Shopify Plus
A Shopify Plus agency built by people who run a Shopify store.
Ace runs Threadheads — a Shopify apparel business doing eight figures a year, with in-house DTG and DTF production across more than one site. Not a store he used to run. One he is running while you read this.
That is the entire claim, and it is deliberately narrow. We are not the biggest Shopify agency, we do not have a case-study wall, and we do not do the part of the job most agencies lead with. What we have is a person on the call who has had the same week you are having.
The argument
Everybody says they understand ecommerce.
We surveyed around fifty firms selling into this market — Shopify agencies, AI consultancies, fractional CTOs. Not one of them made a current-tense operator claim. They sell tenure, logos and speed. Tenure is past tense. Logos belong to somebody else. Speed is commoditised, and there is a global market of competent developers undercutting everyone on it.
The reason nobody makes the claim is that it is expensive to acquire. To copy it, a competitor would have to go and build an eight-figure store first. That is not a positioning exercise; it is a decade.
What it buys you in practice is the scoping conversation. The expensive failure in this category is almost never bad development — it is building the right feature for the wrong process, discovered in month four. Someone who has run the operation you are describing catches that in week one, because they have already made the mistake with their own money.
Scope
What we work on.
Everything below the storefront. The parts of a Shopify Plus business that decide whether an order that converted actually gets made, picked, shipped and counted correctly.
Catalogue and merchandising at scale
Once a catalogue passes a few thousand SKUs, collection curation by hand stops being viable and starts being a full-time job that never finishes. Automated collection rules, sort logic that reflects margin and stock rather than recency, search that returns what the customer asked for, and reporting on what is actually selling versus what is merely visible.
Order and fulfilment flow
Routing across locations and 3PLs, splitting orders sensibly, handling made-to-order and pre-order stock honestly, and making the path from paid to shipped visible so you can see where orders sit still. Shopify Flow does more of this than most stores use, and knowing where Flow stops and code has to start saves real money.
Integrations and the app stack
Most stores at this size are paying for thirty to sixty apps, some of which are fighting each other, several of which are doing one small job for a large monthly fee. We audit what is installed, what it costs, what it actually does, and what can be consolidated or replaced. Then the joins between Shopify, your ERP or WMS, your 3PL and your finance system get built properly rather than as a nightly CSV.
Getting the numbers to agree
Shopify says one thing, the 3PL says another, and the ad platforms between them claim more revenue than the bank account received. So somebody capable spends a chunk of every week rebuilding the truth in a spreadsheet, and by Thursday it is stale. That work does not show up as a line item anywhere — it shows up as a good operator doing data entry, and as decisions made on Tuesday’s version of the truth.
Checkout, Functions and B2B
The Plus-only surface: discount and shipping logic in Functions, checkout extensions, B2B catalogues and price lists, additional storefronts for other markets. Worth doing when there is a real commercial reason. Worth skipping when the honest reason is that somebody wants to use the feature.
Out of scope
What we do not do.
This list exists so you can disqualify us in ninety seconds instead of on the third call. If what you need is in this section, we are the wrong firm and we would rather say so now.
Theme design and front-end build
We do not design or build themes, landing pages or brand systems. There are excellent studios that do this and are far better at it than we would be. If your problem is that the store looks dated, you want one of them, not us.
Paid media and performance marketing
We do not run Meta or Google accounts, and we do not do creative testing. Ecommerce brands typically spend ten to thirty per cent of revenue on advertising and one to three per cent on software and development. We work on the second number — not because the first one is wrong, but because it has already had years of weekly attention from people who are good at it, and the operational side has had almost none.
Content, SEO and lifecycle campaigns
Not our work. We will happily build the data pipeline that makes somebody else’s segmentation possible, but we are not writing the emails.
Stores under about a million
Below roughly a million in revenue, the honest answer is usually an off-the-shelf app and some discipline, not a build. We will tell you that for free on a call, which is cheaper for both of us than a proposal.
Engagements
Fixed price. You own what we build.
Three ways in. Every engagement starts with the first one, because a build that begins without a baseline can never prove it did anything.
| Engagement | Price | Duration |
|---|---|---|
| Operations diagnostic | A$5,000 – A$8,000 | 2–3 weeks |
| Fixed-scope build | A$25,000 – A$60,000 | 6–12 weeks |
| Ongoing | A$2,000 – A$8,000 / month | Rolling, 30 days' notice |
Why the diagnostic is paid
A free audit is a sales document. It was always going to end in a proposal, which is exactly why nobody believes the findings. Charging for it makes it honest work with a deliverable: where your numbers disagree, what the disagreement is costing in hours, and what we would fix in what order. Clients who take that document and fix things themselves are a perfectly good outcome, and we would rather say that out loud than pretend otherwise.
Why the price will not move
Fixed-scope work is quoted as a number before we start. Subscriptions are priced on the work, not on your order volume, so tripling your orders does not move the invoice. You have watched Klaviyo, Recharge, Loop and Gorgias each trigger a merchant revolt through a billing change rather than a bad product. We are not building that into the contract.
Why you own the code
The code and the data are yours from day one, in the agreement, not as a favour granted on the way out. Everything runs on Shopify, Supabase and standard infrastructure that any competent developer can pick up. We are two people; the sensible response to that is to make sure you could leave. We would rather you could and chose not to.
Proof
One case study, and its limits.
We publish one case study. It is Threadheads, which is our own business, and we say so on the page rather than letting it read like a client win. Every figure on it carries a source, a date and the method it was counted by, and the figures we cannot yet source are printed as gaps instead of rounded into copy.
Questions
Before you book anything.
- What makes a Shopify Plus agency different from a regular Shopify agency?
- Plus adds capability that only matters at volume: checkout extensibility and Shopify Functions, Flow automation, B2B, multiple storefronts, higher API limits and script-level control of discounts and shipping. An agency working on Plus should be spending most of its time in that territory rather than on the theme. If the proposal you are reading is mostly design and page building, the Plus part of the label is decoration.
- Do you do theme development or store design?
- No. We do not design themes, build page templates or do brand and creative work, and we will refer that out rather than pretend. Our work starts behind the storefront: catalogue and merchandising at scale, order and fulfilment flow, integrations, and getting the numbers to agree with each other.
- We are not on Plus yet. Should we upgrade?
- Only if you can name the specific capability you are buying — checkout customisation, Functions, B2B, a second storefront, API headroom. Upgrading to fix an operational problem that lives in your fulfilment or your data will not fix it, and you will have added a cost to the same problem. If that is the situation, say so on the call and we will tell you plainly.
- Who actually does the work?
- Ace and Brett. There is no delivery team behind us and no account manager in front of us, which is a real limit on how much work we can take at once and the reason we turn some of it down. It also means the person who scopes the work is the person who does it.
- What does it cost?
- The diagnostic is A$5,000 to A$8,000 over two to three weeks. Fixed-scope builds run A$25,000 to A$60,000 over six to twelve weeks. Ongoing work is A$2,000 to A$8,000 a month, rolling, on thirty days' notice. Fixed-scope work is quoted as a number before we start, and subscriptions are priced on the work rather than your order volume — triple your orders and the invoice does not move.
- You are in Australia and we are not. Does that work?
- Most of the work is asynchronous and the systems do not care where they are deployed. We hold overlapping hours with US and EU clients. If a project genuinely needs somebody standing on your floor, we will say so during scoping rather than after you have signed.
Next step
Start with the baseline, not the build.
Two to three weeks, a fixed fee, and a document you keep whatever happens next. If the numbers do not support a build, we will say so — and you will still have the only honest map of your operation anyone has written down.
Bring your numbers. Ace takes these calls — not a salesperson, because there isn't one.