Shopify development for serious e-commerce.
Custom themes, migrations, apps and supplier-feed automation for catalogues in the tens of thousands of SKUs. Real stores in production, built by engineers, not a template shop.
What we build on Shopify
- Custom Online Store 2.0 themes
- Migrations to Shopify
- Private & public Shopify apps
- Supplier-feed automation
- Calculated & carrier shipping
- Headless (Hydrogen / Next.js)
Who it's for
A fit when the build is real engineering
- DTC and e-commerce brands building or rebuilding a custom storefront
- Stores migrating from WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart or custom platforms
- Catalogue-heavy stores (10K to 100K+ SKUs) needing supplier-feed automation
- Advanced / Plus merchants needing carrier-calculated shipping
- Brands needing a custom app for ERP, CRM or marketplace integrations
- Existing stores needing ongoing engineering and performance work
Probably not a fit
We'll be honest if Shopify is the wrong call
- Pure marketing sites with no checkout, where Shopify is the wrong tool
- Single-product stores that fit a pre-built theme out of the box
- Projects where a freelancer's $500 theme tweak is genuinely all you need
- Teams looking purely for the cheapest Shopify Partner bid
Plan selection
Choosing the right Shopify plan
The answer is rarely Basic past a certain GMV, and it isn't always Plus. Here's the framework we use on the first call, before anyone gets anchored on a price.
Basic Shopify
Small catalogues, single market, lean theme.
Shopify
Established merchants. Custom OS 2.0 theme, modest app stack.
Advanced
Multi-market, complex shipping, custom apps. The DTC sweet spot.
◆ Most growth-stage DTCShopify Plus
Heavy B2B, custom checkout, Functions, multiple storefronts.
Real work
Shopify stores in production today
US Trade & Consumer · Outdoor Power Equipment
Stack
Shopify Plus · Liquid · Custom Apps · Carrier-Calculated Shipping
Built directly with the founderLarge-catalogue Shopify, fed by automation
A US distributor of outdoor-power-equipment and trailer parts running 70,000+ live SKUs with access to over a million OEM parts. The hard part wasn't the theme; it was the data. We built a scheduled ingestion service that normalises every supplier feed (CSV, FTP, API), reconciles it against Shopify, and pushes deltas (new products, price and stock changes, discontinuations) through the GraphQL Admin API without breaking the storefront. Plus real-time carrier-calculated freight rates on heavy items at checkout.
Germany · Pet Food & Animal Feed
Stack
Shopify · Liquid · Custom App · Marketplace Sync
Built directly with the founderMultilingual Shopify for an EU brand
A German specialist feed retailer with a deep, faceted catalogue. We built a custom mobile-first theme with German default and an English mirror, the German-market essentials (Kauf auf Rechnung, free-shipping thresholds, intra-EU VAT), and a sync layer that keeps Shopify, Amazon DE and eBay DE in lockstep within minutes, so nothing oversells.
UK · Luxury Resale Fashion
Stack
Shopify · Custom Liquid Theme · Tag-Driven Filtering
Built directly with the founderOne-of-one merchandising for luxury resale
One of the UK's longest-running preloved designer retailers. Every item is a single quantity with its own condition and provenance. We built a custom theme for unique-SKU merchandising: tag-driven filtering by category, designer, size and price, plus a consignment intake flow built into the same install, so one team manages storefront and seller leads.
India D2C · Sustainable Period Wear
Stack
Shopify · Custom Theme · Bundle Builder · Social Commerce
Built directly with the founderEducation-led D2C with bundle building
A Bangalore D2C menstrual-underwear brand selling a category that's both intimate and educational. We built a mobile-first theme with education-led PDPs, curated bundles merchandised as their own product pages, an age-segmented Teen line, and native Instagram / Facebook social commerce plus marketplace presence.
Personalised Photo Puzzles
Stack
Shopify · Liquid · Photo Upload Module · Print Fulfilment
Built directly with the founderA custom PDP configurator with live preview
Customers upload a photo and get a printed jigsaw. We built the configurator as a custom Liquid section with a JS module: photo upload, crop and rotate, piece-count and size selection, and a real-time preview. Each line item carries the uploaded asset through checkout into fulfilment, with no chasing emails for original files.
How we approach Shopify
How we build high-performance stores
Strong opinions about how Shopify should be built when the store is doing serious revenue. We deviate when there's a real reason, not because something is trending in the Partner ecosystem.
Online Store 2.0 themes
Reusable sections and JSON templates the marketing team can rearrange without a developer. No heavy page-builder apps that bloat the storefront.
Mobile-first, real Core Web Vitals
60-80% of Shopify traffic is mobile. Every PDP is designed at 360px first, with LCP, CLS and INP budgeted, not hoped for.
Migrations done with the APIs
Customers, orders, variants, metafields, redirects and a rehearsed cut-over. Woo, Magento, OpenCart, BigCommerce and custom: we've migrated all of them.
Custom apps when it's the right answer
ERP sync, CRM, billing, dashboards, marketplace exports, built on App Bridge with OAuth, GraphQL, webhooks and rate-limit-aware retries.
Supplier-feed automation
Scheduled ingestion that normalises price and stock files and pushes deltas into Shopify, proven on catalogues up to 70,000+ active SKUs.
Calculated shipping on Plus / Advanced
Freight, oversize, multi-warehouse and trade pricing via a Custom Carrier Service returning real-time rates at checkout.
Storefront features, built native
Filters, product-finder quizzes, photo configurators, bundles and tiered pricing, written as Liquid sections and JS, not bolt-on apps.
Headless when it earns it
Hydrogen or Next.js when the brand genuinely benefits, not because it's the fashionable answer. We'll tell you when it isn't.
How we work
Our Shopify development process
Discovery & audit
One week mapping the catalogue, integrations and business goals. For migrations, the source data model. Output: a written architecture and a 90-day plan.
Stack lock & infrastructure
Plan (Standard / Advanced / Plus), theme strategy, app footprint and hosting. CI, version control and a dev store before any production code.
Sprint zero
Theme scaffolding, base sections, metafield model and admin set up the way merchandising will use it. By the end, you log into a working dev store.
Feature sprints
Two-week sprints shipped through CI, every change reviewed. Progress every Friday and a preview store you can poke at any time.
Cut-over & hardening
Rehearsed dry-run, then live cut-over with redirects, password-reset flows and a checklist run twice. Performance, security and Black-Friday-grade load.
Launch & 30-day watch
Full availability for the first month (real customers find real bugs), then into a maintenance and feature retainer.
Honest comparison
Why choose Appycodes for Shopify
| Capability | Theme-only Partner | Freelancer | In-house dev | Appycodes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Custom Liquid theme development | Yes | Mixed | Yes | Yes |
| Migration to Shopify (Woo / Magento / custom) | Rare | Sometimes | If prioritised | Yes |
| Shopify app development (private / public) | No | Rare | Sometimes | Yes |
| Catalogues 50K+ SKU with feed automation | No | No | Maybe | Yes |
| Carrier-calculated shipping on Plus / Advanced | Rare | Rare | Yes | Yes |
| Time to start | 1-3 weeks | 1-2 weeks | 8-16 weeks | 1-2 weeks |
| Continuity if someone leaves | Mixed | High risk | Yes | Built in |
None of these is universally right. We tend to be the call when the build is genuinely engineering work: migration, custom apps, complex catalogues, calculated shipping, or integrations Shopify alone doesn't cover.
All three. Most of our work sits on Advanced and Plus, because that's where serious merchants land. Plus unlocks Functions, Checkout Extensibility, B2B, multiple expansion stores and the carrier-calculated rates API. We use the standard plan when the merchant is genuinely earlier-stage, and we're honest about which plan fits before recommending an upgrade.
Yes, plus migrations from custom-built platforms. It's more than a CSV import: customer accounts and password resets, historic orders, variants, redirects to preserve SEO, metafield mapping, tax and shipping zones, payment provider migration, and a tested cut-over plan. We use the Shopify APIs, Matrixify, the official importers and custom scripts depending on the source.
Both. New builds are Online Store 2.0 Liquid themes with reusable sections the marketing team can rearrange without code. Existing themes we audit, refactor and extend. We don't strip working code without a real reason, and we avoid heavy page-builder apps that slow Core Web Vitals.
Yes. Our largest build runs a 70,000+ SKU live catalogue with access to over a million OEM parts, fed by scripts that pull supplier price and inventory files (CSV, FTP, API) and reconcile them against Shopify on a schedule, handling new products, price updates, stock changes and discontinuation without breaking the storefront.
Yes. Private and public apps for ERP integrations, CRM sync, billing software, merchant dashboards, marketplace exports (Amazon, eBay) and bespoke storefront features. Built on App Bridge and Polaris with OAuth, the GraphQL Admin API, webhooks and proper rate-limit handling.
All of these. Custom collection filters on Search & Discovery and metafields, branching product-finder quizzes, photo-upload configurators, B2B price-tier logic and bundle builders, written as Liquid sections and JS modules, not bolted-on apps that re-render the page.
Yes. Standard Shopify ships carrier-calculated rates for USPS, UPS, FedEx and DHL. Beyond that, on Advanced and Plus we integrate third-party shipping APIs as a Custom Carrier Service for freight, regional and B2B carriers: trade pricing, oversized items and multi-warehouse split shipments.
Yes. Every build is mobile-first because most stores see 60-80% of traffic on mobile. Real touch-target sizing, Core Web Vitals tuned for mobile networks, Shopify's responsive image pipeline, and PDPs that hold up at 360px wide.
Both. Most clients move into a maintenance and feature retainer after launch. And we'll take over a store from another agency or freelancer, starting with a theme, app and metafield audit, then a focused path forward rather than a rebuild by default.
Ritesh · Founding Partner, Appycodes
A decade shipping Shopify storefronts and apps for serious merchants across the UK, US, Germany, India and Australia, including The OEM Parts Store's 70,000-SKU catalogue. The focus is production e-commerce engineering: the unglamorous decisions that keep a store fast and easy to change years after launch.
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