Frontend Development

In today’s world, selling online is no longer a nice to have, it’s an absolute necessity. Running a business is tough work, you need a great product, a strong team, and most of all professional partners that can help you grow. At our core, we are a team of Project Managers and Developers that understand Shopify development. Ambaum has been an official Shopify Plus Partner for more than 7 years and specializes in programming for Shopify merchants. Ambaum also supports WordPress and WooCommerce; we have many brands that want the benefit of the WordPress CMS to support their content marketing.

Shopify 2.0 Themes

When considering your theme options on Shopify you have two main routes to take: you can choose an off-the-shelf theme from the Shopify theme store, or you can work with us to build your custom theme from the ground up.

Why would you want a custom theme for your brand? We like to explain this by using an analogy. Let’s say you were looking for a new house and you found one with 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom. If the house is just for you, it is ideal! However, if you had a family of 5 and really wanted a 5 bedroom, 3 bathroom house, this wouldn’t work. You could tear up the 2 bedroom, 1 bath house and make it into 5 bedrooms and 3 baths, but that would be silly.

This is also how it works when deciding on using an off-the-shelf theme or having a custom one built for you. If you want to hack-up an off-the-shelf theme so much with changes/updates, you are creating a custom theme, but it’s going to end up a Frankenstein monster. If you want your brand to stand out and have a vision for the look and feel, you will want to design a custom Shopify 2.0 theme.

Shopify Headless Commerce

For fast growing brands a regular Shopify 2.0 theme won’t cut it, they need speed and a highly customizable headless website. Shopify created Hydrogen, a React-based headless framework built on Remix. Ambaum has built Shopify Hydrogen headless themes hosted on Oxygen, and there are a lot of things to consider when compared to a Shopify 2.0 theme.

Headless themes allow for speed and speed equates to more conversions. In addition, you can work with best of breed content management systems like Story Blok, Sanity and many more. There are tradeoffs with headless; there is no Shopify customizer to manage your theme content, not all Shopify apps will integrate seamlessly into a headless theme and total cost of ownership is typically more for a headless theme.

Shopify Maintenance Partner

Ambaum provides ongoing support and maintenance for Shopify merchants that are looking for a professional development firm. We function as your outsourced development team offering strategy on which apps to choose, when to custom build features and how to get the most out of your Shopify theme. If you would like support for your Shopify store, reach out for a chat, we’d love to meet you!

Your Shopify Advisor and Frontend CTO

At Ambaum we see ourselves as more than a development agency, we help you with strategy and guidance for all things Shopify. For frontend development, what this means is that we are going to give you guidance on which apps work the best for your store. Looking for subscriptions? That’s probably going to be Recharge. Want some product upsells, let’s consider Rebuy. We won’t just accept feature requests, we take the overall project into consideration and offer you a solution that helps you out long term.

Theme Development Best Practices

Ambaum will custom code your fully responsive desktop and mobile design into a new custom theme for your site. Ambaum will develop your new Shopify Plus site on top of Online Store 2.0 templates. We have built a proprietary custom theme that includes a lot of pre-built sections, snippets, scripts, icons, and much more. Our starter theme gives you the benefits of a professional theme and you also get the flexibility of building everything from the ground up to fully accommodate the look and feel of your new store. 

We will custom code liquid template files in the new theme as well as use JavaScript where necessary to create a completely unique site. All Shopify development will be done in a Shopify theme and merchants will have access to view our development process real time.

At Ambaum we also make sure to use the official github app to manage updates to your live Shopify theme. This has improved development workflow and reduced manual deployments and errors/overwrites for the merchants we support.

Staying on top of the Shopify Updates

Shopify releases tons of new features every 6 months and you need someone to help you navigate all these updates. For example, checkout.liquid functionality will be removed in 2024 and we are working with our Shopify Plus merchants already to convert over to checkout extensions. At Ambaum we understand Shopify at a deep technical level and you benefit when we build out your theme.