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.
San Francisco, CA
Shopify Plus & Headless Commerce in San Francisco, CA
Plus engineering in the city where headless was invented — including the part where we tell you not to go headless.
Delivered remotely for brands across San Francisco and California.
Scale · San Francisco
Why San Francisco brands come to us for this
- Shopify Functions for wine club tiers, allocation pricing, case pricing and bundle discounts
- Checkout UI extensions for age verification, deposits and staged payments on hardware pre-orders
- Delivery and payment rules that respect state-by-state shipping restrictions at checkout
- B2B on Shopify for specialty food brands supplying Northern California grocery and cafés
- A written headless assessment before anyone commits — including the case for staying on Liquid
This is a strange market to sell Shopify Plus into, because half the founders here have friends who build headless commerce for a living and have already been told, socially and confidently, that Liquid is legacy. So the conversation starts further along than it does elsewhere. Our position is unpopular and consistent: for a brand between one and ten million a year with no in-house front-end team, a well-built theme on Plus outperforms a decoupled stack on every measure that matters, including speed, because the decoupled stack degrades the moment nobody is paid to maintain it.
What Plus is genuinely for here is logic that a stack of apps handles badly. Wine club tiers with allocation releases, volume and case pricing, member-only pricing, bundle discounts that survive a promotion, delivery method rules that hide options a licensed shipper cannot legally offer to a given state — all of that belongs in Shopify Functions, running server-side, instead of in three overlapping subscriptions that fight each other at checkout. Age verification, deposit collection and staged payments for a hardware pre-order belong in checkout UI extensions.
B2B is the quieter half. A specialty food brand that started at a Ferry Building stall and now supplies grocery and cafés across Northern California is running two businesses out of one catalogue: consumer units online and case packs on terms. B2B on Shopify gives those accounts their own price lists, quantity rules, payment terms and self-serve reordering without a second platform, a second inventory truth or a rep re-keying purchase orders from email into the admin.
Local context
The build-versus-buy argument lands differently when the founder can build
In most cities the question is whether a custom feature is affordable. Here it is whether the team should just write it themselves over a sprint, and often they genuinely could. That makes the honest scoping conversation different: we are not defending a budget, we are arguing about maintenance cost over three years and about who owns the thing after the engineer who wrote it leaves for a Series B. We will happily hand a Function or a checkout extension to your own developer and review the pull request instead of building it, and we will tell you when a Shopify app you already pay for does the job well enough that writing code for it is a hobby. What we will not do is quote a Hydrogen build because it makes for a better statement of work. If your content layer, product configurator or multi-locale front end genuinely justifies Hydrogen on Oxygen, we will say so and scope it properly — that case exists, it is just rarer than it is talked about at meetups in SoMa.
Scope
What Plus & Headless includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a San Francisco 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 San Francisco store
We do not work off a rate card. Every San Francisco 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 San Francisco — your questions
That the storefront is rarely the constraint, and that they will inherit the parts Shopify currently gives you free — checkout adjacency, app compatibility, preview and theme editing for the marketing team, and every future platform release. If the team is committed and staffed, Hydrogen on Oxygen is the better-supported route than a bespoke Next.js build because it keeps you inside Shopify's release path. We would rather help scope that honestly than pretend the decision is ours.
The pricing and eligibility side, yes. Tier-based member pricing, allocation quantity limits per customer, case discounts and shipping rules that only show compliant methods for a given destination all run as Functions and subscription logic. The licensing and permit questions stay with your compliance counsel — we configure to the ruleset you are licensed for rather than advising on what that ruleset should be.
Not always, but Plus makes the good version possible. Checkout extensions let you take a deposit, explain the balance and communicate a ship date inside checkout rather than in a confirmation email nobody reads. On a standard plan you can still run pre-orders, you just have fewer places to put the honest explanation, which matters more when the date is going to move.
For forty accounts on standard price lists, comfortably. Company profiles with multiple buyers, per-account pricing, case-pack quantity rules, net terms and self-serve reordering cover the workflow, and it ends the pattern where a rep retypes a purchase order into the admin. Where it stops is negotiated contract quoting with per-line configuration. We tell you which side of that line you are on in technical discovery.
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 San Francisco 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.