Shopify Agency UK: Certified Partner, Senior Developers

A Shopify agency designs, builds and launches Shopify stores for other businesses. In practice that is four jobs: designing the storefront, writing the theme code, wiring up payments, shipping and apps, then handing over a store you can run yourself. FactoryJet does all four for UK brands. We are a certified Shopify Partner, which means Shopify has checked our technical work rather than taking our word for it.

A Shopify Partner holds a verified account inside Shopify’s partner programme and builds stores through it, so Shopify can see the work. Anyone can type "Shopify expert" on a website with nothing behind it. When you compare UK agencies, ask for the partner account, then ask for two live stores they built and the speed score for each. Claims are cheap. Live URLs are not.

Judge on evidence, not portfolio screenshots. Ask for live store URLs you can open, a PageSpeed Insights score for each, the name of the person who writes the code, whether the theme repository is yours on launch day, and what happens in the first month after go live. An agency that cannot answer those five in one call will not answer them once your deposit has cleared either.

Yes. We build on Shopify Plus for UK merchants who need custom checkout screens through Checkout Extensibility, a B2B wholesale portal with company accounts and net payment terms, several storefronts under one admin, or heavy Shopify Flow automation. We also say no to Plus when standard Shopify does the job. Selling someone a plan they do not need is the fastest way to lose them at renewal.

Use whoever answers your questions properly and works in your hours. What matters more than the office address is UK trading knowledge: VAT settings, Royal Mail and DPD rates, Klarna and Clearpay at checkout, and the distance selling rules published on GOV.UK. FactoryJet works to UK hours and builds to those rules. Ask any agency to explain the 14 day cancellation right before you sign anything.

There are three routes: a marketplace freelancer, an in-house hire, or an agency developer. A marketplace hire is quickest to start and hardest to hold to account. An in-house hire only pays off once you have a year of continuous work for them. An agency developer gives you a senior engineer for the length of a project with no payroll commitment. FactoryJet gives you a named engineer, not a rotating pool.

A competent Shopify developer writes clean Liquid with editable section schemas, understands Online Store 2.0 metafields, can build a private app against the GraphQL Admin API, knows Checkout Extensibility now that checkout.liquid has gone, and can read a PageSpeed report and act on it. If someone cannot explain how they would cut Largest Contentful Paint on a product page, they install themes rather than build them.

Yes. Not every job is a full build. Common short engagements are a one-off speed audit, a single new section for the theme editor, a Klaviyo flow rebuild, a checkout tidy-up before a peak trading period, or finishing a theme a previous developer abandoned. These run as fixed-scope work with a written deliverable and an agreed end date, not an open-ended hourly arrangement.

Yes. The engineer who scopes your store on the discovery call writes the Liquid and runs the handover call. There is no account manager between you and the person doing the work, and no quiet handover to a junior once the contract is signed. After launch you keep the same contact, which is the whole point of the thirty day support window.

Yes. A good share of our UK work is overflow for teams that already have a marketer or a developer. We branch from your repository, raise pull requests your team reviews, and follow the naming and deployment conventions you already use. If you run the Shopify GitHub integration with a development theme per branch, we will use that rather than making you adopt our setup.

We scope first and quote after. The discovery call covers catalogue size, the templates you need, your apps, your shipping and tax setup, and anything custom. Then you get one written figure for the whole build, split into milestones: a deposit before design, a payment at development kick-off, and the balance at launch. There is no hourly billing and no scope-creep invoice landing in week four.

A custom theme on an existing store takes two to three weeks from design sign-off. A full store built from scratch, meaning theme, catalogue, payments, shipping, apps and launch, takes three to five weeks. Shopify Plus and headless Hydrogen builds run six to ten weeks depending on B2B complexity and how many storefronts you need. You get a firm date after discovery, not a range.

Figma designs for homepage, product page, collection page and cart on desktop and mobile, a custom Liquid theme with editable sections, catalogue and collection setup, payment providers, UK shipping zones and VAT settings, app installation styled to your theme, technical SEO, a Lighthouse audit before sign-off, and the full theme repository on launch day. Two rounds of design revisions happen before any code is written.

It covers straightforward builds: a custom theme applied to an existing store, or a new store of up to five templates with core pages, payment setup and launch. It does not cover complex migrations, multi-storefront Plus builds, or catalogues running to thousands of variants, because those genuinely take longer. We confirm on the discovery call whether your project qualifies before anyone commits to a date.

Product photography, copywriting for every product page, ongoing paid media, warehouse or ERP integration, and translated storefronts sit outside a standard build. So does written content for collection pages beyond a starter set. None of these are traps. They appear in the quote as separate lines so you can decide whether you want them now, later, or not at all.

Standard Shopify handles most UK direct-to-consumer brands perfectly well. Move to Plus when you need something only Plus gives you: custom checkout screens through Checkout Extensibility, native B2B with company accounts and net terms, several storefronts under one admin, or heavy Shopify Flow automation. We make that call with you during discovery and put the reasoning in writing so you are not taking it on trust.

Headless means the storefront is rebuilt as a separate React application using Hydrogen, while Shopify keeps running inventory, orders and checkout behind it. You gain faster pages and total design freedom, and you take on a second codebase to maintain. Most smaller UK brands do not need it. It earns its keep when a small gain in conversion is worth more than the extra engineering.

Yes. On Shopify Plus we configure native B2B: company accounts, named contacts per company, price lists per customer, net-30 and net-60 payment terms, tax exemption for VAT-registered trade accounts, and a separate B2B storefront with a gated catalogue. On standard Shopify we build the same shape using apps such as Wholesale Gorilla or Locksmith for catalogue gating and customer-specific pricing.

Yes. When no App Store app fits your workflow we build a private app against Shopify’s GraphQL Admin API using their Polaris design system, so the admin screens look like the rest of Shopify rather than a bolt-on. Typical private apps handle a bespoke pricing rule, an order feed into a warehouse system, or a stock sync with a supplier who will not adopt anything modern.

Yes, and that is a design decision rather than luck. Every section we build is exposed in the Shopify theme editor with proper settings: headings, images, links, ordering and visibility. Your marketer can assemble a seasonal landing page by rearranging sections. You need a developer again when you want new functionality, not when you want to swap a photograph or change a headline.

Yes, and it is our most common UK migration. We export products with their variants, images and custom fields, then customers and order history. We map your current URLs and write 301 redirects for every product and collection page so search rankings carry across. The full checkout is tested on a staging store before DNS moves, so launch day has no downtime and no half-migrated baskets.

We have moved UK stores to Shopify from WooCommerce, Magento 1 and 2, BigCommerce, PrestaShop, Squarespace Commerce, Wix, and hand-built platforms with no admin worth the name. Difficulty depends on catalogue size, how many custom fields you use, and whether you have customer-specific pricing that has to be rebuilt inside Shopify’s data model rather than simply copied across.

They survive when the redirect work happens before anything else. We audit your current URLs, find the product and collection pages that actually earn UK traffic, and build the redirect map before touching the store. Every changed URL gets a 301. The new sitemap goes to Google Search Console on launch day and we watch organic traffic for thirty days afterwards to catch anything that slipped through.

Nine steps in this order: audit the current store, export and clean the catalogue, map old URLs to new, rebuild collections and customer groups, import products and customers, build the theme on a staging store, test the full checkout with real cards, switch DNS with redirects already live, then monitor Search Console and analytics for thirty days. Nothing goes live until the redirect map is signed off.

Yes, in every build. That covers title and meta templates for product, collection and page types, Product structured data so listings can qualify for richer Google results, BreadcrumbList markup, canonical tags to handle Shopify’s duplicate variant URLs, compressed images with real alt text, and sitemap submission to Search Console. Writing collection page copy and running a blog are separate pieces of work.

We build to Google’s published Core Web Vitals thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. In practice that means preloading the hero image, setting width and height on everything so nothing jumps, deferring non-critical scripts, and stripping theme code you never use. The audit runs before handover, not after.

Yes. Answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews pull from structured, plainly written pages. So we ship Product markup with price and availability, FAQ content answering the questions people actually type, and clean heading structure on collection pages. It is the same work that helps ordinary search, done on the assumption that a machine reads the page before a human ever does.

GOV.UK sets out what any UK online shop must show. Before an order is placed you need your business name, contact details and address, a clear description, the price including all taxes, and delivery costs and timings. You must tell customers they can cancel within 14 days of delivery, and you must deliver within 30 days unless you agree otherwise. We build that into the theme and the policy pages.

Large and steady rather than exploding. The Office for National Statistics puts the share of Great Britain retail sales made online at 28.3% in July 2026, down slightly from 29.2% the month before. Roughly one pound in every three and a half spent in retail now goes through a website. That is the market your store competes in, and why storefront quality shows up directly in revenue.

Yes, all of it. The complete theme repository lands in your GitHub account on launch day: every Liquid template, every section schema, every line of custom app code. There is no proprietary framework and no FactoryJet subscription keeping your store alive. Any Shopify developer anywhere can pick it up and carry on, which is exactly the position you want to be in.

Every project includes thirty days of post-launch support for bugs, small changes, and the questions that only surface once real orders start arriving. After that you can keep a monthly retainer covering theme work, app integrations, Klaviyo updates, seasonal landing pages for peak trading, and periodic speed reviews. The retainer is optional, and you keep your code either way.

Book a thirty minute store audit. We look at your current store or platform, tell you which pages are losing you the most money and why, and set out what a build would involve. You leave with notes you can act on whether or not you hire us. If it is a fit, the written scope and quote follow within two working days.