I Built 3 Shopify Cart Features Without a Single App – Just Liquid & JS

Three Shopify features that usually require three separate apps – a progress bar, an auto-add free gift, and cart recommendations – can be built with custom Liquid and JavaScript in a single solution. No monthly fees, no extra HTTP requests, no performance hit. I'm a freelance developer from Hamburg, and I recently did exactly this for a Shopify store called Bodenständig. They sell garden supplies for home growers – seeds, fertilizer, edible plants. The store was running Monk for the progress bar and gift logic. The cart recommendations didn't exist before – I built all three features from scratch as a single custom solution, replacing the app in the process. It worked, but it loaded its own script bundle, injected its own CSS, and made extra API calls on every page load. On mobile – where most of their customers shop – it was noticeably slow. Here's how I replaced it all with code that lives directly in the Dawn theme. The Problem With Shopify Apps Every Shopify app loads its own Java