Theme and section work, custom storefront features, performance and technical debt, delivered as bounded projects with acceptance criteria and a rollback.
Development without acceptance criteria becomes a retainer by accident.
Most development requests on a trading store are specific: a template that has to behave differently, a feature the merchandising team needs, a page that is slow, or a piece of the theme that everybody works around.
Each of those is a project with a boundary. It has a written outcome, a way to tell whether it has been reached, and an agreed answer to what happens if it has not. That is what separates development work from open-ended capacity, and it is why development here is quoted per project rather than per month by default.
Work is built in an unpublished theme against the real catalogue, reviewed on a preview, and published with the previous version retained. On a store taking orders, the rollback plan is part of the specification rather than a contingency somebody improvises.
Different work, different risk, different way of proving it is finished.
Swipe the work
Templates
New sections, template variants and settings that let the team assemble pages without another brief.
Features
Behaviour that Shopify supports natively but no theme ships with: metafield-driven content, structured specification data, bespoke selectors and merchandising rules.
Speed
Work on what the templates actually load: images, third-party scripts, app embeds and render-blocking work on the pages that carry traffic.
Debt
Duplicate sections, abandoned campaign code, apps still injecting scripts after cancellation, and the settings nobody dares touch.
The same route every time, so the risky step is never improvised.
| Step | What happens | What is recorded |
|---|---|---|
| Specification | The outcome, the boundary and the acceptance criteria are written down | A scope you can hold the work against |
| Build | Development in an unpublished theme against the live catalogue | A preview link and the theme version |
| Review | You check it against the acceptance criteria, on desktop and on a phone | Comments resolved before publication, not after |
| Publish | Published at an agreed time with the previous theme retained | The theme version to roll back to |
| Verify | Journeys, analytics and the affected templates checked live | A short record of what was verified |
Where a change touches checkout, fulfilment or pricing, verification includes a real transaction rather than a visual inspection.
Some requests are cheaper to solve by not building them.
Reviews, loyalty and subscriptions have mature applications behind them. Building a bespoke version to save a monthly fee usually trades a known cost for an unknown maintenance liability.
Pricing rules, stock logic and fulfilment behaviour implemented in a theme are invisible to every other system that needs them. Those belong where the data lives.
If a change cannot be observed in behaviour or in the numbers, it can still be worth building, but it should be chosen deliberately rather than defended afterwards.
A shorter build with a clear boundary beats a larger one nobody can finish.
Published starting figures in GBP and USD, excluding VAT.
The normal project prices, not a development-only subset
Migration and build
From £5,000From $6,500
Moving to Shopify and building the store in one project, so the data and the storefront land together rather than in two disconnected pieces of work.
Starting price
No migration
From £4,000From $5,200
A substantial rebuild of a store already trading on Shopify. The catalogue and history stay where they are; the storefront that sells them is replaced.
Starting price
Plus, B2B, multi-market
From £8,000From $10,500
Shopify Plus, B2B, multi-market, multi-language, custom integrations or headless work. These configurations are sized after discovery, not instant-priced.
Starting price · scoped after discovery
One bounded piece
£1,500$2,000
One bounded improvement: landing pages, a template rebuild, an analytics implementation, or a build-readiness review credited against a larger project.
Fixed price
Where the requests keep arriving
Per month
From £399From $525
Monitoring, routine technical care and platform updates, plus small edits to text and images already on the site. New pages and substantial feature development are quoted as project work.
Starting price
Per month
From £1,250From $1,650
A live improvement programme on one site. You set the priorities each month, we work the queue in order, and the month closes with what changed and what it did.
Starting price
Per month
From £3,000From $4,000
Continuous delivery across an agreed portfolio, with planning ahead of the work rather than a queue you have to keep feeding.
Starting price
Development work is bought at the same published prices as any other Shopify project, because it is the same work seen from a different angle. One bounded piece is priced as a project. Where the requests keep arriving, a monthly plan is usually cheaper than a sequence of small quotes, and it is still quoted separately.
Regularly. The scope names who owns which part of the theme and how changes are sequenced, because two parties editing the same templates without that agreement is where conflicts and lost work come from.
Yes, where one exists. Where it does not, we work in versioned unpublished themes and keep a record of what was published and when, which is the minimum a trading store needs.
Any customisation adds something to maintain. We keep changes close to the theme conventions, document what was added, and say plainly when a request would make a future theme update materially more expensive.
Usually. It begins with a short review of the current state, because inheriting a half-finished implementation without one is how a small fix turns into an unplanned rebuild.
A short description of the outcome is enough to say whether it is a project, a queue item, or something that should not be built at all.
