Real lessons from building Shopify stores.
What we learned building and scaling stores across Turkey, Finland, the UK and Italy. No marketing filler — decisions, numbers and trade-offs you can act on.
Topics
Articles grouped by subject — each topic page carries a short overview and the questions it answers.
All articles
Shopify development day rates in the UK: what you should actually pay in 2026
What a Shopify developer costs in the UK, why the range is so wide, and how to tell an underpriced quote from a good one.
When should an agency hire a Shopify developer vs. outsource?
The break-even is not where most agency owners think it is. A working model based on utilisation, not headcount cost.
Shopify Markets for UK brands selling into the EU after Brexit
IOSS, duties at checkout, currency and the country-specific payment methods that decide whether an EU customer completes the order.
Shopify vs WooCommerce: The Real Total Cost of Ownership (2026)
WooCommerce is 'free' and Shopify is 'expensive' — until you add up hosting, plugins, developer time and downtime. A line-by-line comparison over three years.
EU VAT and OSS for Shopify: Selling Cross-Border Without Nasty Surprises
Distance selling thresholds, One Stop Shop registration, correct tax display and what changes when you cross €10,000 in EU sales.
Klarna, PayPal or Stripe? The Payment Mix That Converts in Europe
Payment preferences change dramatically by country. The wrong mix quietly costs you double-digit conversion — here is what to offer where.
Magento 2 to Shopify: The Complete Migration Checklist
Magento's maintenance burden pushes many merchants to Shopify. Here is how to move products, customers, orders and — critically — rankings without losing anything.
Shopify Markets: Running Multiple Countries From One Store
Pricing, currencies, languages, domains and tax per market — without maintaining five separate stores.
Core Web Vitals for Shopify: The Technical Playbook
LCP, CLS and INP fixed one metric at a time, with the specific Liquid and JavaScript changes that move each number.
Is Shopify Plus worth it? A straight answer for growing brands
Plus is priced per month, not per feature. Here is what actually changes when you upgrade, what does not, and the four situations where it pays for itself.
How to choose a Shopify agency: nine questions
Three quotes for the same brief rarely describe the same work. These questions make proposals comparable — scope, handover, revisions and post-launch support.
Shopify collection architecture and organic traffic
Most search demand is category-level, not product-level. How to build collections for search rather than for the navigation menu.
Why your Shopify store is slow: eight real causes
The theme is rarely the culprit. App scripts, leftover code, images, fonts and tracking tags — what each one actually costs you.
Metafields or metaobjects? A working rule for Shopify data
Both extend Shopify's data model, but they solve different problems. The rule that decides it in one question, and the mistakes that force a rebuild later.
checkout.liquid is gone: what actually replaces it
Shopify retired checkout.liquid in favour of checkout extensibility. What the replacement architecture is, what you can and cannot customise, and where the old customisations went.
Product schema on Shopify: what search engines actually read
Most Shopify themes emit product structured data, and most of it is subtly wrong. What the markup needs to contain, the errors that suppress rich results, and why answer engines raise the stakes.
Filters and faceted navigation: the quiet crawl budget leak
Shopify filters generate near-infinite URLs. Which ones deserve to be indexed, which should never be crawled, and how to tell the difference without guessing.
Migrating to Shopify without losing rankings: the redirect plan
Most replatform traffic losses are not caused by Shopify. They are caused by a redirect map built after launch instead of before it. What the map has to cover, and in what order.
Getting a Shopify store cited by AI search
Answer engines read stores differently from search engines. What makes a page quotable, why structured data matters more than it did, and which habits actively exclude you.
Custom Shopify theme or premium theme? The honest test
A premium theme costs a few hundred pounds; a custom theme costs thousands. The question is not budget — it is whether your store has a requirement a theme cannot meet.
Headless Shopify: when Hydrogen actually earns its cost
Headless is not faster by default and it is not a growth strategy. The three situations where it genuinely wins, and what you take on when you choose it.
Shopify B2B: running wholesale in the same store as retail
Company profiles, per-company price lists and payment terms are native on Plus. What that replaces, and what still needs building.
Shopify accessibility: what selling into the EU now requires
Accessibility moved from good practice to a compliance question for e-commerce in the EU. What that means for a Shopify store, and the fixes that carry most of the weight.
Custom Shopify app or public app? Choosing the right build
Most merchants who need an app need a custom one, and most who ask for a public one have not decided what business they are in. The distinction, and what each costs to run.
Selling in several countries: domains, subfolders or subdomains?
Shopify Markets supports all three URL structures. They are not equivalent for search, and the choice is hard to reverse once traffic accumulates.
Winning product research: what works and what does not
A winning product is not a secret list. It is validated demand, workable margin and solved sourcing. The method, step by step.
Cookie consent on Shopify: what Consent Mode v2 changes
Consent banners are not just a legal checkbox. Since Consent Mode v2, the signal your banner sends decides whether conversion tracking works at all in the EEA.
What actually breaks in a Shopify migration
Migration problems rarely come from the data that moves. They come from what nobody noticed was not moving. The pre-launch checklist.
Third-party scripts: the performance cost nobody budgets for
Most Shopify speed problems are not the theme. They are the accumulated scripts of apps, pixels and tools nobody has reviewed since installing them.
Selling where Shopify Payments is unavailable
Shopify Payments does not operate in every market. What changes when you use a local provider, what it costs, and what to check before choosing one.
Chargebacks on Shopify: prevention beats disputing
Most chargebacks are won or lost before the order ships. What causes them, which evidence actually works, and the settings that prevent the avoidable ones.