Shopify runs an enormous share of online retail because it solves the hard, boring, never-finished parts of selling: a checkout that stays secure and compliant, payments that keep working when the rules change, hosting that survives the day your product goes viral. You pay a subscription and a slice of sales, and someone else’s engineering team maintains all of it. For most businesses selling most things, that is the right trade.
What Shopify doesn’t do is make the rest of the job disappear. The theme still has to be fast on a phone in a paddock. The product data still has to be structured so people can find what they want. Orders still have to reach your accountant, your warehouse and your stock count without anyone typing them in twice. That work is engineering, and it’s where we come in.
What we build on Shopify
- Storefront and theme development. Custom themes or serious work on an existing one, built for speed and for how people actually shop your catalogue, rather than another demo store with your logo dropped in.
- Custom apps and Shopify Functions. When the platform needs bending for wholesale pricing, unusual shipping rules, bundles, subscriptions or a system with no off-the-shelf connector, we build against the Shopify APIs instead of adding a fourth app that half does it.
- Integrations. Orders, stock, customers, payouts and fees flowing into Xero or MYOB, an ERP, a warehouse system or a CRM. This is the part that gives your team their afternoons back.
- Migrations. Moving from WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, Squarespace or a store somebody built years ago, with products, orders and redirects handled so the traffic survives the switch.
- Performance and conversion work. Finding what is slowing the store down and what is losing carts at the checkout, then fixing the parts that cost you money.
- Shopify Plus and B2B. Bigger catalogues, wholesale channels, multiple storefronts and checkout logic that a standard plan cannot express.
- Headless storefronts. Hydrogen or a custom frontend over Shopify’s commerce backend, when the shopping experience needs to do something a theme cannot.
Payments, and the Afterpay question
Most Australian stores end up running Shopify Payments or Stripe for cards, PayPal for the customers who won’t check out any other way, Apple Pay and Google Pay because they remove a whole form on a phone, and at least one buy now, pay later option. Afterpay is the one shoppers ask for by name, Zip tends to show up on higher-value carts, and Klarna or Humm come up depending on what you sell. We wire whichever ones you want into the checkout, including local gateways like eWAY or Tyro when your bank or your in-store terminals have already made the choice for you.
Worth knowing before you switch them all on: BNPL is the most expensive money you will take. Card processing sits around 1.7% plus a few cents, while Afterpay and its competitors charge merchants roughly 4% to 6% of the sale. On decent margins that can pay for itself in bigger baskets and customers who wouldn’t have bought at all. On thin margins it quietly eats the profit on every order, and nobody notices until someone reads the settlement report properly. We will help you work out which providers are worth their cut for what you actually sell, rather than adding all of them because the theme has logos for them.
The harder part is what happens after the money moves. Each provider settles on its own schedule, nets out its own fees, and reports refunds and chargebacks its own way, so a store running four payment methods gives your bookkeeper four reconciliations that don’t agree with the order list. Getting payouts, fees and refunds landing correctly in Xero or MYOB is payment systems integration work, and it’s the part most Shopify projects skip until the first BAS makes it someone’s problem.
The app bill is the thing nobody warns you about
The usual Shopify store starts clean and gets heavier every quarter. A review app, a popup app, an upsell app, a shipping app, a loyalty app, a page builder. Each one is a small monthly fee and a script that loads on every page, and by the time there are fifteen of them you are paying hundreds of dollars a month for a store that takes six seconds to show a product. Slow pages cost you orders at exactly the moment someone has their card out, which is why speed work on a store pays for itself faster than it does on a brochure site.
When we audit a store, the app list is the first place we look. Some of those apps are doing real work and should stay. Several are usually doing something a few lines of theme code would do faster and for free, and one or two are typically doing nothing at all except loading. Cutting that list is often the cheapest win available to an existing store.
When Shopify isn’t the answer
We build custom software for a living, so it would be easy to talk you into a bespoke store. We mostly don’t, because Shopify is probably the right call and pretending otherwise to win a bigger job would be doing you over. Selling online is a solved problem, and rebuilding a checkout from scratch to sell candles or car parts means owning the security patches, the compliance updates and the payment integrations forever.
The honest triggers for something else are narrow. Pricing your product needs logic the platform can’t express. Your catalogue has a structure Shopify’s product model fights. The order has to trigger a manufacturing or scheduling process, not just a pick and pack. You’re running B2B terms, approvals and account-specific pricing that the checkout was never built for. When one of those is true we will say so and cost out a store you control or the custom system sitting behind it. When none of them are true, Shopify is the cheaper, faster, safer decision and we will tell you that in the first meeting.
Where a Shopify project actually costs money
The homepage is the cheap part. What moves the number is the size and state of your product catalogue, how unusual your shipping and tax rules are, how many systems the store has to talk to, and whether you are migrating years of orders and URLs from somewhere else. A store selling forty products with flat-rate postage is a different job from one with variants, bundles, wholesale tiers and freight priced by weight and zone. Our breakdown of what a website costs in Australia sets the range before you brief anyone, and the Software Project Brief Template turns a rough idea into something a builder can price honestly.
We work with retailers across Australia and overseas, and we are based in Toowoomba, so if you are searching locally see ecommerce and Shopify development in Toowoomba or the wider picture for retail and ecommerce businesses.