A custom CRM for your Shopify or WooCommerce store

Signs your store has outgrown its setup

Hardly anyone decides to change overnight. What usually happens is that symptoms like these pile up:

• A customer's record is split across three places: orders in the store, conversations in email and notes in a spreadsheet.
• Supplier orders go by email, and stock gets corrected by hand when the goods arrive.
• "Where's my order?" arrives by email, and someone has to look it up and answer each one.
• There's a different app for every need: they step on each other and their monthly fees keep adding up.
• Sales, customer and restock reports get rebuilt in a spreadsheet every Monday.
• Your customers want to configure the product, and the platform's variants can't handle that many combinations.

One of these alone doesn't justify anything. Three or four at once usually mean the store sells well, but the business around it is being run by hand.

A situation we see often

A fashion brand with a few hundred orders a month on Shopify and a small team. The store works; the problem is behind it. Suppliers and purchase orders live in spreadsheets, someone updates stock by hand when goods arrive, and every customer asking about an order is one more email to answer.

The answer we propose in cases like this isn't to change stores. Shopify stays as the system for products, stock and orders, and around it we build what it doesn't cover: a complete record of each customer with their full history, suppliers and purchase orders (which update stock in the store on their own when the goods are received), restock alerts and a dashboard with the numbers you actually look at. Plus a customer portal where buyers check their orders, and whatever they ask lands straight on their record.

Extend Shopify or WooCommerce without switching platforms

The idea is simple: your store remains the source of truth for products, stock and orders, and the new system doesn't duplicate it. It reads what already works, through the connection Shopify and WooCommerce provide, and writes back only what's needed, like the stock that comes in with a supplier order. Your team works in one place and nobody copies data from one screen to another.

What usually gets built around the store:

It's the same thinking we apply to any custom management system: customer management isn't a separate product, it's one more business process, connected to everything else.

When extending isn't enough: customized products

There's one case where extending the store won't do: when the customer configures the product. A manufacturer that sells by size, material and finish, with rules between them (this size doesn't allow that finish, this material changes the price), runs into the limits of a standard store's variant model quickly.

There, the answer is usually a store of your own with a product configurator and operations in the same database: what the customer configures reaches the order exactly as chosen, with no manual reinterpretation. We cover it in custom online store development, and exactly where the variant model breaks in WooCommerce and configurable products.

A custom CRM or one more app

The Shopify and WooCommerce app stores have CRMs, and they're a good way to start: you can install one in an afternoon. They stop being a good fit in three situations: when the fee grows with every customer or every user, when your data lives on a third party's servers you don't control, and when the CRM doesn't talk to the rest (purchasing, stock, customer service) and you're back to copying by hand.

If an app covers you, keep it: it's cheaper. If you already have three stepping on each other, a system of your own connected to your store usually pays off, and it's yours. We go deeper in custom vs off-the-shelf software.

Your customers, your data

A CRM holds your customers' personal data, so where it lives matters. It's hosted in your own Azure subscription, in the region you choose, encrypted, with daily backups and an activity log per user, and we sign a data processing agreement before starting.

The code, the repository and the infrastructure are in your name from day one: if tomorrow you want to continue with another team, you take it all with you, working. We explain why in who owns the code of your software.

How we work

We start by understanding how your store sells and what gets done by hand around it today. The first delivery arrives two weeks in: the architecture decided, the environments set up and a first screen working. From there, every two weeks you see a new part, connected to your store and with your data.

You can start with a single piece, usually the CRM or purchasing, and expand once it's paying off. A six-month warranty, no fees to us and a published rate.

Frequently asked questions