Shopify headless commerce: keep your shop, speed up pages

TL;DR: Shopify headless commerce leaves Shopify holding the catalogue, the orders and the money, and moves only the buyer's side into its own storefront. Your team keeps the screens it knows, your apps keep working, and the pages customers open stop waiting on a theme built for every shop. One week to plan at $2,500, the build from $8,000.

A stranger who lands on your product page is not comparing shop software. They are deciding whether to wait. That decision is taken in the first second, on a phone, often on a signal that is not perfect. Keeping Shopify and moving only the part those strangers touch is the shortest road to a faster shop: nothing to migrate, nothing to re-learn under your team's feet. It is one road inside our headless commerce practice.

What this includes

• A storefront that answers in about a second on a phone, timed on your own shop before we start and again the day it goes live
• Shopify still doing the work it does well: catalogue, orders, payments, shipping, tax, stock counts, and the apps your staff open every morning
• The path from basket to payment measured against your busiest week before launch, so the change never lands in your peak season
• A short written record of what we keep, what we put aside and what we leave alone, delivered in week one and yours even if nothing follows
• The addresses that already earn you buyers, mapped one by one and confirmed before the day of the switch
• One product list behind English and Spanish pages, for a shop selling to both halves of South Florida

Where Shopify stops and your storefront begins

Shopify is a good keeper of records: the catalogue, the price list, the stock counts, the orders, the taxes, the discount codes your regulars type in, the apps that print your shipping labels. None of that is broken and none of it is being replaced. What disappears is the requirement that the same software also draw every page a customer sees, in the same second, with the same rules it applies to a shop ten times your size.

A theme is a compromise agreed in advance with thousands of other shops. Your catalogue arrives inside it alongside whatever the most demanding app you ever installed wants on the page, and the page a buyer actually opens carries all of it before it can show them a price. Speed is usually lost there, not in your product photographs.

A storefront standing in front of your Shopify asks for the pieces of one page and nothing more: this product, its price, its stock, the contents of the basket. Shopify's own Storefront API is the door kept open for exactly that, it is included in the plan you already pay, and it reads your existing catalogue instead of a copy of it. Shopify also maintains a storefront kit of its own, which suits a settled design and a team able to work inside it, and the storefront can just as well be built from nothing at all. Whichever road is taken, the catalogue stays where it is.

The vocabulary around this work is loose, and that matters at the moment you compare firms. Some sell it as a rebuild of everything, back office included. What this page describes is the narrower version: the software that holds your catalogue and your orders does not move, and only the customer's side is rebuilt. When the engine beneath has to change as well, that is a separate job with its own published price. And if the shop in question runs on WooCommerce rather than Shopify, the same approach exists for that shop, with a different back office underneath.

One question decides whether it pays for itself: is the shop you are on costing you more every month than rebuilding the customer's side of it would? Thousands of products with live stock, a season that cannot stumble, a pile of installed apps, and pages that take several seconds on a phone is the clear case. A small catalogue that already opens quickly is not, and the first week says so in writing, including when the honest answer is to change nothing at all.

How it works

1. Week one, $2,500. We buy from your shop the way a customer does, on a phone, on an ordinary connection, and note every point where the page stalls or an order slips away, naming the page responsible. The notes are yours whatever you decide next.
2. The plan, before any building. Which parts of the shop stay, which move out, in what order, and what each stage costs. You read it, you approve it, and nothing is built until you have.
3. The build, two to ten weeks depending on scope, from $8,000. The pages that earn your traffic go first, then the route from basket to payment, then the pages people arrive from search on. Throughout, your Shopify sells exactly as it does today.
4. The switch, about a week, included. You choose the date and we steer clear of November to April, when South Florida trade is at its busiest. Every address that earns you buyers answers on the new storefront, and the old one stands as a way back for a month.
5. After launch, from $1,500 a month, optional. Faults show up in the weeks that follow a switch, never on the day itself. This is the stage that catches them, on a fixed monthly block of work, with no cut taken from any order.

What it costs

Nothing on this page is a teaser price. Week one is $2,500 and it buys the measurement, the written scope and the plan. The second week is another $2,500 and it is credited against the build when the build goes ahead. Building starts at $8,000, divided into stages you can stop between. Care, once the storefront is live, starts at $1,500 a month, and no share of your sales ever changes hands. The three figures are the same for a shop turning over a little and a shop turning over a great deal.

Your scope, your price and your dates come out of that first week's document, written once we have seen what your shop actually holds: how many products, how many apps, how many addresses already earning traffic. Every phase and its published price sits on one page.

Proof

Food By Box, which appears in the measured results behind these stores, holds 2,500 products with live stock and scores 95 for desktop speed with Google. Visits climbed from 20,000 a month to 500,000 over 24 months, and not one address that earned traffic was dropped. It is not a Shopify shop, and rather than blur that detail we say it plainly: what those figures stand behind is the method, and the method starts by measuring your shop rather than ours.

Tatiana Miath sells her own work. Her pages needed 4.8 seconds to appear on a phone before we touched them, and they now appear in a little over one second, with no position lost in search. Neither project was started for the pleasure of rebuilding.

Michael Agnassia has spent 15 years in ecommerce. He writes the architecture for each project himself, reads the work before it ships, and works from the studio at 78 SW 7th Street in Brickell, in English and Spanish, visiting shops around South Florida.

The speed bar is not ours to set. Google publishes the numbers that decide whether a page feels fast to a visitor, and we hold your shop against them before the work and after it. For a shop that does decide to leave its platform altogether, the same method is written up on a live move, and the Shopify to WooCommerce route is the one we run for Miami shops. Both are the opposite journey to this page: they change the engine, this page leaves it alone.

Questions

What does Shopify headless commerce mean, in plain words?

Shopify carries on keeping the books: products, prices, orders, payments, stock. The pages a visitor opens become their own lighter storefront, served on their own, so the screens your staff use all day and the pages your buyers use for a minute stop drawing from the same source.

What does headless Shopify development cost us, all in?

$2,500 for the first week and its document, another $2,500 for the second week, credited against the build, from $8,000 for the build itself, and from $1,500 a month afterwards if you want us to stay on. Nothing is charged per order, and nothing is taken as a share of sales.

Will our Shopify store speed change?

On the pages people buy from, yes, and the change is timed rather than asserted. Week one records where you stand today, on a phone, so the comparison at the end is a number and not an opinion.

Do we lose the apps, the discount codes or the customer accounts we have built up?

No. They belong to the shop, and the shop is the part that stays. Accounts, past orders, discount codes and shipping rates carry on working untouched, and every item on that list is named in the first week's document so it cannot become a surprise six months later.

Would our search positions be at risk?

Positions are protected by preparation rather than luck. Each address that earns you visitors gets a matching address on the new storefront, checked one at a time before the switch, and the list of what carries your traffic today is part of the first week's document.

Should we talk to a Shopify Hydrogen agency instead?

Sometimes the honest answer is the storefront kit Shopify publishes itself, and for a shop with a settled design and staff who can work inside it, that is a good answer. It fits fewer shops than the firms selling it admit, because a kit is a beginning and not a finished shop. Whatever we recommend arrives with its price in the plan you approve.

Do we have to close the shop while you build?

Never. The shop you have stays open and selling until the date you choose. The new storefront is built on a test address first, so you can put the same order through both and compare the totals, the tax and the shipping before anything moves. If that comparison fails, the switch simply waits.

Next

What your customers wait for is decided in the first second, and that second is rarely a Shopify problem. Book a call and tell us how the shop sells: the catalogue, the season that matters most, the apps you would not give up, and the pages your team opens every morning.