The ecommerce brand that owns its platform owns its customer relationship.
We build custom ecommerce platforms — branded shopping experiences, subscription and membership platforms, wholesale portals, and the customer data infrastructure that powers personalisation and retention. Fixed scope, fixed price.
Shopify's storefront limits what your brand can do at the customer experience layer. A custom ecommerce platform lets you build the subscription logic, loyalty program, B2B wholesale portal, or headless storefront that Shopify can't support cleanly.
Shopify solves the 80% case for ecommerce businesses — product catalog, checkout, payments, and basic order management. The 20% case is where the brand's competitive differentiation lives and where Shopify's architecture becomes a constraint. Subscription businesses need a subscription management layer that handles skip, pause, swap, and billing retry logic that Recharge handles partially but not perfectly for every business model. B2B wholesale requires a separate pricing tier, net-terms invoicing, and order management workflow that no Shopify app handles cleanly for complex buyer-seller relationships. Loyalty programs powerful enough to drive real retention behaviour require customer-lifetime-value-aware tier logic that no app handles correctly.
The brands that outgrow Shopify's edges either stay on Shopify and build increasingly fragile app stacks to compensate, or they invest in a platform they own. The custom platform investment is the right one when: (1) your business model has requirements that Shopify's architecture doesn't support cleanly, and (2) the customer experience layer is a material part of your brand differentiation.
A headless Shopify architecture — where Shopify handles the backend (product catalog, inventory, order management) and a custom Next.js frontend handles the storefront — is often the right answer. It retains Shopify's operational backbone while giving complete control over the customer experience.
A custom ecommerce platform built around your brand's specific business model — DTC, subscription, B2B, or hybrid — with the customer data infrastructure that makes retention marketing actually work.
Headless Shopify storefront
Custom Next.js frontend consuming the Shopify Storefront API. Complete control over page design, checkout flow, and customer account experience — without Shopify's theme constraints. Lighthouse performance scores above 90.
Subscription management system
Subscription creation, billing, and lifecycle management (skip, pause, swap, cancel) built on Stripe Billing or direct Shopify Subscriptions API. Dunning management for failed charges. Subscriber LTV analytics by cohort and subscription tier.
B2B wholesale portal
Separate login for wholesale buyers. Buyer-specific pricing tiers and minimum order quantities. Net-terms order placement with invoice generation. Wholesale order history and reorder tools.
Customer loyalty and retention engine
Points accumulation on purchases. Tier-based benefits (early access, free shipping, exclusive SKUs). Referral tracking. Automated loyalty email triggers based on customer behaviour. LTV-based tier progression.
Customer data platform (CDP) layer
Unified customer profile: purchase history, subscription status, loyalty tier, communication preferences, and product affinities. Powers personalised email and SMS sequences in Klaviyo or PostScript. Built on Next.js headless frontend, Shopify Admin + Storefront API, Stripe Billing, and Klaviyo for marketing automation.
One honest number to start.
Fixed-scope, fixed-price. The number below is the starting point — final scope is built from your brief.
A custom ecommerce platform built around your brand's specific business model — DTC, subscription, B2B, or hybrid — with the customer data infrastructure that makes retention marketing actually work.
Three steps, every time.
The same repeatable engagement on every project. No surprises, no mystery, no billable ambiguity.
Brief & discovery.
We send you questions, then get on a call. Output: a written scope with every step, feature, and integration listed.
Build & ship.
Fixed schedule, weekly reviews. No scope creep unless you change the scope — and if you do, we reprice it transparently.
Warranty & retainer.
30-day warranty on every launch. Most clients stay on a monthly retainer for ongoing features and maintenance.
Why Fixed-Price Matters Here
Ecommerce brand capital goes into inventory, paid media, and fulfilment. Technology needs to be a defined, bounded cost — not an ongoing hourly engagement that competes with CAC for dollars. Fixed scope and fixed price on a platform with a clear set of capabilities is the right structure.
Questions, answered.
The custom frontend gives you complete control over page design, load speed (Shopify themes are slow), checkout flow customisation, and the subscription/loyalty/B2B logic that Shopify's native features and apps don't handle cleanly. Shopify does the heavy lifting on product management, inventory, and payments — you control the customer-facing experience.
Yes — physical and digital subscription logic differs primarily in fulfillment (physical requires shipping; digital requires access provisioning). Both can be managed in the same subscription management layer with separate fulfillment routing.
Wholesale orders placed on net terms generate an invoice rather than a Stripe charge. Invoice tracking (due date, payment status) is managed in the portal. Payment received is logged against the invoice. Overdue invoices trigger automated reminders.
Headless storefront, subscription management, wholesale portal, loyalty engine, and CDP layer typically runs $65k–$130k depending on complexity of subscription logic and number of business model surfaces. Fixed-price.
16 to 22 weeks for a full headless platform with subscription, wholesale, and loyalty surfaces.
Tell Ryel about your project.
Describe what you’re building and what outcome you need. You’ll have a written, fixed-price scope within the week.