Shopify or a Custom Build?

The default should be the platform

A hosted platform gives you payments, PCI compliance, hosting, security updates, a checkout tuned by thousands of experiments and an app ecosystem. Replicating that is a multi-year project nobody should undertake for its own sake.

So the question is not whether the platform is good. It is whether your business fits inside it.

The four situations where it stops fitting

1. Pricing that the platform cannot express. Customer-specific price lists, volume breaks by category, contract pricing, quote-to-order.
2. Products that are not products. Configurable items, made to measure, anything priced by dimension or specification.
3. Fulfilment that is not a parcel. Multi-warehouse allocation rules, partial shipments, installation scheduling.
4. App costs that have grown past a build. Fifteen subscriptions at £40 a month is £7,200 a year, before anyone counts the fragility.

The clearest signal is a stack of apps chained together to approximate one feature. That arrangement breaks every time one of them updates.

The cost comparison over three years

At modest volume the platform wins comfortably. At high volume with heavy app usage the lines cross, usually somewhere in the low millions of revenue — and the crossing point is where the honest conversation belongs.

The hybrid that suits most growing retailers

Keep the platform for the storefront and checkout, and build the specific thing it cannot do as a service alongside: a pricing engine, a configurator, an allocation service that talks to it through the API.

You keep the checkout, the compliance and the ecosystem, and you get the one capability that was costing you. It is usually a quarter of the price of leaving and it does not put your revenue through a rewrite.

Migrating away, if you do

1. Preserve every product and category URL, or redirect one to one
2. Migrate customers with their order history — they will ask for it
3. Run both in parallel with the new store not yet public
4. Move payment provider deliberately, testing refunds as well as charges
5. Keep the old store read-only for a quarter

Search visibility is the main risk in a commerce migration, and it is almost entirely a redirect discipline problem. Category pages that quietly 404 are how a store loses a third of its organic revenue in a fortnight.

Frequently asked questions