Shopify development

We specialize in eCommerce strategy, advising our clients of solutions that drive real revenue growth through digital channels. One of our favorite foundations for eCommerce growth is the Shopify platform due to the scalability, reliability and robust features it offers. We've been building custom storefronts and applications on the Shopify platform since 2011.

A memorable customer experience is an essential part of building long term brand loyalty and differentiation is a key factor in converting new customers. This is true in all touch points of the customer journey, but especially important for a brand's online storefront.

Our project process includes discovery as a first step of the journey to ensure that scope meets high level business needs and that we have a well drawn out plan for execution. eCommerce is complex - just as you wouldn't build a house starting in construction you shouldn't start building out your storefront without proper planning.

Following discovery, we follow a design strategy proven to deliver beautiful storefronts. It starts with expanding branding into an art direction, or visual interpretation branding into the more robust aesthetic of a website, and finishes with a proper handoff to ensure efficient implementation during development.

We’ve developed a proprietary theme scaffolding tool for use on our projects. This allows us to develop custom themes faster, with full functional control and optimal performance in mind.

Why is that important you may ask?

First and foremost, performance. Themes from the Shopify Theme Store are intended for use by merchants of all shapes and sizes. All the configuration options are powered by additional code in the theme. This means that you end up with more code than you really need on your site and thus noticeably slower performance than if your site visitors were only loading the code specific to your configuration. Site speed is not only a consideration for conversions, but also has an impact on SEO and PPC.

Secondly, themes from the Shopify Theme Store are built by third party developers. In an attempt to offset the theme bloat required to support the one-size-fits-all nature of their theme they typically bundle to minimize the codebase. This improves performance, but results in parts of the code being obfuscated and hard to modify for other developers. This means that if you ever try to add additional functionality, your developer implementing the feature may have to rewrite / override parts of the existing codebase. This results in additional effort by the developer, less clean code going forward and ultimately additional code bloat.

While many agencies continue to customize on top of pre-built themes, we feel that there's a more professional approach and have invested significantly in our tooling to be able to offer custom builds with comparable effort.