Shopify Plus Agency

A Shopify Plus Development Agency is measured on what the merchant actually uses after launch — not on what we demo during discovery. Plus development is where the platform earns its premium: Shopify Functions replace legacy Scripts at millisecond edge latency, Shopify Flow automates ops across orders and inventory, native B2B handles companies and catalogs and customer-specific price lists, HQ lets multi-store operators run regional or multi-brand topologies as one business. A Plus development agency that only ships themes is leaving 80% of the platform on the table.

What we engineer for Plus merchants:

• Shopify Functions — cart transforms, payment customization, checkout validation, custom pricing logic. Edge-runtime code replacing legacy Scripts and App Proxy hacks. Functions run server-side in milliseconds and don't block checkout.
• Shopify Flow — order routing across multiple 3PLs, fraud screening with custom thresholds, inventory alerts at SKU level, fulfillment branching by market or customer tag, customer tagging based on lifetime spend, automated tax exemption based on B2B customer attributes. Reviewable, versioned, documented — not a visual scripting black box.
• Shopify B2B (native, Plus-only) — companies with multiple buyer roles (buyer, approver, reorder-only), catalogs assigned per company with specific products visible and customer-specific price lists, approval workflows for orders above thresholds routed to company approvers, payment terms per customer (Net 30, Net 60, purchase orders, credit limits), quote-to-cart flows for negotiated orders, quick-order forms, CSV upload for repeat buyers.
• Shopify HQ multi-store topology — designed around business structure. Common patterns: one-brand-multi-region, multi-brand-one-org, B2B-separate-from-DTC, franchise/distributed retail. Each has distinct catalog sync, inventory flow, reporting roll-up, and theme inheritance decisions.
• Shopify Markets for multi-market — currency, language, tax, pricing per market. hreflang + URL structure + routing configured correctly so SEO doesn't cannibalize across markets.
• Enterprise integrations — NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Brightpearl, Cin7. Idempotency keys on every write, retry logic with exponential backoff, dead-letter queue for persistent failures, reconciliation jobs catching webhook misses, observability per integration.
• Custom theme + design system mapped 1:1 to Plus primitives so the merchandising team ships without calling us. Sections-everywhere, metafields for extended content, app blocks for third-party surfaces integrated cleanly.
• Performance engineering — CWV budgets enforced at every PR via Lighthouse CI. Liquid profiling, image pipeline (AVIF/WebP with responsive srcset), font strategy (preload critical, font-display swap), lazy hydration for interactive widgets. LCP <2s, INP <200ms, CLS <0.1 on mobile.
• Governance + release discipline — PR review requirements, release branches with cadenced deploys, feature flags for risky rollouts, rollback capability on every deploy, audit trails wired to external logging (Datadog, Honeycomb), theme lock-down preventing direct admin edits in production.
• Security + compliance — SSO/SAML via Okta or Azure AD, access control via staff permissions, audit trails via Plus admin logs plus custom logging, vendor security review support, SOC 2 alignment.

The team shape: minimum two engineers, one design lead, one project lead, one SEO lead — all named and dedicated, not a rotating pool. Architectural review with Merchant Success happens before code on major builds. Launch-day on-call plus 30-day stabilization bake is priced into every engagement.

Engagement model: new Plus builds from $120k fixed-scope (14–20 weeks), Plus migrations from $80k (14–20 weeks), dedicated-squad retainers from $20k/mo. Retainer scope includes ongoing Functions work, Flow maintenance + expansion, B2B customer onboarding, integration updates, feature development, and the standard monthly reporting rhythm (4-hour P1 SLA during business hours, weekly live sync, monthly written report, quarterly co-owned roadmap review).

For the enterprise operational layer — multi-store ops, governance frameworks, SOC 2 posture, ERP integration strategy — see Shopify Enterprise Agency. Plus Agency handles platform-layer engineering; Enterprise Agency handles operational-layer engagement. Many clients engage both in sequence or simultaneously.