Shopify is a powerful eCommerce platform that allows businesses to set up and manage their own online stores. While its native features do offer flexibility, its limitations can become restrictive for businesses as they grow. Breaking out of the native Shopify environment and customising your store allows you to create a more personalised shopping experience and integrate advanced features that meet new business goals.
Why break out of Shopify's native environment?
While Shopify provides a great foundation for most online businesses by offering product and inventory management, payments and analytics, its native functionality may not be enough for more complex requirements.
Breaking out of Shopify’s native environment lets you:
Customise Shopify’s default themes
Extend functionality with custom features not available in Shopify’s app store
Integrate external services, APIs, or third-party tools for better automation and reporting
Improve SEO, performance and overall user experience with custom solutions
Shopify APIs
Making the most of Shopify’s native capabilities through its own API and Liquid templating language is a great place to start. For example, while Liquid is powerful for layout customisation, it’s still limited when you compare it to advanced JavaScript-based frameworks.
You can begin customising your Shopify store by writing Liquid code in your theme files to adjust the look and feel, modify product pages, or create dynamic sections that respond to user behaviour.
Custom apps
While working with Shopify APIs and Liquid is a good place to start, using custom apps is one of the most common ways to break out of Shopify’s limitations. Of course, you can find lots of third-party apps in Shopify’s app marketplace, but sometimes they won’t meet specific requirements and custom apps allow for unique features such as custom shipping options or integrations with non-standard payment gateways. By using Shopify's APIs and development tools you can build a private app tailored to your store, without the constraints of the native environment.
Headless commerce
This option is for developers who want maximum flexibility. Headless commerce decouples the front-end from the back-end, allowing you to build completely custom front-end experiences using frameworks like React, Next.js, or Vue.js.
Headless commerce allows you to keep Shopify as your back-end platform to manage things like inventory, payments and orders while building a completely custom front-end, designed exactly as you’d like.
Third-party integrations
Integrating with external platforms is another handy way to unlock more advanced features you can’t find in Shopify’s app marketplace.
Popular third-party services include:
Klaviyo for advanced email marketing and customer segmentation
ShipStation for more robust shipping and fulfilment options
Zapier for automating workflows between Shopify and other tools like Google Sheets, CRMs, or social media platforms
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for in-depth tracking and reporting These integrations allow you to automate tasks, gain better insights into customer behaviour, and improve overall store management without relying on Shopify’s core tools.
Breaking out of Shopify’s native environment is essential for businesses that require more than the platform’s built-in features. By using Shopify’s APIs, creating custom apps, adopting headless commerce and integrating third-party tools, you can build a flexible, scalable eCommerce store that allows you to grow your business and store without limitations.
We specialise in creating bespoke Shopify solutions and can help you implement what’s best for your business, whether it's using a third-party app, custom development or a combination of both.
Get in touch and we’ll help you turn your vision into a thriving online store.