Almost every ecommerce enquiry we get comes down to the same question, even when it isn't asked out loud: should this be a Shopify store, or something we build from scratch?
Our honest answer, most of the time, is Shopify. We've built plenty of custom stores and we're happy to build more, but we'd rather you spend your money on stock and marketing than on rebuilding a checkout that already works.
Here's how we actually decide.
When Shopify is the right call
If you're selling physical products at normal prices, through a normal cart and checkout, Shopify does that better than anything you could reasonably pay to have built. Checkout, card payments, tax, shipping rates, abandoned-cart emails, fraud checks and security updates are all handled, and they keep improving without you paying for it.
That covers most of the stores in our portfolio. Health and wellness brands like The Vitamart and Nutrifactor, skincare brands like Vincé, barber supplies at Clippers Corner. The work there is mostly in the design, the product pages, the speed and the setup of apps and integrations, not in reinventing the basics.
Shopify is also the safer choice if your team will run the store day to day. Staff can add products and run discounts on day one, and if you ever part ways with us, any Shopify developer can pick it up.
When custom starts to make sense
There are a few signs that a store wants to be built, not configured:
- The product is made to order. Freesnaps, a UK store, sells wooden photo tiles made from the customer's own photos. Uploading photos and styling them into a frame set is the whole product, and that needed custom work alongside the store.
- Pricing is complicated. Quotes, trade accounts with their own price lists, prices that depend on five options at once. Shopify can stretch to some of this with apps, but past a point you're paying for a pile of apps that don't quite agree with each other.
- The store is one part of a bigger system. If orders need to flow into your own stock, production or accounting system (we built an ERP for Nutrifactor, for example), the integration matters more than the shopfront.
- App fees have outgrown a build. We sometimes see stores paying for ten or fifteen monthly apps. Add it up over three years. Occasionally it's cheaper to build the one thing you actually need.
A middle option people forget
You don't have to pick one extreme. Plenty of our stores are Shopify on the outside with custom pieces where it matters: a product builder, a private app that syncs stock with a warehouse, or a separate front end that talks to Shopify behind the scenes. You keep Shopify's checkout and admin and only pay to build what makes you different.
What we ask before recommending anything
- What are you selling, and how many products? (Ten and ten thousand are different projects.)
- Where are your customers, and how do they want to pay? Some local payment methods are easy on Shopify, some aren't.
- Who'll run the store after launch, and how comfortable are they with tech?
- What other systems does it need to talk to?
- What does success look like in a year?
If you can answer those, the right platform usually becomes obvious, and if it doesn't, that's what the first call is for. Tell us about your store on our ecommerce page and we'll give you a straight answer, even if the answer is "you don't need us for this yet".