Headless storefronts, Shopify apps, custom checkouts, and B2B portals. Senior engineer on subscription at $4,999/mo — 2 to 4-day delivery cycles.
- Scope
- Ship
- Iterate
monthly subscription
Who this is for
DTC or multi-brand ecommerce founder doing $2M to $30M a year who has outgrown what Shopify themes and plugins can do on their own. Usually comes to me after stacking five or six third-party apps that conflict with each other, or after a Shopify update broke a custom checkout flow someone else built.
The pain today
- Shopify theme cannot do the custom checkout your business needs
- Subscription logic outgrowing Recharge or Bold, with no clean upgrade path
- B2B pricing, customer-specific catalogs, and quote flows blocked by platform limits
- Plugin stack breaks on every major Shopify update
- Staff need a custom admin but you cannot give them full Shopify access
The outcome you get
- Custom ecommerce engineering on subscription at $4,999/mo
- Headless storefront, custom Shopify app, or full custom — whichever fits
- Subscription, B2B, or loyalty logic that off-the-shelf platforms cannot handle
- Custom admin with role-based access built for your staff workflows
- 2 to 4-day delivery cycles with predictable monthly cost and no hiring overhead
When Shopify is no longer enough
Shopify is a good platform until you hit one of its structural limits. Complex subscription logic beyond what Recharge offers. B2B pricing that changes per customer account or location. Custom checkout flows — multi-step, gated, quote-based. Admin tools for staff that do not map cleanly to Shopify roles. Deep ERP integrations (NetSuite, Cin7, ApparelMagic) that no plugin handles reliably. At that point you need real engineering, not another app from the store.
I work with DTC and multi-brand ecommerce businesses on exactly these problems. The solution is almost never "rebuild everything" — it is finding the smallest custom surface that unblocks the business, building it well, and leaving the rest of the Shopify infrastructure intact.
Custom ecommerce engineering on subscription at $4,999/mo
Shopify app, headless storefront, or full custom — how to choose
Shopify app wins when the custom need is additive. A new admin tool, a customer-facing B2B portal, a custom subscription upgrade flow that runs alongside native Shopify. Fastest path, lowest disruption, and you stay on Shopify's upgrade track. Most of my ecommerce projects land here.
Headless storefront wins when the front-end itself is the constraint — complex product configurators, content-heavy catalog pages, international storefronts with market-specific UX. You keep Shopify as the backend commerce engine and replace the theme with a Next.js application. Performance gains are real: server rendering and CDN edge delivery consistently beat Liquid theme performance on large catalogs.
Full custom (Medusa, Commerce.js, or a Laravel backend with a React front-end) makes sense only when Shopify's own data model is the blocker — typically B2B marketplaces with complex multi-vendor inventory, or businesses that need full database control for compliance reasons. For most DTC brands under $30M in revenue, this path costs more than it returns. I will tell you in the first conversation if it applies to your situation.
120k+: Properties indexed and searchable.
Features I build for ecommerce teams
Subscription flows with pause, swap, skip, and tiered pricing logic beyond what Recharge or Bold handles natively. B2B portals with customer-specific pricing, catalogs, quotes, and credit limit management. Custom checkout — quote-based, multi-step, gated by account type. ERP integrations: NetSuite via Celigo, Cin7 through their API, and custom middleware for ERPs with limited connector support.
Custom admin panels with fine-grained role-based access, built for the staff workflows that do not fit Shopify's default permission model. Loyalty and referral systems when existing apps fall short on logic complexity. Multi-currency, multi-warehouse inventory sync across channels. Search performance improvements using Algolia or Meilisearch on large catalogs where Shopify's native search slows down.
Most individual features ship in two to four weeks of subscription time. Larger integrations — an ERP migration, a marketplace launch — typically take two to four months. I scope honestly before any work starts.
Performance and security for high-volume stores
Performance is not optional in ecommerce. A one-second improvement in load time can shift conversion rates measurably on existing traffic, which means faster pages pay for themselves faster than most marketing spend.
At Imohub I rebuilt a portal with 120,000+ properties, brought query response times below 500ms, and cut infrastructure costs by 70 percent. The same approach applies directly to ecommerce: proper caching with Redis and CDN, smart database indexing, server-rendered pages for catalog and PDP routes, aggressive image optimization, and search handled through a dedicated engine rather than the database.
Security matters just as much. Every ecommerce application I build follows PCI DSS scoping principles: payment data never touches my application layer (Stripe and Shopify Payments handle tokenization), access control is role-based and auditable, and dependencies are kept current with automated checks. For regulated markets (EU/UK), GDPR-compliant cookie and data handling is part of the default scope, not an add-on.
ERP and third-party integrations
ERP integrations are where ecommerce custom development earns its cost back most clearly. Bi-directional sync between Shopify and an ERP — orders flowing in, inventory and fulfillment status flowing back — removes hours of manual reconciliation work daily.
I have run integration-heavy engagements across a wide range of enterprise APIs. At bolttech I integrated 40+ payment providers for a $1B+ unicorn, which meant handling authentication schemes, webhook reliability, and failure modes across a large API surface. That same discipline carries over to ecommerce ERP work: typed API clients, idempotent sync logic, dead-letter queues for failures, and observable pipelines so your ops team can see what is happening.
For NetSuite, the practical path is Celigo when the volume justifies the subscription cost, and direct API integration for simpler sync needs. For Cin7, their REST API is capable enough for most order and inventory sync work. Middleware tools like Pipe17 fill the gap for ERPs with limited API surface. Typical ERP integration ships in four to eight weeks of subscription time.
Pricing and what the subscription covers
Standard plan is $4,999/mo. Pro plan is $5,499/mo. Both include 2 to 4-day delivery cycles, senior engineering throughout, code review, and direct async communication with me — not a project manager or account team.
For most ecommerce projects, one to three months of subscription covers a well-scoped custom feature: a B2B portal, a subscription upgrade flow, a custom checkout, an ERP integration. Customers who have ongoing ecommerce engineering needs — new features, integrations, platform upgrades — keep the subscription as a fractional senior engineer. That usually costs less than hiring, and is available within a week.
14-day money-back guarantee. Cancel anytime after. All code is delivered under Work Made for Hire — it is yours from the moment it ships.
When the app store path is genuinely better
Not every ecommerce problem needs custom engineering. If your need is on the storefront UX side — better product page, improved checkout conversion, subscription management UI — the Shopify app ecosystem often solves it faster than custom work. Replo for landing pages, Rebuy for recommendations, Stay AI for subscription management, Recharge for most subscription use cases: these tools represent real engineering effort and are priced accordingly.
I will say this plainly in the first call if your situation fits. Where custom earns its cost back: staff workflows that involve custom data structures, B2B logic that requires account-level rules the app store cannot handle, integrations that need custom error handling and observability, and performance problems that are rooted in architecture rather than configuration. Those are problems where subscription engineering returns value quickly. Plugin-cobbled solutions to the same problems usually do not.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Rebuilt a real estate portal at a fraction of the cost
Rebuilt Imóveis SC's real estate portal as ImoHub, a faster, more scalable successor, handling 120k+ properties with sub-second search and drastically reduced AWS costs.
Read the case studyFrequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
Yes. I build Shopify apps using their CLI, embedded in the admin with App Bridge and GraphQL API integration. For private apps (your store only), I skip the app store review cycle and deploy directly — fastest path, full control. For public apps intended for distribution, I handle the review process. Most B2B portals and custom admin tools ship in six to ten weeks of subscription time, depending on scope.
A well-scoped single feature — a custom checkout, a B2B portal, a subscription upgrade flow — takes two to six weeks on subscription. A larger integration like a full ERP sync or a headless storefront typically takes two to four months. Timeline is driven by scope clarity, not my availability. I scope projects honestly before starting, so you know the range before any money changes hands.
A Shopify app adds functionality to an existing Shopify store — a new admin tool, a custom customer portal, an extended checkout flow. The Shopify theme and backend remain in place. A headless storefront replaces the front-end entirely with a custom Next.js application while keeping Shopify as the commerce backend. Headless makes sense when the storefront UX itself is the constraint; a Shopify app makes sense when the custom need is additive. Most DTC stores under $30M should start with the app path.
Yes. For NetSuite I use Celigo when order volume justifies the cost, and direct API integration for simpler sync requirements. For Cin7, their REST API handles most order and inventory sync work. I build typed customers, idempotent sync logic, and observable pipelines so your ops team can see what is syncing and catch failures early. At bolttech I integrated 40+ payment providers for a $1B+ unicorn, so complex enterprise APIs are familiar territory. Typical ecommerce ERP integration ships in four to eight weeks.
I migrate from WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, and custom legacy stacks to Shopify or a custom application. A full migration — products, customers, orders, metafields — takes two to four weeks depending on catalog size and data cleanliness. Every migration includes URL mapping, 301 redirects, and SEO preservation. For catalogs above 10,000 SKUs or 100,000 customer records, budget extra time for data cleanup: most legacy exports are messier than they appear.
Subscription only for ecommerce engineering work. Standard is $4,999/mo, Pro is $5,499/mo. For a single-feature project, one to three months of subscription typically covers it. For ongoing ecommerce engineering, customers keep the subscription as an on-demand senior engineer. I do not do hourly billing or fixed-bid contracts for application development — the subscription model keeps incentives aligned and lets me deliver in 2 to 4-day cycles rather than long project phases.