A Year in E-commerce: The Projects That Pushed Us in 2024

Every year has a few projects that stick with you — the ones that required something new, solved something genuinely hard, or changed how you think about the work. Here’s a look back at what defined 2024 for us at Built Best.

Building a HIPAA-compliant e-commerce store

Selling medical products online isn’t a standard Shopify build. This project required encrypted data handling, careful management of protected health information, and compliance documentation — while still delivering a shopping experience that felt straightforward for the end user. The tension between regulatory rigor and user experience is real, and getting the balance right took longer than any purely technical problem would have.

A custom private Shopify app for third-party integration

Sometimes the app store doesn’t have what you need, and the right answer is to build it. This project involved creating a private Shopify app to bridge a gap between the store and a third-party platform that didn’t have a native integration. The work was less about building something flashy and more about making two systems communicate reliably.

A full website rebuild on Showit

Showit offered a level of design freedom that felt genuinely different from WordPress or Squarespace, and the result was a site that looked designed rather than templated. Worth knowing for projects where brand expression is the primary objective.

Migrating a subscription program from Squarespace to Shopify

Moving an active subscription base without losing customers or disrupting billing is high-stakes migration work. Every piece had to keep working while we moved it. The goal was a transition the customer never noticed.

Dynamic product generation with Shopify Functions

Using Shopify Functions, we built a custom app that generates products dynamically based on user input. The potential for personalization at scale is significant, and we expect this pattern to show up in more projects going forward.

Five wholesale portals, each built differently

Five different brands, five different pricing structures and B2B customer experiences. The through-line was the architecture — a single-store approach in each case — but the implementation varied significantly depending on the business requirements.