You didn’t hire a developer to manage plugin updates. You hired them to build features that grow your business.
But somewhere along the way—between the 15th plugin and the third security vulnerability this quarter—maintenance became the job. Fixing plugin conflicts. Testing security patches. Troubleshooting why checkout stopped working on mobile after yesterday’s update.
It’s rarely the plan. But it’s often the reality.
Kyle, VP of E-commerce at Dollar Shave Club, estimates his team spent 40% of their development time just keeping things running when they were on their custom platform. Not innovating. Not building new features. Just maintaining what already exists.
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. This is a common reality for brands running on custom platforms, and it’s more costly than most teams realize. Not just in developer hours, but in missed opportunities. The features that never get built. The competitive advantages that slip away. The innovations that stay stuck in your backlog.
The good news? Switching might be easier than you think. Research shows that migrations to Shopify are 36% faster, 56% less expensive, and 74% more likely to finish on time compared to custom platforms. And the transformation on the other side is measurable. Here’s what that maintenance burden is actually costing you, and what becomes possible when you redirect that time toward growth.
The real cost: what you’re not building
While your team maintains existing functionality, here’s what remains in the backlog:
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Checkout optimizations you know would reduce customer acquisition costs
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Conversion improvements that would protect your profit margins
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Personalization features your competitors launched last quarter
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Mobile experience upgrades that keep sliding down your priority list
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New sales channels like AI platforms where discovery is shifting
Want to sell through ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot as those platforms become product discovery channels? Building those integrations independently means months of development per platform, ongoing maintenance, and infrastructure that handles agentic traffic. Meanwhile, on Shopify, Agentic Storefronts enable it in a few clicks—your products become discoverable in AI conversations with shoppers checking out directly.
The opportunity cost shows up in smaller ways too. How much time does your team spend building internal tools just to understand performance? Generating product content? Debugging issues? Shopify’s AI assistant, Sidekick, handles this work instantly, turning tasks that used to require custom development into simple questions. Since January 2025, it’s powered nearly 100 million merchant conversations.
Ryan Donahue, Shopify Practice Lead at CQL, sees this pattern with brands his team helps migrate: “We like to call it an 80/20 rule where a lot of the time you can get 80% or more of what you want using third-party apps, using everything out of the box. Apple Pay is a checkbox on Shopify, but it’s a three-month project with really good engineers if you’re on custom.”
The opportunity cost extends beyond individual features. It’s the market position you could gain. The experiments you could run. The innovations that stay in someone’s head because there’s no bandwidth to test them.
Why this gets harder over time (and how to fix it)
Here’s the fundamental problem: Commerce innovation moves faster than any single company can.
Ryan explained it plainly: “The market is going to move much faster than your company can, no matter how good your team is.”
That’s the reality when significant development resources go toward maintaining custom platforms rather than building new capabilities.
While your team maintains what you built last year, competitors are launching features you haven’t even scoped yet. Accelerated checkout. Flexible payment options. AI-powered personalization. The innovations that convert browsers into buyers.
Consumer expectations aren’t set by your site. They’re set by the best shopping experience someone had anywhere. That bar rises every quarter. And when your development capacity is locked in maintenance mode, you fall further behind.
You’re not competing against other companies on custom commerce stacks. You’re competing against companies whose commerce platform gives them a six-month head start on every new capability.
The mindset shift matters as much as the time savings. You move from “Can we build this?” to “Should we build this?” From months-long development cycles to week-long experiments.
How Shopify reduces maintenance and unlocks room for growth
Shopify manages the infrastructure, security, and baseline commerce features so your team doesn’t have to. Here’s what comes built into the platform.
Built-in security and compliance
Security and compliance on custom platforms requires dedicated resources: audit cycles, manual patching, vulnerability monitoring, and specialized expertise. On Shopify, it’s platform-managed infrastructure.
Shopify is PCI DSS Level 1 compliant (the highest level), SOC 1, 2, and 3 certified, with automatic PCIv4 compliance as regulations evolve. Security updates, compliance certifications, vulnerability patching, SSL encryption, fraud detection, and DDoS protection are all handled at the platform level.
On custom implementations, maintaining PCI compliance means annual audits, quarterly scans, manual patching across WordPress core and plugins, security plugin management, and ongoing compliance documentation.
The developer time and audit budget that would go toward security work can be redirected to revenue-generating features. What used to require specialized teams and ongoing resources is now built into the platform.
Better usability, agility, and a quality partner ecosystem
Shopify’s 10,000+ apps aren’t unvetted plugins. They undergo review before publication, meet performance and security standards, and are sandboxed to prevent conflicts. They’re built by specialists focused on specific commerce problems, and tested across thousands of implementations and maintained as the ecosystem evolves.
Steve from Arhaus emphasized this advantage: “There’s this huge community of folks that are developing for this platform for all different sizes of businesses. How do you keep your platform current? How do you keep the features you serve the consumer more current? It’s through a lot of these innovative and super thoughtful app creators.”
Ryan from CQL gave a specific example: “If you’re using a Klaviyo or a Yotpo, you may have had to do a custom integration to those platforms. They have the APIs, but that might have taken months to do… The most stark example we like to use is Apple Pay. That’s a checkbox on Shopify, but it’s a three month project with really good engineers and a lot of testing if you’re on custom.”
When thousands of brands use the same platform, common challenges have shared solutions. You benefit from collective learning instead of solving everything from scratch.
Faster to implement and more cost-effective than alternatives
If you’re evaluating migration, you’re likely considering multiple platforms, not just Shopify. The data shows Shopify outperforms across the board.
Based on time to value research commissioned by Shopify and published by EY in October 2025, migrations to Shopify compared to custom platforms are:
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36% faster to implement
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74% more likely to finish on time
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56% lower in budgeted costs
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1.9x more likely to stay on budget
What’s more, total cost of ownership data shows Shopify on average delivers 33% better TCO, 23% better platform costs and 19% better operation/maintenance costs than competitors like BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and Adobe Commerce.
From defense to offense: what brands build on Shopify
Kyle from Dollar Shave Club described their progression: “We were playing a lot of defense at the very beginning of our relationship. We really turned a corner of making sure that we’re being more thoughtful about what that two or three year roadmap looks like and how we can delight our consumers even more and drive business KPIs around retention.”
Steve from Arhaus described their current focus: “The big thing for me right now is kind of pushing the envelope of what is next. What is the thing that no one in our industry has done but is going to make an impact?”
That’s the question you can ask when maintenance isn’t consuming your capacity.
Real outcomes from brands who made the shift:
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MakerFlo went from 5-10 months to implement a loyalty program to days or hours—a $120,000 annual savings in developer time now redirected to revenue-generating features.
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Lull rebuilt a decade of custom infrastructure in 6 months for under $10,000. They achieved 25% reduction in infrastructure costs, 25% decrease in payment processing fees, and product launches that now happen in minutes instead of months.
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Peter Sheppard Footwear tripled their conversion rate while giving business users autonomy to manage merchandising independently, freeing developers to work on strategic initiatives.
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Arhaus scaled nationally with consistent customer experience, testing industry-first innovations without platform constraints.
Kyle explained the balance: “It’s almost like this pendulum. 100% custom means that every single word, every single pixel is your decision. And this other side of the pendulum of out of the box is like zero personality. But I think where we’ve been able to really strike a balance working with Shopify is in that middle ground, leveraging what already exists, but making it your own.”
Ryan from CQL added guidance: “There are a lot of very unique features and touch points that warrant the extra timeline, the extra budget to make every pixel exactly how you need it to be—great, invest in that one thing. But your entire experience does not need to be that.”
What’s next?
This isn’t really about WordPress versus Shopify. It’s about your roadmap versus your maintenance backlog.
Consider these questions:
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What’s been in your backlog for six months because you “don’t have the resources”?
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What features are your competitors launching that you can’t match?
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What ideas has your marketing team proposed that never progressed past “we’ll look into it”?
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How will you keep up when selling through AI chatbots becomes table stakes?
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If your developers had 40% more capacity, what would you build first?
Eduardo Fris, Field CTO at Shopify, described the shift he’s watched brands make: “There are so many things that we have built just because we could, not because we needed to. And over time, we have forgotten the reasons and in many cases the reasons are no longer valid.”
Migration creates the opportunity to evaluate: what actually drives your business versus what’s accumulated complexity?
