Build vs. Buy on Shopify
Build, buy, customize, or wait — decided with numbers. Capability-by-capability verdicts with honest 3-year cost math.
Custom wins on 3-year cost or fit — with maintenance counted honestly.
The app wins your scenario — we say so plainly.
Buy the app, build the glue: very often the honest mid-market answer.
Shopify is shipping this natively. Don't spend yet; we'll tell you when it flips.
Latest Decisions
Should You Mix Self-Managed and Managed Markets on Plus?
CUSTOMIZEPlus lets you act as merchant of record in the markets where you already have an entity while Managed Markets covers the rest, at 3.25% of order value on Plus.
International & Localization
Build or Buy a Payment Customization Function on Plus?
BUYHiding, reordering or gating payment methods is a $3.99–$9.99/month app decision (verified Sep 2026); a custom function needs Plus and rarely pays back.
Checkout & Conversion
Should You Build Payment Rules for Pre-Order and TBYB?
BUYPre-order and try-before-you-buy payment flows come packaged; the Plus-only Payment Customization Function gates methods around them and excludes subscriptions.
Checkout & Conversion
Should You Plan Around Plus's 200-Location Ceiling?
WAITShopify Plus supports adding up to 200 locations per store, a documented ceiling that decides when consolidation stops working and a platform starts paying.
Retail & POS
Will Your Apps Survive a Move to Hydrogen?
BUILDReviews, upsell and personalization apps that render through theme app extensions have nowhere to go on a Hydrogen storefront, because there is no Liquid theme.
Content & Storefront
Can You See Every App's Access Scope in One Place?
BUILDShopify discloses an app's data-access scopes at install and afterward one app at a time from its about page, with no consolidated view across the app fleet.
Trust, Legal & Compliance
Can You Trust Every App Store App to Honor GDPR Deletion?
WAITShopify rejects any App Store app that fails to answer the mandatory compliance webhooks, with a 30-day action window. Custom apps sit outside that scope.
Trust, Legal & Compliance
Should You Plan Around Shopify's B2B Company-Size Ceilings?
WAITA B2B company holds up to 10,000 locations and 10,000 customers, but only 50 customers per location. The 50 is the number that actually constrains you.
B2B & Wholesale
Checkout Extension Network Access: What Shopify Actually Allows
BUILDCheckout UI extensions declare four capabilities in the extension TOML file, and network_access is the one Shopify makes you request before publishing.
Checkout & Conversion
Build or Buy Observability for Checkout Functions on Shopify?
CUSTOMIZEShopify documents 12 function error types and stores each run in the Dev Dashboard, but no default alert tells you a checkout function has started failing.
Platform & Architecture