Shopify development and integration
Shopify is the right call when you want the platform to own hosting, checkout and payment-card compliance. That leaves your budget for the parts that are genuinely yours: the catalogue, the integrations, and the operations behind each order.
01Capabilities
Where the money and the risk sit in a Shopify project
The storefront is rarely the hard part. On the e-commerce work we take on, the difficulty sits in the data model, the ERP boundary and the order lifecycle. Four shapes of work account for most of it.
- Re-platform
Storefronts and moving onto the platform
Moving off an ageing custom store, or off a WordPress-based setup, onto Shopify without losing the URL surface, the search visibility or the content model. The migration risk is almost never the theme. It is product data, redirects and the cutover order.
- Integration
The boundary with your back office
The middleware between Shopify and whatever holds stock, prices and the source of truth for products. Deciding which system wins per field is the real design work, and it belongs in platforms development and integration.
- Extensions
Where the platform's own model runs out
Bespoke pricing, B2B portals, subscription logic, fulfilment rules. Built as apps and extensions with tests and version control, not as logic buried in a theme where nobody will find it again.
- Markets
Several storefronts, one product set
Several countries running from one product data set and one order process, so adding a market is a configuration exercise rather than a project. This is usually where business process automation earns more than storefront work does.
02Case studies
A catalogue we already took onto Shopify
One published build, in e-commerce and retail, where the catalogue was the whole project.
See all case studies
03Fit
Who should carry the operational weight
Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce are not really competing on features. They compete on who carries which burden: hosting, checkout, upgrades and compliance. Shopify wins where you want the platform to carry all four. Five of the six rows below send you somewhere other than a Shopify project with us, and two of those name no unicrew page at all.
| Your situation | What we recommend |
|---|---|
| You want hosting, checkout and payment-card compliance owned by the platform | Use ShopifyThat is the whole argument, and it is a strong one. You are buying out of a class of problem rather than buying features. |
| Deep catalogue complexity, per-customer contract pricing, layered B2B account structures | Different pageOur Magento page. The modelling freedom is what justifies its operational weight, and Shopify will make you work around its assumptions instead. |
| WordPress is already the centre of gravity and your content is what sells | Different pageOur WooCommerce page. Running the store as a second system beside the content you already publish costs more than it returns at that size. |
| You have outgrown the hosted platform: its assumptions now block the business | Move the logic, not the storeBuild the pricing or fulfilment rules as your own service, see custom software development, and let a storefront be one of its clients. Re-platforming rarely fixes this on its own. |
| The store converts badly, and the platform is not the reason | We argue againstDo not re-platform. Fix merchandising, page speed and checkout friction first. Changing platform to fix conversion buys you a new store with the same numbers. |
| Hard data-residency or hosting-control requirements | Start elsewhereStart from the constraint and work back. Shopify's model means accepting where and how it runs, and that is sometimes a genuine blocker rather than a detail. |
Scope
What we own on Shopify work is the boundary. That means the data model, what we deliberately keep outside the platform, and how the store behaves when an integration fails mid-order. unicrew has been building commerce systems since 2012, with 100+ senior in-house engineers across six countries. We run that work under an ISO 27001:2022 certified information-security management system. Where the honest answer is a smaller piece of work than the one you came for, you get that answer.
Most of the work on a serious Shopify build is not the storefront. It is everything behind it: stock that is true in two systems at once, orders that reach the warehouse in the right shape, and returns, which are where the edge cases live. Teams budget for the theme and are surprised by the integration. We would rather have that conversation first.
Yaroslav HavrylivSenior Engineering Manager, unicrew04Delivery
The order a re-platform has to happen in
The sequence decides how much this hurts. Steps one and three are where re-platforms are won or lost.
- Model the product data before touching the storefrontProducts, variants, options and metafields, mapped from whatever you have today. The object model decides what is cheap to change later and what turns into a workaround you live with for years.
- Decide what deliberately stays outside ShopifyPricing engines, entitlement rules, anything regulated, and anything your product also depends on. If two systems need the same rule, it belongs in the one you can test and version, not in a theme.
- Preserve the URL surface and the redirectsA redirect map built from the real inventory of live URLs, not from a sitemap somebody exported once. Losing search visibility is the most common self-inflicted wound in a re-platform, and it is entirely avoidable.
- Test the money paths under real conditionsCheckout, tax, shipping rules, order sync, refunds and partial fulfilment, exercised the way customers and your own staff will actually hit them. That work runs through our QA and test automation practice rather than a manual pass at the end.
05Stack
The platforms this decision sits between
The four neighbours of a Shopify decision, each with its own page if that is the call you are really making.
06Questions
What store owners ask before committing
Answered the way we would answer them on a call. If yours is not here, it is a good first message.
Yes, and you can bring our engineers onto your team. What we will not do is staff a build where Shopify is the wrong platform, which happens whenever the platform is picked before anyone reads the catalogue. Our engineers work inside our delivery model: an architect outside the delivery team reviews the design, and the code goes through the same QA and test automation practice as our own projects. Team extension is managed teams.
Ask who should carry the operational weight. Shopify takes hosting, checkout, payment compliance and upgrades off your plate, and in exchange you accept its assumptions about how commerce works. Magento hands those assumptions back, which is what you want when the catalogue and contract pricing are the product. If you cannot name a modelling requirement Shopify blocks, Shopify is the cheaper answer over five years.
Yes, and it is usually the larger half of the project. The interesting decisions are which system owns which field, what happens when a price changes while an order is being placed, and how the store behaves when the ERP is unreachable. We build that as a service with its own tests, retries and a reconciliation view somebody actually looks at, rather than a chain of webhooks nobody can debug.
It does not have to. Where it happens, it is because redirects were treated as a launch-week task. We build the redirect map from a crawl of what is actually live and indexed, including the URLs nobody remembers publishing, then verify it after cutover rather than assuming it worked. Product and collection URL shapes change on Shopify, so the mapping is real work.
A scoping call with an engineer. For an existing store we want the product export and a description of where order data goes afterwards, because the catalogue and the back-office boundary decide the platform question. You get back a written recommendation with the reasoning, including the version where you keep what you have. Most engagements start within two to four weeks.
Three shapes, and which one fits depends on how settled the scope is. Time and materials is billed hourly and quoted per project, which suits work still moving. Fixed price is outcome based and quoted per project, and we offer it once the first read is done, because a fixed number on a store nobody has opened is a guess with a contract around it. Team extension is billed monthly per engineer.
Re-platforming, or is the integration the real problem?
Tell us what the catalogue looks like and where the order data has to go. You will get a straight recommendation, including the cases where Shopify is not the platform we would put you on.