A custom storefront for a launch, then a simpler one the team could run themselves

The problem

A retailer needed a storefront built quickly around a preorder campaign. A standard Shopify theme could not give the campaign the control it needed over the buying flow, but Shopify still had to handle the products, orders and payments.

The risk

Custom builds are attractive because they can do almost anything you like. They also come with a running cost that is easy to overlook at launch, because there is a separate front end to host, monitor and keep updated, and a developer has to be involved in every change to the content.

The less obvious risk comes later. Once a custom front end exists, there is a temptation to keep it simply because it was expensive to build, long after the reason for building it has gone, and the business ends up maintaining (and paying for) more software than it needs.

The decision

For the campaign, we built a headless storefront (a separate front end that talks to Shopify behind the scenes) on Next.js, using Shopify’s Storefront API. It covered the preorder flow, product setup and the handoff to Shopify’s own checkout, so payments stayed on Shopify’s infrastructure.

Once the campaign had done its job, the priority changed: the marketing team wanted to update content themselves, without waiting for a developer. We therefore recommended moving to a standard Shopify theme they could run day to day. That meant retiring work we had built ourselves, and I would make the same recommendation again, because keeping a custom front end for its own sake would have suited us better than it suited the client.

The outcome

The retailer had a storefront that fitted the campaign it was built for, and then a simpler setup that matches how the business actually works. The marketing team manages the content directly, and there is no separate front end left to host and look after.