Most Shopify agencies sell design. This page covers something different: what's underneath the screenshots. Architecture. Integrations. The decisions that decide whether a store holds up under real order volume, not just how it looks in a demo.
Raghwendra Web Services has been building websites since 2005. In that time, the agency has delivered 651 projects for clients in more than 20 countries. Shopify work sits alongside Drupal builds and custom software projects in the wider agency portfolio, and that breadth turns out to matter here. A Shopify Plus build often needs to talk to systems nobody designed with Shopify in mind.
What follows is what a Shopify web development company actually does once the wireframes are approved. Theme architecture. Headless builds. Shopify Functions, ERP connections, migrations — the backend work that keeps a B2B or enterprise store running without surprises.
Why Choose RWS
Code ownership matters more here than on a typical design engagement. Every custom app, every Shopify Function, every API integration RWS builds belongs to the client. Nothing licensed. Nothing rented back at a monthly fee tied to an agency's own app.
Twenty-one years of hands-on experience shows up most clearly in how integration problems get handled: solved, not worked around. ERP connections, legacy data migrations, multi-currency setups — all of them come with edge cases that only surface once real data hits the system. Catching those early usually comes down to having seen enough of them before.
The agency also works across more than Shopify. Drupal, Laravel, custom software development — none of it is Shopify-specific, and that matters when a project needs backend thinking the Shopify admin panel simply doesn't expose.
651 completed projects across 20+ countries. Not all Shopify, but enough breadth to know what a migration looks like when data is genuinely messy, not the tidy demo version.
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Custom Shopify theme development
Custom applications
A custom theme starts from a blank file, not a modified template. RWS builds using clean Shopify Liquid, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, without the bloated app-generated code that tends to sit underneath a design it was never built for. That shows up in load times, and in how easy the theme is to edit later without untangling someone else's shortcuts. It suits brands that have outgrown off-the-shelf themes, or that need a storefront built around a specific product catalogue instead of a generic layout stretched to fit.
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Online Store 2.0 architecture
Content management system
Online Store 2.0 replaced Shopify's old section-only homepage with drag-and-drop blocks available on every template. Built correctly, a marketing team can assemble new landing pages, swap banners, or reorder sections without filing a developer ticket. RWS structures custom sections and blocks so that flexibility is real rather than decorative. The page builder actually gets used, not left as a demo feature nobody touches after launch.
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Headless Shopify development
Mobile friendly designs
Headless separates the storefront from Shopify's backend. React, Next.js, or Shopify Hydrogen render the front end, while Shopify still handles products, orders, and checkout through its APIs. The appeal is speed: a headless build can shed the overhead of a traditional theme and load in a fraction of the time. It isn't the right call for every store, though. Headless suits high-traffic catalogues or brands running custom front-end experiences a standard Liquid theme can't support — not a store that just wants a slightly faster version of what it already has.
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Custom functionality and third-party tool integration
Mobile friendly designs
Some features simply don't exist in the Shopify App Store, or exist only as a bloated app doing one small thing badly. In those cases, RWS builds the functionality directly: custom logic, bespoke integrations with external tools, features scoped to exactly what the store needs. No unnecessary app subscriptions. No extra script tags slowing the storefront down for something that could have been a few hundred lines of clean code.
Shopify Plus and enterprise solutions
Shopify Plus enterprise development
Shopify Plus opens up multi-store setups, dedicated expansion stores for individual markets, and deeper access to Shopify Functions and Scripts — none of it available on standard Shopify plans. RWS configures that multi-store architecture for brands expanding into new countries or currencies, and builds the custom checkout and automation logic Plus specifically unlocks. Enterprise-tier infrastructure, in other words, for stores that have outgrown what a single standard Shopify instance can handle.
Multi-store / multi-currency enterprise setup
Selling into more than one country usually means more than translating a page. Currency conversion, region-specific pricing, tax handling, sometimes entirely separate expansion stores: all of it needs configuring correctly from the start. RWS sets up multi-store and multi-currency architecture on Shopify Plus so that each market can function independently where it needs to, without turning into several disconnected stores that happen to share a brand name.
Shopify Functions and Flow automation
Shopify Functions let developers customise checkout logic, discounts, and shipping rules at a level standard apps can't reach. Shopify Flow works differently: it automates operational tasks like tagging orders, triggering notifications, and updating inventory, without custom code for every rule. RWS uses both where they fit — Functions for logic that needs to live inside checkout itself, Flow for repetitive operational work that shouldn't need a person doing it by hand every day.
Custom checkout extensibility
Shopify Plus checkouts can be extended with custom fields, targeted upsells, and conditional logic that responds to what's actually in the cart. Configured well, this is one of the more direct ways to lift average order value (AOV) without redesigning the whole buying journey. RWS builds these checkout extensions to fit the specific store: not a generic upsell app bolted on afterwards, but logic designed around the products and customer behaviour that store actually sees.
Migration and re-platforming services
Seamless platform migrations
Moving from Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix, or a custom PHP build onto Shopify is rarely just a data export and import. Each platform structures products, variants, and customer records differently. A naive migration tends to lose exactly the details that matter: variant options, order history, reviews that never make the jump. RWS plans around those structural differences up front instead of discovering them halfway through the transfer.
Data and catalogue transfer
Products, variants, customer histories, orders, and reviews all need mapping from the old platform's data structure to Shopify's. Get the mapping wrong and a store can launch with broken variant options, missing order history, or reviews that never made the jump. This is careful, unglamorous work: checking the data against the source platform before and after transfer, not just running an automated import and hoping it held together.
Theme migration and rebuild
Stores still running on legacy, pre-2.0 Shopify themes carry technical debt that limits what can be built on top of them. RWS rebuilds on Shopify 2.0's section-and-block architecture. Where the original design still works, it stays; the underlying template gets replaced with something that actually supports the drag-and-drop editing 2.0 was built for. Old theme, new foundation.
SEO preservation (301 mapping)
A platform migration is one of the fastest ways to lose search rankings that took years to build — usually through broken URLs, not lost content. RWS maps old URLs to their new Shopify equivalents using 301 redirects before launch, not as an afterthought once traffic has already dropped. Every category page, product page, and blog post gets a mapped destination. Nothing gets left to redirect to a generic 404.
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Custom Shopify app development
Custom applications
Public apps from the Shopify App Store cover common needs well. They don't cover workflows specific to one business: a particular approval process, a non-standard pricing rule, an internal tool that needs to talk to Shopify's admin API in a way no existing app was built for. RWS builds both public and private apps in Node.js and Ruby for exactly those cases, where the workflow exists first and the app gets built around it, not the other way round.
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ERP and CRM integrations
Content management system
Connecting Shopify to a system like NetSuite, SAP, Salesforce, or Microsoft Dynamics comes down to keeping inventory, order, and customer data in sync across platforms that weren't designed with each other in mind. RWS builds the integration through the relevant APIs, translating between Shopify's data model and whatever structure sits on the other side. The goal: one source of truth, instead of two systems quietly drifting apart.
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Custom API and webhook development
Mobile friendly designs
Real-time stock updates from a warehouse. Order data pushed to a third-party logistics provider (3PL) the moment a customer checks out. Inventory synced across a fulfilment centre and the storefront without a nightly batch job creating a lag. RWS builds the custom API and webhook connections that make that real-time flow possible, instead of leaving the store dependent on scheduled syncs that create a gap between what it shows and what's actually in stock.
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Advanced subscription logic
Mobile friendly designs
Recurring billing on Shopify usually starts with integrating a subscription platform such as Recharge or Skio, then building the logic around it: customer-facing portals, billing cycle rules, and the edge cases that come with letting customers pause, skip, or modify a subscription themselves. RWS builds and integrates that layer so the subscription experience feels native to the store, not like a separate system the customer's been redirected to.
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Payment gateway and checkout integration
Mobile friendly designs
Standard payment and checkout setup covers the gateways a store needs to accept payment reliably, configured correctly for the currencies and regions it sells into. It sounds basic. Done badly, it's the difference between a checkout that just works and one quietly losing sales to failed transactions or unsupported payment methods in a specific market.
Store setup and technical foundations
Shopify website setup and configuration
Every Shopify store needs its foundational settings configured correctly before anything else gets built on top: shipping zones, tax settings, checkout rules, domain and email configuration. RWS handles this setup as a deliberate first stage, not a rushed formality, since a misconfigured setting here tends to surface as a customer-facing problem much later.
Product and inventory management setup
Product data structure decides how well a catalogue scales. Variants, collections, tags, and inventory tracking all need setting up with the store's actual product range in mind, not a generic structure that works fine for a twenty-product demo store and breaks down at two thousand. RWS structures this from the outset so the catalogue stays manageable as it grows.
Technical SEO and AEO infrastructure
Search engines and AI answer systems both need clean, structured signals to understand what a page is about. RWS implements JSON-LD schema, monitors Core Web Vitals, and sets canonical structure correctly across the store, addressing both traditional search rankings and the newer requirement of being readable by AI-driven answer engines. This is infrastructure work, invisible to a shopper, that decides whether the store shows up in the first place.
Performance and ongoing support
Speed and performance optimisation
A slow storefront loses customers before they see a single product. RWS optimises image delivery, script loading, and theme code to bring load times down, working from Core Web Vitals data rather than guesswork about what's slowing a page. Particularly relevant for stores that have accumulated apps and scripts over time — each one usually adds weight the store owner never notices until performance data shows it.
Ongoing development support and maintenance
A launched store still needs someone maintaining it: Shopify platform updates, app conflicts, seasonal feature requests, bug fixes that come up once real customers start using the site. RWS provides ongoing development support after launch, so a store isn't left without a developer the moment the initial build wraps up.
Shopify store audits and technical troubleshooting
Stores that have grown organically over several years often carry problems nobody planned for: conflicting apps, broken theme customisations, checkout issues nobody's tracked down yet. RWS audits the technical setup, identifies what's actually causing a specific problem, and fixes it instead of defaulting to a rebuild as the answer to every issue.
Shopify Plus development agency
Shopify Plus isn't just "Shopify with more features" — it's a different platform tier with different rules. Plus stores get access to Shopify Functions, Scripts, multiple expansion stores under one organisation, and checkout customisation that standard Shopify simply doesn't expose. Building for that environment means understanding what changes structurally, not just which settings unlock.
Being Plus-capable as an agency comes down to being comfortable with checkout-level customisation, multi-store architecture, and the higher stakes of enterprise order volume. A mistake at checkout on a Plus store affects a lot more transactions than the same mistake on a small standard store.
Plus makes sense once a store has outgrown standard Shopify's limits: usually multiple markets, high order volume, or checkout customisation needs that a standard plan can't support. It's a higher-cost tier, and RWS is upfront that it isn't the right fit for every store. For a brand still finding product-market fit in one country, standard Shopify is very likely enough. Plus earns its cost once the business has genuinely outgrown what standard Shopify offers.
B2B and wholesale Shopify development
A B2B storefront has to do things a consumer store never needs to: show different prices to different accounts, hide the catalogue from anyone not logged in, and let a buyer place a large order on payment terms rather than a card at checkout.
Wholesale portals on Shopify typically involve gated catalogues visible only to approved wholesale accounts, tiered volume pricing that changes the unit price as order quantity increases, and net-30 payment terms handled either through Shopify's own B2B tools or a dedicated app layered on top. RWS builds this structure around the store's actual pricing tiers and account types, instead of a generic wholesale template that assumes every B2B buyer behaves the same way.
What's genuinely feasible depends on the specifics — how many pricing tiers, how account approval should work, whether retail and wholesale need to live on the same store or separate ones. Those decisions shape the build more than the wholesale label itself does.
Shopify migration services
The fear behind every migration conversation is usually the same three things: losing search rankings, losing data, or the store going down during the switch. All three are legitimate risks, and none of them are unique to Shopify migrations — they're the standard risks of moving any established store to a new platform.
Redirect mapping addresses the ranking risk. Every old URL gets a mapped destination on the new store before launch, so search engines find the new page instead of a dead link. Staged data transfer addresses the data risk: products, variants, customer records, and order history get moved and checked against the source platform, instead of migrated in one irreversible pass with no verification step.
Downtime is minimised by building and testing the new store before the switch happens, instead of building live on the domain customers are already using. None of this eliminates risk entirely; any migration carries some. But a planned migration and a rushed one carry very different odds.
Shopify app development agency
Most stores never need a custom app. The Shopify App Store covers common functionality well, and reaching for custom development too early usually means paying for something a low-cost app already does.
A private app becomes the right call when a workflow is specific enough that no existing app matches it: an internal approval process, a non-standard pricing calculation, a connection to a system the store owner uses that no app developer has built an integration for. RWS builds these in Node.js or Ruby, scoped to the actual workflow, not a generic feature set.
Ownership and maintenance work differently here than with a marketplace app. The client owns the code outright — no monthly licence fee to a third-party developer, no risk of the app being discontinued. The trade-off is that ongoing maintenance sits with whoever built it, which is worth factoring into the decision alongside the upfront cost.
Get started
Talk to RWS about a Shopify build, migration, or integration project. Share what the store needs to do, and get a straight answer on scope, feasibility, and what a Plus-tier build would actually involve for your business.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Shopify Plus adds checkout customisation, multiple expansion stores under one account, and access to Shopify Functions and Scripts—features that aren't available on standard Shopify plans. Since Shopify Plus also comes with a significantly higher cost, it generally makes sense only when a business has genuinely outgrown the limits of standard Shopify.
It depends on how the migration is handled. With proper redirect mapping and staged data transfer, the migration risk is manageable. A rushed export-import process without verification can lead to issues such as lost product variant data and broken redirects.
Not by default. Most ranking losses during a migration happen because URLs are not redirected correctly. That's why we prepare and implement 301 redirect mapping before launch to help preserve your search visibility.
Headless Shopify separates the storefront from Shopify's backend and is typically built using React, Next.js, or Hydrogen. It's best suited for high-traffic businesses or brands needing a highly customised front-end experience. For most stores, a well-built standard or Shopify Plus theme is more than sufficient.
Yes. We integrate Shopify with ERP and CRM platforms such as NetSuite, SAP, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics using their APIs. The integration depends on the platform involved, the data that needs to be synchronised, and how frequently it should sync.
Yes. Shopify supports wholesale and retail selling through gated catalogues, tiered pricing, and dedicated wholesale customer accounts. Whether both businesses run on one store or separate stores depends on your specific business requirements.
Both. We recommend proven Shopify App Store apps wherever possible. When your business requires functionality that existing apps cannot provide, we develop custom Shopify apps tailored to your workflow.
The client does. All custom Shopify themes, applications, and integrations developed by RWS become the client's property after project completion, with no ongoing licence fees payable to the agency.
We provide ongoing Shopify development support, including platform updates, bug fixes, performance improvements, and feature enhancements. The exact scope of support is agreed upon based on your project requirements.
The timeline depends on your catalogue size, integration requirements, and the level of customisation involved. Rather than providing a generic estimate, RWS defines the project timeline after reviewing your specific business needs.
