Shopify is responsible for infrastructure, not for your store. Outages on Shopify differ from outages on WooCommerce, because they almost never start with the site failing to load. They start with the site loading, looking normal, and still not selling, or selling stock you do not have. They cost as much as a classic outage, only nobody notices for far longer.
Where the line runs, stated plainly
Shopify owns: platform availability, servers and their scaling at peak, payments at platform level, PCI DSS compliance for the layer it controls, platform updates and the certificate for a domain connected per their instructions. Real value, and the reason your store needs no server administrator.
Everything that makes this store yours stays on your side: the theme and its code (including sections built by a previous agency), apps and conflicts between them, integrations with ERP, WMS and wholesalers, product data quality, theme performance after each added script, shipping, delivery zones and taxes. Shopify will not call you when an app stops syncing inventory, because from the platform's point of view nothing happened. The store is up.
The same boundary we describe in what an SLA does not cover. A vendor answers for its own layer. The layer above it needs an owner you actually have.
What really breaks on Shopify
A list from practice, with symptom, cause and a rough amount of work. Orders of magnitude from our tickets, not a time commitment: how long a fix takes depends on access, on the app vendor and on whether anyone kept a copy of the theme.
An app update breaks the theme. Symptom: the product page suddenly has two add to cart buttons, or the collection grid falls apart. Cause: the app injects its own block and the new version changes the selectors. Usually from one to three hours, if a copy of the theme from before the change exists.
A conflict between apps loading scripts. Symptom: the cart stops responding to clicks, the browser console is full of errors. Cause: two apps modify the same element and whichever loads last wins. Diagnosis often takes longer than the repair, because apps have to be switched off one at a time. Usually from two to five hours.
The ERP integration stops syncing stock. The worst symptom of all: you sell something you do not have and hear it from the customer. Cause: an expired token, a changed file structure on the ERP side, or requests rejected silently. Repairing the connection is often an hour, cleaning up stock and orders from the last few days can take a working day.
Moving the domain and the certificate. Symptom: the browser warns about an unsafe site, or part of the traffic still lands on the old address. Cause: DNS records pointing at the previous hosting, missing redirects. From one hour to several, plus propagation time, which nobody controls.
API limits during a large import. Symptom: the price list import stops halfway, some products keep old prices. Cause: the request limit is exceeded and the script has no retry handling. Fixing the importer is usually from three to six hours.
A slow theme after apps pile up. Symptom: the product page loads noticeably slower than six months ago and cart abandonment climbs. Cause: every app adds scripts and none clean up after being uninstalled. An audit and cleanup is usually from five to ten hours.
Checkout extensibility, the change nobody told you about
The best example of a platform not replacing care. Shopify retired the old way of customising the checkout and the thank you page. Shopify Plus stores had a deadline of 28.08.2025, stores without Plus (Basic, Shopify, Advanced) 26.08.2026. Shopify Scripts, meaning custom discount and shipping logic, stopped working on 30.06.2026. After the deadline, scripts in the Additional Scripts field, checkout.liquid modifications and script tags on the Thank You page and Order Status page stop running. Shopify runs an automatic upgrade on the deadline date, with no transition period.
It is now September 2026, so for stores without Plus that deadline has passed. How to tell something stopped working after August: conversion data is missing in Google Ads and Meta, or sits clearly below the order count in your admin; discount codes or shipping rules written in Scripts no longer apply; elements have vanished from the thank you page (return instructions, a survey, a parcel tracking widget, a referral code). The first symptom is the dangerous one, because the store keeps selling while you optimise campaigns on incomplete data.
Shopify has set the migration path: the checkout editor and UI extensions instead of checkout.liquid, Web Pixels through Customer Events for Google, Meta, TikTok and Klaviyo, Shopify Functions for custom discount and shipping logic (Plus only), Thank You page and Order Status page extensions instead of script tags. Checking what dropped out is doable within one working day and needs no technical knowledge beyond admin access.
The real cost of a Shopify store
The cost has five lines: platform subscription, apps, transaction fees, theme and technical work. The first and third sit on an invoice and nobody forgets them. The second is the most expensive and least supervised, because every app looks cheap alone and every one was needed at some point.
An exercise you can run without us, today. List every installed app with its monthly fee and add it up. For each, answer three questions: who used it last month, what breaks if it is switched off, and whether another app or the theme already does the same job. In stores we take over, that total most often lands from 80 to 350 USD per month, and a third to a half of it goes to apps nobody knowingly uses. That is a budget you can move to technical work without raising total spend. We do the fuller maths in what it costs to maintain an online store.
How many hours a month does a Shopify store need
Our support packages are a pool of hours for changes you commission: Basic 250 USD for 10 h, Advanced 500 USD for 20 h, Premium 1,000 USD for 40 h. An hour inside the package costs 25 USD, an hour above the pool 40 USD, and the service window is business days from 8 to 18.
Honestly: most Shopify stores fit inside Basic, a genuine advantage of this platform on running costs. No core updates, no server patching, no PHP migrations. What is left is the theme, apps, integrations and data. Advanced makes sense with a permanent ERP or wholesaler integration, several markets or languages, or regular sales changes. Premium fits a Shopify Plus store with custom logic in Functions and several parallel projects. If somebody tries to sell you forty hours a month for a simple store, ask them to break those hours into tasks.
Does a Shopify store need availability monitoring
We answer honestly here too, even though it reduces our own invoice. Server availability monitoring makes less sense on Shopify than on your own hosting, because that is what the platform is for and answers for. In the classic sense it is a weaker argument here.
Three things, though, make as much sense as on any other platform. First: monitoring the purchase path, a recurring check that a product can be added to the cart and the flow reaches payment. Second: watching inventory sync, because drift between the ERP and the store raises no alert on its own. Third: watching expiring integrations, tokens and external certificates. Our Standard SLA starts at 240 USD per month and includes a store check every 60 seconds, human verification of an alert within 15 minutes and a post incident note. We set out the difference between that and a pool of hours in technical support or SLA. We guarantee response time, not resolution time, because the second number depends on vendors we do not control.
A checklist you can tick off today
Four questions. Each takes a quarter of an hour to verify and each protects you from the situation where the store runs but you can do nothing with it.
Who owns the Shopify account and the domain. The account should be in your company name and on your email address, not an agency address or a former employee's. The domain should be registered to your company, with registrar panel access.
Who has access to the apps and which payment card is attached. Anyone's personal card is a risk: once it expires, the app handling shipping or the product feed switches off.
Whether the theme lives in a repository. If the only copy sits in the Shopify admin, you have no change history and no way of knowing who changed what last month.
Whether a theme copy is made before changes. One minute of work that turns a multi hour investigation into a rollback.
Review your Shopify store after the August checkout change: we will check which scripts stopped working, whether conversion data still reaches Google and Meta, and what needs moving to Web Pixels and extensions. Start with Tester eCommerce, which diagnoses a store from its address, or write to us via the support and SLA page. We will send back what we found with an estimate in hours, no commitment.