Build a Shopify store that doesn't need babysitting

Six to ten weeks for most builds, measured from the end of discovery to go-live. Discovery adds a week. What extends it is almost never design: it is catalog data quality and how many systems have to agree with each other. A single ERP integration adds two to three weeks. If your product data needs cleanup before it can be migrated, that work happens in parallel but it has a floor.

Not if the redirect map is done properly. Every existing URL gets mapped to its new destination before launch, we keep the mapping in a spreadsheet you can audit, and we monitor Search Console for 404s and crawl errors for 30 days after cutover. Expect a short dip in the first two weeks while Google recrawls, then recovery. The risk is real but it is a process problem, not an unavoidable cost.

You own all of it. Theme code lives in your GitHub organization, the store is in your Shopify account, and any middleware runs on infrastructure billed to you. We do not hold licenses, we do not use proprietary page builders, and we do not charge to hand things over. If you want to move to another agency or bring it in-house, everything they need is already in your accounts with documentation.

Often yes, and we will tell you when that is the cheaper answer. If the theme is a well-maintained commercial one with sane structure, extending it is usually the better spend. We recommend a rebuild when the theme has accumulated years of app snippets and dead code, when it predates Online Store 2.0 so your team cannot edit content, or when performance problems trace back to theme architecture rather than apps.

Customers, addresses, and historical orders migrate. Passwords cannot transfer between platforms for security reasons, so customers set a new password on first login, and we handle that with a communication sequence rather than letting people discover it at checkout. Subscription contracts are the one genuinely difficult case: those usually need coordination with the subscription app vendor and sometimes re-authorization from the customer.

The same people who were on the call. You get a named senior developer and a named lead for the engagement, and there is no handoff to a junior team once the contract is signed. We run a weekly standing call, keep one shared backlog you can see, and send a Loom recap each week so progress is visible without you chasing it.