Shopify
Storefronts built around the buying decision.
Shopify handles the hard parts of selling online, which means the theme is the easy bit. The work that decides whether a store makes money is product information, navigation, speed and checkout, and none of that comes with the template.
What does a Shopify build include beyond the theme?
Information architecture, meaning how collections are organised and how someone finds a product. Product data, meaning images, variants, specifications and the answers to the questions people ask before buying. Performance, which on Shopify is mostly about how many apps you have installed. And the checkout experience, which is where most revenue is lost.
Baymard Institute's aggregate of fifty studies puts documented cart abandonment at 70.22%, with unexpected extra costs the most cited reason, followed by forced account creation and a long checkout. Those are design and information decisions, not traffic problems.
A theme is a starting point. Two stores on the same theme can perform very differently, and the difference is almost never the visual design.
The theme is not the project
Shopify gives you hosting, payments, security, inventory and a checkout that works. That removes an enormous amount of risk and it also removes the parts most people think of as building a store. What is left is the part that actually decides whether it sells.
Most failing Shopify stores do not fail because the theme is ugly. They fail because a visitor cannot find the product they want, because the product page does not answer the question stopping them buying, because the page takes six seconds on a phone, or because the shipping cost appears at the last step.
That is why our first conversation about a Shopify project is rarely about design. It is about what people ask before they buy, what makes them hesitate, and what the current store does about it.
Where the revenue actually goes
Baymard Institute aggregates fifty separate studies of documented cart abandonment spanning 2006 to 2025, and surveys the reasons shoppers give for leaving.
SourceCart abandonment rate statistics, Baymard Institute, 2025, 50 studies
Every one of those is fixable on Shopify without changing a single thing about your traffic, and all three of the named reasons are decisions somebody made rather than problems that arrived.
What the work consists of
This is the order we work in, which is close to the reverse of how most store projects are scoped.
Fix the navigation and collection structure
How somebody finds a product is the highest leverage thing in a store. Collections that match how customers think, filters that are useful rather than exhaustive, and a search that works. If a visitor cannot find it in two clicks, nothing else matters.
Make product pages answer the real question
Manufacturer copy tells you what something is. Customers want to know whether it will fit, how long it takes to arrive, what it is actually like, and what happens if it is wrong. Sizing guidance, real photographs, genuine reviews and a clear returns policy do more than a longer description.
- Multiple real photographs including scale and detail
- Delivery and returns answered on the page, not in a linked policy
- Variants that make sense rather than a dropdown of thirty options
Show the total cost early
Unexpected extra costs is the most cited abandonment reason in Baymard's research. Shipping thresholds stated on the product page, taxes indicated, and no surprises at the final step. This is an information decision, not a pricing one.
See the remaining steps: What the work consists ofHide the remaining steps: What the work consists of
Simplify the checkout
Guest checkout available, express payment options offered early, the fewest steps the platform allows, and the whole thing tested on a real phone rather than in a desktop preview.
Control the apps
App creep is where Shopify speed goes. Each app injects scripts into every page, and stores routinely carry apps installed for a campaign two years ago. An audit of what is installed, what it does and what it costs in load time is usually the single largest performance win available.
Get the product data right for search and shopping
Product structured data with accurate price and availability, a Merchant Center feed that matches the store, and collection pages built to be found rather than only to be browsed.
Steps three and four typically return more than anything else on this list and cost the least.
App creep, and what it costs
The Shopify app ecosystem is genuinely useful and it is the most common reason a store is slow. Every app that renders something on the storefront injects JavaScript and CSS, usually on every page rather than only where it is needed, and usually loaded from a third party domain that your store now depends on.
Ten apps is not unusual. Each one seemed reasonable at the time. Collectively they can add several seconds to how long a product page takes to become usable on a phone, which affects both conversion and the cost of every paid click pointed at the store.
The audit is straightforward and is rarely done: list every app, establish what it does, establish whether anybody still uses it, and remove the ones that fail that test. Removing an app also means removing the code it left behind in the theme, which is the step people skip.
Where an app is genuinely needed, the question becomes whether it can be loaded only on the pages that use it rather than everywhere, which on most themes is achievable.
What is costing your store money right now
Most of this you can check yourself on your own phone in fifteen minutes.
- Add something to your cart on a phone and go through checkout. Count the steps and note where the shipping cost first appears.
- Is guest checkout available, or does the store require an account before paying?
- How long does a product page take to become usable on mobile data, not on office wifi?
- Can you find a specific product in two clicks from the home page without using search?
- Does the product page answer your three most common pre-purchase questions, or link to a policy page?
See the full checklist: What is costing your store money right nowHide the full checklist: What is costing your store money right now
- How many apps are installed, and can you say what each one is for?
- Are discontinued products returning errors, or redirecting to the home page, which is worse?
- Does the Merchant Center feed have disapprovals nobody has looked at?
The checkout walkthrough is the single most useful fifteen minutes available to any store owner, and most have never done it on their own phone.
Shopify against the alternatives
The decision is mostly about whether selling or content is the primary job.
| Item | Better when | Worse when |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Selling physical products, checkout matters | The site is mostly content with a few products |
| WordPress with commerce | Content heavy with a small catalogue | Checkout complexity and payment risk sit with you |
| Marketplace only | Testing demand with no fixed costs | Margin and customer relationship belong to someone else |
For a business whose revenue is products, Shopify removes a category of risk that is genuinely expensive to carry yourself. For a business whose revenue is services with an occasional product, it is the wrong shape.
How a store is measured
Revenue by landing page, which tells you which pages actually earn. Conversion rate by device, because mobile and desktop usually differ enough that a combined figure hides the problem.
Checkout step completion, which is where the Baymard reasons show up in your own data. If a large share of carts die at the shipping step, you have just been told what to fix.
Read the full breakdown: How a store is measuredHide the full breakdown: How a store is measured
Average order value and repeat purchase rate, because together they decide what you can afford to pay to acquire a customer, which changes the economics of every paid channel.
Core Web Vitals from field data, since speed affects conversion directly and affects what you pay per click on any paid campaign pointed at the store.
What to ignore: sessions as a headline, and any dashboard metric that does not resolve to money.
We do not publish a price for this piece of work on its own, because the right scope depends on what already exists. What is published is the bundle pricing: 2,400, 3,600 or 4,800 dollars a month depending on which channels are running. You can read the full breakdown on the pricing page, and you will get an exact number in writing before anything starts.
How this connects to the rest
This is one route through our web design and development work, alongside WordPress for content driven sites.
E-commerce SEO covers the search side of the same store: collection architecture, faceted navigation, duplication and product feeds. The two pieces of work overlap substantially and are usually scoped together.
Conversion rate optimisation is where the checkout work continues after launch, and website speed optimisation is where app creep gets dealt with on an existing store.
Paid advertising interacts closely, since shopping campaigns run off the same product feed and a faster store lowers the cost of every click.
Walk your own checkout on your own phone.
Count the steps and note where the shipping cost appears. Bring us what you find and we will tell you what it is costing, before anybody talks about a redesign.
Straight answers.
Do I need a custom theme?
Often not. A well chosen theme configured properly, with the navigation and product pages done well, outperforms a custom build with weak information architecture.
Custom work earns its place when the buying experience genuinely needs something the theme cannot do, rather than when the store wants to look different.
Why is my Shopify store slow?
Almost always apps. Each one injects scripts into every page, and most stores carry several installed for a campaign that ended long ago.
The second most common cause is unoptimised images uploaded at full size, which the platform will serve but cannot fix for you.
How do I reduce cart abandonment?
Start with the three most cited reasons in Baymard's research: show the total cost including shipping early, allow guest checkout, and shorten the checkout.
Abandoned cart emails help at the margin. They do not fix a checkout that is losing people for a reason.
Can you migrate my existing store to Shopify?
Yes, and the part that needs care is not the products, it is the URLs. Every existing product and collection URL that has traffic or links needs a mapped redirect, or the migration costs you rankings.
Product data usually needs cleaning during a migration too, which is a good opportunity and an underestimated amount of work.
What happens to products we stop selling?
Decide it once as a policy. Temporarily unavailable products keep their page and say so with an alternative offered. Permanently discontinued products redirect to the closest replacement or the parent collection.
Deleting them outright wastes any authority the page had, and redirecting everything to the home page is worse than a clean error.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.