Anyone can have a store live by the weekend. What decides whether it sells is the tracking, the structure and how many apps you are paying for by month three. I build the store and run it monthly; Shopify’s own plan you pay to Shopify, never through me.
Shopify removed the hard part of launching, which is why so many stores look finished and still take no orders. Nothing is broken — it is just that nobody built the parts that do the selling.
Same money either way, so it goes into the things that move the number: a theme that looks like you, a checkout nobody abandons out of confusion, and measurement that works from day one.
I build both, so I have no reason to push one. The difference is who takes a cut and who does the maintaining — and it is worth two minutes on a call, because switching later is the expensive way to find out.
I build on a development store, which is a working shop that costs neither of us anything while it is being made. At launch the store is transferred into your ownership and you pick your plan then — not months earlier, funding a shop nobody can buy from yet.
On Shopify there is no hosting to run and no updates to install — Shopify does that, so I do not charge you for it. What you pay me for is the work that keeps a store selling: new sections, merchandising, and product pages written to be found.
“Daniel set up our store and SEO completely. Within 3 months we were selling consistently online — he handles everything.”
“Our old website was years behind the business. Daniel rebuilt it from scratch and now runs our SEO — one point of contact, and things move without chasing.”
Yes, and that is usually the more interesting job. A store that does not sell rarely has a design problem: it has product pages nobody searches for, tracking that never got finished, and eight apps fighting each other. I go through it first and tell you what is actually costing you orders, and you decide from there.
Not ten items typed into a spreadsheet. Each one is a page built to be found: the search terms people actually use, a description that answers the objection, questions and answers underneath, and the structured data that lets Google show it properly. Ten a month is the pace that compounds without turning into filler — and it is $12 a page, against the $20 and up a writer charges for the words alone.
No, and nobody should tell you it is. Shopify bills you directly for its plan, exactly like Google bills you for ad budget. My fee is for building and looking after the store.
Yes. A migration is quoted separately because the work is in the data — products, customers, orders and the redirects that stop you losing the rankings you already have.
Preferably not. Every app is a monthly forever, and a pile of them is the quiet reason a store costs more than the owner thought. Built properly, most of what people bolt on is already there.
Shopify is one of two routes. This is the other, and what comes after.
One call. Which platform fits how you actually sell, what it will cost you a month all in — and I will say if you do not need a new store at all.
