Shopify Services

Apps first, images second, theme code third. A store running fifteen apps is loading fifteen sets of scripts on every page, frequently including pages where the feature is irrelevant. After that: oversized images without proper sizing, render-blocking third-party scripts, and themes that load every section regardless of use. We audit installed apps before touching code, because uninstalling three unused ones typically beats a week of optimisation work.

Only with a clear reason. Headless gives you full front-end control and can be very fast, at the cost of an infrastructure and build pipeline you now own, app compatibility you lose — most Shopify apps assume a Liquid storefront — and merchandising workflows your team must have rebuilt for them. It fits large catalogues with a dedicated front-end team, or brands with genuinely unusual storefront requirements. For most stores a well-built Liquid theme is faster to deliver, cheaper to run and easier for the merchandising team to operate.

Within what the platform permits, which depends on your plan. On standard Shopify, checkout customisation is deliberately limited. On Shopify Plus you have checkout extensibility, Shopify Functions for discounts, shipping and payment customisation, and more control over the flow. Any agency offering deep checkout modification on a standard plan is describing something that will break — checkout is where Shopify protects conversion and security most tightly, and mostly for good reason.

Yes — both private apps for a single merchant and public apps for the Shopify App Store. The engineering that matters is usually around the platform's rules rather than the feature itself: webhook reliability and mandatory compliance webhooks, API rate limits and the cost-based query budget on GraphQL, session token authentication, and billing integration for public apps. App Store review has its own requirements and timeline, which is worth planning for rather than discovering at submission.

Yes — from WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce or a custom build. The work is mostly data and URLs rather than design: mapping products, variants, customers and order history into Shopify's model, which will not match one-to-one, and building the redirect map. That redirect map protects your search traffic and needs to be ready before launch rather than assembled after rankings drop. We also flag early what genuinely cannot carry over, because every migration has something.

Through the Admin API with a middleware layer rather than point-to-point coupling, so a change on either side does not require rewriting the other. The practical constraints are rate limits, the fact that inventory sync is eventually consistent rather than instant, and deciding which system owns each field — a question that must be settled explicitly, because both systems believing they own stock levels is the most common failure in this work.

That is a design goal rather than an afterthought. Sections and blocks configured so merchandisers can build pages within the design system rather than outside it, metafields with clear names, and documentation for anything non-obvious. Most complaints about a store being hard to manage trace back to a theme built for the developer rather than for the people using it daily.

You do, on payment — theme code, any custom apps written for you, and configuration. The Shopify account, domain and third-party service accounts should be in your organisation's name from the start, never ours. Handover is built into the closing sprints so nothing about running or extending the store depends on us still being involved.