Shopify Agency in Chicago, IL

Yes — Solo Media Group serves Chicago, IL. We're a Shopify Plus & Platinum Partner agency that has designed, built, and scaled 500+ Shopify stores over 8 years, generating $500M+ in annual revenue for our clients. We work with Chicago brands remotely with full working-hour overlap and weekly reporting — handling everything from brand-led design and custom development to migrations and email/SMS retention.

Solo Media Group is a senior design and development studio for commerce brands. We design, build, and grow Shopify stores end to end — brand-led design, custom development and integrations, email and retention marketing, and ongoing support. One team handles strategy, design, engineering, and QA, so you're not stitching together multiple vendors.

We work with direct-to-consumer and retail-first brands across beauty, wellness, food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, and specialty retail — from new-brand launches to established businesses replatforming or scaling. We're especially strong with brands that sell across multiple channels (direct-to-consumer, retail, wholesale, and POS).

A dedicated senior team: a Shopify solution engineer for architecture, engineers for development and custom apps, e-commerce-focused designers, a Klaviyo/email specialist for retention, and a project lead who runs communication and keeps the work on schedule. You work with the same team throughout — no hand-offs to junior staff.

We run a proven four-phase design process in Figma: (1) Brand discovery — a brand exercise, asset collection, competitive landscape, and a mood board; (2) Concepts and mood boarding — early creative directions that establish the visual language, tone, and feel before full design; (3) Full site design — iterative design of every key page; (4) Handoff — final designs with engineering notes, then development.

Yes — Shopify and Shopify Plus are our core platform. We build custom themes, apps, and integrations, and we architect stores for performance, maintainability, and growth.

Standard Shopify fits most single-brand stores. Shopify Plus adds enterprise features and lets you run up to 10 storefronts ("expansion stores") under one organization — useful if you operate multiple brands, currencies, or regions. We'll recommend the right plan based on your structure; you purchase the Shopify license directly.

Yes. We build on editable, well-structured themes so your team can update content and pages without opening a development ticket for every change. We also provide documentation and a walkthrough at handoff.

Yes. We build custom middleware and apps to connect Shopify with the systems your business runs on — ERPs and POS systems, Salesforce and other CRMs, subscription platforms, and custom logic unique to your business. Integrations are scoped up front so they're reliable and maintainable.

Yes. For brands with physical retail, we set up Shopify POS and keep inventory in sync between online and in-store, so both channels run off one source of truth.

Yes. We build B2B and wholesale experiences using Shopify Plus's native B2B features — gated portals, tax-exempt handling, customer-specific pricing, and automated renewals — often connected to your CRM.

Yes. We regularly migrate stores to Shopify from Magento / Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, OpenCart, and other platforms — including the design, data, and integration work required to run the new store.

Protecting search rankings is a core part of how we plan a migration. We map redirects and preserve technical SEO so you don't see a post-launch traffic drop — in past migrations we've replatformed stores with no SEO dip after launch.

Yes. We migrate products, variants/SKUs, customers, and order history, along with catalog structure, collections, and metafields. For large catalogs we confirm the exact data scope (for example, how much order history to bring over) during discovery.

A typical new build runs about 8–12 weeks from design kickoff to launch. Smaller, more focused builds can be 4–6 weeks. Migrations depend on data and integration complexity.

The biggest factor is how quickly feedback comes back from your side. With a single decision-maker and prompt, consolidated feedback each round, we move fast; with multiple stakeholders and longer review cycles, timelines extend. Custom integrations and data migration also affect scope.

When speed matters — for a retail debut or seasonal launch — we can compress the design phase and run multiple design teams in parallel across projects. Focused builds can launch in as little as 8 weeks with quick turnarounds on approvals.

Most full design-and-build projects start at around $20,000, depending on scope, integrations, and whether it's a net-new build or a migration. We provide a detailed, line-item estimate so you can see exactly what's included and add or remove pieces.

Projects are billed against milestones — for example, a percentage on signing to begin design, at design approval, at development start, and at launch. Invoices are typically net 15. We agree on the schedule up front in the statement of work.

Both. Many engagements are fixed-scope projects; others are ongoing retainers for continuous design and development. Retainers start at 20-hour engagements or $3,000/month, and for brands with variable workloads we can combine project (tranche) billing with a small retainer to keep us on call.

Yes. If you have your own development team, we can provide design-only services and deliver production-ready Figma files for your engineers to build.

Yes. We integrate Klaviyo with your store and build core lifecycle flows — welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and post-purchase — plus campaigns and segmentation strategy.

Yes. If your sender reputation has suffered, we rebuild it methodically — for example, using high-engagement, protected sending to restore reputation before scaling campaigns again — and set up segmentation and win-back flows to improve retention.

Yes. We set up subscription programs on platforms like Stay.ai and ReCharge, and we can migrate subscription communications into Klaviyo for better segmentation. Subscriptions work well for routine- and regimen-based products to lock in recurring revenue.

Yes. We set up GA4, marketing pixels (Google, Meta, TikTok), product feeds for Google and Meta, and reviews that syndicate to Google Shopping and Facebook — so your tracking and ad infrastructure are ready at launch.

Every build goes through dedicated QA — cross-device and cross-browser testing, checkout and integration testing, and pre-launch bug fixing — before it ships. All work lives in version control, so changes are reviewed and reversible.

Yes. Builds include a 30-day post-launch support window for fixes on the original scope, and ongoing support is available through flexible retainers for continued design, development, and optimization.

We adapt to your process. We work in your project management tool (such as Asana), share a Slack channel for real-time questions, hold weekly syncs, and provide transparent time and progress reporting so you always know where things stand.