Traffic Is Expensive. Your Store Should Stop Wasting It.

A launch build on a customised premium theme starts around $3,200. A fully custom Online Store 2.0 theme with a bespoke section library runs about $8,500. Shopify Plus builds with checkout extensibility, B2B or subscriptions start near $18,000, and headless Hydrogen storefronts are quoted per project. Your Shopify subscription, apps and transaction fees are paid directly to Shopify and are separate from development.

A well-chosen premium theme, properly customised, is the right answer for most stores under roughly $1M in annual revenue. It launches faster, costs far less and performs well. A custom theme becomes worth it when your merchandising needs something themes don't support, when brand differentiation genuinely drives your margin, or when theme bloat has become the thing capping your conversion rate. We'll tell you honestly which case you're in — including when it's the first one.

A launch build on a customised theme takes 3 to 4 weeks. A fully custom Online Store 2.0 theme takes 8 to 10 weeks. Shopify Plus projects with checkout extensibility, B2B or ERP integration take 12 to 16 weeks. Product data readiness is usually the longest pole in the tent, so catalogue preparation runs in parallel with design rather than after it.

Yes, and migrations are one of our most common projects. That covers products, variants, collections, customers with their order history, content pages and blogs, plus a complete 301 redirect map from every legacy URL. Redirect mapping and preserving customer accounts are where migrations usually go wrong, so both are treated as first-class deliverables with their own testing pass. Moving the other way, see our WordPress and WooCommerce service.

Plus is Shopify's enterprise tier. It unlocks checkout customisation through Shopify Functions and checkout extensibility, higher API limits, B2B wholesale, up to nine expansion stores, and lower transaction rates at volume. Most merchants should stay on Advanced until either checkout control or B2B becomes a real constraint, or until transaction-fee savings alone justify the higher subscription — which typically happens somewhere in the low millions of annual revenue.

Headless means the storefront is rendered by a separate front end, usually Hydrogen or a custom app on the Storefront API, while Shopify continues handling products, checkout and orders. It buys front-end freedom and very fast page loads, at the cost of a more expensive build, ongoing developer dependency, and losing the theme editor your merchandising team relies on. It suits large catalogues, content-heavy commerce and teams with in-house developers. For most stores, a well-built Online Store 2.0 theme performs comparably for a fraction of the cost.

On Shopify Plus, yes — through checkout extensibility and Shopify Functions, which allow custom discount logic, delivery customisation, payment method rules and UI extensions in a supported, upgrade-safe way. Note that checkout.liquid was deprecated, so any agency still proposing to edit it directly is working from outdated practice. On non-Plus plans, checkout customisation is limited to branding and the settings Shopify exposes.

As few as the business genuinely needs, because most apps inject scripts into every page and collectively they're the leading cause of slow Shopify storefronts. A typical audit finds several apps that were installed for a campaign, never removed, and are still loading on every page view. We audit the app stack on every project and frequently replace three or four apps with a small amount of theme code — which also removes their monthly cost.

That's a build target rather than a hope. We work to a Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds on throttled mobile, which comes from a lean theme, disciplined app usage, correctly sized and modern-format images, and deferring third-party scripts. Shopify hosting is fast by default — what slows stores down is almost always what gets added on top of it.

Yes. Shopify's native B2B on Plus supports company profiles, customer-specific catalogues and price lists, payment terms, and quantity rules — without the separate wholesale channel merchants used to maintain. For non-Plus stores we implement B2B through customer tagging, gated collections and appropriate apps, which works well up to a point but is genuinely more limited.

You do, completely. The Shopify account is yours, the theme code is delivered in your Git repository, and any custom app is registered under your Partner or organisation account. We don't retain licences, keys or dependencies that would require you to keep working with us, and any competent Shopify developer can continue from our codebase.

Yes, and it's optional. Every build includes a warranty covering defects — 30 days on Launch, 90 days on Custom Theme, six months on Advanced and Plus. Ongoing retainers covering theme updates, new section development, app management, conversion testing and monthly performance reporting are available separately.