Custom Shopify webshops that convert

Having a webshop built starts with choosing a platform, and that choice sets what maintenance costs and what is possible for years to come. Shopify is a hosted platform: the software, the servers and the security sit with Shopify, so your own team spends its time on range, brand and customer. In practice that means:

• 01Hosting and security: Shopify hosts the store, the SSL certificate is included and the platform is certified to PCI DSS Level 1, which covers your store too.
• 02No upgrades: you never update the platform yourself. New features and security updates from Shopify arrive on their own.
• 03Checkout: the Shopify checkout with Shop Pay comes as standard, and on Shopify Plus it can be extended with your own checkout extensions.
• 04Extending: features from the Shopify App Store, and your own logic as a Shopify Function.
• 05International and wholesale: Shopify Markets handles currencies, languages and domains per market, and since April 2026 B2B also works on Basic, Grow and Advanced.

That does not make Shopify the right choice for every organisation. If you want to control your webshop's source code yourself, or run processes that reach deep into the software, an open platform is the deliberate choice, and the maintenance comes with it. If what you want is to sell and keep building without managing servers, Shopify takes that work off your hands and the budget goes into the store itself.

Shopify is set up so you can start on your own. You pick a theme, such as the free Horizon theme Shopify launched in May 2025, load your products and put pages together in the theme editor, without code. For a first store with a manageable range, that is a good start. What it mostly costs is your own time.

The tipping point usually comes with one of these questions. Does the brand need to stand apart from the many stores running the same theme? Does the range call for its own product pages, filters or a configurator? Does the webshop need to exchange data with an ERP, accounting package or warehouse? Or are you moving an existing webshop with rankings you cannot afford to lose? At that point the question shifts from whether you can do it yourself to what a mistake would cost you, in revenue, in visibility and in time.

If you have the build done for you, the next question is by whom. A freelancer is a good fit for individual changes or a well-defined technical job. A new webshop needs strategy, design, development, integrations, testing and a plan for after launch, and those parts have to fit together. That is why at Webfluencer strategists, designers and Shopify developers work on the same build, so the design you approve is the design that gets built.

Every Shopify webshop runs on a theme, the layer that decides how the store looks and how its pages are put together. So the question is not whether you use a theme, but whether you set up an existing one or have your own theme designed and built. Either way you work with sections that you add, remove and reorder in the theme editor, so your team can assemble pages itself after launch. The differences lie elsewhere:

One difference often only shows up later. Shopify only applies a new version of a Theme Store theme automatically as long as the theme files are in their original state; your settings and page layouts do not count towards that. Once code in a purchased theme has been changed, new versions arrive as a copy that you review first and then publish. A middle route, a premium theme with a few custom sections, therefore involves the same trade-off.

Which route fits depends on your stage, your budget and your plans for the coming years. We go through that in the introductory call, before there is a quote.

A webshop on Shopify has two budgets: the one-off build and the ongoing cost of the platform. For the build, this is our guideline. A build on a premium theme typically lands between €8,000 and €15,000, fully custom between €15,000 and €40,000, and higher once extensive research, complex integrations or a heavy migration come into play. Shopify Plus projects for scale-ups and established e-commerce brands start from €50,000.

Where you land within that range becomes concrete once you write out the scope. A template is a page type, such as the homepage, the collection page, the product page or a content page; every type with its own design is design and build work. With integrations, most of the work lies in agreeing which system leads on stock, prices and orders. With a migration, it lies in the data and the redirects. And it matters who supplies the product data and copy. Once the scope is set, you get a quote with a timeline.

On top of that you pay Shopify itself: a subscription, payment fees per transaction, apps that nearly always charge monthly and possibly a paid theme, which you buy once. Those rates differ per plan and change regularly; the current overview with worked examples is in the article below. Shopify Plus has a pricing model of its own.

The timeline follows the same split: a build on a premium theme goes live sooner than a fully custom one. The indicative timelines per type of build are in the frequently asked questions below.

• Shopify pricing 2026Plans, payment fees, apps and themes, with worked examples.
• Shopify PlusWhat Plus adds for checkout, scale and international growth.

How smoothly a build runs depends largely on what is ready when the work begins. Ideally, you map out these parts up front:

• 01Product data: titles, descriptions, images and variants. A Shopify product has at most three options and up to 2,048 variants; if a product has more choices, decide up front how to split it.
• 02Structure: the collections, the navigation and the filters customers need to choose. Product attributes go into metafields, which can also be used as filters.
• 03Brand and content: brand identity, photography and the copy for the homepage, the collections and the standard pages.
• 04Payments: to offer iDEAL | Wero through Shopify Payments, your store sells in euros, has the Netherlands set up as an active market and meets the Shopify Payments requirements.
• 05Systems: which ERP, accounting package, warehouse or PIM leads on stock, prices and orders.
• 06Your current webshop: a list of every URL with traffic or backlinks, so each old page gets a redirect to its new address.

If something is missing, that is no reason to wait. In discovery we map out together what is there and what still needs to come, and that gap helps set the scope and the timeline.

If you are moving an existing webshop, the build is also a migration. Products, customers and orders come along, and the redirects decide whether your visibility survives the move.

• Shopify migrationFrom Magento, WooCommerce, Lightspeed or another platform to Shopify.
• Shopify SEOThe technical foundation and content that make your webshop findable, and keep it that way.