A storefront built to sell, then kept fast.

A theme gives you a storefront; an engineering partner gives you a store that keeps improving without a quote for every change. In practice that means merchandising controls your team uses without a developer, custom logic where revenue depends on it, app consolidation so the pages stay fast, real integrations with your back office, and speed and conversion work measured per template. If your store is small and standard, a good theme genuinely is enough — and we will say so rather than sell a build.

Often yes, and the platform's trajectory is part of the reason: $115.6bn of GMV in Q2 2026, up 32%, with international volume up 37% and B2B up 76%. The right question is what you are replacing. Where a bespoke stack consumes developer time on plumbing, moving is usually a clear win. Where you have deep custom logic that Shopify handles differently, the migration needs to be planned around it rather than discovered mid-project. We will map that honestly before quoting.

By treating it as an SEO project with a build inside it. Before anything moves we take a full URL inventory, record current rankings and revenue by landing page, and produce a redirect map that our SEO team signs off. Metadata, structured data, internal links and canonical logic are carried across deliberately, not regenerated. After cutover we monitor indexation, rankings and revenue per template daily for several weeks, so anything that slips is caught in days rather than at the next quarterly review.

Usually, though the fix is straightforward. Duplicated apps add scripts to every page, monthly cost to the bill, and unpredictable interactions during a sale. We inventory what is installed, what it actually does, what it costs and what it loads, then remove duplicates, replace a few with small functions or extensions you own, and keep the ones that genuinely earn their place. Cutting app weight is often the fastest speed improvement available on a mature store, and it lowers a fixed cost at the same time.

Enough to plan around. Deloitte Digital and Google measured a 0.1-second mobile improvement producing an 8.4% lift in retail conversions and a 9.2% lift in average order value. On Shopify the gains come from unglamorous work: removing duplicate scripts, deferring non-critical code, sizing images properly, cutting render-blocking fonts and not loading widgets on pages that do not need them. We measure Core Web Vitals per template before and after, so the result is a documented change rather than a claim.

Only if your volume, checkout requirements or B2B needs justify it. Plus buys checkout extensibility depth, higher API limits, more staff accounts, scripts and functions capability, and better support during peaks — real advantages at scale and an unnecessary line item below it. We will look at your order volume, catalogue, wholesale requirements and peak traffic and give you a straight answer, including the case for staying on standard and spending the difference on the store itself.

We can, with Hydrogen or a framework of your choice, and for most merchants we would advise against it. Headless adds a front end you now own and maintain, and the speed benefit is often smaller than simply removing app weight from a well-built theme. It earns its cost when you have genuinely unusual front-end requirements, multiple storefronts sharing one back end, or a content platform that must lead. If that is you, we will build it and be explicit about the ongoing maintenance it adds.

Through the platform's supported paths rather than legacy checkout scripts, with the authoritative purchase event taken from the backend where possible so it is not at the mercy of the browser. Our server-side tracking team wires conversions APIs with proper event identifiers so nothing is double counted, and reconciles what the platforms report against your actual orders. That matters more than it sounds: your bidding is only as good as the purchase data feeding it.

Your team can, and many do. The build lives in a repository with review and staging, the sections are documented, and we write a runbook covering the routine jobs: adding a section, changing a price rule, seasonal templates, responding to an alert. We also train whoever will own it during the build rather than in a handover meeting. Where you would rather keep an engineering partner, we work as a monthly retainer with a shipping cadence — both routes are fine, and neither locks you in.

A custom storefront build is typically a fixed-scope project quoted after the audit, so you approve a number rather than an open-ended hourly count. Migrations are priced on catalogue size, data complexity and how many integrations must survive the move. Ongoing work is a monthly retainer scoped to a shipping cadence you choose. We would rather scope down to what will pay for itself in the first two quarters than sell a rebuild your traffic does not yet justify.