Shopify Customization: Common Changes and Challenges

Customizing your Shopify theme can be a quick way to give your store a new look. For new stores, Shopify customizations or tweaks can make it easy to differentiate your brand, make products eye-catching, and engage customers.

But scaling brands with multi-million dollar revenue are often looking for far more than simple changes.

Eventually, you want to push the limits of what’s possible with your Shopify website beyond easy customizations. You might hire an agency or dedicated developer to code custom features or templates, but this isn’t always a sustainable long-term solution.

Over time you may find that you simply outgrow out-of-the-box themes and minor Shopify customizations.

Fortunately, you have the option for more flexibility with headless commerce, or a separate—more flexible—frontend. Here we’ll cover why this emerging option could be great for you if you’re feelin’ the strain.

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Full design control<cta-title>Gain full control over your Shopify site with sub-second page load speed.Learn more

Scaling merchants are outgrowing minor Shopify customizations

Often, when we chat with experienced Shopify store owners, they want:

• More creative freedom and design flexibility than is possible with standard Shopify customizations as they imagine the next evolution of their store
• No more compromises: brands want highly performant sites (think: sub-second load times) without limits on rich merchandising opportunities, and
• The ability to launch campaigns and promotions at speed

And while Shopify has extensive customization capabilities, it does have its limits.

As Shogun Agency Partner Helixian’s Bill Dzadon shares:

“When growing merchants inevitably run up against the limitations of the native Shopify environment, we see it usually boils down to three things: Site performance, UI/UX customizations and/or Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).”

And the third-party integrations that got you up and running? Dzadon notes their agency often sees these starting to hold merchants back:

“While Shopify’s marketplace of apps can be great for new merchants to get up and running fast, they can cause severe issues for brands as they grow and need to make agile decisions. Merchants have to weigh functionality gains against the performance cost that each app brings.”

Some of the other most common challenges include:

Item customization

Shopify has a 100-variant limit for product customizations. While this may seem like a lot, experienced merchandisers know this can add up quickly. A product (like a pair of pants, for example) might come in multiple colors, and each color must come in all sizes. With 15 color options and eight sizes, you already have 120 product variants.

Detailed checkout customization

This is only properly available in Shopify Plus and requires coding in Liquid to alter the look and functionality of your store checkout. Because your checkout can make or break your store’s ability to convert and grow, this is a massive opportunity and why many merchants seek changes beyond what comes native to Shopify.

Going beyond the standard default theme

Lastly, most merchants are building off of the same popular Shopify themes, and they tend to be very cookie-cutter or recognizable to your shoppers.

As Helixian’s Bill Dzadon shares:

A separate frontend gives you long-term flexibility

If you reach the stage of growth where you feel like you’ve outgrown the many customization options available out-of-the-box with Shopify, headless commerce may be the best way for you to get the flexibility you need.

#cta-paragraph-fe#Headless commerce refers to using different tech to power the frontend of your online store (what your customers interact with)—separate from the backend (the behind-the-scenes functionality that facilitates sales). Learn more here.

Unleash creativity without slowing down your store

Taking your store headless gives you access to functionality that isn’t possible with traditional ecommerce platforms, like rich merchandising that helps provide site visitors with an elevated shopping experience.

Even better, you can get this design flexibility without compromising on site load times or mobile performance.

By going headless via a Progressive Web App (PWA headless commerce)—you get huge speed advantages compared to traditional ecommerce sites.

For customers, clicks between pages using a PWA are nearly instant because of the way PWAs handle page load. This means you can have a visually rich site that provides a unique shopping experience, with no slow down for your customers.

For example, before going headless, OneBlade was unable to include videos or rich media on their site because they were struggling with slow site speeds, with page-to-page load times nearing 12 seconds.

Not only did going headless reduce their page-to-page load times by 83%, but they were able to add rich merchandising throughout the site. Now, when a customer clicks between different product options, the images on the page dynamically update to match their selection.

This functionality wasn’t possible with their traditional ecommerce platform on Shopify alone—and they’ve been able to get even more creative, adding 3D renderings of each razor model without any hit to site performance.

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Full design control<cta-title>Gain full control over your Shopify site with sub-second page load speed.Learn more

Run promotions instantly

Replacing your store’s frontend with something especially flexible means you can take back ownership of your Shopify store’s time-to-market.

Your marketing team doesn’t need to wait for developer availability to build site pages, which can massively slow down your ability to plan, launch, and run time-sensitive campaigns.

A quality frontend platform will help you build pages visually, with more control and much less code. This enables your marketing team to see a true view of what the shopper will see.

With control over all aspects of upcoming campaigns—including the all-important site page promotions point to—this makes it much easier to launch promotions at speed and reap the revenue (the entire goal of your ecomm team).

Once you’ve added a flexible frontend to your traditional ecommerce platform, you’ll find site edits much more accessible for your whole team.

For Nomad, going headless has given them much more control over their site and their growing catalog. They can build new pages and custom landing pages without coding, meaning they can do everything much faster than when they were using Shopify alone.

Now, the marketing team can cook up a campaign, build a custom collection, and begin driving traffic to it the next day—all without any input from their developer teams.

Shogun Frontend makes taking your site headless easy

If you think headless commerce can bring the flexibility you need to grow and develop your Shopify store, then Shogun Frontend is the solution that can help you maximize your website’s potential. We’ve put together a full guide covering how to go headless with Shopify.

It used to be that your only option for creating a flexible, customizable store was to build it yourself. Coding the entire frontend of your site from scratch takes a long time, and even after all that work, you may end up with something that doesn’t deliver the top-quality customer experience you imagined.

Unlike building a custom frontend from scratch (requiring lots of complex, modular choices), Shogun Frontend is a unified platform wherein you get everything you need to start building incredible site experiences.

From the CMS to the Experience Manager, the APIs, and middleware—everything’s bundled and included, and it’s all best-in-breed tech.

It can be a great way to go headless without the headaches. And gets you away from piecemeal or minor Shopify optimizations as you scale to become the next major DTC brand.

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Improve page-to-page load times and conversions<cta-title>Shogun Frontend is your headless commerce solution.Try today