I launched a Shopify store tonight. The whole thing. Product page, checkout, connected to a custom frontend. Took a few hours.

Here's the stack and how it went down.

The idea

I run an Instagram page called Zero Dark Tactical where I repost thermal hog hunting videos. It's grown enough that monetizing made sense. One product to start: a tactical hoodie with an integrated face cover, designed for night hunts.

The tools

Shopify for the backend. Product management, inventory, checkout, payments. All the boring stuff that needs to just work.

Bolt for the frontend. It's an AI-powered site builder. You describe what you want, it writes the code. I used it to build a custom storefront that looks way better than a default Shopify theme.

Ace (my OpenClaw AI agent) to help me connect everything. This is where it got interesting.

The Shopify + Bolt connection

This part was honestly a pain. Shopify recently moved to a new "Dev Dashboard" for apps, and the old way of getting API tokens doesn't work anymore. Here's what actually worked:

  1. Created a Shopify store and added my product
  2. Built the frontend in Bolt (dark tactical theme, product display, cart)
  3. In Shopify's Dev Dashboard, created an app called "Website integration"
  4. Added Storefront API scopes (unauthenticated_read_product_listings, etc.)
  5. Released a new version of the app with those scopes
  6. Installed the app on my store

Then the auth kept failing. Tried the GraphQL Storefront API with the client ID as the token. Nope. Tried the Admin API with the client secret. Nope.

The fix was stupid simple: just use the public REST endpoint. https://your-store.myshopify.com/products.json returns everything with zero authentication. Product data, variants, images, prices. All of it.

Told Bolt to fetch from that endpoint instead, and everything connected immediately.

What Ace actually did

I was doing this from my phone over WhatsApp. Ace walked me through every Shopify admin screen, told me exactly what to click, diagnosed auth errors in real time by actually hitting the API endpoints to test them, and wrote the prompts for Bolt when I got stuck.

The whole thing was me sending screenshots, Ace telling me what to do next, and pasting prompts into Bolt. Phone to store in one session.

What's live

Zero Dark Tactical has a custom storefront pulling products from Shopify. One product for now (the tactical hoodie), checkout redirects to Shopify's hosted checkout. Clean, fast, on brand.

Check it out: zerodarktactical.co and follow the IG at @zerodarktactical.

Next up: automating content posting on the Instagram page. That's where it gets really fun.

The takeaway

You don't need to know how APIs work to launch an ecommerce store with a custom frontend anymore. Between Bolt building the site, Shopify handling the backend, and an AI agent connecting the dots, the barrier is basically just having an idea and a product.

The whole "learn to code" era is over. Now it's "learn to describe what you want clearly." And honestly, that's a skill too. But it's a lot more accessible than learning React and REST APIs.