Stop renting your checkout
Cycliq sell camera bundles across three stores, Australia, the UK and the US. The bundle logic ran through a paid third-party app, which meant 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, written once and owned by Cycliq outright. No subscription, and no third-party dependency sitting on the critical path.
We rolled it out the way we roll out anything that touches money. Australia went first so we could watch it on a real store, then the UK and US followed from a tested playbook. The whole thing was handed over documented, so it isn’t a black box 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 want bundles to behave differently, that is a change to their own code rather than a feature request in someone else’s queue.
What to take from it
Apps are the right answer for most things, right up until one sits on your critical path. If a third-party subscription stands between your customer and checkout, it is worth asking what it would take to own that capability instead. The build is often smaller than the monthly fee makes you assume.
