The honest answer for most product businesses is Shopify — and the exceptions are specific enough to list. Here is the whole decision.
This question gets argued as ideology when it is really arithmetic. Shopify sells you a solved back office — inventory, payments, taxes, shipping, refunds, fraud — for a monthly fee plus a slice of every sale. A custom storefront sells you control and margin for more up-front build and more responsibility. Which trade is right depends on your catalogue, your volume and how unusual your selling model is.
What it should never depend on is what your developer finds more interesting. We build both, and we will tell you plainly which you are.
The admin your staff can run without you, apps for everything, and infrastructure that does not fall over on a busy day. For a normal catalogue it is the fast, safe answer.
A tight catalogue, total design control, no platform fees compounding on volume, and selling models — subscriptions, bookings, hybrids — that fight a standard store's assumptions.
Platform cut plus app subscriptions scale with success. At low volume they are trivial; at high volume they quietly become a salary.
Choose Shopify when you have a growing catalogue, staff who need to manage orders without calling a developer, and standard commerce needs. The theme look is escapable — that is design work, not a platform limit — and the app store papers over most gaps. This is the right answer for most product brands, most of the time.
Choose custom when the catalogue is small and controlled, the experience is the brand, the selling model bends a standard store out of shape, or the volume makes the platform's percentage worth engineering away. A four-product skincare line selling on story and subscription is the classic case — which is exactly the kind we have shipped.
You are not married to the first choice, but divorces need doing properly. The traffic risk in any migration is page addresses: every product and collection URL that changes must permanently redirect to its successor, or the search traffic you built evaporates with nothing to show for it.
Keep the domain constant, map the redirects, carry over the product copy and reviews, and test payments, tax and shipping with real orders before the switch flips. It is a weekend of care that protects years of accumulation — and it is included when we do the move.
Straight answers. If yours is not here, call and ask.
Shopify: from $39/month plus transaction fees and typically $20–100/month of apps, forever. Custom: more up front to build, then hosting measured in dollars. The crossover point depends entirely on your volume — we will run your numbers honestly.
Yes — the template look is a design budget problem, not a platform one. We design storefronts on Shopify that do not resemble the theme they started as.
Fine for a first stall; they get outgrown fastest of all. If commerce is the business rather than a side feature, start on Shopify or custom and skip the middle migration.
Yes — products, images, copy and customer-facing pages, with every old address redirected so rankings carry across. Payments, tax and shipping re-tested with live orders before launch.
Tell us about the business and we'll come back with a fixed price and a timeline. No obligation, no sales pitch.