A Shopify Development Agency You Can Actually Call
Custom Shopify themes, bespoke apps and real integrations, built in-house by a UK team. No bought themes, no page-builder apps, a fixed quote before we start, and the code is yours.
Some of our direct clients
Why Brands Choose Us for Shopify
Custom Liquid themes, bespoke apps and real integrations built in-house by a UK team you can speak to directly, with a fixed quote before anything starts.
Custom Themes, Never Bought Ones
Every store is built from scratch in clean Liquid around how it actually sells. No paid theme reskinned, no page-builder app locking your layout into someone else's format and monthly bill.
Fixed Quotes Up Front
We scope the work properly and price it before anything is built, so you know what you are committing to and there are no surprises halfway through.
UK Team, In-House
Every project is built by our own developers in the UK. Nothing is passed to a third party, and you speak directly to the people writing the code.
You Own the Code
The theme and any apps we write for you are yours, handed over and documented, on your own Shopify account. No licences and nothing tying you to us.
Built to Be Merchandised
The theme editor only shows the sections your team needs. Running promotions and updating the storefront should not require a developer every time.
Support That Continues
Updates, monitoring and a developer to call. Launch is the start of the store's life, not the end of the relationship.
The Platforms We Build and Connect
Custom Shopify and Shopify Plus at the core, with the stock, fulfilment, accounting and payment systems your store needs to talk to. Where a project genuinely outgrows Shopify, we build it on Laravel instead.
Laravel & Bespoke Platforms
For systems and platforms that require bespoke processes, data handling complex integrations or internal business platforms with security at the forefront of the build.
WordPress & WooCommerce
For fast, reliable and easy to manage brochure based websites built following best practice with a bespoke theme powered by ACF Pro and supporting custom built plugins.
Shopify & Shopify Plus
For eCommerce and retail brands looking to grow revenue significantly online. Built using a bespoke theme specific to your brand and with a full seamless migration from legacy platforms.
Recently Completed Projects
Clintons Cards
A full migration from Magento 2 to Shopify Plus, with order, customer, product, stock and finance integrations kept live through the switch.
Ecommerce · Shopify Plus · IntegrationsQualityHive
A Laravel platform that web agencies use to capture, assign and close website bugs, taken from wireframe to launch, then handed over as clean, documented code.
SaaS platform · Laravel · API integrationsThe Sauce Foundry
A brand, a WooCommerce store and product photography for an artisan hot sauce startup, launched to a 3.8% conversion rate from day one.
Ecommerce · Branding · WooCommerceHave a project like these in mind?
Get in touchHere's What Our
Clients Say
Consistently rated 5* on Google by our full build clients and retainer clients.
Frequently Asked Questions
Hiring a Shopify Development Agency
Most people arrive at this page with the same handful of questions: what will actually be built, whether the store will still be easy to live with in a few years, and what it costs to keep it running. Here is how we answer all three.
What a Shopify development agency actually does
Almost every web company will tell you it works with Shopify, because almost every one does. The gap is between installing a bought theme and configuring apps around it, and building a store from the ground up around how your business sells. The first is assembly. The second is development, and it is the difference between a store you can grow into and one you replace in two years.
We build custom Liquid themes, write bespoke apps where the App Store falls short, connect the store to the other systems you run, and stay involved after launch. Everything is built in-house in the UK, and you speak to the developers rather than an account manager relaying messages.
Shopify is one of several stacks we work in. If a project turns out to be better served by something else, we will say so rather than forcing it, and our wider web design and development work covers the alternatives.
Custom themes rather than bought ones
A paid theme ships with code for every use case its author could imagine, and your store loads all of it whether it uses any of it or not. A page-builder app adds another layer on top, storing layout in a proprietary format that is painful to leave and billed for every month. Both feel fast at the start and expensive later.
A custom theme contains only what your store needs. The Liquid is clean, which helps both Core Web Vitals and accessibility. The theme editor exposes only the sections your team will actually use, which means fewer ways to break the storefront. And when the store is redesigned in a few years, your catalogue lives in Shopify as products, collections and metafields rather than as builder markup, so it moves with you.
Where a store needs behaviour Shopify does not offer natively, we build a bespoke app for it instead of stacking overlapping ones from the App Store. Keeping that logic in an app you own means a future redesign does not put the functionality, or a pile of monthly subscriptions, at risk.
Subscriptions, wholesale and the awkward cases
Plenty of Shopify projects are more than a storefront. Subscription and recurring billing, wholesale and B2B with pricing and access rules, high-volume catalogues with deep variant and metafield structures, and Shopify Plus stores that need custom checkout logic, scripts and flows.
Where a store needs its orders handled without someone re-keying them, that moves into automated order processing, including stores that have to talk to stock, accounting or fulfilment systems rather than sitting on their own.
Occasionally a requirement genuinely outgrows Shopify, usually when it is closer to an application with users, permissions and workflows than to a store. That is portal and platform development, which we build on Laravel. We will tell you when a project has crossed that line rather than pushing Shopify somewhere it does not belong.
Not sure what your project involves?
Send us what you have, even if it is only a rough idea. We will tell you plainly what it would take and roughly what it would cost, with no sales pitch attached.
Making Shopify talk to your other systems
A store is rarely the only system a business runs. Orders need to reach a warehouse, stock and pricing need to stay in step, customers and invoices need to reconcile with accounting. We build those connections directly against each vendor's own API and Shopify's APIs through our API integration work, rather than chaining together automation tools that fail silently and cost more as volume grows.
Common ones we handle repeatedly include syncing orders into fulfilment platforms, keeping stock accurate across channels, and wiring in the payment gateways a business already uses.
The test we apply is simple: if a person is copying data between two systems every week, that is a job for an integration.
Speed, apps and conversion
Shopify hosts and scales the store for you, which removes a whole class of problems, but a bloated theme and a pile of apps will still make a fast platform feel slow. We keep themes lean, defer what does not need to load immediately, handle images properly, and audit apps for what they genuinely earn.
Every app is a dependency someone else controls, updates and bills for, and three or four overlapping ones is a common reason a store is both slow and expensive to run. We would rather build one small custom piece than carry a stack of subscriptions doing similar things badly.
Conversion follows from the same discipline. A quick, clear storefront where the path to checkout is obvious will out-sell a heavier, cleverer one, so we design around what a shopper is trying to do rather than around effects.
What happens after launch
A Shopify store is not finished at launch, it just changes shape. Apps update, Shopify ships new theme and API versions, and the business asks for changes. Left alone, that is exactly how a store drifts into being slow or clunky, usually discovered at the worst possible moment.
We can hand a store over cleanly with documentation and step away, or stay on with a monthly arrangement covering updates, monitoring and a set amount of development time, so there is a developer to call rather than a scramble.
Where a store collects personal data or runs analytics, we also handle cookie consent and GDPR setup properly, rather than dropping in a banner that blocks nothing.
If you are an agency rather than an end client
A good share of our Shopify work never carries our name. Agencies that win Shopify projects but do not want permanent development staff use us as their build team, invisibly, with the client relationship staying entirely theirs.
That arrangement is set out in full on our white label Shopify development page. The technical standards are identical either way. The only thing that changes is whose name is on the work.
Partner with Zestcode for Industry Leading Quality and Reliability
Tell us what you're looking for and we'll see how we can help. Quotes are typically provided within 2 working days of the initial call.