Three things changed in the last eighteen months that decide whether a store gets found at all. None of them are design problems. All of them are engineering problems.
A 2026 study of 216 live Shopify storefronts found only 13% fully readable by AI answer engines — the median scored 46 out of 100, and 72% failed on the machine-readable product and brand data those engines cite. Shopify reports orders from AI search up roughly 11x year on year. The demand has already arrived; nearly nine stores in ten can't be seen by it.
Shopify's current default ships on every new store, so your competitor's site is built on the identical skeleton — and merchant reviews sit around a third positive, with the loudest complaint being updates overwriting customisations. Fighting a theme you don't control is a cost you pay every year. Owning the code you run on is a cost you pay once.
The drag on a Shopify store is rarely Shopify. It is a stack of apps each injecting JavaScript on every page, leftover code from apps uninstalled two years ago, and a page builder doing what native theme code should do. It is invisible on a desk machine and brutal on a phone on 4G.
Three reasons brands end up paying twice — once for the build, and again for the recovery. All three are measurable, and all three are decided before a single pixel is drawn.
The homepage wins the presentation. The collection pages, the PDP and the checkout — where money actually changes hands — get whatever time is left in the sprint. Around 70% of carts are abandoned industry-wide, and research puts the lift available from checkout design alone at roughly a third. That is the page that gets designed last.
Shopify's own data across live stores is unambiguous: every additional 100ms of load time costs roughly 3.5% of conversion, and a store loading in 2.5 seconds converts about 30% below one loading in 1.5. Responsiveness carries the same penalty — every 32ms of interaction delay costs around 1.5%. Speed isn't a technical vanity metric. It's revenue.
Go-live day is treated as the finish line. Tracking and conversion events get rebuilt by whoever is free, the team rotates onto the next project, and the small fixes that decide whether the store performs never get made. You inherit a codebase nobody still at the agency actually wrote.
Every engagement is scoped and quoted individually. No packages you have to grow into, no upgrade ladder, no subcontracted offshore build team.
A custom-designed, custom-built theme on a clean native codebase — your identity, your conversion path, your templates. The catalogue, apps and trading history stay; the store around them is rebuilt.
2–6 weeksGround-up development where a theme redesign isn't enough: custom templates, bespoke merchandising and filtering, configurators, and functionality built to your commercial model rather than around an app's.
4–8 weeksPlus-tier work for larger brands — expanded checkout, B2B and wholesale, multi-market and multi-currency, scripts and functions, and the launch discipline a bigger catalogue demands.
Scoped individuallyThe connections off-the-shelf apps can't make: ERP and stock systems, bespoke product configurators, subscription and finance flows, CRM and warehouse integrations, private apps.
Bespoke · priced per projectMoving onto Shopify from Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or a bespoke stack — catalogue and customer data, URL mapping and redirects, tracking and integrations rebuilt so rankings and revenue survive the move.
Scoped individuallyFor brands that don't need a rebuild but do need a senior pair of hands on call — landing pages, product launches, campaign templates, seasonal work and the steady stream of small fixes.
Rolling monthlyEvery build is engineered from scratch for that client, on the current version of the platform and current best practice. Behind it sits 350+ Shopify stores built to load faster, rank higher and convert better — and a commercial theme I engineered to be one of the fastest and highest-ranking on the platform for SEO. Every build now is organic- and AI-centric by default.
Shopify gives you no server access — no config file to lean on for redirects, caching rules or header control. Every gain has to be engineered inside the theme itself. Two decades of doing that is why builds here are fast by construction rather than fast by plugin.
Platform-level constraintFaceted filtering is where big catalogues quietly break: thin duplicate URLs, wasted crawl budget, sluggish collection pages. No one solution fits every catalogue, so filtering is custom-built to your range and how customers actually shop it — fast and indexable at scale. Bespoke development where a store needs it.
Custom built to your catalogueTargeting 1.5–2 seconds to load on mobile and desktop, with INP under 200ms and CLS under 0.1 — measured on real visitors, not a lab score. App audits and removal, leftover script cleanup, image and font discipline, Liquid refactoring. Load time is a commercial number long before it's a technical one.
Core Web Vitals pass on launchTemplate-level semantics, heading and internal-link architecture, canonical and pagination logic, full JSON-LD coverage across product, collection, review, FAQ, breadcrumb and organisation. Migrations get URL mapping and redirects done before launch, not after the traffic drops.
Technical SEOGenerative engine optimisation: entity-level clarity about what your brand is, machine-readable product and policy data, content structured so an assistant can quote you accurately instead of guessing from a stale scrape. This is the channel most stores are currently invisible in.
AI-search readiness on launchEverything is built as native theme code and a documented component system. No page-builder dependency, no monthly app fee to keep your own homepage rendering, no framework you can't leave. Your team extends it; you own it outright.
Yours to keepLive builds, plus two stores currently in development. Every one of these is native theme code, designed for both screens in parallel and engineered to load fast before a single app is added.
A bespoke Shopify store for a premium hi-fi and home cinema retailer in Ontario, designed, built and migrated from the ground up. A filtering layer lets customers narrow a thirty-brand catalogue by what they actually care about, with 2,800+ products migrated and re-optimised.
Read the case study
A custom Shopify theme for a Vancouver high-end audio and video retailer, built on their existing store with technical SEO first. Catalogue, theme and site architecture were rebuilt as one piece of work in eight weeks, and pages now load in under a second.
Read the case study
Brand-led and showroom-first. The homepage leads with a flagship system and a demo booking, then hands over to category and brand navigation, so a buyer can go straight to what they came for.
Link coming soon
Built around how specialist hi-fi actually sells: authorised brands straight under the hero, shop by category, installation services, staff picks with a named recommendation on every card, and a clear path to book a listening demo.
Link coming soon
A seasonal, heavily-visual catalogue with a short buying window — so the homepage has to carry category navigation, range and trust in one screen. On mobile the kayak range page puts pricing, review scores and specification badges into the card itself, so the comparison happens in the grid.
Visit Wave SUP Boards
A fabric-first essentials brand where the photography does the selling. Full-bleed editorial blocks on desktop, and a collection grid on mobile with swipeable product imagery, inline size and colour options and add-to-basket in the tile — browsing and buying in the same gesture.
Visit ROAVE
Considered-purchase retail: a deep range filtered by colour, type, style, thickness, price and wood grade. The product page carries an area calculator, live price per m², free-sample ordering and finance terms — the questions a flooring buyer asks before they will commit.
Visit Flooring RevolutionLong-form accounts of the design, build and marketing work behind two specialist audio & video retailers — what was broken, what was built, and what it produced over several years.
Most quotes you'll compare look alike on paper. These are the differences that show up after launch — in the load time, the rankings, the invoice and who answers the phone.
Most studios design on top of a theme someone else wrote. I've designed, built and shipped a commercial Shopify theme benchmarked among the fastest on the platform and ranked top for SEO — then engineered and optimised 350+ stores since. You're buying the engineering, not a skin.
350+ stores · 20+ yearsCore Web Vitals engineering, technical SEO and AI-search readiness are part of every build at no extra cost. Nobody comes back in month three with a performance retainer to fix what should have shipped correctly. A store that won't load or can't be found isn't finished.
In the fixed feeShoppers increasingly ask an assistant instead of a search box, and those systems read your domain to decide who to cite. Builds here ship with full structured data, entity-level clarity and machine-readable product information — so you're eligible for a channel most stores are invisible in.
GEO · AI-search readyNative theme code and a documented component system. No page-builder app holding your homepage together, no monthly licence to keep your own site rendering, no proprietary framework you can't leave. Your developer or your next agency can pick it up and extend it.
No lock-inYou deal directly with the person designing and building it. No account manager relaying decisions, no junior team learning on your project, no strategist reselling work that gets built elsewhere. A small number of builds run at a time, deliberately.
Direct accessBuild clients keep whatever marketing arrangement they already have — incumbent agency, in-house team or both. I'll brief them on the tracking, the templates and the structure so nothing breaks at launch. The build stands on its own and is priced on its own.
Agency-friendlyBuild projects are taken by invitation and I run a small number at a time. It's better for both of us to establish fit on the first call.
Trading well, but the theme, the app stack and the load time are now the ceiling on conversion. Revenue matters less here than whether the store is genuinely holding you back.
Moving from Magento, WooCommerce or a bespoke stack and needing the migration done without losing rankings or breaking tracking.
Customisations fighting the theme, updates overwriting your work, and a page builder holding the homepage together.
New brand with real backing that needs the store fast, clean and properly structured from launch rather than patched later.
A launch date already in the diary that doesn't allow for structure, design and engineering to be done properly.
If a $9,997 theme build is most of your available capital, the money is better spent proving the product first.
A redesign won't repair pricing, margin or product-market fit — and I'll say so before you spend.
There is always someone cheaper. There is rarely someone who has engineered and optimised 350+ Shopify stores and will put the performance standard in writing.
Direct contact throughout — no account manager relaying messages, no status call that exists to fill an hour.
A few examples from over two decades and 350+ Shopify stores — design, build, replatforming, performance engineering and, where the brand wanted it, the marketing too.
Past and present engagements.
Two routes. Custom theme design and build from $9,997, or bespoke custom design and development from $19,997. Speed, technical SEO and AI-search readiness are included in both — you get the exact figure, the scope and the launch date in writing before anything starts.
Thirty minutes on your current store: speed, technical SEO, AI readability and the conversion path, with the bottlenecks named and prioritised. You leave with an indicative range whether or not we work together.
A custom-designed, custom-built theme on a clean native codebase — your identity, your conversion path, your templates. Fully engineered for speed, technical SEO and AI search. 30 days of post-launch fixes included.
Ground-up bespoke work: Plus builds, complex catalogues, custom apps, ERP and subscription integrations, multi-market and B2B. Scoped and quoted individually, invoiced in three stages — signature, design sign-off, launch.
Every engagement begins with the free audit call above. Nothing is committed until you have the fixed fee, the scope and the launch date in writing.
All fees are quoted in US dollars. I work with brands in the UK, US, Canada and Australia — you'll be invoiced in your own base currency, converted at the prevailing exchange rate on the date of invoice. UK VAT applies to UK clients only and is added at invoice; it does not apply to clients outside the UK.
KA Consultancy was built for businesses that no longer want their growth handled through layers of low-level account managers, fragmented specialists, and slow-moving agency process. I work directly with serious Shopify brand owners who want experienced CEO-level judgement, hands-on execution, and faster, more commercially sound decision-making.
With over twenty years in digital marketing — agency-side, client-side, and as an independent — I've watched the agency model evolve into something that mostly doesn't serve brand owners well. The senior practitioner who sold the engagement is rarely the one doing the work. Reporting has become theatre. Most accounts are managed against platform-attribution numbers that bear little resemblance to actual profit.
My role is not to add more noise. It's to identify what matters, fix what's holding growth back, and help move the business forward with greater clarity and control. The work itself is focused: bespoke Shopify and Shopify Plus design, development and front-end engineering — native theme code, no page-builder apps, no lock-in.
Over 350 Shopify stores designed, built and optimised, with a current roster of established brands across the UK, US, Canada and Australia. The roster is small by design — typically 8–12 active engagements at any time. Quality of attention is the product.
Direct answers to what brand owners ask before commissioning a build — including the ones about cost, ownership and what happens when Shopify changes something.
That is what the audit call is for. Thirty minutes on your store — speed, technical SEO, AI readability and the conversion path — with the bottlenecks named, prioritised and an honest answer on which route is worth your money.
Send your store URL and what's prompting the work — a conversion rate that won't move, a theme nobody can maintain, a migration, a move to Plus. We'll cover what yours involves, what it costs and whether it's the right spend right now. No fee, no obligation.
Fixed project fee · written scope before you commit · 30 days post-launch fixes