Shopify Specialists

How a Shopify store is built: core, apps and theme

Making good decisions on Shopify starts with understanding its three layers. The core, managed by Shopify, covers catalogue, customers, orders, checkout, taxes and payments. Apps add what the core doesn't do: reviews, subscriptions, advanced search, loyalty programmes or connectors to other systems. The theme is the visual layer and decides how all of the above is presented to the customer.

Almost any requirement can be solved in one of the three layers, and choosing the right one makes the difference in the medium term. Data specific to your business, such as a technical spec sheet, product compatibility or a size guide, usually fits better in Shopify's own metafields and metaobjects than in a third-party app: it stays in your store, is edited from the admin and the theme displays it without depending on anyone else.

Our work as specialists starts there: deciding what the standard platform solves, what needs an app and what deserves custom development, before committing budget.

Shopify adds new features continuously, and some end up replacing apps that used to be essential. We follow those changes closely so your store makes use of what the platform already includes and doesn't keep paying for what is now native.

Apps: what to check before installing one

The app ecosystem is Shopify's great strength and also its main source of problems when it grows unchecked. Every app that injects code into the store adds weight to the pages, many charge a monthly fee that adds up, and some access customer and order data. Before installing one we check who maintains it and how often it is updated, which permissions it requests, how it affects loading speed, whether it duplicates something another app or Shopify itself already does, and what happens to the data if it is ever uninstalled.

When no app in the ecosystem handles a process well, or when the process is specific to your business, we build a custom app that lives only in your store. It is the usual option for integrations with internal systems, specific business rules or automations that make no sense as a generic product.

Theme Store theme, custom theme or headless

There are three routes for the visual layer. Starting from a Theme Store theme and adapting it is the fastest and works well when the brand's design fits its structure. A custom theme, built in Liquid on Shopify's sections architecture, gives complete design freedom without leaving the standard model, so apps and the theme editor keep working as expected.

The third route is headless: the front end is built separately, for example with Hydrogen, Shopify's framework, and draws on the store's data through the Storefront API. It gives total control over the experience and lets you combine content from other sources, but it also means more development, more maintenance, and some apps that integrate with the theme no longer working as they are. We only recommend it when there is a specific need the theme cannot meet.

Selling in several countries, and limits worth knowing

Shopify Markets lets you group countries into markets and decide the language, currency, prices and domain for each one. The important questions are business ones: whether prices are converted automatically or set per market, whether each market has its own domain or a subfolder, how taxes and duties are displayed and which catalogue is sold in each country. We settle them with you before configuring anything, because they affect margins, tax and search rankings.

There are also structural limits worth knowing before choosing Shopify. URLs follow a fixed scheme, with prefixes such as /products/ or /collections/, which shapes the redirects in a migration. The checkout belongs to Shopify and how far it can be customised depends on the plan. And the number of variants and options per product has a cap that can fall short for highly configurable catalogues. None of these rules the platform out, but they should be assessed at the start, not halfway through the project.