Shopify development services
Every way we build, rebuild and extend Shopify stores, in one place. 140 stores shipped by senior engineers, each service with its own scope, price from and timeline. Start where the audit points you.
140 stores built, 8 years on the platform, senior engineers only
Every service starts with the same free audit
Whatever you think you need, the audit is where scope meets your actual store. It is free, recorded, and yours to take to any team.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Real device measurements plus the script inventory behind them, with keep, lazy and remove verdicts.
Conversion blockers
Checkout adjacent friction, mobile layout issues and missing trust signals, ranked by estimated revenue impact.
Data and integrations
Where stock, order and customer truth lives, what drifts, and which flows leak money through manual work.
Technical SEO
Indexation state, metadata gaps, structured data coverage and redirect risk, as a crawler sees it.
What Shopify development services actually cover
Shopify development services fall into a small number of real categories, and most agencies blur them together to sell whatever they have staff for. Here is the honest map. A theme build changes what customers see: the storefront, its speed, its structure. Custom development changes what the store does: buying flows, portals, configurators, logic that no app sells. An app build packages that logic into owned tooling inside your admin. An integration connects Shopify to the systems that run your operations, ERP, warehouse, CRM, finance. A Plus replatform moves an established business onto the platform tier that fits its scale. A headless build replaces the storefront layer itself. And embedded developers add senior capacity inside your own team.
The categories matter because the failure modes differ. Stores that buy theme work when they needed integration work stay pretty and broken. Stores that buy headless when a theme would do pay premium prices for slower marketing cycles, a trade nobody would sign knowingly. Our audit exists to prevent exactly that: it names the leak first, then the service that fixes it, then the price.
Everything below shares the same delivery spine: a paid nothing audit upfront, a written scope with a fixed price, weekly demonstrable progress, a rehearsed launch and a handover where you own the code. The numbers we publish, 23% median conversion lift, 38% median LCP reduction, a 9 weeks median project, come from that spine being the same every time.
The seven services, and who each is for
Every service page carries its own quick answer box, pricing table, process timeline and FAQ.
How to choose between the services
Choose by symptom, not by fashion. If the store looks generic or loads slowly, the service is theme development: speed and differentiation are storefront problems with storefront fixes. If customers cannot buy the way you sell, quotes, subscriptions with unusual rules, configuration steps, that is custom development, possibly wrapped as an app your team owns. If operations run on spreadsheets between systems, that is integration work, and the oversell incidents and month end rituals are the cost of leaving it.
If you are hitting platform ceilings, staff seats, API limits, checkout lock in, the answer is Plus, and the economics check is arithmetic we do with your GMV. If content drives your funnel harder than catalogue browsing, headless earns its premium; otherwise a fast theme wins on every axis. And if the real constraint is throughput rather than architecture, embedded developers are the honest answer.
Two cautions from experience. First, do not buy architecture for problems you might have in three years: platforms change faster than projections. Second, sequence matters: integration truth before a replatform, performance before traffic spending, brand clarity before a headless design system. The audit sequences the work so each project funds the next.
How every engagement runs
The same spine under every service
01
Audit
Free, recorded, yours. Findings and a recommendation, whether or not you hire us.
02
Fixed scope
Written deliverables, a fixed price and a launch date. It only moves if the scope does.
03
Weekly proof
A staging store you can click, a weekly note on what shipped, no black box months.
04
Launch and handover
Rehearsed launch with rollback, then repositories, documentation and training, all yours.
At a glance
All seven services, side by side
The one table to screenshot for your budget conversation. Starting prices, timelines and the situation each service answers.
| Service | Price from | Timeline | Choose it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Theme development | $3,500 | 4 to 6 weeks | The store looks like competitors or loads slowly on mobile |
| Custom development | $5,500 | 4 to 10 weeks | You need buying logic, portals or configurators no app sells |
| App development | $4,500 | 6 to 10 weeks | App fees scale with volume or your rules do not fit any app |
| Integration services | $4,000 | 3 to 6 weeks | Stock, order or customer truth drifts between systems |
| Shopify Plus replatform | $9,000 | 8 to 12 weeks | You are outgrowing plan limits or need checkout control |
| Headless development | $15,000 | 10 to 16 weeks | Content and commerce are entwined beyond what themes express |
| Embedded developers | $25/hr | Start in 1 to 2 weeks | You need steady senior capacity inside your team |
What changed on Shopify recently, and what it means for you
Shopify ships fast, and three shifts matter for anyone budgeting development in 2026. Knowing them changes what you buy: several line items that used to be custom builds are platform features now, and several shortcuts that used to work are being closed off.
Checkout is extensible, officially. Shopify Functions and checkout blocks let Plus merchants add upsells, validation and delivery logic inside Shopify's supported upgrade path. The practical consequence: checkout work that required risky scripts five years ago is now safe, testable and cheaper. If an agency still proposes forking checkout, that is a signal to keep looking.
Themes got genuinely powerful. Sections everywhere, theme blocks and metafield driven content mean marketing flexibility that once demanded a page builder or a custom app is native editor work now. The result is faster stores (no builder wrappers) and lower ongoing fees. Our theme builds exploit this hard: we have removed entire app budgets with native sections.
Headless matured into a platform product. Hydrogen and Oxygen turned bespoke front end architecture into a vendor supported stack. That lowered the risk of headless, but not the cost of doing it well. The decision test stays the same: content depth, traffic economics or interaction demands that a theme genuinely cannot meet.
The direction of travel is consolidation. Reviews, subscriptions, B2B and loyalty have all moved toward first party features. Every quarter, some paid app becomes a settings screen. A good development partner should be reducing your app bill over time, not just adding to it.
How to evaluate any Shopify development agency, including us
Five questions that separate agencies worth their quotes from agencies worth avoiding. Ask them in the first call and watch what happens to the conversation.
- 1
Who exactly will do the work?
Names, seniority and availability. Agencies that cannot answer this are selling capacity they will staff later, usually with whoever is free. The follow up: will those same people be in the kickoff call?
- 2
What did you decide not to build, and why?
Strong agencies have a portfolio of nos: the headless build talked down to a theme, the custom app replaced by a settings change. A agency with no nos has never protected a client budget.
- 3
How does the quote handle the edge cases?
Migration dirty data, third party API quirks, peak season load. Quotes that ignore the edges are teasers. Ask what happens to the price when reality arrives, and get the exclusions in writing.
- 4
What happens at the end of the engagement?
Repository transfer, documentation, training, and who owns the infrastructure. If the answer involves a licence, an escrow or a monthly fee just to keep the lights on, keep looking.
- 5
Which numbers will you commit to?
Baselines before, measurement windows after, and a named owner for the delta. Marketing language is free; a committed number is the only evidence an agency expects to be held to its work.
Engagement models
Three ways to buy the work
Fixed scope projects
Best for defined outcomes: a replatform, a theme, an integration, an app. You get deliverables, a price and a date in writing. Changes are quoted separately, so nothing drifts silently.
From $3,500
Monthly care plans
Best for live stores needing continuity: monitoring, updates, small fixes, reporting and a prioritised backlog. Sized to the stack, from a simple theme to a headless build.
From $500/mo
Embedded developers
Best for teams with their own roadmap: a named senior engineer in your tools, monthly capacity you control, work logs you audit, and a flat fee conversion to permanent after six months.
From $25/hr
Most clients combine models over time: a fixed project first, a care plan while the store settles, embedded hours when the roadmap fills. The audit recommends where to start and what each stage should cost.
Where these services earn their keep fastest
The same service lands differently by category. A theme rebuild for a beauty brand is a content architecture problem; for a B2B wholesaler it is a reorder flow problem. We staff teams that already know the difference.
Fashion and apparel
Variant depth, size friction, seasonal drops. Theme speed and returns design carry the quarter.
Beauty and personal care
Subscriptions, bundles and education led buying. Custom logic earns its fee here every week.
Home and living
Big baskets, delivery surcharges, 3PL complexity. Integrations protect margin on every order.
B2B and wholesale
Price lists, quotes, net terms. Plus with company accounts, built properly, replaces a fleet of workarounds.
Food, beverage and wellness
Regulated content, delivery windows, locality rules. Checkout extensibility keeps compliance invisible.
Multi market DTC
Currencies, duties, languages. Markets configuration plus careful catalogue modelling scales without clones.
Services usually arrive in combinations
Real scopes rarely match one service page. These three combinations cover most of what we quote, and the audit says which one you are actually looking at.
Replatform stack
Plus development plus theme plus one integration, sequenced so data truth arrives before the new storefront depends on it. Typical total $13,000 to $24,000 over ten to fourteen weeks.
Growth stack
Theme rebuild plus custom features plus a care plan: speed first, then the buying logic the fast store exposes, then the team to keep compounding. Typically $4,500 to start and $500 monthly.
Operations stack
Integration services plus app development: sync the systems, then own the tooling that sits on top of them. Typically $10,000 to $16,000, with reconciliation reports from week four.
The platform terms that matter in a scope conversation
Plain definitions, because half of all scoping confusion is vocabulary. These are the terms that change price and timeline when they appear in a brief.
- Shopify Plus
- The enterprise tier: more staff seats, higher API limits, checkout extensibility, Flow automation, B2B features and negotiated payment processing rates. It earns its fee somewhere around $1M annual GMV, a calculation the audit does with your numbers.
- Liquid
- Shopify's template language. Everything a theme renders, from product pages to metafield content, flows through Liquid on the server. Fast, well documented, and the reason native themes outperform bolted on page builders.
- Shopify Functions
- Server side logic that runs inside checkout, discounts and delivery: validation rules, custom pricing, delivery options. The supported replacement for risky checkout scripts, which is why we build on it exclusively.
- Storefront API
- The GraphQL interface that powers custom and headless front ends: products, carts, customer accounts. Hydrogen is Shopify's framework for consuming it, and Oxygen is its edge hosting runtime.
- Shopify Markets
- Native multi market selling: currencies, languages, duties and catalogues per region from one store. Configured well, it replaces a small fleet of single country stores and most of the apps that patched for it.
- Metafields and metaobjects
- Structured custom data: specifications, size guides, editorial blocks, anything a product or page needs beyond the standard fields. Modelling them well is the difference between a flexible store and a hardcoded one.
What to bring to the first call
Thirty minutes with the right inputs beats three weeks of back and forth. Whatever agency you talk to, ours included.
- 1
Your revenue band and trajectory
Not for a pitch, for sizing. The right service for $800k a year is actively wrong for $8M, and the crossover points are arithmetic.
- 2
The constraint, in one sentence
Sales are flat, the store is slow, ops is drowning, we cannot ship pages: one sentence beats a fifty page brief for choosing a service.
- 3
Store access, read only
Analytics, themes and apps visibility. It turns the conversation from hypotheses to findings, which is the whole point of the audit.
- 4
A decision maker
Someone who can sign a scope. Projects stall in committee and ship with a named owner, and the calendar reflects it within two weeks.
- 5
Your numbers, if you have them
Conversion rate, LCP if known, order volume, app spend. Absence is fine: the audit gathers them, and then they are yours in writing.
Shopify development services FAQ
The questions we hear when brands compare services. Service specific questions live on each service page.
What Shopify development services does Codioo offer?
Which service should a growing brand start with?
Do all services come with fixed quotes?
Can services be combined in one engagement?
What does a Shopify development service cost per month afterwards?
How do I know which service my store needs?
Do you work with stores outside the US?
What is the first step if we are not sure yet?
What size stores do you work with?
Can you take over a project another agency started?
Do you work with our existing designers or developers?
Do you offer ongoing Shopify maintenance?
Not sure which service you need? Start with the audit
The free store audit names the biggest leak in your store, revenue, speed or operations, and recommends the service that fixes it, with a fixed quote. Within one business day.
- Stores built
- 140
- Reply time
- Within one business day
- Cost
- Free, no obligation