.
It can, and that is the single most expensive way a replatform goes wrong. Shopify forces its own URL structure — /products/, /collections/ — so almost every page on your old store changes address, and a migration that does not map them one to one drops whatever those pages ranked for. The mapping is done before launch, checked after, and it is the part of this work I am least willing to rush.
Yes, and the build assumes you will. Shopify's admin is genuinely usable, and the theme is set up so copy, images, sections and collections are yours to change without touching code. You get training on the parts you will use before launch.
Most stores are six to ten weeks from kickoff to live. A large or messy catalogue is the usual reason it runs longer, and integrations with systems that have poor APIs are the second. The honest variable is not the build, it is how quickly decisions and product data come back.
Often the better option, yes. A store that converts badly, loads slowly or leaks staff time into manual work usually does not need replacing — it needs the specific thing that is wrong fixed. That is a smaller piece of work and it gets quoted as one.
Start with what the store has to do
Not the design you have in mind — what you sell, where else you sell it, and what somebody on your team is doing by hand every week. That is the part that decides what this costs.