Shopify, built around how you sell.

Yes, and starting from nothing is the easier version of this job because there's nothing to untangle first. The setup runs end to end: the Shopify account and the right plan for your volume, your domain pointed at it, products and collections loaded with descriptions written and photography shot for them, payments connected and tested with a real order, shipping rates and tax set for the places you ship to, and the theme built out before anything goes public. You get shown round the admin at the end so adding a product or running a sale doesn't mean calling anyone.

Yes, and it's usually where a store stops looking generic. Shopify templates the product, collection, and cart pages and leaves the rest to you: a homepage that does more than list items, an about page that explains who is behind the brand, landing pages for a launch or a campaign, size and care guides, wholesale enquiry pages, and a blog if you want one. These get built as sections you can reorder and edit yourself.

Yes, though how big a job it is depends on where you're coming from. Squarespace, Wix, and BigCommerce are straightforward: small catalogues, clean exports, and most of the work is the theme. WooCommerce is usually fine as well, though a store carrying years of plugins needs each one looked at before anybody quotes it. Magento is a scoped project and not a two-week build. What decides whether the move costs you money is the redirect map, and that gets built URL by URL before anything else starts.

Three things, and they're much better known at the quoting stage than at cutover. Passwords never transfer, because platforms hash them differently, so every customer resets and logins dip for a week afterwards. Refunds against old orders stop working, because those payments were never captured in Shopify: the history imports and displays fine, but your old admin has to stay readable until the refund window closes. Subscriptions are the serious one. Stored card details can't simply be handed from one payment gateway to another, so either the two gateways agree to transfer them, which takes time and their cooperation, or your subscribers re-enter their card and a share of them don't. If you're running subscriptions, that conversation comes before anything else gets planned.

If you're already selling and the admin is the bottleneck, almost certainly, and the same holds if you're about to launch with a catalogue you expect to grow. What you're buying is the boring infrastructure: fraud screening, tax tables that stay current, refunds that reconcile, abandoned cart recovery, and a checkout customers recognize. Rebuilding that from scratch is expensive and never quite finished. Where Shopify stops making sense is a short catalogue with no inventory to track, or a business whose real transaction is a deposit or a booking, where the platform fee and the per-sale cut buy you very little. That case gets built into your own site instead, and it's a service here too.

The plan starts around $50 CAD a month and rises with the features you need. On top of that Shopify takes a small percentage of each sale unless you use Shopify Payments, and the payment processor takes its own cut either way. Apps are the cost people underestimate: four or five subscriptions at $15 to $50 a month each adds up faster than the plan does, which is why the app list is a decision rather than an afterthought.

Yes, and it's often the sensible starting point. A well-built premium theme handles a lot of the plumbing, and the work becomes custom sections, a proper homepage, product page changes, and stripping out what you don't use. If the theme is fighting you more than helping, that comes up early rather than after the invoice.

Usually, yes. Slowness on Shopify is nearly always the same three causes: apps injecting scripts on every page, images uploaded at full camera resolution, and theme code loading everything up front. That gets audited on its own, without a rebuild, and you get the list: what each one costs you in seconds, and what it takes to fix.

Two weeks for a store with a catalogue ready to load and photography to use. A migration runs longer where the catalogue is large, where years of WooCommerce plugins have to be unpicked, or where subscriptions are involved, and which of those applies gets settled before you commit rather than halfway through.

Yes. Plus adds checkout customization, scripts, and B2B features that are worth using when you're on the plan. Headless, meaning a custom storefront on the Storefront API with Shopify still handling checkout, buys you speed and design freedom at the cost of more to maintain. Which one fits comes out of a conversation about your volume and your team, not a preference stated up front.