Shopify Consulting

Improve, more often than the industry admits. Replatforming carries real risk — search traffic, data migration, retraining, and a period where the new store is worse than the old one — and it only makes sense when the platform itself is the binding constraint. If the actual problems are app bloat, image handling, a poor theme or a clumsy checkout flow, those travel with you. We would want to see the funnel data and the app audit before supporting a rebuild, and we have talked several clients out of one.

Technical and analytical factors rather than creative ones: real-user performance on mobile, which is where most stores lose money before design matters at all; funnel drop-off by step with the data to support it; checkout friction and avoidable fields; form and validation behaviour; and whether your analytics is even measuring the funnel correctly, which is surprisingly often the first finding. We rank issues by likely impact and give you what to fix rather than a list of everything imperfect.

Yes, and this is one of the most common questions we get. The trade-off is concrete: front-end freedom and potential speed, against losing app compatibility, owning a build and hosting pipeline, and rebuilding merchandising workflows your team relies on. It suits large catalogues with a dedicated front-end team or genuinely unusual storefront requirements. For most brands a well-built Liquid theme with the app list pruned reaches similar performance at far lower cost and risk, and we will say so plainly.

From the workflows your team actually runs and the volume you actually do, rather than a feature comparison. What matters in practice is integration depth with the systems you already have, how the pricing model behaves as you grow, the performance cost each app imposes on the storefront, and how difficult leaving would be. We also count the apps you could remove, which is frequently a larger and cheaper win than anything you would add.

Yes, and it is often the most useful two weeks a client spends with us. We assess whether the scope addresses the actual problem, whether the estimate is credible for the work described, whether the technical approach will age well, and what has been left out — data migration, redirect mapping and integration edge cases are the usual omissions. We give you the questions to put to them rather than simply recommending ourselves.

Yes. Shopify handles traffic spikes on the storefront side considerably better than most teams expect, so the constraints usually appear elsewhere: API rate limits on your integrations, apps that fail under load, inventory sync lag causing oversells, and downstream systems like your ERP or 3PL that were never sized for the peak. We look at the whole path from storefront to fulfilment, because the store staying up while orders pile in unprocessed is not a successful event.

Most run two to three weeks depending on store complexity and integration count. Cost depends on scope and duration and is agreed in writing before work begins — we scope against a specific question rather than selling a package. If a short conversation would resolve it, we will tell you that rather than propose an engagement.

No, and the deliverables are written on that basis. Clients regularly take our findings to their existing agency or internal team, which is a legitimate outcome and one we plan for. If you do want us to implement, that is a separate commercial conversation held after the assessment rather than bundled into it.