By Cairo Studio, Studio 6 min read
Clients ask us the same thing at the start of almost every commerce project: should we use Shopify or build our own? We have done both in the last year, for good reasons each time.
Two coffee companies, built from scratch
Dropped roasts in Cairo and sells single origins with the gear to brew them. The Coffee Concept supplies machines and equipment from Dalla Corte, Eureka, Hardtank, IX Water and TAF in Egypt. For both, we built the storefront, the commerce API and the admin behind it.
The reason was operational, not aesthetic. Local payment and delivery, stock that moves between a roastery and a warehouse, products with real technical specs, and teams who wanted one admin shaped around how they already work. Fitting that into a hosted platform would have meant a stack of paid apps and workarounds, every one of them a monthly bill and a point of failure.
A denim brand on Shopify
Denaro makes denim slides, caps and socks in Cairo, in limited runs. Small catalogue, drops, and a team that needs to launch a product on their own on a Thursday night. Shopify does that well. We designed and built a custom theme on Horizon so the store looks like Denaro and not like a template, and left the plumbing to Shopify.
How we decide
- Who runs the shop day to day, and what do they already know?
- How unusual are the products, the stock and the delivery?
- How many apps would a hosted platform need to do the job?
- Who pays for changes in two years, and how much?
The honest answer
Custom is not better and Shopify is not cheaper by default. The question is who will run the shop on a Tuesday afternoon, and what will make that person faster. Answer that first, and the platform usually picks itself.
