● Agent-Native Headless Storefront
Built for shoppers. Legible to agents.
A Next.js storefront on Shopify's rebuilt Hydrogen SDK and Vercel Shop—serving fast visual pages to people and structured, purchasable data to AI agents from your own domain.
The problem
Custom headless builds often take months to stand up, while traditional storefronts force AI shopping agents to scrape HTML layouts just to read prices, stock or options. Bolting a third-party chat widget onto a theme does not make a store agent-ready or share state with the cart.
Technical approach
We deploy and customise Vercel Shop on Shopify's Hydrogen SDK and Next.js. Through built-in content negotiation, the same product URL serves a visual page to people and machine-readable product data (price, availability and options) to agents, backed by structured data in pages and sitemaps. Your domain exposes Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and MCP discovery so external agents can search the catalogue, check availability, build a cart and request a checkout link directly, while an optional in-store assistant powered by eve lives in the same codebase and shares the cart with the web storefront. Checkout stays on Shopify.
What we engineer
- Next.js storefront on Vercel Shop and Shopify's Hydrogen SDK, deployed to Vercel
- Shopify Headless channel, Storefront GraphQL API and webhook cache invalidation for products, collections and metaobjects
- AEO and GEO surfaces: product-URL content negotiation, embedded structured data, paged sitemaps and experimental WebMCP browser tools
- Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and MCP discovery on your domain for catalogue search, cart creation and checkout links
- Starter tier ($650 · 4 days): Launch storefront connected to Shopify, brand palette and typography, Shopify-powered nav/footer menus, webhook cache invalidation, and built-in UCP/AEO/GEO
- Standard tier ($1,450 · 8 days): Everything in Starter plus custom Home, PDP and PLP styling (variants, swatches, recommendations, bundles), Shopify-managed content pages and blogs, Customer Account sign-in, and Vercel Analytics, Speed Insights and GTM
- Advanced tier ($2,800 · 14 days): Everything in Standard plus the in-store eve AI shopping assistant with shared cart, Shopify Markets (multi-region/currency) or next-intl, custom Storefront GraphQL and metaobject queries, and an update-shop upgrade runbook
Typical scope
- Timeline
- 4 to 14 days
- Engagement
- Fixed-price package
- Price
- Fixed price · $650–$2,800
- Ideal fit
- Brands and agencies in the US, UK, AU and NZ who want a fast Next.js and Shopify storefront with native agent discovery and a shared cart, without a multi-month custom headless build.
Capabilities
- Vercel Shop
- Hydrogen SDK
- Next.js
- Storefront GraphQL API
- UCP & MCP
- AEO & GEO
- Shopify Markets
05 / Forge process
Raw problem. Shipped system.
Five stages. The line between them is the transformation.
01
Diagnose
The commercial problem before the backlog. Which constraint is costing money, and where it lives.
- Business problem
- Technical constraints
- Existing architecture
- Customer journey
- Operational requirements
02
Architect
Solution architecture written down with its trade-offs, before implementation starts.
- Solution architecture
- Shopify capabilities
- Integrations
- Technical constraints
- Implementation plan
03
Engineer
Iterative delivery on a staging store, every change behind a performance budget.
- Storefront
- Custom functionality
- Integrations
- APIs
- Automation
04
Test
Functionality, responsiveness, performance and edge cases verified before anything reaches production.
- Functionality
- Responsive behaviour
- Performance
- Edge cases
- Integrations
- Accessibility
05
Ship
Production deployment with monitoring, handoff and an optimisation roadmap for what comes next.
- Production deployment
- Monitoring
- QA
- Handoff
- Optimisation roadmap
06 / FAQ
Questions we get before the first call.
Often not. Native B2B company accounts are available on Basic, Grow and Advanced, not only Plus, including up to three active B2B catalogs assigned via a B2B market. Company account requests are collected with Shopify Forms and stay unapproved until you review them. Plus still earns its cost when you need multiple stores, checkout extensibility, higher API limits, unlimited catalogs for customer-specific pricing, or direct catalog assignment to companies and locations. If your constraint is theme architecture or app conflicts, Plus will not fix it. We will tell you which one you have before you commit to the plan.
Projects are fixed scope with a fixed price, quoted after a paid discovery when the problem is not yet well defined. Where the scope is already defined, we also publish fixed-price packages, such as Native B2B Gate Setup and Agent-Native Headless Storefront. Retainers are a monthly allocation with a three-month minimum. We publish ranges during the first call rather than after a proposal cycle.
A custom storefront runs six to twelve weeks. A migration runs eight to sixteen weeks depending on catalogue complexity. A B2B implementation runs eight to sixteen. Headless is twelve to twenty-four. Discovery sharpens these before anything is committed.
Yes, and most of our work is exactly that. We start with an audit of the theme, app stack and data model, and we give you the findings whether or not you engage us for the remediation.
Modelling your real account structure as companies and locations, building catalogues and price lists per buyer, implementing contract and volume pricing, configuring payment terms, and migrating the wholesale process people currently run by email.
Not if redirects are planned rather than retrofitted. We crawl the live site to generate a complete URL inventory, produce the redirect map from it, and rehearse the cutover on a staging store before touching production. We monitor rankings daily for two weeks after launch.
Yes, when the logic belongs in an app. Frequently it belongs in a Shopify Function or a checkout extension instead, which is cheaper to run and closer to where Shopify evaluates the rule. We choose based on where the logic has to execute.
Usually not for a ground-up build—custom headless doubles the maintenance surface and checkout stays on Shopify regardless. Where a full custom build earns its cost is content-heavy storefronts with the engineering capacity to own a decoupled front end. For teams that want Next.js speed and native AI agent discovery (UCP, MCP and product-URL content negotiation) without a multi-month build, we also offer a fixed-price Vercel Shop + Hydrogen SDK package that ships in four to fourteen days.
An agreed monthly capacity with named engineers, a prioritised backlog you control, feature development and bug fixing, performance monitoring, a defined emergency response path, and a quarterly architecture review.
Yes. White-label Shopify engineering behind your brand, working in your tools and to your process. We do not appear in front of your client and we do not approach them directly. Several of our engagements are agency partnerships.
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Need agent-native headless storefront?
Tell us the constraint you are hitting. We will tell you what it will take.