Checkout Extensibility Build
Checkout UI extensions for trust content, delivery choice, gifting and post-purchase upsell. Native, upgrade-safe, and no longer dependent on checkout.liquid.
Chicago, IL
Shopify Plus & Headless Commerce in Chicago
Plus-tier engineering for Chicago companies whose hardest problem is not the storefront — it is the twelve systems standing behind it.
Delivered remotely for brands across Chicago and Illinois.
Scale · Chicago
Why Chicago brands come to us for this
- B2B company accounts and per-customer price lists replacing the sales director's pricing spreadsheet
- Net terms and PO capture at checkout, wired to how your AR team already works
- Shopify Functions for case-pack, pallet and volume-break pricing without an app stack
- ERP and 3PL middleware with retry, dead-letter handling and a daily reconciliation report
- Honest headless assessment — most Chicago catalogs are better served by fast Liquid
Chicago is a B2B town wearing a consumer coat. Behind a lot of the pretty Fulton Market packaging is a company that also sells pallets to a broker, cases to a foodservice distributor and truckloads to a big-box account. One store has to serve all of it, and standard Shopify runs out of road quickly.
That is what Plus is actually for here. Company profiles with multiple buyers per account, so a purchasing agent and a plant manager at the same industrial customer see the same contract price. Volume breaks written as Shopify Functions instead of stacked discount apps. Net 30 that does not require someone in accounts receivable to rekey an order. Checkout extensions that collect a PO number before payment rather than in a follow-up email.
Headless is a different conversation and usually a shorter one. For a Chicago distributor with a deep technical catalog, a well-engineered Liquid theme with proper faceted search beats a Hydrogen build on every axis that matters. Where Hydrogen has earned its cost with brands here is content-heavy commerce — recipe and application libraries, spec-driven configurators, brand sites that carry a genuine editorial layer. We will tell you which side of that line you are on before you spend on it.
Local context
The system of record problem
Chicago companies rarely arrive with a clean slate. There is an ERP that has been running since the Bush administration, a WMS at a third-party warehouse in Joliet or Bolingbrook, an EDI relationship with a national retailer, and a pricing spreadsheet a sales director has maintained personally for a decade. The engineering question is never whether Shopify Plus can do it — it is which system owns inventory, which owns price, and what happens at 4am when the nightly sync fails and the CenterPoint intermodal yard has already released the trucks. We answer that in the architecture phase, in writing, with named owners per record type. Skipping that step is the single most reliable way to spend six figures and end up with two systems that disagree politely forever.
Scope
What Plus & Headless includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Chicago brand’s realities.
Full service detailShopify Functions
Custom discount, delivery and payment-method logic written as Functions. Volume tiers, bundle pricing and B2B rules run server-side instead of via three stacked apps.
B2B on Shopify
Company profiles, price lists, payment terms, quantity rules and a self-serve reorder portal. Wholesale and DTC on one catalogue, one inventory, one admin.
Shopify Markets & Localisation
Multi-currency, multi-language, market-specific catalogues, domain routing and correct hreflang. Expansion without a store-per-country sprawl.
Headless Hydrogen Storefront
Hydrogen on Oxygen with the Storefront API, edge caching and streaming SSR. We build this only when the performance or content case is real, and we say so when it isn't.
ERP, PIM & 3PL Integration
NetSuite, Business Central, Akeneo or a 3PL wired in through a documented middleware layer with retry logic, error alerting and a reconciliation report.
Scoped and quoted for your Chicago store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Chicago engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedHow it runs
From kickoff to results
Technical Discovery
We map your systems, order flows and edge cases end to end, then document where data breaks today. Output is an architecture diagram you can hand to any engineer.
Solution Design
Native-versus-custom decision for every requirement, with cost and maintenance load attached. Plenty of requests get answered with a $0 native setting.
Build in Sprints
Two-week sprints in a dev store with a staged demo at the end of each. You see working software every fortnight, not a status deck.
Load & Failure Testing
Peak-traffic simulation, payment-failure paths, partial-sync recovery and a rollback plan. We break it in staging so BFCM doesn't break it live.
Launch & Enablement
Phased rollout, monitoring dashboards and training for ops and finance. Every custom component ships with a README and a named owner.
Proof
Plus & Headless results
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
Supplements (Subscription DTC)
~$4.2M/yr, 60% subscription revenue, 22 SKUs, US · Shopify Plus (Recharge, Klaviyo)
Monthly subscription churn hit 9.4% and the cancel flow was a single button on a hosted page nobody had touched in three years. Support processed 340 subscription changes a month by hand because customers could not do it themselves. The named constraint: no forced logins. The brand refused to gate account access behind a password reset, which ruled out every off-the-shelf portal.
9.4% → 6.1%monthly subscription churnheld for five consecutive months, not a single-month dip
+34%12-month customer LTV$187 to $251 on the subscriber cohort
19% → 38%of revenue from email + SMScategory benchmark for a healthy program is 25-40%
-71%subscription support tickets340/mo to 98/mo after the self-serve portal launched
Home Goods & Furniture
~$11M/yr, 2,300 SKUs, configurable upholstery, US · Shopify Plus + Hydrogen storefront (Oxygen)
Fabric, leg and size options turned 2,300 SKUs into more than 40,000 variant permutations, and the Liquid theme rendered a configurable PDP in 6.9 seconds on mobile. Collection filtering ran client-side, so 40% of shoppers left before the first product painted. The named constraint: the ERP stayed. It was the single source of truth for stock and lead times and was not up for replacement.
6.9s → 1.4smobile LCP75th-percentile field data on configurable PDPs
+64%CVR on configurable products0.44% to 0.72%. Sitewide conversion rate rose 23%
+52%organic sessionsserver-rendered facets made 1,900 filter combinations indexable for the first time
+$2.4Mincremental annualized revenuemonth-8 run rate vs. the pre-build baseline
In their words
Clients on this work
Reorder time 20 min → 3 min
“We sell wholesale into about 400 accounts and were still taking reorders by email like it was 2009. They built the B2B catalog on Shopify with net-30 terms and per-account price lists, and moved our whole rep team onto it in one week. Average reorder went from roughly 20 minutes of back-and-forth to under three.”
Director of WholesaleFood & beverage brand, ~$22M/yr · Dallas, TX
Verified client, 2025LCP 4.1s → 1.3s
“A Hydrogen build plus a NetSuite sync that our own team had failed at twice. Inventory finally matches between the warehouse and the storefront, which sounds boring and is the most valuable thing anyone has done for us this year. LCP went from 4.1s to 1.3s. The honest part: the first six weeks felt slow and I genuinely wasn't sure we'd picked right — it only clicked once we moved to a standing Thursday call with the engineers instead of account-manager summaries.”
CTOJewelry brand, ~$18M/yr · New York, NY
Verified client, 2026FAQ
Plus & Headless in Chicago — your questions
No, but it does not replace it either. EDI usually stays with your ERP or an EDI provider, and Shopify becomes another order source feeding the same fulfilment path. What we do is make sure inventory allocation accounts for committed retail orders, so a direct customer cannot buy stock that is already promised to a Midwest DC.
For most mid-market Chicago distributors, yes. Company accounts, assigned catalogs, quantity rules, net terms and gated pricing cover the majority of what a dedicated B2B platform sells you, at a lower total cost and with a much better front end. Where it genuinely struggles is engineering-level configure-price-quote, and we will say so rather than take the project.
Usually not. Headless earns its cost when you have a real content-and-commerce problem — a large application or recipe library, a complex configurator, a custom front-end framework requirement. A Chicago catalog with thousands of SKUs mostly needs fast faceted search, which Liquid handles well. Headless would add budget and permanent engineering load for no conversion gain.
Not in Q4, and not during your trade season. For food and gift brands here that means avoiding the run-up to holiday, and for housewares avoiding the spring show cycle. We generally cut over in a low-traffic Central-time window mid-week, with a rehearsed runbook and a rollback plan, and we never do it on a Friday.
Usually not. A well-built Liquid theme hits sub-2s LCP and costs a fraction to run. Headless earns its keep when you need a custom front-end framework, a heavy CMS-driven content layer, or interactive product configuration Liquid cannot serve. We will talk you out of it if the numbers don't hold.
No. Shopify has retired it in favour of checkout extensibility, and anything still running on it is on borrowed time. We migrate custom checkout logic into checkout UI extensions and Functions, which survive platform upgrades instead of blocking them.
For most mid-market brands, yes. Company accounts, per-company price lists, net payment terms and quantity rules cover the majority of wholesale workflows natively. Where it falls short is complex quoting and contract pricing, which we handle with Functions or a light custom app.
Next step
Plus & Headless for your Chicago brand.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.