I’ve been spending some time back in Shopify lately. Being on the job hunt I’ve been seeing Shopify in job descriptions and wanted to revisit the system. It’s wild how much has changed and how much still feels familiar.
Back around 2018, I built a proof of concept for Arbonne to see if we could use Shopify as our primary sales system. The goal was to test whether Shopify could handle a key part of the business model: tracking consultant sales attribution. We needed a way for each purchase to tie back to the consultant who referred the customer. In the MLM space if you can’t do that the system, no matter how shiny, will never work.
At the time, Shopify didn’t have built-in multi-tier referral tracking or complex custom logic for that kind of networked sales structure. But what we could do was attach a custom value to the cart. I built a setup where the consultant’s business name was passed into the checkout as a custom cart attribute, effectively “tagging” each order. It worked—at least well enough to show it was technically possible and the CIO had another option for the board.
That proof of concept never went live at scale, but it taught me a lot about Shopify’s flexibility and where its boundaries were. Coming back to the platform now, I’m impressed with how many of those limitations have been addressed. The app ecosystem is deeper, checkout extensibility has matured, APIs are far more capable, and documentation much easier to read.
It’s been fun to rediscover Shopify through a modern lens—seeing what’s new, what’s improved, and what old tricks still hold up. Sometimes revisiting an old system is like catching up with an old friend: you recognize the foundation, but you’re surprised by how much they’ve grown.