I am a Shopify expert developer with 6+ years of hands-on store building — a senior engineer who has also run his own Shopify business end to end. If you need a Shopify developer for hire who understands both the code and the P&L, you are in the right place.
Working with US and Canadian brands · UTC-3, overlapping almost the entire North American business day · fluent English · invoiced in USD
Currently on my desk
US building-products manufacturer
Day-to-day operator, B2C + B2B storefronts
International luxury fashion brand
Sole engineer
US-based beauty & lifestyle brand
Took over the operation
Martin — my own brand
Founder and operator
Four stores, four verticals, one playbook: fix the data, fix the speed, fix the funnel — at enterprise scale and at startup scale.
Most people who call themselves a Shopify expert have only ever worked from a ticket queue. I started differently: my first Shopify store was my own. I built the theme, wrote the Liquid, set up the payment and shipping stack, ran the ads, packed the boxes and answered the support emails. That store, Martin (martin4shop.com.br), went on to process 1,959 orders and roughly R$552,000 in revenue. Every technical decision I make for a client is shaped by having personally paid the price of a bad one.
Since then I have worked as the sole engineer for an international luxury fashion brand, where I rebuilt the storefront around Core Web Vitals, corrected the technical SEO foundation, cleaned up a sprawling catalog and wired the marketing stack together properly. Over that engagement the store grew +455% in sessions, +114% in orders and +74% in revenue. I have also run a two-storefront setup (B2C and B2B) with 7+ sales channels kept in sync for a US manufacturer with a difficult multi-variant catalog — the kind of project where a single bad CSV import can take a catalog offline for a day.
I work as an individual contractor, not an agency. You talk to the person writing the code. No account manager, no junior developer quietly assigned to your store, no ticket that sits for a week. That is usually the difference between a Shopify expert developer who ships and a vendor who bills.
Liquid, Online Store 2.0 sections, metaobjects and JSON templates. I build new themes from a design file or extend the one you already run, keeping the code readable so the next developer does not have to start over. No page builder bloat.
Reactive variant selectors, tiered pricing, AJAX add-to-cart, cart drawers, free-shipping progress bars, bundles and upsell modules — the pieces that move average order value on stores that already have traffic.
Crawl and index audits, collection and facet architecture, canonical rules, product and FAQ schema, internal linking and content structure. This is what drove the +455% sessions result, and it compounds long after the invoice is paid.
Klaviyo, Meta CAPI, Google Merchant Center, Amazon Seller Central, review and subscription apps, ERP and 3PL syncs. When no app fits, I build a private Shopify app with the Admin API instead of duct-taping three subscriptions together.
Matrixify and CSV workflows, bulk edits across thousands of SKUs, multi-level variant configuration, metafield migrations and inventory synchronisation across channels — done on a staging copy first, with a rollback file kept ready.
Core Web Vitals work on real Shopify constraints, third-party script auditing, GA4 and server-side tracking that reports numbers you can trust, and conversion experiments prioritised by revenue impact rather than by opinion.
Most Shopify developers have only ever built direct-to-consumer stores. I run both sides daily for a US building-products manufacturer — a B2C storefront and a B2B storefront sharing one enterprise-scale catalog with multi-level variants.
Search is the cheapest traffic a Shopify store will ever buy, and on most stores it is broken in ways an SEO agency cannot fix because the fix lives in Liquid. I work as a Shopify SEO expert and a developer at the same time, which removes the usual handoff where a consultant writes a recommendation nobody can implement.
Shopify is one platform with a dozen very different jobs inside it. These are the ones I am hired for most often, and the ones where a generalist agency usually stalls.
You tell me what is broken or what you want to build. I ask about traffic, order volume, current theme and apps, and where the money is actually leaking. If I am not the right person for the job, I tell you on that call and point you elsewhere.
Within two business days you get a short document: what I will do, what I will not do, the deliverables, the timeline and the price. Small jobs are fixed-price. Ongoing work is a monthly retainer with a defined number of hours.
Nothing touches your live store until you have seen it. I work on a duplicated theme or a development store, share a preview link at each milestone, and keep a written change log so you always know what moved.
We publish during your lowest-traffic window, watch analytics and error logs for the first days, then I hand over documentation and the repository. You own everything, and you are free to take it to any other developer.
Small scoped jobs — a section, a bug, a speed pass — are usually fixed-price and start around US$500. Larger builds are quoted from the written scope. Ongoing work runs as a monthly retainer with an agreed number of hours per week, which is the cheapest way to buy senior Shopify time. My hourly rate for ad-hoc work is US$60 to US$90 depending on the type of work and urgency, and I always tell you the number before anything starts.
I am in São Paulo, UTC-3, one to two hours ahead of US Eastern depending on the season. That means I overlap with essentially your entire business day, whether your team is in New York, Toronto, Chicago, Vancouver or Los Angeles. I attend calls in fluent English, respond on Slack or WhatsApp during your working hours, and no work gets pushed to a night shift you cannot reach.
Yes, on every engagement. I work under a written contract covering scope, payment schedule, confidentiality and IP assignment, and I am happy to sign your NDA or MSA instead of mine. I have worked under client paperwork for US and Canadian companies, and I handle store credentials through your own staff-account permissions with the minimum access needed.
You do, completely, from the moment it is delivered and paid. Themes, custom apps, scripts and documentation are assigned to you in the contract. I do not keep licensing fees, I do not lock work behind a proprietary framework, and I do not hold your store hostage. If you hire another developer next year, everything I wrote is readable, commented and portable.
Yes. Plus work includes Shopify Functions, checkout extensibility, B2B catalogs and company accounts, Shopify Flow automations, and multi-store or multi-market setups. I also work on standard Shopify plans, and I will tell you honestly when a problem you have does not actually require upgrading to Plus.
Yes, that is the monthly retainer. It covers the ongoing work a store generates whether or not anyone plans for it: theme and app updates, new sections and landing pages, catalog and pricing changes, broken tracking, performance regressions, and the occasional emergency. You get a reserved block of senior hours, a shared backlog we reprioritise on a weekly call, and the same person every month rather than whoever is free. It is not a managed-services contract you cannot leave — 30 days' notice, and you keep the code, the documentation and every account.
It depends entirely on what your traffic is already worth. If a store does US$20,000 a month and converts at 1.2%, a two-point improvement in checkout completion pays for a month of senior work several times over, and speed, catalog and SEO fixes compound for years after. If the store has almost no traffic yet, engineering is the wrong spend — you need demand first, and I will say so rather than sell you a theme rebuild. The honest test is whether you can name the number you expect to move. If you cannot, start with a paid audit instead of a build.
An individual, deliberately. A Shopify expert agency sells you a senior name in the pitch and staffs the work with whoever is free that sprint, and you pay for the account manager, the project manager and the sales commission on top of the code. You get me directly, at one rate, with no layer in between. Where a project genuinely needs more hands — design, copy, paid media — I bring in people I have worked with and you contract them yourself, so nothing is marked up.
Ask for a store they operated, not just built, and ask what the numbers did afterwards. Ask them to explain a decision they got wrong and what it cost. Ask what happens to your store the day they stop working on it — a good answer involves documentation and a repository you own, a bad answer involves a retainer you cannot leave. Rates on Shopify work range from roughly US$25 to over US$200 an hour, and the cheap end almost always gets re-done within a year.
Both, and on Shopify they are the same job. Most Shopify SEO problems — duplicate collection URLs, index bloat from tag pages, missing or invalid structured data, a redirect map that was never built after a replatform — are fixed in Liquid and in the store settings, not in a content calendar. I audit, prioritise and then implement, which is the part a standalone Shopify SEO consultant usually cannot do.
That is a large part of what I do. I start with a read-only audit: theme code quality, app conflicts, broken tracking, SEO regressions and anything that will bite during the next update. You get the findings as a prioritised list with effort and impact estimates, and you decide what to fix. There is no obligation to continue with me after the audit.
Send me the store URL and what is going wrong. You get an honest opinion within one business day — free, no sales call required.