Custom commerce on Vendure, when your checkout logic is a state machine.
Headless commerce backends for DTC and Rx brands that outgrew Shopify Plus.
State-by-state prescription rules, subscription routing, eligibility logic, transactional email infrastructure, with AI personalization on your own data. You own the stack.
Don't move off Shopify unless your business is fighting it.
Shopify Plus is genuinely great software. The fastest path from idea to first sale. The biggest app ecosystem in commerce. A non-technical team can run a $50M brand on it.
We'll be the first to say: don't move off Shopify unless your business is fighting it.
The signs you're past the Shopify ceiling:
- Your theme has 1,000+ lines of liquid templating for checkout edge cases.
- You're stacking 3+ paid apps to handle logic that should be one workflow.
- Your devs spend more time fighting the theme than building new things.
- You're at $10M+ revenue and Shopify's 2.9% transaction fees are taking real money ($290k/year on $10M).
- Your business logic is genuinely complex (prescription rules, multi-step eligibility, state-by-state regulations).
- You want AI personalization based on YOUR customer data, not what Shopify's algorithm sees.
The Dear Brightly migration: real numbers.
Dear Brightly is a US DTC Rx skincare brand that sells generic Retin-A via prescription. They were on Shopify Plus.
Their checkout had to branch on (state, prescription eligibility, formulation strength, subscription cadence). State-by-state rules meant California allows formulation X but not Y, Texas requires an extra disclaimer before checkout, some states block subscription auto-refills for controlled substances, eligibility checks have to happen before payment but after cart.
On Shopify Plus, this was:
- 2,400 lines of liquid templating: theme spaghetti, every conditional branch hardcoded
- 3 paid apps ($300/mo combined for subscription, eligibility, state rules)
- A Cloudflare Worker running the eligibility logic
- Two custom Shopify Functions to validate cart items per state
Their devs were losing whole sprints to compliance updates.
What we built
A single Vendure plugin. 180 lines of TypeScript.
The plugin defines state-by-state rules as data (a table their compliance team can update in a Notion-like admin without redeploying). Vendure's GraphQL API exposes everything to their existing React frontend, which didn't change at all. Frontend devs barely noticed the migration.
| Metric | Before (Shopify Plus) | After (Vendure) |
|---|---|---|
| Rebuild time | n/a | 11 days |
| Black Friday conversion | (projection) | +23% vs projection |
| Theme spaghetti | 2,400 lines | 180 lines |
| Compliance updates | 2 days each | 2 hours each |
| Monthly platform cost | ~$3,000 | ~$500 |
| App fees | $300/mo | $0 |
| Per-transaction fee | 2.9% | 0% |
| Annual savings (on $10M GMV) | n/a | ~$320k |
Architecture sprint: 1 week. Build: 11 days. Total: ~$120k. Payback period: 6 months.
Read the full case studyWhen each one wins.
Shopify Plus is the right call when
- Your products are a flat catalog (same items, same pricing rules, available the same way to everyone).
- You're under $5M revenue. Per-transaction fees aren't yet meaningful.
- Your team is non-technical. Theme editors, drag-and-drop, app marketplace. No engineering required.
- The Shopify app ecosystem is doing most of the work (Klaviyo, Gorgias, Recharge, Bold).
- You need Shopify-only features. Shop Pay, Shopify's discovery surface, certain payment integrations.
Vendure is the right call when
- Your commerce logic is a state machine. Checkout branches on eligibility, state, subscription cadence, formulation strength, regulatory rules.
- You're at $10M+ and transaction fees hurt. 2.9% on $10M = $290k/year. A Vendure migration usually pays back in 9–18 months.
- You have engineering capacity (in-house or partner). Vendure is great if you can own it. Painful if you can't.
- Custom fields and flows are core to your business, not edge cases. When your competitive advantage IS how you handle Rx eligibility or subscription routing.
- You want AI personalization on your data. Shopify's algorithm is good but it's working on Shopify's view of your customers.
- You're spending more time on theme spaghetti than on features. The theme file becomes the bottleneck.
The 60-second test
Stay on Shopify if: flat catalog, under $5M, non-technical team, ecosystem-dependent.
Move to Vendure if: complex checkout logic, $10M+, engineering capacity, custom flows are your moat.
Most brands fall clearly in one camp within 5 minutes of a conversation.
Three Vendure patterns.
Rx / regulated commerce
Prescription routing, state-by-state rules, eligibility verification, transactional email at scale. Dear Brightly is the proof story.
Subscription + DTC commerce
Custom subscription cadence, churn-recovery flows, AI personalization on customer history. Plays well when your subscription logic is more complex than Recharge handles cleanly.
Headless commerce migrations
Coming off Shopify Plus, Magento 2, BigCommerce, or custom legacy. Full migrations: data import + validation, custom plugin rebuild from app stacks, transactional email infrastructure, payment processor migration.
Not just product recommendations.
- Eligibility verification agents: read uploaded prescription docs, verify against state rules, surface decisions in real-time.
- Customer service triage: incoming support emails get auto-classified, ranked by urgency, routed to the right team with a draft response attached.
- Churn prediction with intervention: agents flag at-risk subscribers + draft a personalized retention email + queue it for human review.
- Personalization on owned data: recommendations and copy variations driven by your customer database, not Shopify's algorithm working in their cloud.
Same 4-step process.
Common questions.
Considering moving off Shopify?
Free 30-min call. Tell us your revenue, transaction volume, checkout pain points. We'll show you the year-by-year math and tell you honestly whether the migration is worth it.