Manager of an award-winning local cleaning company is evaluating whether Shopify fits a service-based, in-home cleaning model rather than a traditional product store. The goal is to leverage Shopify selectively without reshaping the core service offering.
Planned uses under consideration:
Offer digital gift cards redeemable for cleaning services.
Sell a small set of cleaning products that clients already request.
Use Shopify as the public-facing website while keeping scheduling on a separate booking tool.
Enable local delivery for cleaning kits or small bundles.
They are seeking experiences from others who have run a similar service-first setup on Shopify, including what worked well and what didn’t. No decisions or outcomes yet; the thread is an open request for practical feedback and potential pitfalls.
Summarized with AI on December 19.
AI used: gpt-5.
I help manage an award winning cleaning company, Sparkly Maid San Diego, and we’ve been looking at whether Shopify can make sense for a local service based business like ours. Most discussions I see focus on product sales, so I’m curious how well Shopify works when the core offering is in home services.
We’re not trying to turn cleaning into a product store, but we’re considering Shopify for a few limited uses:
Digital gift cards for cleaning services
Selling a small selection of cleaning products clients already ask about
Using Shopify as a front facing site while keeping scheduling handled by a separate booking tool
Possibly supporting local delivery for cleaning kits or small bundles
If you’ve used Shopify in a similar service first setup, I’d appreciate hearing what worked and what didn’t.
Hi @sparklymaidsandiego
Caveat for “service” based business on shopify: there are workarounds for service based models shopify , yet there is not a native feature set in shopify for these types of business.
Similar to digital products the business will be very reliant on third party apps if you try to make shopify the center of things like scheduling, dispatching, reservations, etc.
That said everything in your specific list not revolving around booking is almost stock standard.
For selling a small subset of items you’ll probably want to look into new in person sell methods using the shopify app depending on if your employees are equipped to handle that for on the spot sales. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shopify-admin/shopify-app/quick-sale/accept-payment
The more sensitive part will be testing local deliveries to find any gaps in shopify’s feature set that don’t match your business reality. Like order editing restrictions, shipping zones etc.
Or instead also looking into running popup shops so local-delivery is done as a meet up for local-pickup; such as if there’s a bunch of clients in a single business park.
To me what you’ve listed looks like a usual online store, nothing really special.
Embedding or linking to a booking service can be done relatively easy.
One thing to be prepared for – Shopify uses strict URL structure which is not changeable, like /pages/about-us, you can’t have just /about-us.
One thing about bookings – would that service charge customers as well or you need to bring some data (like type of cleaning) back to Shopify for charging? Or other way around – pay for service in Shopify and then perform booking based on the options selected Shopify-side?