Tools we
actually use.

We've built on WooCommerce, Magento, and BigCommerce. Shopify wins every time. The admin is intuitive enough for non-technical merchants, the theme system is flexible enough for developers, and the checkout converts better than anything else we've tested. The app ecosystem is massive, Shopify Payments eliminates third-party gateway headaches, and you never have to worry about hosting, SSL, or security patches. For 95% of stores, Shopify is the right answer.

Most Shopify stores start with email-only support and quickly hit a wall when tickets pile up across different channels. Gorgias solves this by unifying everything and giving agents full Shopify context alongside each ticket — order status, history, tags, all of it. The automation rules are genuinely powerful: you can auto-close common queries like "where's my order?" with zero human input. For any store doing real volume, it pays for itself in hours saved within the first week.

Shipping is where most Shopify stores either overpay or lose customers at checkout. Easyship solves both problems: it aggregates pre-negotiated rates across hundreds of carriers so you're always getting the best price, and it shows live shipping costs plus tax and duties right at checkout — which kills the surprise fees that cause cart abandonment. The automation rules are a game-changer once you're doing volume: set your preferred carrier per destination, print batch labels in one click, and let tracking updates go out automatically. We use it because it turns shipping from a daily chore into something that basically runs itself.

We register all our domains through Namecheap. The pricing is consistently lower than GoDaddy or Google Domains, and unlike most registrars they include lifetime WHOIS privacy for free — no sneaky add-on at checkout. The dashboard is clean and no-nonsense: DNS management, auto-renew settings, and domain forwarding all work exactly as you'd expect. For clients who need hosting outside of Shopify (landing pages, blogs, internal tools), their shared hosting starts under $2/mo and includes a free domain for the first year. It's the registrar we trust for every project.

If a client needs a WordPress site — whether it's a blog, a portfolio, or a landing page that sits alongside their Shopify store — Bluehost is the first host we point them to. The onboarding is dead simple: sign up, pick a domain, and WordPress is already installed and ready to go. You don't need to mess with cPanel or FTP just to get started. The staging environments on higher plans are genuinely useful for testing changes before pushing live, and the 99.99% uptime guarantee means we're not fielding "my site is down" calls. For the price, especially at the exclusive rate, it's hard to beat.

We install TinyIMG on almost every client store. Unoptimised images are the #1 speed killer on Shopify, and most merchants don't have the time to compress, resize, and convert every product photo to WebP manually. TinyIMG automates all of it. The script control feature alone — letting you disable heavy third-party app scripts on pages where they're not needed — is worth the subscription. One app doing the work of five.