Working notes on Shopify themes, apps, Plus and the odd opinion, written by the person doing the work, not a content team.
The gap between someone who can install a theme and someone who can engineer your store is wide, expensive, and hard to see from a portfolio. How to vet a Shopify developer for how they think, not how they present.
The platform fee is billed in dollars, the payment fees matter more than people think, and the build is a separate line entirely. A straight breakdown of what Shopify Plus actually costs a UK merchant, all in.
Plus is a real step up in capability and a real step up in cost. The signals I look for before recommending a merchant makes the jump, and the ones that mean you should stay put and spend the money on the store itself.
I built the thing my last post described: an MCP server that lets Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity answer real questions about your store, across 20-odd data sources, read-only and encrypted.
Discounts, shipping rules, and cart logic can live in a Function, an app, or both. A practical decision framework, with the trade-offs I weigh on real builds.
Letting Claude or ChatGPT answer questions about your store is genuinely useful, and genuinely risky if you wire it up wrong. The MCP pattern I use to keep it read-only and audited.