Shopify (or similar hosted platforms) makes sense for a retailer just starting to sell online, quick to set up, no infrastructure to manage. The friction shows up later: transaction fees on every sale, limited flexibility for local payment methods, and monthly costs that scale with the store's success rather than its actual hosting needs.
A custom e-commerce platform removes the per-transaction fee structure and lets the checkout flow support the payment methods Ghanaian customers actually use, mobile money first, cards second, instead of forcing a Shopify-native flow that treats mobile money as an afterthought plugin.
Migration risk is the real concern for any retailer considering this move: product catalog, order history, and customer accounts all need to transfer cleanly, and SEO rankings built up on the old platform's URLs need proper redirects, not a fresh start from zero.
The right time to make this move isn't day one, it's once transaction volume is high enough that the ongoing platform fees clearly outweigh the cost of a custom build, which for most growing retailers becomes obvious within twelve to eighteen months.