Shopify Plus Development
Moving to Shopify Plus is a bet that your next stage needs more than a bigger plan: a checkout you can extend, discount logic the built-in rules can't express, wholesale on the same backend as DTC, and separate storefronts for new regions. Skill Align is a Shopify Partner that builds those capabilities on the APIs Shopify supports long-term, not on workarounds.
We'll also tell you when Plus isn't worth it yet. Some brands pay for Plus and use none of its exclusive features; others on Advanced spend months hacking around limits Plus would remove. A free store audit shows which camp you're in.
Shopify brands we've worked with
Plus doesn't upgrade every feature. It unlocks specific capabilities and carries a substantially higher platform fee that, at higher volumes, scales with revenue. It pays off when one of those capabilities removes a constraint you hit today, not because revenue crossed an arbitrary line. The signals we look for:
Checkout UI extensions for delivery notes, gift options, purchase-order fields, loyalty redemption and trust content, styled through checkout branding so they survive Shopify's own checkout upgrades. Customizations that lived in the retired checkout.liquid get rebuilt the supported way.
Tiered and stacked discounts, hiding or reordering payment and delivery methods, cart validation such as per-customer limits on a drop, and bundles through cart transforms. Stores still relying on legacy Shopify Scripts get a behavior-by-behavior migration plan.
Company profiles with multiple locations, catalogs and price lists, volume pricing, quantity rules and net payment terms, so wholesale buyers order from the same inventory as your DTC customers instead of a separate wholesale site.
Shopify Markets for local currency, language and pricing from one store, and dedicated expansion stores when a region needs its own catalog, legal entity, payment providers or fulfillment setup.
Flow workflows that tag high-value customers, hold risky orders for review and alert on low stock. Sales and drops are scheduled ahead with Launchpad or scheduled Flow workflows, depending on what your store has available.
A Hydrogen storefront hosted on Oxygen when you need an editorial or app-like front end, recommended only when the gain outweighs losing parts of the theme editor and theme-based app integrations.
Multi-store setups are where Plus projects most often go wrong. Duplicating a store takes an afternoon; keeping five of them consistent for two years is the hard part. We build one theme codebase that every store deploys from, with store-specific settings and content held in metafields and metaobjects rather than forked code, so a fix ships everywhere at once.
We also settle the split between Shopify Markets and expansion stores before anything is built. Markets keeps one catalog, one admin and one SEO footprint with localized subfolders or domains. A separate store makes sense when a region needs a different catalog, legal entity or wholesale operation. Choose wrong and you either fight Markets' limits or triple your merchandising workload.
Hydrogen gives you full control of the front end and can deliver very fast, content-rich experiences. It also means a React codebase to maintain, merchandisers losing much of the drag-and-drop theme editor unless a CMS is added, and App Store apps built around theme app extensions needing custom integration work.
For most DTC brands, a well-built Online Store 2.0 theme on Plus hits the same Core Web Vitals targets at a fraction of the running cost. Headless earns its keep for brands with a heavy editorial layer, a complex product configurator, or one front end serving several channels. We lay out the build and maintenance cost of both routes before you commit.
Brands moving to Plus often come from Magento (Adobe Commerce), Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce or a heavily customized WooCommerce build. At this level a migration is mostly about what must not break: customer records, order history, subscription contracts, URL equity, and integrations with ERP, 3PL and marketing tools.
Our Shopify migration services map every old URL to a 301 redirect, rebuild custom logic as Functions or apps, and reconcile data before cutover. Customer passwords can't be carried across platforms, so we plan launch messaging that explains how returning customers sign in.
Our Process
Got Questions?
Every Plus project is scoped individually, so there are no fixed packages. After a discovery call we send an itemized proposal within 24 hours that prices each piece separately, such as checkout extensions, Functions, B2B setup or a migration. For reference, full custom Shopify stores start from $960, and Plus builds with integrations and custom apps sit above that. Shopify bills the Plus subscription itself separately.
A custom Plus storefront typically takes three to four weeks across discovery, design, development and QA. Projects that add ERP or 3PL integrations, B2B catalogs, several expansion stores or a large data migration take longer, and the proposal gives you a dated plan rather than a vague range. A single checkout extension or Function is a much smaller job.
No. Any Shopify Partner can build on Plus stores using the same APIs and tools a Plus agency uses: Checkout Extensibility, Shopify Functions, B2B, Markets and Flow. Skill Align is a Shopify Partner with hands-on Plus build experience. The better test is evidence, so review our portfolio and ask us about the specific Plus features your project depends on.
Upgrade when a Plus-only capability solves a problem you have now: checkout steps you need to customize, private Functions for pricing or shipping logic, native B2B, or extra stores for new regions. If your main issues are design, speed or conversion, Advanced is usually enough and the budget is better spent on the storefront. We map your roadmap against both plans in the free audit.
checkout.liquid no longer powers Shopify's checkout, so anything that depended on it has to be rebuilt as checkout UI extensions, branding settings or Functions. Shopify has been retiring the Ruby-based Scripts in favor of Functions as well. We inventory what your old code did, map each behavior to its supported replacement, and test discounts, shipping and payment rules side by side before switching.
Yes, and it is one of the strongest reasons brands choose Plus. Wholesale buyers sign in to company accounts and see their own catalogs, pricing, quantity rules and payment terms, while retail shoppers see your normal storefront. Some brands still prefer a separate expansion store for wholesale when branding, catalog or operations differ a lot, and we help you weigh the two options.
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