What’s Included in a Shopify Development Project?

If you’ve ever gotten three quotes from three different agencies/freelancers for a “Shopify store,” you’ve probably noticed they don’t look anything alike. One number is five figures higher than the others. One proposal is two pages long; another is fifteen. That’s because “Shopify development” isn’t one fixed thing. It’s a scope, and scope is exactly what varies from agency to agency (check out how we price ours here).

Before you sign with anyone, you should know what a proper Shopify development project actually includes, what’s usually billed separately, and how to define the right Shopify development scope for your business instead of guessing based on price alone. To make that easier, we’re showing you exactly what’s included in our own base Shopify package so you can compare it against anything else you’re being quoted.

What Does “Shopify Development” Actually Mean?

Shopify development is the process of building, customizing, or extending a Shopify store so it does what your business actually needs. That can range from lightly customizing an existing theme to building a fully custom storefront with integrations into your POS, ERP, or marketplace accounts.

The problem is that both of those very different projects get called “Shopify development.” This is why defining your Shopify development scope up front before any contract is signed (make sure to ask them the right questions, too!) is the single most important step in avoiding surprise costs, missed deadlines, or a store that technically launches but doesn’t do what you needed it to do.

What’s Included in Our Base Shopify Package

Here’s a real look at what a standard project with us covers, broken into the two phases every build goes through.

Store Foundations & Strategy

• Kickoff call to align on goals, catalog, and timeline
• Website marketing consultation
• Sitemap and information architecture development: how your store’s pages and categories are structured before any design starts
• Domain setup and management
• Google Analytics and Google Search Console setup, so you’re tracking data from day one
• Shopify store setup
• Payment gateway setup
• Shipping configuration
• Product uploads: up to 10 products included in the base package

Ecommerce Design, Build & Performance

• 2 design concepts to choose a direction from
• 3 rounds of revisions during the design phase
• 5 to 8 unique pages, including Shop, Category/Collection, Cart, and Checkout
• Unlimited stock photos, icons, and illustrations
• Shopify Content Management System (CMS) configuration
• A brand-aligned website style guide
• Custom theme development
• Page content development
• On-page SEO setup for every page
• A recorded handover and training session, so your team knows how to manage the store after we hand it over

A good-looking Shopify store without traffic is just an expensive brochure. And unfortunately, this is where a lot of businesses stop short. They treat the store as the finish line, then wonder six months later why sales haven’t moved.

The store functions like any brick-and-mortar store (except it’s online). You still need to drive people to it. The Shopify store is the vehicle, SEO, content, social, and paid ads are what actually put people’s eyes on it.

That’s why we don’t hand off a finished store and disappear. Because we build the marketing engine in-house too, we can plug your new site directly into a growth plan from week one instead of leaving you to figure out demand generation on your own.

Core Components, Explained

Here’s what each of those line items actually means in practice, and why it matters.

Discovery & Information Architecture

Before any design work starts, we map your product catalog, your existing tools, your must-have integrations, and how your pages and categories should be structured. Skipping this step is the number one reason projects go over budget. Requirements that should’ve been caught in the kickoff call get discovered in week six instead.

Website Marketing Consultation

We’re pretty open to consulting and answering marketing questions like “how do we actually get customers here?” We help prioritize channels, allocate budget, and create a clear messaging strategy by identifying your needs rather than just assuming.

Theme Design & Customization

This covers everything visitors actually see and interact with: homepage layout, product pages, collection pages, cart, and checkout. Our base package includes 2 design concepts and 3 rounds of revisions during the design phase. That’s enough room to point us to a direction that actually fits your brand without dragging the project out indefinitely. From there, we build a custom theme rather than relying purely on a stock template, so you have real control over how your products get presented.

Migration (If You’re Moving Platforms)

If you’re migrating from WooCommerce, Wix, Magento, or another platform, your scope needs to include product data migration, customer data migration, URL redirects to protect your SEO rankings, and order history handling. This is frequently underscoped elsewhere because it looks like “just moving data.” In practice though it’s one of the most detail-heavy parts of the project.

App & Third-Party Integrations

Most stores need more than what Shopify offers natively. Maybe it’s a connection to an external inventory system, or maybe CRM or email marketing platform integration. If your project needs these, they get scoped and quoted alongside the base build, not assumed to be a quick add-on after the fact.

Payments, Shipping & Tax Setup

Payment gateway and shipping configuration are both part of our base setup. Getting these wrong means lost sales at checkout! Not exactly the best moment to have a setup gone wrong.

Mobile Optimization

With most Philippine ecommerce traffic coming from mobile, every theme we build is tested across devices as a standard part of the process, not treated as a nice-to-have.

SEO Foundations

On-page SEO is included in our base package: clean URL structures, proper meta tags, image alt text, and a technically sound foundation from launch. This isn’t a full ongoing SEO strategy (since we work on a separate engagement for that) but the base technical setup should never be something you have to beg for separately.

QA & Testing

Before launch, we test across devices, browsers, and payment flows (including edge cases like out-of-stock items, discount codes, and abandoned carts). This step gets brushed off constantly elsewhere, and it’s usually the reason a store “launches” and then needs a week of emergency fixes.

Handover & Support

Every project ends with a recorded handover and training session, so your team can actually manage the store. We teach your non-technical team how to update products, edit pages, check orders without needing to call us for every small change.

What’s NOT Included (And What We Offer Separately)

To keep expectations clear, here’s what sits outside the base Shopify development scope with us and with most agencies too (even if they don’t say so upfront):

Custom Features & Functionality

Trade-in calculators, product comparison pages, custom wishlist features, product configurators, wholesale portals, or subscription models… 

Anything Shopify doesn’t offer natively falls under custom development, scoped separately from the base package based on what your business actually needs.

Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy & Ongoing SEO

Trying to rank for competitive keywords, building topic clusters, and growing organic traffic month over month is a different kind of work: ongoing, strategic, and ideally informed by real performance data from your live Shopify store. That’s a separate engagement, scoped and priced on its own.

Paid Ads Management & Ad Spend

Running Meta or Google Ads campaigns requires a different skillset and dedicated, continuous attention which warrants a separate cost from the initial base setup fee. A store with great paid ads support can start generating leads within days of launch; that’s an intentional, budgeted decision, and not something that’s inserted as a basic line item in a development quote.

Landing Page Design Beyond the Core Site

Your core site already includes 5 to 8 unique pages + the Shop, Category/Collection, Cart, Checkout, and the essentials around them. Dedicated campaign landing pages (for a specific promo, a paid ads campaign, or a product launch) are a different deliverable, built for one very specific conversion goal rather than general browsing. We offer these as an add-on so you only pay for the ones you actually need.

Product Uploads Beyond the First 10

Ten products is enough to launch and start selling, but most catalogs are bigger than that. Uploading the rest is straightforward work, but it’s still work, so it’s scoped based on your actual catalog size rather than assumed to be unlimited. We write and format search-optimized product descriptions, size images, set variants, and adjust inventory levels so you can focus on actually growing your business.

Ongoing Maintenance & Feature Additions After Handover

Once we hand off your store, you own it. Your team can manage day-to-day changes using the training from the handover session. 

But adding new features, integrations, or design updates down the line (a new payment method, a redesigned collection page, a fresh promo section) is a new scope, not a warranty claim. We’re happy to keep working together on this basis; it just needs its own conversation rather than being assumed as included forever.

If an agency’s quote for “Shopify development” already includes all of the above for a suspiciously low price, ask exactly what’s in scope. It’s usually a sign something on this list has been left out, not included for free.

How Long Does a Shopify Development Project Take?

The timeline depends entirely on scope. A theme customization on an existing catalog usually takes two to four weeks. A fully custom build with multiple integrations, custom features, and a data migration typically runs six to ten weeks. 

Anyone quoting you a firm timeline without first asking about your integrations, catalog size, and custom feature needs is guessing. That guess tends to slip once the real scope surfaces mid-project.

How to Choose the Right Shopify Development Scope for Your Business

Before working with any Shopify agency, here are some quick questions they may ask and you need to consider answering prior:

• How many SKUs and variants are you managing? If you have more than 10 products at launch, factor in product upload time beyond the base package.
• What systems does your store need to talk to? POS, marketplaces, email platform, accounting software… List them all before getting quotes.
• Are you migrating or launching new? Migration adds real time and real risk that needs its own line item.
• Do you need ongoing marketing, or just the build? A comprehensive marketing strategy is typically a different engagement from development. Decide early whether you want both from the same team.

Getting these answers clear before you talk to an agency is what turns “Shopify development” from a vague phrase into a scope you can actually plan and budget around.

Personally though, here’s how I’ll decide if you’re all good with our base setup.

• If you’re new to the ecommerce space with a few SKUs and variants (not more than 10), our base setup should be more than sufficient. 
• If you’re new to the ecommerce space with a lot of SKUs and variants (more than 10), our base setup should be fine but with changes in the scope since there will be more products to upload.
• If you’re already in the ecommerce space and in need of some marketing, we need to customize the scope based on your actual needs.

Why Work With Tatak Studio

We don’t quote “Shopify development” as a black box. Every project starts with a free store audit and a kickoff call where we map out exactly what your business needs against our base package and identify what should be scoped as an add-on before you commit to anything. 

And because we also handle SEO, content, social, and paid ads in-house, the store we build doesn’t sit idle waiting for traffic; we can connect it directly to a growth plan from day one.

If you’re planning a new Shopify store or rebuilding one, let’s talk through your actual scope. No generic packages, no guesswork.

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