Shopify Headless vs Shopify Plus: Why Headless Cost Us $300K a Year

We moved a nine-figure e-commerce brand to Shopify headless. It cost us more than $300,000 a year, and it was the stupidest decision we ever made. Today that brand is back on Shopify Plus.

I was head of growth at that brand, so I lived through every part of it. In this article: what headless actually means, exactly what broke, what it really cost, and the one question to ask before anyone sells you headless.

What “headless” means

On normal Shopify or Shopify Plus, everything your customers see runs on a Shopify theme. Apps plug straight into it. Tracking plugs straight into it. Analytics just work.

Headless means you cut that front end off. Your developers build the entire storefront themselves as a separate website (for example with Shopify Hydrogen or another framework, on top of Shopify’s Storefront API), and Shopify only runs the back end: your products, your orders and your checkout.

On paper it sounds great: total design freedom and a faster site. That’s what we were promised.

Let me say this right away: the faster site is a myth. We didn’t get better speed. Once you add back your tracking, your reviews, your apps and your scripts, a headless store is no faster than a well-built Shopify Plus theme.

Problem 1: everything has to be hardcoded

Here’s the first thing nobody tells you. On headless, everything you want to integrate has to be built by hand.

On a normal Shopify store: want reviews? Install an app, five minutes. Upsells in the cart? Install an app. A pop-up to collect emails? Install an app.

On headless, most of those apps simply don’t work, because they’re built to plug into a Shopify theme and you don’t have one anymore. So every app becomes a developer project. Every small change becomes a ticket. And every ticket waits in a queue.

Problem 2: tracking took four weeks

We use Elevar for tracking. It makes sure every add-to-cart and every purchase is sent correctly to Google Analytics, Meta, Google Ads and your email platform, server-side, so ad blockers and iPhone privacy settings don’t eat your data. Your ads optimise on that data.

On a normal Shopify store you set it up in a few days. On headless it took us four weeks to make it work: four weeks of developers working on nothing but tracking, and four weeks of our ad platforms learning from incomplete data. When you spend serious money on ads, that alone costs you.

Problem 3: analytics you can’t trust

Next, your Shopify analytics break. Sessions, conversion rate, the funnel from product page to add-to-cart to checkout: on a normal store or on Plus, Shopify shows all of it out of the box.

On headless it just doesn’t work the same way. Numbers go missing or stop matching. And when you can’t trust your numbers, you can’t make good decisions; you’re guessing. (This is what reading your funnel should look like: the 7 funnel metrics.)

Problem 4: months before we could A/B test

For me this was the most painful one. We needed to integrate our A/B testing software. On a normal Shopify store, that takes a day or two. On headless it took us a few months.

Think about what that means: months without a single test. On a store that size, one winning test can be worth tens of thousands of dollars, and we couldn’t run any.

And it wasn’t just Elevar and the testing tool. Every other piece of software we wanted to add took a long time to integrate, weeks or more, for things that take an afternoon on Shopify Plus.

Problem 5: the site broke on our biggest sale day

This was the scariest. During the biggest sales event of the year, the day with the most traffic and the most money on the table, our website wasn’t working properly.

That’s the hidden risk of headless. Your storefront is custom code, so when something breaks, it’s your problem. Shopify Plus is built and tested by Shopify for exactly those days. Headless simply isn’t as stable.

What headless really costs, and who benefits

Shopify doesn’t charge extra for going headless. The real bill is developers: first to build the store, then every single month after that for maintenance, fixes and every new integration.

And it isn’t only their salaries:

• Hiring and replacing developers costs time and money. Finding a good one takes weeks. When one leaves, the next needs weeks just to understand a custom codebase that only the last person really knew. You pay twice: in money and in time.
• Managing them: briefs, sprints, bugs, deadlines that slip. Someone on your team ends up managing developers instead of growing the business. Honestly, it’s a headache I don’t recommend to anyone.

The honest truth is that the people who benefit most from Shopify headless are the developers. They make a lot of money from it.

The math

Developers, agency hours and maintenance cost us more than $300,000 a year, just to keep the store running and to rebuild things that work out of the box on Shopify Plus.

Now imagine putting that $300,000 into paid ads instead. At a standard 3x return on ad spend, that’s about $900,000 in revenue, instead of losing time, money and nerves on developers.

Shopify headless vs Shopify Plus

	Headless (our experience)	Shopify Plus
Apps	Each one rebuilt by developers	Install in minutes
Server-side tracking	4 weeks to work	A few days
Shopify analytics	Unreliable	Works out of the box
A/B testing	Months to integrate	A day or two
Speed	No faster in practice	As fast with a well-built theme
Peak-day stability	Your problem	Built and tested by Shopify
Real cost	$300K+/year in developers	From about $2,300/month

Why we went back to Shopify Plus

So we went back, and the difference was immediate. Apps install again in minutes. Tracking works. Shopify analytics work. We can run A/B tests again. And the developers work on things that actually grow revenue, not on fixing integrations.

Plus still gives you most of what people want from headless: a fully custom design if your theme is built well, a checkout you can customise, and room to scale. (Not sure Plus is worth it for you? Here’s the math.)

When headless can make sense

To be fair, headless isn’t always wrong. It can make sense if:

• you have a big in-house development team, not an agency billing by the hour;
• you need something a theme truly can’t do, like one storefront serving your website, a mobile app and screens in your shops;
• you can afford to rebuild every integration yourself.

For most brands, even nine-figure brands, it’s the wrong move.

The one question to ask before going headless

Before anyone sells you headless, ask: “What exactly can’t we do on Shopify Plus today?”

If nobody can give you a clear, specific answer, you don’t need headless. You need better tests on the store you already have.