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.
Toronto, ON
Shopify Plus & Headless Commerce in Toronto, ON
Markets, checkout extensions and native B2B for GTA brands who crossed a border and a language line before they hit ten million.
Delivered remotely for brands across Toronto and Canada.
Scale · Toronto
Why Toronto brands come to us for this
- Markets configured as three real surfaces: CAD for Canada, USD for the US, and a French catalogue for Quebec
- Duties and import tax collected at checkout, with HS codes, country of origin and CUSMA origin claims done at the product level
- B2B on Shopify for GTA importers: company profiles, dual-currency price lists, case packs and net terms on one inventory
- Checkout UI extensions for delivery choice, gifting and post-purchase offers — no dependency on retired checkout.liquid
- Hydrogen only where a bilingual content layer or configurator genuinely justifies the ongoing engineering cost
Shopify is a Canadian company and Toronto brands still tend to use the least Canadian parts of it. Markets is the feature that matters most here and the one most often left in its default state: one market called International, a currency converter, and a US buyer looking at a price ending in eleven cents. Configured properly it is three distinct commercial surfaces — CAD for Canada, USD for the United States, and a French catalogue and content layer for Quebec — running off one admin and one inventory record.
The expensive failure in this city is at the border, not in the checkout design. A GTA brand ships to a US buyer, the parcel meets a customs charge nobody warned about, and the buyer refuses it. You pay outbound, you pay the return, you eat the chargeback, and you have burned a customer in your largest market. Duty and import tax collected at checkout fixes it, but the real work is upstream: HS codes and country of origin on every product, and preferential-origin treatment claimed correctly where your goods qualify under CUSMA. Most catalogues we inherit from Toronto brands have neither field populated.
The other archetype here pushes past a standard theme from the wholesale side. A great many GTA consumer brands are the second generation of a family import business in Scarborough, North York or Markham, which means a real wholesale book alongside the DTC storefront. B2B on Shopify handles it natively — company profiles, CAD and USD price lists per account, case-pack quantity rules, net terms and self-serve reordering — instead of a second store, a spreadsheet and a discount code. Hydrogen is a separate conversation and we will usually argue you out of it.
Local context
Three Toronto Plus builds that look identical and are not
A King West apparel label, a Markham importer going direct and a Yorkville fine-jewellery house all arrive asking for Plus and all need different fifths of it. The apparel label needs Markets, duty-inclusive US checkout and a French catalogue. The importer needs B2B: company accounts, per-account price lists in two currencies, case packs, net thirty, and an inventory model where a wholesale pallet and a DTC unit are the same stock. The jewellery house needs deposit flows, made-to-order lead times, appointment booking and a checkout that does not panic at a five-thousand-dollar order from a new customer. Confusing these is how a Toronto brand pays the Plus fee for capability it never switches on. We decide which of the three you are in the first technical workshop, and if the answer is that standard Shopify covers you for another eighteen months, we say that.
Scope
What Plus & Headless includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Toronto 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 Toronto store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Toronto 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 Toronto — your questions
A separate store, no — Markets covers US pricing, USD checkout, US shipping rates and localised content from one admin. Whether you need a US entity is a tax and legal question for your accountant, driven by nexus and volume, not by Shopify. What we can tell you is that we have never seen a Toronto brand solve a cross-border problem by duplicating the storefront; it just doubles the catalogue drift.
Collect the landed cost at checkout so the carrier is prepaid rather than chasing the buyer at the door. That depends on accurate HS codes and country of origin per product, and on claiming preferential treatment where your goods qualify under CUSMA. Cross-border duty rules change with policy, so we build the configuration to be updated rather than assuming a threshold holds forever.
For most GTA mid-market distributors, yes. Company profiles with several buyers, price lists per account and per currency, case-pack quantity rules, net terms and self-serve reordering cover the bulk of the workflow, and it runs off the same inventory as the DTC store. Where it stops is contract quoting and complex configuration. Discovery establishes which of those you are, not the invoice.
Not necessarily a separate market — French is usually a language within your Canadian market with its own domain or subfolder and correct hreflang. You would only split it into its own market if the Quebec assortment or pricing genuinely differs. What matters more than the structure is that the French version is complete: checkout, transactional email and Klaviyo flows included, not just the storefront.
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.
Through a documented middleware layer, never point-to-point. Every sync gets idempotency keys, retry with backoff, dead-letter handling and alerting into your Slack. You also get a daily reconciliation report so a silent failure cannot run for a week.
Next step
Plus & Headless for your Toronto 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.