Field Queens: a Shopify store redesigned to sell
Field Queens makes GAA gloves and sportswear designed by women players for women players, and sells them online to Ireland and the UK. Its store ran on Shopify’s free Brooklyn theme, with the brand’s early photographs still on the product pages.
Loco Digital redesigned the store on Shopify’s Mode theme in 2024. The home page now opens on footage from the brand film, and ten products were photographed again: gloves front and back on white, hats and snoods worn by players against a concrete wall. The film and the photographs were produced with our partners and managed by us, as part of our marketing and video work.
The redesign went live in spring 2024 and is still the store at fieldqueens.ie. Read the Field Queens case study.
When Shopify is the right platform for an Irish store
Shopify suits a business selling physical products to consumers. Hosting, security updates and the checkout come with the monthly plan, so there is less to maintain than on a self-hosted store, and your team can run products, discounts and orders without a developer.
It is not always the answer. A store that sits inside a busy content site, or sells bookings and memberships alongside products, is often better on WooCommerce, and a custom build earns its cost when the workflow is the product. Our guide to Shopify, WooCommerce or a custom build weighs the three, and our page on ecommerce development in Dublin covers stores on other platforms.
Shopify store design in Ireland, built on an established theme
We start from a theme on the Shopify Theme Store that already suits your catalogue, then design the pages around your products and brand. Updates to a Theme Store theme are free to stores that bought it, and settings made in the theme editor carry across to the new version (Shopify Help Center).
Where the theme lacks something, such as a size chart, a trade enquiry form or a comparison table, we write a custom section. Sections are Liquid modules that your team can add, remove and reorder in the theme editor (Shopify developer docs). Keeping our code in its own sections leaves fewer edits to reapply when the theme updates.
Product set-up and product photography
We plan collections, filters and variants with you before any product is entered. Shopify allows three options per product, such as size, colour and material, so a catalogue built around more has to be restructured first.
Photography and film are produced with our partners, and we manage the shoot from the brief to the final files. Each image is delivered at the same size and crop, then uploaded and named against its product before launch. Short product videos and social cut-downs can come from the same shoot, made with our motion graphics and video partners.
Shopify Payments and other payment options in Ireland
Shopify Payments is available to businesses in Ireland (Shopify Help Center). Stripe is its banking partner, so where Shopify Payments is supported, standalone Stripe cannot be added as a separate gateway (Shopify Help Center).
You can still use another provider. Shopify then adds a transaction fee on those orders, 2% on the Basic plan, and PayPal and manual payments are exempt while Shopify Payments is active (Shopify pricing for Ireland and third-party providers, both checked 30 Sep 2026). Our guide to payment gateways in Ireland compares the options and fees.
VAT and One Stop Shop settings on a Shopify store
An Irish business selling to consumers in other EU countries charges VAT at each customer’s national rate once those sales pass €10,000 in a calendar year, and registers in each country or for the Union One Stop Shop (Revenue on distance sales). The One Stop Shop covers them all in a single electronic quarterly return (Revenue on the Union scheme).
Shopify has a setting to collect VAT under an OSS registration, which needs Shopify Tax or Basic Tax as the store’s tax service (Shopify Help Center). We configure rates, prices and invoices to the position your accountant sets. Confirm with your accountant which registrations apply to your business.
Connecting Shopify to Xero, Sage and your other systems
Shopify’s app store has connectors for Xero, Sage and most CRMs and couriers, and for many stores one of them is enough. Where it is not, for example when refunds, payouts and fees have to post to your books in a particular way, a small custom integration through Shopify’s API does the job. How orders and payouts reach Xero or Sage is explained in accounting automation in Ireland, and we check any connector against your accountant’s needs before launch.
WooCommerce to Shopify migration
Search traffic is the part of a migration most at risk. Shopify fixes product and collection addresses under /products and /collections, so most old WooCommerce URLs change. On a migration we map every old address to its new one as a 301 redirect, imported in bulk before launch (Shopify Help Center), then resubmit the sitemap and watch Search Console in the weeks after.
The same checks apply to any replatform, and our page on website redesign in Dublin sets out the full process.
How we build a Shopify store
- Your store, your data. The store, its customers and its orders are yours, and any Shopify, domain or payment account we open on your behalf moves to you whenever you ask.
- Apps with a reason. We add an app only when it earns its monthly fee, and hand over a list of every app and what it costs.
- Accessible and fast. We check the theme and our sections against WCAG 2.1 AA and test the product pages on phones before launch.
- Led by our senior team. They plan the store with you and stay with it from the first call to launch day.
