Shopify Development: Custom Build vs Theme, and When to Go Headless
Shopify powers 4.8 million stores. Most of them look the same. Here is how to decide between a theme, a custom build, and a headless architecture, and what each actually costs.
AI made e-commerce recommendations, search, and forecasting cheap. Whether they convert depends on your own transaction, behavior, and catalog data.
Launching a Shopify store takes a weekend now. Selling through it takes everything the weekend did not teach you. The setup got easy. Selling stayed hard.
The cart and checkout funnel loses most of your buyers before they pay. The fix is not a better funnel. It is no funnel. Featureless commerce keeps the product page, replaces the eight steps after it with one Buy action, and pushes everything else into workflows you own.
Your buyer used to find your store on Google. Increasingly, they find stores in AI answers, and the AI only names a few. Here is what is changing, why most stores are not yet visible inside AI answers, and what closing the gap looks like for you in practice.