Stop renting your checkout
Cycliq sells camera bundles across three stores: Australia, the UK and the US. The bundle logic ran through a paid third-party app: a monthly fee, a vendor roadmap they didn’t control, and one more moving part between a customer and a completed order.
What we did
We rebuilt the bundle logic as a Shopify Function: code that runs inside Shopify’s own checkout infrastructure, written once, owned by Cycliq outright. No subscription, no third-party dependency on the critical path.
We rolled it out the way we roll out anything that touches money: the Australian store first, watched it, then the UK and US stores from a tested playbook. The whole thing was handed over documented, so it isn’t a black box that only we can touch.
The result
Bundles now work the same way on all three stores, the recurring cost is gone, and the logic can’t be broken by someone else’s product update. When Cycliq wants bundles to behave differently, that’s a change to their own code, not a feature request in someone else’s queue.
What to take from it
Apps are the right answer for most things, until one sits on your critical path. If a third-party subscription stands between your customer and checkout, it’s worth asking what it would take to own that capability instead. Often the answer is smaller than the fee suggests.
