Case study: TRINTA, the tender-intelligence platform we built and run. Read the case
Shopify agency · Lisbon, Portugal · Shopify Partners since 2020
We are a Shopify agency in Lisbon, Portugal: we design, build, migrate, and operate Shopify and Shopify Plus stores. The stores we run together with our clients generate more than 2 million euros a year in sales, so for us every design decision is a business decision.
€2M+/yr across stores we co-operate · Lisbon and Paris · official Shopify Partners
the shift
For a decade, selling online meant buying cheap traffic and converting just enough. That game is over. Four forces are separating the stores that grow from the ones that fade.
AI assistants and shopping agents now research, compare, and recommend products before a customer ever opens a browser. Only fast stores with structured product data and machine-readable content make it into that conversation.
Acquisition costs climb year after year on Meta and Google. Brands that rely on campaigns alone pay for every sale twice: once to the platform, once out of the margin.
The first sale pays for the traffic; the profit lives in the second and the third. Email, SMS, and subscriptions stopped being a nice-to-have and became the engine of the business.
Shopify matured, checkout became extensible, and social commerce shortened the path to purchase. Your customer compares your store with the best store they have ever bought from, not with the shop next door.
Who is winning
Who is losing
the pattern
We have audited stores for years and the brakes repeat themselves. It is almost never the product. It is one of these four.
Every extra second of load time costs conversion, especially on mobile, where most of your visits are. Heavy themes and piled-up apps turn a good brand into a store nobody waits for.
Visits go up, sales do not. The product is right, the journey is wrong: product pages that leave questions unanswered, carts that hide costs, a checkout full of friction.
When the campaigns stop, the store stops. Without email, retention, and repeat purchase, the whole business lives on rented land, and the rent goes up every quarter.
Orders, stock, content, and customer support eat the hours that should go into growth. The team works hard, the store barely grows.
None of these brakes is released with more traffic. They are released with a system: speed, conversion, retention, and measurement. That is the system we build, and the one we run every day in our own stores.
the method
The same method we use in the stores we operate. Data first, design second, measurement always.
Before designing anything, we read the data: analytics, session recordings, speed, margin per channel. We leave with a map of where the store loses money, prioritised by impact and effort.
Hypotheses first, screens second. We design product pages, collections, cart, and checkout to help the customer decide, with the brand identity intact. Every visual choice has a conversion reason behind it.
A custom theme, fast by construction rather than by miracle. Apps only when they earn their place. Integrations with payments, shipping, invoicing, and ERP so the operation runs itself.
Klaviyo built properly: welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, and win-back flows, plus campaigns with a calendar and real segmentation. This is where the second sale happens.
A dashboard with conversion rate, average order value, retention, and margin. Every week, the numbers pick the next week’s priorities. No guesswork.
what we deliver
From launch to repeat purchase. Every front comes with concrete deliverables, not vague promises.
New stores built from scratch, from catalogue to checkout, ready to scale without a full rebuild a year from now.
From WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento, or a custom platform to Shopify, with SEO, customers, and history intact.
A continuous programme of hypotheses and tests on the pages that pay for the store, not a blind redesign every two years.
The highest-return channel in e-commerce, built with method: automated where it should be, human where it counts.
Predictable revenue: subscription models, bundles, and repeat-purchase logic that turn buyers into customers.
Numbers you can actually trust, from pixel to dashboard, so decisions are made on reality rather than half of it.
typical timelines
Start with an audit, build or migrate the store, then keep it running. The three timelines we publish for stores.
Timelines as published on the programs page. Yours is written into the proposal, with the scope and a fixed price.
the record
We are not an agency that delivers and disappears. We operate stores together with our clients, front and back office. When we design a product page, we are designing revenue we answer for too.
E-commerce + Social Media
A custom Shopify store, product photography, and front and back office operations for the chocolatier founded in 1933. Today the online store is worth more than the city-centre flagships.
view the case
E-commerce
A Shopify platform for a Portuguese leader in fabrics: a huge catalogue, simple navigation, and a back office we run together, week after week.
view the case
Design + E-commerce
Design and e-commerce for an accessories brand: identity, store, and product drops built to sell from day one.
view the caseresearch · SO-MA index 2026
We measured 382 online stores of Portuguese brands. 217 are ready for AI agents.
proof
“Our e-commerce store is bigger than our city-center flagship stores. Outstanding results so far.”
Francisco Bastos · CEO, Arcádia Chocolates
Arcádia was founded in 1933 by the Bastos family, who still remain at the forefront of the brand's destinations, preserving the tradition in their recipes and manufacturing processes.
“Every collab is a hit.”
João Pedro · CEO, Wrong Weather
Wrong Weather is a leading player in the luxury business in Portugal.
Every store is a custom quote, delivered as a proposal. These are the starting points.
Everything you need to launch a fast, beautiful Shopify store, set up right from day one.
For brands that want the full build: custom design, migration, email, and growth, handled end to end.
frequently asked
The answers we give on the first call, written out in full.
For the vast majority of brands, Shopify is the right answer: the most battle-tested checkout in the world, security, and an ecosystem that saves you from reinventing the wheel. We build the custom layer on top, in the theme, the integrations, and the automations. When scale justifies it, we move to Shopify Plus. And if your case genuinely calls for another stack, we tell you so in the first conversation.
In Commerce Build, our full Shopify or Shopify Plus build with migration of catalogue, customers and orders, the published timeline is 8 to 16 weeks from design to launch. The catalogue, the integrations and the product photography decide where each store lands in that range. The real deadline is fixed in the proposal, with a week-by-week timeline, and the store only goes live after serious testing.
You can, and that is exactly what method is for: a complete URL inventory, 301 redirects, metadata preservation, customer and order-history migration, and monitoring in the weeks that follow. The migrations that go wrong are the rushed ones with no map. Ours come with testing before cutover and a rollback plan.
Every store is a custom quote, delivered as a proposal: scope, timeline, and price fixed before we start, with no surprises halfway through. The Starter and Golden formats are starting points for the conversation. After launch, you can continue with us as an ongoing growth partnership or take the store in-house with full documentation and team training.
Yes, and we prefer it. The best stores come from the sum: we bring the system, the engineering, and the method; your team brings the product and the customer. We train the back office, document everything, and agree who does what, whether you become autonomous or we operate together.
Yes. That is the Agent-Ready Audit: where your brand and products appear when customers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google what to buy, and whether AI shopping agents can read your store. It takes 2 to 3 weeks and ends with a 90-day plan. You can run the free page check first.
AI visibility audit for Shopify storesIt is half the reason SO-MA exists, working between Lisbon and Paris. We build multi-market stores with Shopify Markets: local currencies, languages, taxes, shipping, and payment methods per country. Internationalisation is designed into the store from the start, not patched on later.
new project
Tell us where the store is today and where you want to take it. We reply with an honest read and a proposal with scope, timeline, and price fixed.
lucas@so-ma.studio · Lisbon and Paris
