E-commerce sites built for speed, not plugins.

Shopify gets you selling in a week. A year later you're paying $300/mo in plugins and loading in 8 seconds on mobile. Custom e-commerce sites that load in under a second, rank on Google, and convert on checkout — on the platform that fits your business, not the one that fits a template shop.

Where you're leaking customers.

I.

Shopify plus 12 plugins equals an 8-second load

Every plugin is another script blocking the page, another $10–$30/mo subscription, another attack surface. The initial build was fast. A year in, the site is slow, expensive, and you're paying rent to someone else's code.

II.

Generic checkout wastes every conversion win

You can optimize landing pages all day, but if checkout is 4 Shopify screens of 'oops something broke' and 'please create an account,' half the carts die on the way to payment.

III.

Product page SEO is a mess

No product schema, no rich results, no proper canonical URLs, pagination eats your crawl budget. Google can't rank what it can't understand, and your organic traffic plateaus around month 3.

What actually gets fixed.

I.

Hand-coded frontend on a real backend

Headless Shopify, Medusa, or custom — whichever fits. Fast frontend in Astro or Next.js that loads in under a second and doesn't care how many products you have. Zero plugin rot.

II.

Checkout that actually converts

Custom checkout (when the platform allows) or aggressively tuned native checkout. One-page, guest-friendly, with every tested conversion pattern — abandoned-cart recovery, upsells, trust badges, the real stuff.

III.

SEO built for products, not brochures

Product schema + Offer schema + Review schema on every product. Rich results in Google. Proper canonical handling so variants don't compete with parents. Google Shopping feed built clean from day one.

Case study: Rivermont Boutique

RB

Rivermont Boutique — E-commerce launch drives $12k first month

A local clothing boutique wanted to sell online without the fees of marketplaces like Etsy.

What we did: Custom Shopify build with Instagram feed integration, local pickup option, Klaviyo email flows, and a simple CMS for non-technical staff.

First-month online revenue
$12,400
Email subscribers
0 → 840
Orders per week
32 avg
Customer acquisition cost
$4.20
See full portfolio

Before you ask.

Shopify, headless, or something else?
Depends on your catalog size and operations. Under 50 SKUs and simple fulfillment: Shopify standard + a hand-coded theme. Over 500 SKUs or custom fulfillment: headless (Shopify Hydrogen or Medusa). Over 5K SKUs with heavy customization: fully custom. I'll recommend based on your situation, not based on what I want to build.
Can you migrate my existing store?
Yes. Products, customers, order history, URLs (with 301s so you don't lose SEO). Migration is a fixed-price add-on — usually $800–$2,500 depending on volume and complexity. Zero downtime during the cutover.
What about payment processors?
Stripe, Shopify Payments, PayPal, Square, Authorize.net — all supported. I typically recommend Stripe for flexibility + Shop Pay for conversion. I'll integrate whatever your current processor is so you don't have to change mid-flight.
How do you handle inventory sync?
Depends on where inventory lives. If it's in Shopify, the site reads from Shopify's API in real time. If you use a warehouse system (ShipStation, NetSuite, QuickBooks), we either sync one-way or use a middleware layer like Zapier for smaller volumes.
Is SEO really different on e-commerce?
Very. Product schema, variant handling, faceted navigation crawl budget, canonical consistency, sitemap generation — all ecommerce-specific concerns that most template sites get wrong. Expect 6–12 weeks for meaningful organic ranking improvement post-launch.

Ready to fix this?

Free 5-minute audit if you want to see what's broken first. Or jump straight into a project.

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