A theme, or a custom storefront?
Most Shopify stores run on a theme: Shopify draws the pages, and you edit them within the theme's settings. A custom storefront, often called headless Shopify, keeps Shopify running the store behind the scenes while your own website draws every page.
It makes sense when the theme has become the limit: the brand needs more than a template, the site carries more than products, or the pages have grown heavy with apps.
What stays in Shopify
Nearly everything you manage day to day: products, prices, inventory, discounts, orders, customers, shipping and payouts. Your team keeps using Shopify admin exactly as before. Only the storefront changes: the pages your customers see.
- Products and inventory
- Orders and customers
- Checkout and payments
How checkout works
When a customer checks out, the cart passes to Shopify's own checkout, with Shop Pay, your payment methods, discounts and shipping rates. It's the same checkout your customers already trust, and the order lands in Shopify admin.
A lighter option: the Buy Button
Not every business needs a full storefront. If you sell a handful of products alongside your services, Shopify's Buy Button can put products and a cart on any page of your site, with checkout handled by Shopify.
Keeping your rankings
We keep Shopify's product and collection addresses where we can, and redirect any that change before the switch, so search engines follow every page to its new home. Titles, descriptions and product details carry across with them.
