Shopify was built to restock, and your Whanganui studio makes each piece exactly once

A theme build with proper fragile freight and local pickup logic runs NZ$18,000 to NZ$35,000. A private app that syncs availability and handles reservations across channels sits at NZ$35,000 to NZ$65,000. Below about NZ$18,000 you are buying a theme install, which is fine if inventory is not your problem.

Only with help. Shopify tracks a quantity of one accurately within its own world, but it has no awareness of a piece being wrapped at a stall or held in an Instagram conversation. A private app that treats an external register as the source of truth is the pattern that actually works.

Build packaging tiers rather than a flat rate, because a boxed vessel and a crated sculpture are not the same parcel, and apply rural delivery surcharges by destination. Getting this right typically recovers more than the cost of the build within a year for makers shipping regularly outside main centres.

Keep Shopify. The checkout, payment handling, PCI compliance and uptime are worth the platform fee, and rebuilding them consumes budget that should go into solving your inventory problem. Custom work belongs around Shopify, not instead of it.

Shopify Markets handles currency presentment and regional pricing, but GST treatment differs between domestic sales and exports, so the accounting integration needs explicit rules. Export sales are zero-rated for New Zealand GST, and getting that wrong is a costly correction at return time.

They should. An archive template keeps the photography, dimensions and story live and marked as sold, which continues to attract search traffic and gives collectors provenance. Deleting sold work throws away your best content and creates dead links pointing at your store.

You must, from day one. The Shopify account should be registered to your business with your billing details, and the domain held at a registrar in your name. Agencies holding either can effectively switch your business off, and recovering it is slow and expensive.

Five to eight weeks for a theme build with custom freight, eight to twelve for a private app handling availability. The variable is not development time, it is how quickly you make decisions about freight tiers and reservation rules, so nominate one decision-maker before the project starts.

It should share the same availability register rather than syncing store to store. That is the whole point of the pattern, and it is why /pos-system-development/whanganui-mwt/ and Shopify work should be scoped together rather than as separate projects six months apart.

A professional Shopify build runs $2,000 to $6,000 for theme setup with light customization, $8,000 to $25,000 for a fully custom theme, and $25,000 to $80,000 or more for Shopify Plus builds with ERP or 3PL integrations, based on Digital Heroes delivery experience across 2,000+ projects. The biggest price driver is not design but the number of systems the store has to talk to. Get every template, app, and integration listed in the quote before comparing numbers.

For a focused first build, most small businesses land between $8,000 and $60,000: roughly $8,000 to $45,000 for a custom website and $25,000 to $60,000 for an internal tool or simple web app, based on Digital Heroes delivery across 2,000+ projects. Customer-facing products with payments, logins, or a mobile app start around $40,000. Quotes far below these bands usually mean a template with your logo on it, not software shaped around your workflow.

Liquid with Online Store 2.0 JSON templates and sections, Shopify CLI for local development, Git for version control, and the GraphQL Admin and Storefront APIs for anything custom. Custom apps are typically Node or Ruby with React and Polaris for the admin UI, and headless builds use Hydrogen, Shopify's Remix-based framework. If a candidate describes editing theme code inside the online admin editor as their workflow, keep looking.

Almost always yes, through CSV exports or the vendor's API, and migration should be scoped as its own workstream with field mapping, a dry run, and a planned cutover window rather than an afterthought. The real time sink is rarely moving the data; it is cleaning it, since years of duplicates, free-text fields, and inconsistent formats surface all at once. Pull a full export from your current vendor before committing to anything new, because some SaaS plans restrict exports on lower tiers.

A one-page brief beats a 40-page requirements document: the business problem in plain words, who will use the system, the 5 to 10 workflows it must handle, the tools it must connect to, and your budget range and deadline driver. You do not need wireframes, a specification, or technical vocabulary; producing those is the agency's job during discovery. Stating a budget range up front is the single best move, because it gets you honest scoping instead of a quote engineered to win the meeting.

Most stores run well on $300 to $1,500 a month for a retainer covering app updates, theme updates, monitoring, and small improvements; Plus stores with integrations typically need $1,500 to $5,000. Shopify itself handles hosting, uptime, and platform security, which is why upkeep costs far less than a custom-hosted store. Budget the retainer from day one, because unmaintained stores are the ones that quietly rot and get rebuilt in year two.

Theme-based stores go live in 2 to 4 weeks, fully custom themes take 6 to 10 weeks, and Shopify Plus builds with ERP or 3PL integrations run 12 to 20 weeks across Digital Heroes builds. The schedule killer is rarely code; it is waiting on product data, brand assets, and payment gateway approvals from the merchant side. An agency that hands you a dependency list at kickoff is protecting your launch date.

Digital Heroes builds custom Shopify development systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. The work is delivered remotely: our engineers work from Delhi and Lucknow, leadership is in New York, and some team members live in London and Sydney and work remotely from there. We have no office in Whanganui. You can chat with the team directly, and every form gets an email reply within 24 hours.