Headless Commerce Development
A custom storefront as fast as your product, with Shopify or Woo running the commerce engine.
Who this is for
If any of this sounds like you, we should talk.
You hit the wall of your theme
Your designer keeps drawing things the theme cannot do. Every custom section is a fight. You are ready to stop bending the template and build the storefront the brand deserves.
You are losing sales to slow load times
Your store is on Shopify or Woo, but the front end is dragging your Core Web Vitals into the red. You know speed correlates with conversion and you want sub-second loads.
You want content and commerce in one place
You publish editorial content, lookbooks, or rich product stories. You want them living alongside the product catalog, not on a separate blog subdomain.
You are planning for scale and multi-region
You sell in multiple markets, currencies, and languages. You need a frontend that handles localization, A/B testing, and personalization without third-party app sprawl.
What changes for you
Outcomes you can point to, not features you can ignore.
- A storefront that loads in under one second, even on mobile networks.
- A frontend that matches the brand without the constraints of a theme system.
- Content and commerce served from the same architecture, no separate blog stack.
- A platform that scales into new markets, languages, and channels without a rebuild.
- A future-proof stack you can extend with the tools you actually need.
What is included
Scope, organized by phase.
Discovery (Phase 1 of 5)
Phase 1
Discovery
What we lock down in this phase before moving on.
- Audit of current storefront and performance baseline
- Brand, content, and commerce requirements review
- Market and localization needs documented
- Stack decision (Hydrogen, Next.js, or composable)
- Migration and cutover risk assessment
How an engagement works
From hello to handoff, step by step.
Discovery call
You walk us through where the current storefront breaks down. We assess whether headless is actually the right answer for your stage.
Scoped proposal
Within 48 hours you get a written scope, stack recommendation, and delivery window. If headless is overkill for your case, we say so.
Architecture sprint
We agree on frontend framework, CMS, hosting, and API strategy. Decisions get written down and reviewed before code starts.
Build in two week sprints
You see the storefront come together in a preview environment every Friday. Feedback informs the next sprint.
Launch with parallel running
We run the new storefront in parallel with the old one, validate against real traffic, then cut over with redirects and rollback ready.
Handoff and optional care
Documentation for your developers and content team, plus an optional retainer for ongoing work, performance, and new features.
Case study
Confidential D2C apparel brand
Mobile load times dropped from over four seconds to under one second, and paid ad conversion improved alongside it.
The brand was scaling fast on Shopify but the theme could not keep up with the design ambition or the performance bar. Mobile load times were hurting paid ad efficiency and the editorial team was stuck on a separate blog.
We rebuilt the storefront on Next.js with the Shopify Storefront API, brought content into a headless CMS, and moved hosting to the edge. The cart and checkout handoff stayed native to Shopify so payments and fulfillment did not need to change.
Why us
What you get with WitsCode that you don't get elsewhere.
We tell you when headless is the wrong call
Most brands do not need headless. We will say so. When it is the right move, we build it. When it is not, we will help you get more out of the platform you have.
We work in your real stack, not a demo stack
Next.js, Hydrogen, Remix, Astro. Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok. Vercel, Cloudflare, AWS. We pick the tools that fit the brand and the team, not the ones that look good in a case study.
Commerce stays native, frontend goes custom
We keep Shopify or WooCommerce handling what they do best (products, inventory, payments, fulfillment) and build the parts that matter for brand and conversion from scratch.
WitsCode rebuilt our Shopify store so it finally converts the traffic we were already getting. They understand speed and storytelling in equal measure, and the store has been a real growth lever since launch.
Frequently asked
Questions before you reach out.
It means decoupling your storefront (what shoppers see) from your commerce engine (products, cart, checkout, inventory). The backend stays on Shopify or WooCommerce. The frontend is a custom app you fully control.
When your theme is the bottleneck. When mobile performance is hurting conversion. When you need content and commerce together. When you are expanding into multiple markets. If none of those apply, a well-built native theme is usually the better call.
Upfront, yes. Build time is longer and there are more moving parts (hosting, CMS, frontend framework). Long term it can pay back through conversion lift, faster iteration, and lower app dependency. We will model the math during scoping.
Yes. The Shopify backend stays exactly as it is. We connect via the Storefront API and Admin API. Products, orders, customers, and inventory all keep flowing through Shopify.
Next.js for most projects. Shopify Hydrogen if you want a Shopify-native frontend with Oxygen hosting. Remix or Astro for specific cases. We make the call based on your team, your content strategy, and your scaling needs.
Yes. We hand off to the native Shopify or Woo checkout, which keeps PCI compliance, payment methods, and fraud protection intact. On Shopify Plus you can also customize the checkout itself with checkout extensibility.
Server-side rendering, clean URLs, proper meta and schema markup, and a 301 redirect map for any URL changes. Done right, headless is better for SEO than most themes because page speed and crawlability are easier to control.
Ready to outgrow your theme without breaking your store?
Tell us where the current storefront is hurting. You will get a scoped proposal within 48 hours.