Case study collection
Custom Shopify Applications
Work where the answer was an application — with its own data model, its own rules, and a database behind it — rather than a theme change or something installed from the app store.
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Case studies
These engagements have little in common on the surface: a fundraising platform attributing orders to individual sellers, a shipping service that has to quote a price Shopify cannot express, pricing driven from a spreadsheet the business already maintains, an audiobook catalogue whose media lives outside the platform entirely, backend workflows that never touch a storefront. What connects them is the point at which configuration ran out. Each one needed state that Shopify does not model, or a calculation Shopify does not expose a setting for, and the honest answer was to build the thing rather than bend the platform around it.
That decision has a cost and it is worth naming: an application is something somebody has to own. These are the cases where the alternative cost more.
The engineering behind this work is custom Shopify app development.
Written up
What this work taught us, in detail.
Architecture
Shopify Checkout Extensibility pre-purchase upsells: inventory reservation, target line binding, and mutation race conditions
Engineering
Shopify Function product discount rules: tiered volume pricing and margin protection
Engineering
Shopify custom shipping rate calculation: Carrier Service API, heavy freight palletization, and timeout resilience
Architecture
Delivery customization functions in Shopify Plus: gating shipping methods by freight, address, and cart lines
Architecture
Seller QR attribution in Shopify: cookieless tracking, cart attributes, and payout ledgers
Architecture
Payment customization functions: gate payment methods by terms, not cart tags
Architecture
Dynamic art framing previews: orientation geometry over combinatorial media
Engineering
Custom checkout calculations are lines, not arithmetic
Architecture
Shopify hosts the store. Somebody has to host the app
Architecture
A role belongs to the membership, not the person
Engineering
A checkout rule that fails open is a suggestion
Architecture
Shopify sells the thing; it has no opinion about what the thing is made of
Engineering
Checkout is a budget, not a canvas
Architecture
The spreadsheet is not the problem: business-managed data as an integration boundary
Architecture
A balance is a cache: paying money out of a Shopify business
Your store next
Most engagements start with the same question.
What is actually slowing this store down, and is it worth fixing? Send us the URL and we will answer it honestly.