Start with Shopify. Always.
Merchants ask us weekly: “Should we build custom?” Our answer, almost always, is no. Here's why — and what to do when you actually need the custom part.
Shopify's checkout uptime. Your custom checkout will not match it — ever. That gap alone is worth the monthly fee.
The four hidden costs
Custom-built stores pay the bill forever.
Security is a full-time job.
PCI-DSS compliance is not a one-time checkbox. Every dependency you ship becomes a potential CVE. Shopify has an entire security org whose job is this. A custom platform has you, at 2am, patching a vulnerability you didn’t know about until TechCrunch published.
Uptime is a promise you can’t make.
Shopify’s status page is public. Their engineering team handles the 3am incidents. Your custom platform has you — and “the developer who built it, who’s now at a different agency.” 99.99% uptime sounds doable until your first Black Friday.
Updates never stop.
Browsers change. Apple changes Safari’s cookie policy. Google deprecates an API. Card networks roll out new 3DS mandates. Shopify pushes these through. Your custom platform needs you to catch every one — or break silently.
Scaling is someone else’s problem.
Caching, CDN, image optimization, checkout throttling under traffic spikes. Shopify handled scaling before you opened the store. Custom platforms hit their first scaling wall at the worst possible moment — usually on a marketing team’s biggest launch day.
The hybrid answer
Shopify for the platform. EcomHub for the custom.
Shopify covers 80% of what merchants need — platform, security, checkout, payments, infrastructure. The other 20% is where merchants call us: custom apps, warehouse tools, payment gateways like ArmPay, internal dashboards, automations between systems. You get Shopify's consistency for the core, and our custom work for the specific. Both, not either.
Why we're on Shopify, too
We built our own products on Shopify.
ArmPay, DealRotator — both live on the Shopify App Store because we practice what we preach. If you need custom, we'll build it on Shopify, not instead of it.
On the Shopify App Store
ArmPay
Armenian payment gateway on Shopify. ArCa, Visa, Mastercard behind one checkout.
On the Shopify App Store
DealRotator
Automated discount rotation on collections. Set it once and let it run on schedule.