When the App Store isn’t enough
Shopify’s App Store covers common needs well. But every growing brand eventually hits a requirement no public app handles:
- pricing rules specific to your wholesale customers
- a sync with an ERP nobody else uses
- a bundle logic your merchandising team invented
- a fulfilment flow tied to your own warehouse
The usual workaround, stacking several apps and hoping they don’t conflict, gets expensive and fragile.
A custom app does exactly what you need. It runs on Shopify’s supported APIs, so it survives platform updates, and it often costs less over a year than the subscriptions it replaces.
Typical builds
- ERP / 3PL / CRM integrations: orders, inventory, customers and fulfilment kept in sync both ways, with retries and a sync log. See API integrations.
- Shopify Functions: custom discounts, payment and delivery customizations, and validation, built on the extension points that replaced checkout scripts.
- Metafield-driven theme sections: structured product data your team can edit, displayed through theme app extensions instead of fragile theme edits.
- Internal admin tools: bulk operations, reports and workflows inside the Shopify admin.
Built with the rest of your stack in mind
A Shopify app rarely stands alone. It touches tracking, analytics, your ERP and your marketing tools. Because I also handle server-side tracking, integrations and performance work, the app is designed with those connections in mind, not added on afterwards.
For agencies, I’m available as a white-label developer for app and backend work while you keep the client relationship. See the agency partnership page.
Pricing and running costs
A focused custom app usually takes two to five weeks. Examples:
- a single integration
- a set of Functions
- an admin tool for one workflow
Two-way ERP syncs, B2B pricing engines and apps with their own customer-facing UI take longer and are quoted after a feasibility check.
Hosting a custom app usually costs a few dollars a month on Railway, Fly or your own cloud, with no per-order fees. Compare that with the combined monthly cost of the apps it replaces: for many stores, a custom build pays for itself within the first year and removes the risk of several third-party apps conflicting at checkout. A small maintenance plan keeps the app current with Shopify’s quarterly API versions.
Testing before it touches your store
Every app is built and tested on a development store that mirrors your products, customers, discounts and markets. Edge cases are tested before anything is installed on your live store:
- refunds and partial fulfilments
- multi-currency and draft orders
- high-volume sale days
The first live orders are monitored closely, and you get a clear rollback plan, so a new app never becomes the reason checkout breaks during a campaign.