Theme development and release
Liquid sections, blocks and templates built so your team can edit them without a developer. Changes ship from a branch and a staging theme, never straight into the live store.
Fractional Teammates · Development
A senior Shopify developer inside your team, part-time
Your storefront gets a named specialist from the OlDevs studio for a set slice of every week: theme code, apps, checkout, product data and merchandising. They work in your admin, on your board, at your pace.
A senior specialist, not a junior placement You own the work and the accounts Reply within one business day
shop.client.com/checkoutLive
Basket · 3 items
Optimised checkoutMerino crew
Canvas holdall
Ceramic carafe
x1
Merino crew · medium
x2
Canvas holdall
x1
Ceramic carafe · pair
Subtotal · delivery included
Complete order
2.9%
Conversion
41s
To checkout
−22%
Cart abandonment
What a shopify developer is
OlDevs places a fractional Shopify developer, a senior specialist from our Vancouver studio, inside your team for a defined slice of every week on an ongoing basis.They own the storefront: theme development in Liquid, app evaluation and clean-up, checkout and cart work, product and metafield data, and the merchandising your team needs to run promotions. They work in your Shopify admin, your repository and your standups, not behind a wall, and the rest of the studio is behind them when a job needs design, SEO or back-end help. You own the store, the code and the accounts. Every engagement is quote-based.
Key facts
- 01Group
- Development
- 02Commitment
- An ongoing weekly slice, not a fixed scope
- 03Works in
- Your Shopify admin, repository and rituals
- 04Coverage
- Vancouver studio, remote across Canada and the US
- 05Typical commitment
- 1 day a week
- 06Judged on
- Checkout completion · Time to launch a promotion · Theme errors
Development
What this teammate takes off your plate
What this teammate takes off your plate
App stack review
Apps accumulate. Your teammate catalogues what is installed, flags what duplicates native Shopify features or slows the storefront, and tests removals on a staging theme before anything changes on the live site.
Checkout and cart work
Checkout extensibility, cart logic, discount behaviour, shipping and payment options. Work is scoped to what your Shopify plan actually permits, and tested with real orders in a test environment before launch.
Product data and metafields
Variants, options, metafields and metaobjects modelled once so merchandising, search and feeds all read the same data. Bulk edits and imports are scripted and reversible, not typed into the admin by hand.
Merchandising your team can run
Collections, badges, bundles, landing sections and promotion templates set up so marketing can launch a sale without filing a ticket. Your teammate builds the controls, then shows the team how to use them.
Storefront speed and accessibility
Theme performance measured on real product and collection pages, not a homepage score. Templates are built to WCAG 2.2 AA so keyboard and screen-reader shoppers can finish a purchase.
Benefits
What changes when someone is watching the store
01
The live theme stops being the workbench
The store stops changing under a shopper mid-session, and the published theme is left alone during trading hours. Work happens on a duplicate, marketing approves a preview link, and the change goes live at a time somebody chose.
02
Peak trading gets planned, not survived
Your busiest weeks stop arriving as a surprise. Discount logic, the code freeze, inventory edge cases and the rollback plan are settled while the calendar is quiet, so trading days are spent watching orders rather than patching Liquid.
03
Platform deadlines enter your roadmap
Shopify sets the dates: API versions expire, checkout moves to extensions, theme standards shift. Those become planned work in your own schedule instead of an outage on the morning an old integration finally stops being accepted.
04
Installing an app becomes a decision
Nobody reaches for another app to patch a gap in a hurry, and the ones removed do not leave snippets behind in the theme. The storefront stops carrying third-party scripts that nothing on the site still depends on.
05
Checkout and platform calls get weighed
Whether to customise checkout, commission a private app or move platform at all gets argued out with someone who has made those calls before — experience few single stores keep occupied five days a week.
06
Store knowledge stays in your organisation
The theme repository, the staging store, app admin access and the reasoning behind each customisation live in your accounts, recorded as the work happens. When the arrangement ends, the next person can read the store rather than guess at it.
How it works
How the engagement runs
Store review
We spend the first sessions in your admin and theme: what is installed, what is custom, what breaks at peak. You get a written picture before anyone changes code.
Agree the slice
We set the days and hours, the standing meetings your teammate joins, and who they report to. The commitment is written down so both sides can plan around it.
Access on your terms
Your teammate is added to your Shopify admin, repository and project tool with the permissions you choose. Every account stays in your name, from the first day to the last.
Weekly demo
Every week ends with a working demo on a preview theme and a short note: what shipped, what is in progress, what is blocked. No monthly surprise.
Cover from the studio
If your teammate is on leave, a second developer from OlDevs picks up the board. Notes, branches and runbooks live in your repository, so nothing sits inside one head.
Who it's for
Who this suits
Fractional works when the Shopify need is real and constant, but not big enough to fill a senior week. Here is where it fits, and where it does not.
Brands whose store outgrew the marketing team
The team can edit content but not templates, and every real change waits on an outside contractor. A standing slice of developer time clears that queue each week.
Merchants replatforming or rebuilding a theme
You are moving to a new theme, to Online Store 2.0, or to Shopify from another platform, and want someone senior who stays after launch to look after what was built.
B2B, franchise and multi-store operators
Several storefronts, markets or B2B catalogues to keep in step. One developer who knows all of them beats a different contractor learning each store from scratch every time.
Not a fit: one fixed-scope build
If you need a theme delivered and then nothing, ask us for a project instead. If Shopify work fills a full week every week, hire, and we will help you interview.
12+
Years of studio experience since 2014
1
Typical commitment — 1 day a week
EN/FR
Languages this engagement can be delivered in
Other fractional roles
Often paired with
01
Front-End Developer
Your interface layer gets an owner: components, responsive layout, state, performance budgets and WCAG 2.
Explore02Conversion & Analytics Specialist
One senior specialist owns your GA4 and server-side tracking, the event design underneath it, and the experiment programme that tests pages, forms and funnels.
Explore03Email Marketing Specialist
Segments, lifecycle flows, the sending calendar and inbox placement, handled on agreed days each week inside the platform you already use.
ExploreFAQ
Questions buyers ask before committing
The storefront. That means the theme code, the app stack, checkout and cart behaviour, product and metafield structure, and the merchandising controls your team uses for promotions. They also own the release process: staging themes, branches and a rollback path. What they do not own is your commercial strategy. They will tell you what a request does to page weight, admin complexity or launch dates, then build what you decide.
They are yours and they stay yours. The theme lives in your repository, apps are installed under your Shopify account, and every third-party licence is held in your name. At the end of an engagement we hand over a written runbook, close our access, and stay reachable for a handover call with whoever picks the work up. There is no lock-in clause and nothing is held back.
Hiring gives you a full week of attention and full-time overhead. Fractional gives you a senior slice and no recruitment. We will not claim it is always the cheaper option, because that depends on how much work you actually have; if the queue fills a week, hiring wins. Against an agency, the difference is embedding: one named person in your standups and your admin, not tickets passed between account managers.
Not without a reason and a plan. Normal work goes to a staging theme, gets reviewed, then publishes on an agreed day. Around Black Friday, a product launch or a peak season we agree a freeze window in advance and only ship fixes inside it. If something breaks during a promotion, the rollback is a published theme version, not an emergency rewrite.
Both, within limits we state up front. Your teammate evaluates apps, configures them, writes the theme code they need, and builds app extensions or private apps where an off-the-shelf one does not fit. They do not maintain someone else's public app. If a request needs another discipline, such as a back-end integration, an ERP feed or a paid-media pixel, the studio behind them covers it.
Send us the store URL, the theme you are on and the three things currently stuck. We reply within one business day, usually with questions rather than a pitch. If it looks like a fit we review the store, then propose a weekly slice and the rituals your teammate would join. Every engagement is quoted individually, so there is no standard package and no public rate card.
Let’s connect
Let’s talk about the shopify developer gap.
Tell us what is not getting done and roughly how much of a week it needs. We’ll reply within one business day with who would cover it and a tailored quote — no obligation.