Shopify or a custom build?

Choose Shopify when your catalogue fits its structure and your value is in what you sell rather than how you sell it. Choose a custom build when the thing that makes you money is something Shopify cannot model — configuration, tiered channel pricing, slab-level stock, or a quotation process that is not a shopping cart. Most businesses in the building materials trade fall somewhere between, and the useful question is which parts belong where.

We build both, so there is no answer we are trying to steer you towards.

What does Shopify give you that is genuinely hard to build?

More than people assume, and this is the part custom-build advocates tend to skip.

Checkout that converts, refined across an enormous number of transactions. PCI compliance, handled. Payment integrations that already work. Hosting that survives a traffic spike. Security patching you never think about. Fraud screening. An app ecosystem for the things you have not thought of yet.

Rebuilding that list is expensive, and doing it as well is harder than it looks. Any argument for a custom build has to be worth giving all of it up — or worth keeping Shopify for checkout and building only the part that does not fit.

What does Shopify genuinely not do?

Requirement	Position
More than three product options	Not supported natively — split products or use apps
Batch or lot-specific stock	No concept of non-interchangeable inventory
Slab-level unique items	Not the model at all
Tiered pricing by customer type	Possible with apps or Plus; not native and not simple
Configured, made-to-order products	Apps exist; complex interacting options are a poor fit
Quotation and approval workflows	Not a cart process
Credit accounts and ledgers	Not what it is for

Read that list and notice what it describes: most of it is B2B. Shopify is excellent at selling a defined product to a consumer who pays at checkout, and progressively less comfortable the further you move from that.

How should you actually decide?

Four questions, in order. The first that returns a firm answer usually settles it.

1. Who is buying, and do they pay at checkout? Consumers paying by card is Shopify’s home ground. Dealers ordering on credit against negotiated prices is not, and no amount of configuration makes it so.

2. Can your catalogue be expressed in three options? If yes, a great deal of the objection disappears. If not, decide whether splitting products is acceptable before ruling anything out — it often is, and it is better for search than the alternative.

3. Is the price the same for everyone? One price, one channel — straightforward. Different prices by customer type, region or volume is where the work starts.

4. Is the sale a purchase or a quotation? If the customer configures something, receives a price, negotiates it and approves it, that is not a cart. It can be built alongside Shopify, but Shopify is not doing it.

What about doing both?

This is what most building materials businesses actually end up with, and it is a deliberate architecture rather than indecision.

Shopify runs the consumer-facing store — the products that sell simply, to people who pay by card. A separate system runs the dealer portal, the configurator, the quotation flow and the catalogue of record. They share product data, with the full structure held in your own system and a simplified view published into Shopify.

The cost is integration, which is real work and routinely underestimated. It is still less work than making one platform do two jobs badly. The same reasoning applies to ERP, and we have written about it in build, buy or neither.

What is the honest case against custom?

You own it forever.

Every payment gateway change, every security patch, every browser update, every new device size — yours. Shopify absorbs all of that invisibly, and a business that has never maintained a platform tends to underestimate what continuous ownership means over five years.

The second cost is checkout. Custom checkouts convert worse than Shopify’s, usually by enough to matter, because Shopify has optimised theirs against a volume of transactions no individual business will ever see. If you build your own, budget for that gap.

So the question is not “which is better” but “is the thing Shopify cannot do worth what Shopify gives you”. For a tile manufacturer selling to consumers, usually not. For one running a dealer network on credit with negotiated pricing, usually yes — for that part of the business.

Common questions

Is Shopify Plus the answer for B2B?

It adds B2B capability including customer-specific pricing, and for some businesses that is sufficient. Test it against your actual requirements rather than a feature list — particularly credit terms, approval workflows and how your channel really orders.

Can we start on Shopify and move later?

Yes, and it is often sensible — launch quickly, learn what customers do, then build the part that genuinely does not fit. Keep your product data structured in your own system from the start so migration is a publishing change rather than an extraction project.

How much does an app-heavy Shopify store cost to run?

Monthly app subscriptions accumulate quietly, and a store running fifteen apps has an ongoing cost worth calculating before assuming Shopify is the cheaper route. Add them up over three years and compare properly.

Does a custom build rank better in search?

Not inherently. Shopify stores can rank perfectly well. Control over URL structure and page output is greater on a custom build, which matters at scale — but it is not a reason to build one on its own.

More on this: what breaks when a deep catalogue meets Shopify and migrating a custom store to Shopify. See also eCommerce development.