AI Development · Shopify

Shopify Development Services

We build and rebuild Shopify stores — custom themes, private apps, headless storefronts and Shopify Plus migrations. What makes us a different kind of Shopify development company is what we build them for: not just shoppers browsing a category page, but the AI agents that increasingly do the browsing on their behalf.

155,000+ page-1 rankings
11+ years shipping
Shopify Plus & headless
DTC & B2B commerce
Shopify Build Score
Passing
96
of 100
A store built fast for shoppers and legible to AI agents.
Core Web Vitals
94
Theme quality
97
Product schema
100
Metafield depth
92
Checkout
95
What we build

Four kinds of Shopify build

Most Shopify development services are one of these four. Knowing which one you need is usually the difference between a project that lands and one that doubles.

Custom theme development

A Shopify theme built from your design, not a marketplace theme wrestled into a shape it was never drawn for.

Bought themes are cheap until the third app conflicts with the fourth and every page carries 900KB of CSS for sections you never use. Custom Shopify theme development means the markup matches the design, the sections your merchandising team needs exist as real sections they can arrange themselves, and Core Web Vitals are a build constraint rather than a post-launch emergency. We build on Online Store 2.0 — JSON templates, section groups, app blocks — so the store stays editable without a developer for routine work.

Shopify app development

Private apps that solve one merchant's problem, and public apps for the App Store.

Shopify app development covers a wider range than most merchants expect. At one end: a private app that syncs your ERP stock levels every fifteen minutes, or a bundling engine your category does not have an off-the-shelf answer for. At the other: a public App Store listing with billing, onboarding and review compliance. We build both on Remix and Polaris against the current Admin and Storefront GraphQL APIs, with webhooks, rate-limit handling and retries treated as requirements rather than as things to add when it breaks.

Custom & headless Shopify builds

When the storefront needs to do something the theme layer cannot.

Custom Shopify development past the theme layer usually means one of two things: a Hydrogen storefront on Oxygen, or a front end we own — often Laravel — talking to the Storefront API while Shopify keeps the catalogue, checkout and payments. A Shopify headless storefront buys you real control over rendering, routing and integration with systems that have nothing to do with commerce. It also costs more to build and more to maintain, so we will tell you when a well-built theme would have done the job.

Shopify Plus migrations & scaling

Change platform, or change plan, without paying for it in traffic.

Migrations from WooCommerce, Magento or BigCommerce fail in the same place every time: the redirect map. We build it before the theme, from a full crawl of the existing site, and monitor rankings through the cutover. On Plus itself the work shifts to what Plus actually unlocks — Shopify Functions for discount and checkout logic, checkout extensibility, B2B catalogues and price lists, multi-store and multi-currency, and scripted bulk operations that would take a person a fortnight.

Built for how people shop now

Your next customer may never see your storefront

A growing share of shopping now starts in a conversation. Someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot for the best option under a budget, with a constraint, for a use case — and an AI agent searches, compares merchants and returns a shortlist of two or three. Shopify Catalog puts your products in front of those agents automatically. What it cannot do is make the agent choose you.

That decision is made from your data. Product taxonomy and metafields tell the agent what the thing actually is. Complete Product and Offer schema tells it price, availability and variants without guessing. Machine-readable policies let it answer "does this ship to Ireland, and what if it does not fit" mid-conversation instead of hedging. Review signals break the tie. A store where all of that is thin gets listed and skipped — which from the merchant's side looks exactly like not being there at all.

We build these in from the start rather than selling them back to you as an optimisation project later. That means clean metafield architecture during the build, schema emitted by the theme rather than injected by an app, and content that renders in HTML instead of appearing after three JavaScript hops. If you want that pushed further — competitive positioning inside AI answers, knowledge base buildout, agent attribution reporting — that is AI-agent-ready storefronts, and it runs on top of this.

Schema at the theme layer

Product, Offer, Review and Organization emitted once, correctly — not duplicated by an app on top of what the theme already outputs.

Metafields as architecture

A taxonomy designed up front, so attributes are consistent across the catalogue and an agent can compare your SKUs against a rival's.

Rendered, not assembled

Specs, policies and descriptions present in the HTML. Anything that needs a click and two fetches to appear is content an agent will not wait for.

What's included

Everything in a build engagement

Custom theme development
Built from the design up, not a bought theme bent into shape.
Shopify app development
Private and public apps on Remix, Polaris and the Admin API.
Headless & custom builds
Hydrogen, or a Laravel front end over the Storefront API.
Shopify Plus migration
Change platform without losing rankings, data or revenue.
Product data architecture
Metafields, taxonomy and variants agents can reason over.
Performance engineering
Core Web Vitals fixed in the theme, not patched with an app.
Systems integration
ERP, 3PL, subscriptions, CRM and payments wired properly.
Post-launch engineering
A retained roadmap after go-live, not a handover PDF.
Our process

How a Shopify build runs

The same six steps every AI Development engagement runs on. No bespoke methodology invented for the pitch.

1
Discovery
Understand your users, goals & scope
2
Architecture
Plan the stack, data model & integrations
3
Design
Map the flows, interfaces & edge cases
4
Build
Develop in tested, reviewable sprints
5
Launch
QA, deploy & hand over the code
6
Support & Scale
Monitor, iterate & grow with you
Where this sits

Building the store is one of three jobs

This page is the build: theme, apps, headless, migration. If you have not settled on a platform yet, start at eCommerce Development instead — that is the platform-agnostic version of this conversation, and Shopify is not always the answer.

Getting found is separate work. Our Shopify SEO services cover the technical fixes, collection and product optimisation, schema and the AEO/GEO layer that decides whether AI answers name you.

Getting chosen by agents is the third. Agentic commerce for Shopify is the ongoing work of making your store the one an AI shopping agent recommends out of the several it compares.

Proof & results

What we bring to it

155,000+
Page-1 Google rankings driven
11+
Years building and ranking sites
4
Markets served directly

We have been building commerce sites and ranking them since 2015 — including custom builds like Velaquin, where structured data and on-page SEO were in the brief from the first sprint rather than retrofitted after launch. That habit is why our Shopify builds ship agent-readable by default. Client references for your sector are available on request.

FAQs

Questions, answered

How much does Shopify development cost?
A theme customisation on an existing store typically runs a few thousand dollars. A custom theme build from design files is a larger project, and a headless or Shopify Plus build with integrations larger again. The honest answer is that the range is wide because "Shopify development" covers a template tweak and a re-platform equally. We scope and quote a fixed price after a discovery call rather than publishing a number that would be wrong for most people who read it.
How long does a Shopify build take?
A custom theme build usually takes six to ten weeks from approved designs to launch. A Shopify Plus migration from another platform takes longer — eight to sixteen weeks — because the work is data, URL mapping and integration testing more than it is front-end. App development depends entirely on scope; a focused private app can ship in two to four weeks.
Do you work with Shopify Plus?
Yes. Plus is where the harder work lives — Shopify Functions for custom discounts and checkout logic, checkout extensibility, B2B catalogues, multi-store and multi-currency setups, and scripted bulk operations through the Admin API. We also advise honestly on whether you actually need Plus yet, because a good number of stores that upgrade did not have to.
Can you migrate my store from WooCommerce or BigCommerce to Shopify?
Yes, and the SEO half of that migration is the half most agencies get wrong. We map every existing URL to its new destination, preserve product and collection structure, carry over reviews and customer records, and monitor rankings through the cutover. Migrations lose traffic when redirects are treated as an afterthought; we plan them before the build starts.
Do you build Shopify apps as well as themes?
Both. Private apps that solve one merchant's problem — a custom ERP sync, a bespoke bundling engine, an internal ops dashboard — and public apps for the Shopify App Store, built on Remix and Polaris against the current Admin and Storefront APIs.
Will my store be ready for AI shopping agents?
That is the part we build in by default rather than sell back to you later. Complete Product and Offer schema, clean metafields and product taxonomy, machine-readable policies, and a theme that renders its content without JavaScript gymnastics. Those are the same things that decide whether an AI shopping agent can read, trust and recommend your catalogue.

Start with what your store looks like to AI

Before we quote a build, we will show you how AI engines and shopping agents currently read your store — your schema, your product data, and who gets recommended instead of you. Free, and yours whether or not we work together.

Shopify development services for DTC and B2B brands in the US, UK, Europe and Australia.

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