Shopify store or custom site?
How to decide, why the checkout matters more than the award, when a custom build pays, what speed costs, and who keeps the code when it is done.
Almost every brand that asks us this question should be on Shopify, and we say so on the call even though a custom build is the larger invoice. The exceptions are real and they are specific. This is how to tell which one you are.
How do you decide?
Ask what the site has to do that a standard store cannot. If the answer is nothing, the decision is made. Shopify's checkout is better tested than anything we could build you, its payment handling is a solved problem, and the thousand small things a store needs, taxes, shipping rules, returns, abandoned-cart email, are switches rather than projects.
- You sell physical products with fixed prices through a cart. Shopify, with a good theme and no more than a handful of apps.
- Your product is sold by conversation, a personalised item or a quote, and the checkout is the inbox. Then the question is the wrong one: you need a page that starts the message and a store that takes the money afterward, and Shopify does the second part fine.
- Your catalogue is one-off items that change every week, each with its own history, estimate and provenance, feeding a sale process the platform has no concept of. That is an auction house, a gallery, a dealer. Build custom.
- The site is where the work happens: staff log in, records are processed, something is generated. That is software with a shop attached, not a shop. Build custom, and scope the software before the shop.
If you are not sure which you are, you are the first kind.
Why the checkout, not the award?
Most storefronts are designed for the portfolio shot: the full-screen video, the typographic flourish, the product hidden two scrolls down. They win design awards and lose sales, because the person who arrived from an ad wanted to see the product, the price and the shipping cost, in that order, on a phone, before the page finished loading.
Seyr is the storefront we built around the purchase rather than the shot. What a buyer needs to see, in the order they need to see it: the product, the detail, the price, the path to the checkout, with nothing between them that exists to impress another designer. It is the one place on this site where a visitor can click through to a finished thing instead of reading about it, and it was built to convert, not to win awards.
That is the standard for a Shopify build as much as for a custom one. The platform does not decide whether a store sells. The order of what the buyer sees does, and that is a design decision somebody has to make on purpose.
When does a custom build pay?
When the site is part of the operation. Frank Zoller Authentic History is a militaria auction house whose catalogue is made of one-off items, each with a description, an estimate and a history, and whose listings are written by an AI platform we built from the photographs of each lot. zollerhistory.com and its shop are custom because the shop is the end of that pipeline, not a separate thing with a cart on it. A record is photographed, described, estimated and listed, and the website is where that record is seen. No store platform models an accession card.
A custom build pays when it removes work that happens every week, or when it makes a sale possible that the platform could not. It does not pay when its justification is that the brand is special. Every brand is special; most of them sell a product with a price through a cart, and a custom cart is a worse cart that costs more to keep working.
We decide how a build makes money before we build it. If the answer is a feeling rather than a number, the recommendation is Shopify, and we have made it to clients who came in wanting the larger project.
What does speed actually cost?
A slow store spends its ad budget on visitors who leave before the page has said anything. Google measures how a page feels to use on real visitors' phones: how quickly the main content appears, how soon the page responds to a tap, whether things jump around while it loads. Those measures affect both where the store ranks and whether the person who arrived stays.
Shopify stores get slow in a predictable way: the theme was fast on the day it was installed, and then forty apps were added, each loading its own script on every page, until the product image arrives after the visitor has gone. The fix is a theme that does what you need without the apps, and an audit every quarter to remove what nobody uses.
Custom sites get slow in a different way: they were fast when they launched and nobody kept them fast. A custom build is only fast if someone owns its speed after the invoice is paid, which is a question to ask before you commission one. Whichever you choose, we measure the store on a phone over an ordinary connection before and after any change, and the measurement is in the report.
Who keeps the code?
You do. The repository is in your name from the first commit, the theme lives in your store, the hosting is on your card, and the domain was always yours. We work in it with access you grant and can take away. When the engagement ends, nothing has to be handed over, because nothing was ever ours to hand.
This is the question most buyers forget to ask and most regret not asking. An agency that holds the code, the hosting or the domain holds the business, and the day you want to leave is the day you find out what that costs. Ask before the build, get the answer in the contract, and check that the accounts are in your name on the first day, not the last.
| Shopify store | Custom build | |
|---|---|---|
| Right for | Physical products, fixed prices, a cart | A catalogue or a process the platform cannot model |
| Checkout | The platform's: well tested, hard to break | Yours to design, and yours to keep working |
| Speed | Fast until the apps pile up; audit quarterly | Fast until nobody owns it; name the owner |
| Cost | A theme and a set-up, priced on the call | Priced to the number, as software, after scoping |
| Who keeps it | You: the store, the theme, the domain | You: the repository, the hosting, the domain |
| Time to launch | Weeks | Months, and the scope decides how many |
What does it cost, and what is not included?
Website development is not part of the Standard package; the pricing page says so in the exclusions rather than in small print. A Shopify set-up, the theme, the structure and the product presentation, is a smaller project than a custom build and is priced on the first call once we have seen what you sell. A custom build is Tailored, which means priced to the number it has to produce, after we have scoped it as software and not as a website with ambitions.
What a build does not include, whichever kind: the product photography, which no site survives without, and the ads that send people to it. Both are separate decisions, and both usually matter more to the result than the platform does.
When do we say no?
When a custom build is wanted for reasons that are about the brand's self-image rather than the buyer's path to the checkout. When the budget for the site would leave nothing for the photography or the ads. When the site is to be built on a platform nobody on your side can operate after we leave. And when the real problem is the offer, which a new site will present more beautifully and not fix.
The right site is the one that gets out of the way between the ad and the order. Most of the time that is a Shopify store with a good theme and a ruthless edit. Some of the time it is software with a shop at the end of it. Tell us what you sell and the number you need from it, and we will tell you which.