Ecommerce
Shopify Store Setup and Development
We set your Shopify store up, and develop an existing one around what the business actually needs. Theme work, custom functionality and the systems the store connects to are one project.
The real work starts after setup: how the catalogue is structured, which jobs run from the admin, and which ones need development.
Is Shopify the right platform for your business?
Shopify is not the answer to every ecommerce project. Settling that early costs far less than six months on the wrong platform.
It can be a strong choice
- You want the fundamentals of commerce ready-made, and development spent where you differ.
- Products, orders and content need to run from a single admin interface.
- An ecosystem of existing apps beats writing the same things from scratch.
- What needs building is the work around the commerce engine, not the engine.
It may not be enough on its own
- The business rules are too particular to fit the platform's model.
- The order or payment architecture is unusual.
- What is needed is an internal operations system rather than a shopfront.
- The project is not really about selling online at all.
If the platform is still undecided, the wider comparison lives on the ecommerce store setup page.
If what you need is less a store than a system with rules of its own, that moves to custom software development.
A new store, or an existing one?
The work looks different depending on which one you are starting from.
Building from scratch
How the catalogue is structured decides how easy the store is to run on every day after the first.
- Catalogue architecture: products, variants, collections
- Theme setup, brand and content implementation
- Navigation, product and collection pages
- Shipping, delivery and payment provider
- Domain, analytics and technical setup
- The apps and integrations the store needs
- Pre-launch checks and testing
The scope follows what the store sells.
Payments carry a country-dependent limit worth knowing early. Shopify Payments, Shopify's own infrastructure, is available only in the countries listed in Shopify's official documentation; Türkiye is not among them, and Shopify directs merchants outside that list to a third-party provider. Which one fits is settled while the setup is planned.
Developing an existing store
The work is usually not building from scratch, but straightening what bent as the business grew.
- The theme no longer fits what the store has become.
- The theme is adapted, or the sections falling short are rewritten.
- Product and collection structure has sprawled.
- The catalogue is restructured, and filtering and navigation follow.
- Apps have piled up doing each other's jobs.
- We work out which are needed and simplify the rest.
- Work the admin does not cover is being done by hand.
- Repetitive work moves to development or an integration.
Shopify theme and storefront development
A theme is both look and manageability. How a section is written decides who can change the content later.
The layers of a theme
- TemplateDefines which sections make up a given type of page.
- SectionA reusable content module added and reordered from the theme editor.
- BlockA smaller unit arranged individually inside a section.
- SnippetRepeated pieces of theme code; invisible in the admin.
Content in the right layer means the next change needs no developer.
What the work covers
- Adapting an existing theme to what the store needs
- Reusable custom sections
- Shaping the product page around how the store sells
- Collection pages, filtering and navigation
- Consistent behaviour across screen sizes
Where apps reach into the storefront, we prefer the theme app extensions Shopify provides for exactly that. Edits scattered through theme code cost more at every update after.
An existing app, or custom development?
This is the decision Shopify projects turn on most often. Each is right some of the time; what is always wrong is deciding without looking.
An existing app may be enough
Custom development may make more sense
The requirement is common and standard.
The workflow is specific to the business.
How the app works matches how the process works.
Several manual steps need to become one solution.
The total running cost is reasonable.
An external system needs a precise integration.
It adds no unnecessary complexity.
An off-the-shelf option brings too many compromises.
Maintenance stays with the provider.
The business logic will not fit in settings.
Custom is not automatically better. If an existing app does the job, we do not rewrite it.
Where a project calls for it, custom Shopify app and integration development can be part of the scope. That describes a type of work — not a product of ours published on the App Store.
The systems a store connects to
Where the connection is missing, somebody is carrying orders, stock and customer data between systems by hand.
- ERP and accounting
- CRM and customer records
- Stock and warehouse management
- Shipping and delivery
- Payment providers
- Analytics and reporting
- Marketplaces and other sales channels
- The company's own services and APIs
What is possible depends on what the other system exposes and which Shopify interfaces the project can use.
Once the work becomes a process running between systems, it joins up with business process automation.
If processes outside the admin need a system of their own, that falls under custom software development.
If orders arrive through WhatsApp rather than the store, that channel has a flow of its own: WhatsApp order automation.
Migration, rebuilds and technical groundwork
Moving a site to Shopify is not a matter of copying data across. The part that needs planning is everything around the data.
What a migration has to account for
- What moves: products, variants, customers, order history
- URL structure and redirects from the old addresses
- How product and category structure is rebuilt
- The equivalent of each existing integration
- Analytics continuity
- The domain switch and the order things go live in
Technical groundwork
- Discipline about images and media
- Keeping theme and app weight under control
- Theme code that can still be maintained later
- Crawlable category and product pages, redirect and canonical behaviour
These describe how we work, not a promised outcome. We do not commit to a particular speed score, search ranking or lift in conversion.
Selling in more than one language or market
Selling into several countries takes decisions in a few places at once.
Shopify provides a structure for separating currency, language, domain, product availability, tax and theme content by market. Which of those a given store can use changes with how it is set up, so we plan against the current state at the start of a project.
What has to be decided
- Which languages you sell in
- Currency and regional pricing
- Product availability per market
- Domain or subfolder structure
- Shipping and tax rules
Before the conversation
With answers to these, the first call can be about scope instead of guesswork.
- Is there an existing Shopify store — a new build, or development work?
- Roughly how many products and variants?
- Which theme is in use, and which apps are installed?
- Which custom sections or features are needed?
- Is there an ERP, CRM or accounting system to connect?
- Which payment and shipping providers are in use?
- Which languages, currencies and countries will you sell in?
- If this is a migration, what is the current platform?
- Who will manage the store after launch?
Frequently asked questions
- Can a Shopify store be built from scratch?
- Yes. Catalogue structure, theme, shipping and payment configuration, integrations and pre-launch checks are handled as one scope. The timeline depends on the number of products and how much custom development is needed.
- Can an existing theme be developed further, or does it need rebuilding?
- In most cases the existing theme can be worked on. Rebuilding comes up when its structure cannot carry the changes being asked of it, or when layers of past edits have made it impossible to maintain.
- An existing app, or custom development?
- If the requirement is common and the app works the way your process works, an existing app is faster and cheaper. Custom development earns its cost when the workflow is specific to the business.
- Can Shopify connect to other systems?
- It can. What is possible depends on what the other system exposes, so we do not give a definitive answer before seeing your systems.
- Can my current ecommerce site be migrated to Shopify?
- It can. The hard part is not moving the data but planning around it: URL structure, redirects, how categories are rebuilt, and the order of the domain switch.
- Is Shopify the right choice for every business?
- No. It is a strong choice when you want the fundamentals of commerce ready-made. When the business rules do not fit the platform's model, we would rather say so at the start.
Tell us about your project.
Write down what you have in mind in a few sentences. We will show you what we could build for it.