Wellington Shopify Development Company
Wellington Shopify development for boutique and creative brands where the store is the whole brand experience. Small catalogues leave nowhere to hide, so we spend the budget on product presentation and checkout rather than on features nobody uses.
Real Mojo Dojo clients, on the record.
Small catalogues, strong brands, and customers beyond the CBD.
The Wellington region had the highest GDP per person of any region in New Zealand in the year to March 2024, at $92,776, and Wellington City residents are among the most highly qualified in the country. It is a market that notices craft, design and quality, which is why so many of the brands here are boutique labels, makers, studios and specialist food and drink producers.
The last two years have been harder. Public sector cuts from 2024 took a large bite out of CBD spending, the city population dipped 0.3% in the year to June 2025, and the number of business units in the region fell. Brands that relied on lunchtime foot traffic on Lambton Quay or Cuba Street now need online customers elsewhere in the country and overseas.
Online spending in New Zealand passed $12.7 billion in 2025, and NZ Post found smaller centres growing faster than the big cities. For a boutique brand, that is the opportunity: a store that carries the same care as the physical space and sells to people who may never visit it.
We build Shopify stores where presentation does the heavy lifting: editorial product pages, considered photography layouts and a quick, simple checkout, all on eCommerce SEO foundations that help a small catalogue get found.
Shopify development in Wellington: a small but valuable market.
Four figures from Stats NZ, Parliament, MBIE and WellingtonNZ.
Industries we help in Wellington.
Where boutique and specialist brands in the capital get the most from Shopify.
Screen and creative studios
Merchandise, prints, limited editions and digital downloads for studios and artists, with pre-orders and international shipping for fans who are rarely local.
Food, drink and hospitality
Craft beer, coffee, chocolate and pantry brands selling direct, with subscriptions, gift boxes and courier rules for chilled or fragile items.
Fashion, design and events retail
Designer labels and makers who launch around events such as WOW. We build lookbook-led collections, limited drops and waitlists that turn event buzz into online orders.
Technology and media
Software, publishing and media companies selling products, memberships or merchandise, often with headless storefronts or integrations into existing account systems.
Health and wellbeing
Natural health, skincare and wellness brands with ingredient information, subscriptions and review content that builds trust with careful, well-informed buyers.
Ready for a Wellington store as considered as your brand?
Talk to our Shopify developers about a new build, a redesign of an existing store, international shipping or a migration from WooCommerce or Magento.
What conversion-focused eCommerce work delivers.
Results from Mojo Dojo eCommerce clients across our portfolio. They are not figures from the capital. Case studies follow below.
Why boutique brands in the capital choose Mojo Dojo for Shopify.
A small catalogue leaves nowhere to hide, so every product page has to earn its place. We have spent 15 years putting brands on Shopify and Shopify Plus and moving others across, and we put the budget into presentation, speed and checkout rather than features nobody uses.
We are a web design and development agency with marketing skills in the same team, which means the look of the store and the way it will be found are designed together.
Shopify is a hosted platform for selling, shipping and managing inventory that works for a studio with a dozen products as well as a large retailer. The difference between an ordinary store and a memorable one is an experienced Shopify designer and developer.
Project managers, designers, developers and SEO specialists work on each build, keep it straightforward for your team and help you make decisions that still hold up as the range grows. The same philosophy has converted millions in client sales.
Our Shopify services
- Shopify development
- Shopify planning & discovery
- Shopify headless
- Shopify Plus development agency
- Shopify website design
- Shopify theme development
- Shopify SEO and our Shopify SEO agency
- Magento to Shopify migration
- Shopify alternatives
Why a hosted Shopify store suits a boutique brand.
Shopify handles hosting and security, so a small team can focus on product and presentation.
Paying developers for every update
Custom platforms need developers to patch and update the code on a regular basis.
Free updates and platform uptime
You receive free updates to the code, uptime from the Shopify platform and access to a range of functions for a set monthly subscription.
A theme that makes a beautiful product look ordinary
Stock layouts crop photography badly, bury the story behind a product and look the same as thousands of other stores.
Editorial templates you can reuse
We design product and collection templates around your photography and storytelling, then build them as sections your team can reuse for every new release.
Privacy and card processing risk
Handling payments and customer data yourself carries compliance and security risk.
A compliant, secure environment
Shopify provides an environment which is compliant with privacy laws and credit card processing laws, and payments are processed via the Shopify platform so your data and your customers' data is not stolen.
Locked into one payment provider
A single processor can leave you paying more in fees than you need to.
A choice of payment processors
You have the choice of payment processors, which helps reduce additional fees.
A customer base tied to the CBD
Fewer office workers in the central city means fewer walk-in sales, and a store built only for local pickup cannot replace them.
A store built to sell nationwide and overseas
We set up national courier rules, international shipping through Shopify Markets and search-friendly collections so customers in other regions and countries can find and buy from you.
All our Shopify websites are.
Small catalogue or large, every Wellington build meets these four standards.
SEO friendly. An SEO friendly Shopify store: our team of experts takes time to understand your business to ensure relevant keywords are built in to rank well.
On brand. Brand relevancy by creating a Shopify design aligned with your brand that meets customer needs.
Designed to convert. Developed around the ultimate user pathways, ensuring customers are converting and generating revenue.
Easily modifiable. Your Shopify store can be managed and modified by you at the end of the day, without relying on external parties.
Shopify development with a difference.
Shopify lets a small team run the whole store without a developer. You have the ability to:
Manage inventory
Keep track of your stock levels both in your bricks and mortar store and on your website. Make modifications to your products, offer variations in size, colour, in bundles or singular items, and find the most efficient ways to categorise them.
Modify and customise your own site
Have you always relied on your agency or developers to modify your site? Shopify developments allow you to make changes to your site without relying on external parties.
Website maintenance
We highly recommend regular website maintenance to improve the security of your website. Regular updates bring new features and functionality and reduce the risk of being hacked.
Flexible shipping options
Choose fixed shipping rates, tiered rates, free shipping over a certain spend or as a standard inclusion, weight-based shipping or location-based shipping all over the world.
Secure payment facilities
Secure payment gateways and integrations with multiple applications ensure your payments are delivered to you safely and your customers' payment details are not compromised.
Manage customer information
Store customer information through customer profiles, categorise customers, export for marketing purposes and learn more about your customer groups through their buyer behaviour.
Headless Shopify
Shopify headless uses a Jamstack approach and focuses on speed and scalability. A headless build with Hydrogen or your custom stack gives you the flexibility you need from your eCommerce platform.
Get your free Shopify store audit.
Send us your store URL and we'll return a Shopify audit within 48 hours covering product presentation, speed and checkout. No calls, no obligations.
Launch timing around the capital's calendar.
The biggest moments for design and food brands here are tied to events. The World of WearableArt Show contributed $31.75 million to the region in 2024, and 64% of its ticket holders came from outside the capital, which makes it as much an online opportunity as a physical one. Wellington On a Plate and Beervana in August delivered a $10 million boost in 2025, and CubaDupa fills the Cuba Quarter each March.
We plan drops and pre-orders around those dates so visitors who discover a brand at an event can buy again from home. The national peak is the last quarter of the year, when nearly 30% of annual online spending happens. We make sure builds are live and stable by early October, and we set up gift guides, bundles and delivery cut-off messages for Christmas.
Our Shopify development services in more depth.
Getting the basics right for a boutique store
Boutique stores rarely need every feature Shopify offers. They need a handful done well: beautiful product pages, fast mobile browsing, a checkout with no surprises and shipping that works nationwide. Here is how each of our services supports that, from a standard build to Shopify Plus and headless.
Shopify Store Development
Shopify is the world's leading ecommerce platform for good reason. It handles hosting, security, and payment infrastructure at a level that most businesses could not replicate themselves. What it does not do is tell you how to build a store that converts.
Over the last 15 years, Mojo Dojo has built hundreds of Shopify stores across retail, fashion, health, beauty, homewares, food, and industrial supply. Every store we build starts with your customers. How do they navigate? What do they need to see before they buy? Where do they drop off?
Our store builds cover everything from initial Shopify account setup and theme selection through to custom Liquid development, app configuration, and full launch support. We do not hand you a store and disappear.
Shopify Plus Development
Shopify Plus is the enterprise tier of the platform, built for high-volume merchants. It unlocks capabilities that standard Shopify does not offer, including checkout extensibility, advanced automation through Shopify Flow, dedicated support, and lower transaction fees at scale.
Our Shopify Plus work includes:
- Custom checkout UI extensions and checkout.liquid builds
- Shopify Flow automation design and implementation
- Wholesale / B2B store configuration
- Multi-store / expansion store architecture
- Launchpad campaign scheduling and flash sale configuration
- Enterprise ERP and OMS integrations (NetSuite, SAP, MYOB)
Headless Shopify / Jamstack
For merchants who need extreme frontend performance, a headless Shopify architecture decouples the storefront from the Shopify backend. Your frontend is built with a modern JavaScript framework (Next.js, Remix, Nuxt) and served via a CDN edge network, while Shopify handles the commerce logic through the Storefront API.
The result is a store that loads in under a second, scores 95+ on Google Lighthouse, and can support complex content experiences that are impossible in a standard Liquid theme.
We use Shopify Hydrogen for purpose-built headless storefronts and can integrate with Contentful, Sanity, or your existing CMS for content management. Headless is not right for every store, and we will tell you honestly if the complexity is warranted by your revenue and performance requirements.
Shopify SEO Optimisation
Shopify has well-known SEO constraints out of the box. Duplicate content from collections and products, the /collections/*/products/* URL structure, and limited control over canonical tags are common pain points that affect organic performance.
Our Shopify SEO work addresses the platform's limitations directly:
- Product and collection page schema markup (Product, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage)
- Canonical URL management and duplicate content elimination
- Faceted navigation and filter page management
- Image optimisation and alt text at scale
- Collection page content architecture for long-tail keyword targeting
- Core Web Vitals and Lighthouse score improvements
Magento to Shopify Migration
Migrating from Magento to Shopify is one of the highest-value platform decisions an ecommerce business can make. Magento carries significant technical debt, requires expensive dedicated hosting, and demands developer involvement for tasks that Shopify handles natively.
A migration done poorly destroys organic rankings built over years. Our migration process preserves your SEO equity through meticulous 301 redirect mapping, URL structure planning, and content validation before cutover. We have migrated stores ranging from 500 to 50,000 SKUs.
Our migration process covers:
- Product, customer, and order data migration
- 301 redirect mapping for all existing URLs
- SEO audit pre- and post-migration
- App stack rationalisation and configuration
- Theme development on the new platform
- Parallel testing before cutover
- Post-launch monitoring and issue resolution
How we build your Shopify store.
Six stages, run remotely with video calls, shared staging and short feedback loops that suit small teams.
Planning and discovery
We map your customers, catalogue, integrations and goals in a Shopify planning and discovery phase, then recommend Shopify, Shopify Plus or headless based on what your store actually needs.
UX and design
We design user pathways and a Shopify design aligned with your brand, focused on purchases via a refined UI/UX and conversion best practice.
Development
From Shopify account setup and theme selection through to custom Liquid development, app configuration and integrations.
SEO and data migration
Schema markup, canonical URLs and Core Web Vitals are built in. For replatforms we migrate product, customer and order data and map 301 redirects for every existing URL.
Testing
Parallel testing before cutover, plus a pre-launch crawl to verify nothing has been missed.
Launch and ongoing support
Full launch support, post-launch monitoring and issue resolution, with an ongoing maintenance and optimisation retainer available.
Areas we serve in Wellington.
We work remotely with brands across the region, using video calls, shared staging stores and regular reporting. In the city that means Wellington Central, Te Aro, Thorndon, Kelburn, Newtown, Kilbirnie, Miramar, Island Bay and Karori, and in the northern suburbs Johnsonville, Khandallah and Tawa.
Beyond the city we build for businesses in Lower Hutt, Petone, Eastbourne and Upper Hutt, in Porirua, along the Kāpiti Coast at Paraparaumu and in the Wairarapa at Masterton.
eCommerce work from our client portfolio.
Online store projects from across Mojo Dojo clients. They illustrate how we work rather than results for businesses in this region.
“Their team understood our business before we even had to explain it. Enquiries are up 250% and the quality is better than ever.”
The framework behind the stores we build.
Most stores are optimised for traffic. This one is about revenue, the ten changes to a store that move the number at the bottom of the report, in the order to make them.
Send me the Ecommerce Playbook →
Free. 14 pages. In your inbox. Magic-link delivery, it arrives in about two minutes, and there's no sales call attached to reading it.
Do you work with Wellington businesses?
Yes. We work with brands in the capital remotely, through video calls, a shared staging store and regular reporting, scheduled in New Zealand business hours. There is no office involved, and small teams usually find remote reviews easier to fit around trading.
Is Shopify worth it for a small catalogue?
Usually, yes. With a small range, the value is in presentation and conversion rather than catalogue tools, and Shopify lets you put the budget into design, photography layouts and checkout. We keep the app stack small so monthly costs stay proportionate to your sales.
Can Shopify handle Te Reo Māori product names?
Yes. Shopify supports macrons in product titles, descriptions and collection names. We check how they appear in URLs, search and emails, and set up redirects or alternative spellings so customers find products whether they type the macron or not.
How long does a Shopify build take?
A standard Shopify store with an existing theme and up to 500 products typically takes 4 to 6 weeks from design approval to launch. Custom theme builds or Shopify Plus projects with complex integrations typically take 8 to 12 weeks. Migration projects depend on the size of your product catalogue and the state of your existing data. We provide a detailed project timeline as part of your quote.
Will my store rank on Google after you build it?
We build every Shopify store with Shopify SEO optimisation as a baseline requirement, not an optional add-on. This includes schema markup, canonical URL management, clean URL structures, image optimisation, and Core Web Vitals performance. For ongoing organic growth, our Shopify Ecommerce SEO retainer builds on that foundation with content strategy, link acquisition, and monthly reporting.
Do I need Shopify Plus or will standard Shopify work for me?
Shopify Plus becomes commercially justified when you need custom checkout extensibility, advanced automation via Shopify Flow, B2B wholesale channels, multi-store expansion store architecture, or when your transaction volume makes the lower transaction fees economically worthwhile. We will give you an honest assessment based on your current and projected revenue.
Can you migrate my store from Magento or WooCommerce without losing my SEO rankings?
Yes, and this is one of the most important parts of a platform migration. We conduct a full pre-migration SEO audit, document every indexed URL on your existing store, map 301 redirects to their new Shopify equivalents, and run a post-migration crawl before going live to verify nothing has been missed. We have successfully migrated dozens of stores from Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and custom platforms without ranking loss.
What does a Shopify development agency do?
A Shopify development agency plans, designs, builds and launches your Shopify store. That covers account setup, theme selection or a custom theme, custom Liquid development, app configuration, integrations, data migration and SEO foundations, followed by launch support and ongoing maintenance.
Why choose Shopify over a custom-coded eCommerce site?
Shopify is a hosted solution, so the infrastructure, code updates and uptime are handled for you. It provides an environment that is compliant with privacy and credit card processing laws, processes payments securely, and lets you extend the store with apps rather than paying developers for every change.
Can I manage and update my Shopify store myself after launch?
Yes. Every store we build is designed to be easily managed and modified by you and your staff. You can update products, variations, collections, shipping rules and customer information without relying on your agency or developers.
Is headless Shopify right for my store?
Headless Shopify decouples your storefront from the Shopify backend for extreme frontend performance and complex content experiences, typically built with Shopify Hydrogen. It suits stores whose revenue and performance requirements justify the added complexity, and we will tell you honestly if a standard Liquid theme is the better choice.
Can you take over a Shopify store another developer built?
Yes. If your current developer cannot handle your Shopify customisation or produces sub-par results, we audit the existing theme, apps and custom code, fix what is holding the store back and take over development and support from there.
Do you offer ongoing Shopify maintenance and support?
Yes. We do not hand you a store and disappear. We offer post-launch monitoring and issue resolution plus an ongoing retainer for maintenance, new features, conversion rate optimisation and security updates.
Which systems can you integrate with Shopify?
We integrate Shopify and Shopify Plus with enterprise ERP and OMS platforms such as NetSuite, SAP and MYOB, content management systems such as Contentful and Sanity, and the Shopify app ecosystem for reviews, subscriptions, shipping and marketing.
Get your free Shopify store audit.
Send us your store URL and we'll return a Shopify audit within 48 hours covering product presentation, speed and checkout. No calls, no obligations.