Custom Shopify development essentially involves connecting a shopify store with outside resources to accomplished a desired task. The app development helps in increasing the functionality of a Shopify store, and also creates automated features that may yet been available on Shopify. Shopify themes are extensively used by merchants to improve the look and functionalities of their ecommerce stores.

However, getting started with your own Shopifcy theme could pose some real challenges. Liquid is a highly readable and expressive Ruby-based language which is most commonly used for the development of Shopify themes. Liquid uses a placeholder constructs to access a store’s data and output it into a template. Each Liquid template can be used for a specific purpose by suffixing it with a unique view.

Timber, an open source theme framework is just the right choice to speed up Shopify theme development. It comes with a wide range of templates and codes that could be modified as per a project’s needs.

Some key examples of custom Shopify development are:

• Getting outside pricing feeds
• Creating functionalities never used before
• Site-wise product changes
• API or third-party integration
• Integration with ERP
• Handling customer orders and information
• Connecting the shop with other sites

A key point to keep in mind for custom Shopify theme development is to store the codes in a remote repository. This will ensure that the code not only stays organized but also maintains history and prevents the work from getting lost. Each Shopify developer at Flexsin works on a separate branch and theme, and only merges them when the features are complete. This approach allows for quick fixes but also saves us from inadvertently publishing some half-baked features. We always work on unpublished themes to keep the changes hidden during the development process.

In case we need to make changes within the online theme editor, we download the changes and incorporate them into repo so that the changes do not get overwritten eventually. This way, the repo manages the code efficiently.

Abstracting features for satiating user experience

When Shopify compiles .scss files, Liquid happens before Saas. To get around this, our developers interpolate the Liquid, However, for JavaScript, It’s better not to have Liquid logic in the mix, as Liquid is not a programming language, its main purpose is to output the data and create markup. JavaScript is just apt to do some heavy lifting and come out of some endless string appends.

As our clients are the primary users of their store, our custom Shopify developers abstract as much features of the site as possible, to avoid hard coding settings into the theme. We leverage on metafields, relatables, schemas and locales to control the website content.

An analysis of CSS compression, images, JavaScript and Liquid compression need to be done during custom Shopify development to evaluate how these features affect the site’s load time and performance. We work to avoid rendering content, such as carousels that contain numerous images and text but need to be primarily hidden. This helps Flexsin developers in saving a significant amount of rendering time. Less waiting means the customers will have more satisfying experience while shopping from your online store.