Shopify Questions, Answered

Two packages. Starter is ₹85,000 and covers theme customisation, product and checkout pages, payment gateway, GST configuration, analytics and 30 days of support. Advanced lists at ₹1,25,000 and adds custom Liquid code that replaces paid apps, AI SEO and schema, a Google Merchant Center feed and 60 days of support. For the first 100 stores we are offering Advanced at ₹60,000. All prices exclude 18% GST.

No, and this is worth being clear about. The ₹60,000 offer is the Advanced package, which lists at ₹1,25,000, for the first 100 stores. Starter remains ₹85,000. So the offer is better value than Starter, not a cheaper version of it.

50% to start and 50% before delivery. No hourly billing and no retainer unless you specifically want ongoing work.

No. Shopify's own plan is paid by you directly to Shopify, from roughly ₹1,994 a month on Basic. We keep it in your name deliberately — your store, your billing, your account.

No, all quoted prices exclude 18% GST. We issue a GST invoice.

No. The quote is fixed in writing before anything is built, based on a written scope. If you later ask for something outside that scope, we price it separately and you decide — it never appears as a surprise line on an invoice.

Not by default. Support for the first 30 or 60 days is included depending on the package. After that you can extend support monthly or stop entirely. There is no lock-in and no notice period.

Migration starts at ₹8,999 for up to 5,000 products, covering products, variants, images, customers, past orders and reviews. The redirect map for your old URLs is quoted separately once we have seen how many pages actually hold rankings — on one store that was 675 URLs, which is a real piece of work, not a checkbox.

A standard store of up to about 300 products is usually live in twelve working days, counted from when your content and product data reach us. Migrations, B2B pricing rules or custom integrations add roughly three to six working days. The timeline is written into the quote.

Product data in any usable form (a spreadsheet, a CSV export, or access to your existing store), your logo and brand colours, product photographs, and your policy content for shipping, returns and privacy. If you do not have the policies, we draft them for you to review.

Three. Scope and wireframe, where we agree pages, features, gateways and a fixed price before any code. Build in Liquid, where theme sections are coded, payments wired in and GST invoicing built. Then launch, where data is migrated, old URLs are redirected, the product feed goes to Google, and support begins.

We start from a clean, well-maintained base theme and build the sections your store actually needs on top of it in Liquid. You get a custom result without the fragility of a theme written from zero, and you stay compatible with Shopify's own updates.

Yes. Everything is built on an unpublished theme with a preview link you can open and click through. Nothing touches your live storefront until you say so — in fact you publish it, not us.

We do not count them. What we do instead is agree the scope and wireframe before building, which is what actually prevents rework. Changes within the agreed scope are part of the job; a change to the scope itself gets priced and you decide.

Yes, all over India, and the work runs the same way — calls, WhatsApp and a written scope. Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai clients can also meet us in person if they prefer.

Yes, and the redirects are the part that decides it. We map every old WooCommerce URL to its Shopify equivalent and set 301 redirects before the domain is pointed, so existing rankings and backlinks carry across instead of hitting a 404.

Your ranking pages 404 and the traffic does not come back on its own. On one store we audited, 675 dead WooCommerce URLs were still earning 67% of every click the site had recorded, at nearly double the click-through rate of the live Shopify pages that had replaced them. The old URLs kept the rankings; the new store never inherited them.

Because the URL patterns differ. WooCommerce uses /product/, Shopify uses /products/, and many Indian stores also carry a slug suffix like -india. Nothing matches by accident, so unless someone builds the map deliberately, every page breaks.

Only where it is safe. We match on model tokens — the digits and roman numerals in a product name — rather than fuzzy text similarity. Fuzzy matching is genuinely dangerous here: at a 0.82 similarity cutoff it paired a Nikon Z6 III with a Z7 II and a 35mm lens with an 85mm. URLs it cannot match confidently are handed back as a list for a human decision rather than guessed.

Products with their variants and images, collections, customers, past orders, and reviews. We also rewrite the SEO fields, because migration tools almost never carry them and the new store otherwise launches with every product's meta data empty.

Check the values, not whether the field looks filled. Automated import tools often populate barcode and SKU with generated junk — the tell is a 13-digit timestamp, like a barcode of 1737441146548/511. On one migrated catalogue 78% of products carried these. It matters because Google accepts brand plus MPN when a product genuinely has no GTIN, and junk in SKU closes that fallback too.

Yes. The product import differs by platform but the important part — the redirect map, the SEO fields and the theme rebuild — is the same work regardless of what you are leaving.

No. The new store is built and checked in full while your existing site keeps trading. The only moment anything changes is when the domain is pointed, and the redirects are already in place before that happens.

Usually because the SEO title and description are empty, so Google falls back to the raw product title. A migrated or agency-built store typically ships with these blank on 90 to 100% of products — on one catalogue, 2,377 of 2,686 products had no SEO title at all. Nothing looks broken, which is exactly why nobody checks.

Not if it was measured with a presence filter. Asking Shopify how many products have a product type returns the whole catalogue whether the values are filled or blank, because the filter matches the empty string. On one store a coverage query reported all 2,686 products typed; four samples proved every value was blank. Sample real values, never counts.

Yes, to the real character budget rather than a generic template, and we read any copy a human already wrote and send it back unchanged. On one store that meant 2,415 products written and 74 existing hand-written descriptions preserved.

Most themes append your shop name to every page title, which spends around 13 of the 60 characters Google actually displays. We drop it on product pages only, keeping it on collections, blog and home, which returns that budget to every product title.

Often the theme is truncating them, not Google. We found one theme chaining a truncate filter onto the whole description expression, so every hand-written description shipped cut at 152 characters with an ellipsis. It is a one-snippet fix once you know to look.

Yes — Product, Organization, Breadcrumb and FAQ schema as part of the build, so search engines and AI assistants read your catalogue as structured data rather than guessing from the page.

Only if the alt text is right. One store we audited had 47 images across 12 products carrying German alt text from a bulk app run with the wrong locale, which forfeits image search entirely. Alt is invisible in the Shopify admin unless you open each product's media, so it goes unnoticed for years.

The build itself ships SEO-ready — URL structure, schema, meta fields on every page, a Merchant Center feed and Core Web Vitals tuned on mobile. Ongoing content and link work is a separate service you can add. It is never compulsory, and we do not guarantee rankings.

No, and be wary of anyone who does. We can guarantee the technical work — structured data, clean URLs, redirects that preserve equity, fast mobile pages — but where you rank depends on competition we do not control.

From the SEO title field, not the product title. Shopify's Google channel sends seo.title as the Merchant Center product title and appends the variant name. This surprises most merchants — editing the product title changes your website and does nothing to the feed.

Almost always promotional SEO titles. Phrasing like “Buy X Online in India” is fine on a collection page, which is not in the feed, but on a product it reads as non-product data and gets the offer rejected. We rewrite those to product data before they get flagged — on one store that was 38 live titles.

Merchant Center rejects the submitted store name and falls back to the bare domain when it disagrees with the schema markup your theme emits. Aligning your shop name with the Organization name in your structured data fixes it.

Not necessarily. A feed price below your page price is caught and disapproved, but a feed price above it often passes with no issue code and no dashboard signal at all — while losing every price comparison in Shopping. On one store, 14 of 14 sampled items were overstated by 21 to 89%.

It is a classifier fallback, not a bug, and appealing is the wrong move. An empty or bare-numeric Google product category leaves the classifier nothing to work with, and monopods genuinely are also sold as shooting sticks. Setting the real category cleared one strike within minutes; a second also needed the word “shooting” thinned out of the description.

Not always, but you need something valid. Google accepts brand plus MPN when a product genuinely has no GTIN, and declaring identifier_exists correctly when it has none. What breaks it is junk in those fields, which looks filled but closes every fallback.

Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree and Instamojo, plus UPI and QR checkout. Cash on delivery is configured as standard, with an optional verification step to cut fake orders.

Yes, and it is set up as a first-class option rather than an afterthought. We can add a verification step — an OTP or WhatsApp confirmation before the order is accepted — which is the usual lever for reducing COD returns.

Yes. GST invoices with HSN codes are generated for every order, built into the theme rather than rented as a monthly app.

Yes. Tiered price lists, minimum order quantities and quote requests can all be built in Liquid, which is how we avoid the monthly cost of a B2B app on stores that need dealer pricing.

Far fewer than most stores do. Size charts, bundles, GST invoices, wishlists, bulk pricing and similar features are written into your theme instead of rented monthly. Custom Liquid typically replaces ₹5,000 to ₹25,000 a month of app subscriptions.

Payment gateways, shipping aggregators and third-party review platforms. We tell you which ones before you commit rather than implying everything can be replaced with theme code.

Shopify only emails marketing-subscribed contacts. Most abandoners have an email on file but are not subscribed, so adding more automations just sends more mail to the same few people. On one store, 51 of 68 abandoned checkouts had never been emailed at all and ₹0 had been recovered.

Active refers to the workflow, not the message. Open the automation and check the message row underneath — it can read Draft or Paused under an Active workflow, and a draft message sends nothing. The discount block also ships with its title, amount and requirements hidden, so the email renders a bare button with no code in it.

When inventory tracking is off, Shopify never consults the quantity or the out-of-stock policy, so the variant is always purchasable. A store can be set entirely to stop selling at zero stock and still accept orders. It is diagnosed on the tracking flag, not the backorder setting — one store had 102 untracked variants across 58 products.

Yes — order confirmation, COD verification and abandoned-cart nudges through WhatsApp. Worth knowing that Shopify's SMS marketing is not available in India at all, while WhatsApp is supported and the cheapest market on their list, so it is the right channel here rather than a compromise.

Yes, all three, in Liquid on the Advanced package — along with bulk-buy discounts, cross-sell and upsell, reward points and product comparison. These are the features most commonly rented as separate monthly apps.

Sixty days on the Advanced package, thirty on Starter: bug fixes, small tweaks, and a walkthrough so your team can add products and run the store without calling us.

You do, entirely. The Shopify account, the domain, the theme code, the analytics and any advertising accounts are all in your name. We do not hold your assets as leverage, and there is nothing to transfer if you leave.

That is the intent. You get a recorded walkthrough covering adding products, editing collections, running discounts and reading orders. Custom sections are built to be edited from Shopify's own customiser rather than requiring a developer for every change.

No. Work is done on an unpublished theme and handed to you with a preview link. You publish. That is deliberate — it means no change reaches your customers without you seeing it first.

Only if you agree to it. The stores named on this site — Hey Jimmy, Pro Audio Brands, Stamporaa — asked to be named, or agreed when we asked. Anything else stays described rather than identified, and you can withdraw agreement later and we will take it down.

That is a large part of what we do. Send the URL and we check what can be checked from outside — catalogue SEO coverage, feed health, redirects, theme faults — and tell you what we find before any quote and before there is a contract.