Choosing a Shopify agency is one of the bigger decisions a growing brand makes, and one of the hardest to judge from the outside. Every agency's site says roughly the same thing. Everyone is award winning, everyone is data driven, everyone builds fast, beautiful stores that convert. The things that actually make a difference are rarely the ones on the homepage.
So this is written from the other side of the table. We have won projects we were right for, lost projects we were wrong for, and inherited enough stores from other agencies to have a decent sense of what tends to go well and what does not. Here is what we would look at if we were the ones buying, including the questions we would happily have asked of us.
A bit of thinking before you start
The most expensive misunderstandings usually happen before anyone talks to an agency, when a brand goes looking for a partner without having quite decided what it needs, and then buys whatever the most convincing agency recommends.
Three things are worth settling first, and none of them take long.
Know the outcome you want, not just the thing you want built. "We want a new website" describes an output. "Our mobile conversion rate is half our desktop rate and we cannot work out why" describes an outcome, and it points at completely different work. Any decent agency can advise you better once it knows which one you are actually chasing. If you can put a number and a rough date on it, even better.
Have a budget range, and be willing to share it. There is a common worry that naming a budget means an agency will spend all of it. In practice, keeping it back mostly costs you time. Shopify projects run from a few thousand to well into six figures, and an agency that does not know your range cannot tell you whether it can help. If the budget does not stretch to what you are describing, a good agency will tell you which part to do first rather than quietly scoping something you cannot afford.
Write a short brief. It does not need to be formal. Goals, budget range, rough timeline, the things you cannot launch without, and anything already decided such as an existing design or a platform you are leaving. A page is plenty. The value is that it lets you compare proposals against each other, rather than against three different interpretations of three different conversations.
What kind of project is this?
Most brands come looking for an agency when the more useful first step is working out what sort of project they actually have. There are really only four, and they overlap less than the industry's vocabulary suggests.
You are launching something new. You have products and a brand, and you need to be selling properly. A store setup puts you on a premium theme, configured properly, usually in a few weeks. It is far more capable than people expect, and it is the right answer far more often than agencies admit. If the brand needs to look genuinely distinctive from day one, a premium setup adds design and development work on top of that theme foundation.
You want to improve the store you have. Something specific is not working, or you have a list of things the theme cannot do. This is development work on an existing theme, and it is where most projects with us start. There is no natural minimum here: it can be one change or twenty.
You want to replace the store you have. The theme itself has become the constraint, or the store no longer looks like the brand you have become. You will see this called a redesign or a custom build depending on who is describing it, and in practice it is the same craft. Which word gets used mostly depends on whether you are thinking about what you are replacing or how it gets built.
You are moving from another platform. Magento, WooCommerce, PrestaShop. A migration is its own discipline, mostly because of what has to survive the move: your data, your customers, and your search rankings. It runs alongside whichever of the three above you are also doing, because you have to arrive somewhere.
You do not need to work this out alone, and a good agency will help you place yourself. It is worth being a little wary of anyone who recommends the most expensive option before understanding your catalogue, your team and your budget.
Telling agencies apart
Once you have a rough idea of the project, the shortlist gets easier. Here is what tends to be genuinely revealing, roughly in order.
Look at the work rather than the case studies
Every case study is a success story, which makes them all read alike. What tells you more is whether the stores are real, current and comparable to yours. Open a few on your phone. Are they quick? Do the product pages handle variants well? Does the filtering work properly? Five minutes of that is worth an hour of portfolio pages.
Category matters too. An agency that has built twenty fashion stores has opinions about sizing, returns, drops and imagery that simply do not transfer from selling industrial equipment. Ours is fashion, lifestyle and luxury, which we mention partly to be useful and partly because if you sell something very different, someone else will serve you better.
Find out what they are actually good at
Agencies describe themselves as full service considerably more often than they are. Some are design led and outsource development. Some are development shops that find brand work harder. Some are marketing agencies that also build stores. None of that is a problem in itself, as long as it is not hidden.
It is a fair question to ask directly: what do you do in house, and what do you not? We do not offer SEO, paid media or content marketing, because we would rather do a few things properly, and we say so on our own services page. If an agency is excellent at everything, it is either much larger than it looks or being generous with the word excellent.
Read reviews for the texture, not the stars
Star ratings tell you very little. The words tell you a lot. Look for comments about communication, about what happened when something went wrong, and about life after launch. Anyone is pleasant on a project that goes to plan. The reviews worth reading describe a problem and how it was handled.
Ask who will actually do the work
This one is entirely fair to ask and catches quite a few agencies out. In larger teams it is common to be sold by senior people and delivered to by juniors, which is not sinister, everyone has to learn somewhere, but it is better known before you sign than discovered afterwards.
Ask who writes the code, whether you will speak to them, and how many other projects they are on. We are deliberately small so the people who scope your project are the ones who build it, and there are no juniors to hand you to. That is a trade rather than a virtue: if you need a hundred people across six offices, we are the wrong choice and will say so early.
Notice how they communicate before you hire them
How an agency handles the sales conversation is usually how it will handle the project. Do they answer the question you asked? Do they push back when you suggest something unwise? Does a reply take a day or a week?
Worth asking what the working rhythm will be: which tool, how often you see progress, who to contact when something is urgent. Long builds with no visibility are where most client relationships come unstuck, and it is easily avoided. On our custom builds every sprint ends with a preview link and a short walkthrough, so you watch the store take shape rather than waiting months for a reveal.
Reading a proposal, and a note on estimates
When proposals arrive, compare scope before price. A good one says what is included, what is explicitly not, the timeline with milestones, what the agency needs from you and when, and what happens after launch. A cheaper proposal with a narrower scope is not cheaper, it is smaller. And a proposal that never says what is excluded is usually the one that produces an awkward conversation in month two.
Which brings us to something worth saying plainly, because it is easy to do by accident.
If an agency sends you a genuinely detailed estimate, please do not pass that detail on to everyone else.
It happens often, usually with no bad intent. One agency takes the time to break the work into parts, think through each one, flag the bits that will be tricky and explain the approach. That document is enormously useful, so it gets forwarded, or its structure gets copied into the next brief, and suddenly every other agency is quoting against a scope somebody else worked out.
The reason to avoid it is not fairness, it is that you lose the most useful thing you had. That level of detail is itself the signal. An agency that breaks a project down, groups the problems sensibly and explains what it would do has demonstrated that it understands your store. An agency handed that same breakdown can produce a matching number without ever having thought about any of it, and you have quietly turned a comparison of expertise into a comparison of price.
Prices that arrive that way also tend not to hold. A number attached to someone else's thinking usually moves once the work starts and the gaps appear.
So when you are comparing, it is worth asking yourself which you would rather have: someone who took your list and returned a figure, or someone who took the time to work out what the list actually involves and showed you their reasoning. The estimate tells you a lot about both experience and transparency, and it is one of the more reliable signals you get before any work begins.
If you want a fair comparison, give everyone the same brief you wrote at the start, and let them each show you how they think.
A few extra questions for a custom build
If you are commissioning something bespoke, three more things are worth asking, and they rarely come up until later than they should.
What can our team change afterwards? This one decides how the next couple of years feel, and it is the most commonly skipped question in the whole process. A custom theme with no editor controls means a developer request every time you want to move a section, swap a hero image for mobile or put a campaign page together. Ask to see the theme editor on one of their builds rather than taking the word flexible on trust. What you are hoping to see is real control: different media per device, heading levels you can set for SEO independently of how they look, spacing you can adjust, colour handled sensibly.
Who owns the code? Worth getting in writing. The theme should be yours outright at handover, with no licence fee and no dependence on the agency to keep using it. If ownership is vague, that is a commercial decision being made about your future options.
Who handles maintenance? This is the genuine trade-off with custom work, and it does not get mentioned often enough by the people selling it. A commercial theme is maintained by its developer, who ships updates for browser changes, platform changes and security. A custom theme is yours, so that responsibility moves to you or to your agency. It is a fair price for the performance and control you gain. It just ought to be a decision you made rather than something you discover in year two.
Things worth pausing on
None of these mean an agency is bad. They are just worth a second question.
- A proposal that arrives the day after the first call with no scoping conversation. It is a guess, and guesses tend to get revised upwards.
- A portfolio of design mockups rather than shipped stores.
- Vagueness about who writes the code.
- Reluctance to confirm that you will own what you pay for.
- A price dramatically below everyone else's. Builds take the hours they take, and the difference usually reappears as change requests.
- Enthusiasm for the most expensive option before anyone has asked what you sell.
What we would want you to ask us
For the sake of symmetry, here is how we would answer our own questions.
We work with fashion, lifestyle and luxury brands and almost nothing else. We build from live stores you can open, including Sabyasachi, Marfa Stance, Hunza G and Nude Project. We do not offer SEO, paid media or content in house, and we are happy to recommend specialists we trust. You work directly with the senior team, because there are no juniors to hand you to. Every section we build comes with editor controls your team can actually use, and we will show you before you commit. The theme is yours outright at handover. Support is on demand with no mandatory retainer, and you are free to take the work elsewhere whenever you like. And if a cheaper option would serve you better, we will say so, because a project sold against the wrong brief goes badly for everyone.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a Shopify agency cost? It depends entirely on scope. A store setup runs in the low thousands, a premium build somewhat more, and a fully custom theme considerably more again. What matters most is whether the tier matches the problem. Paying for a custom build to solve a configuration problem is the most common way brands overspend.
How long does a Shopify project take? A store setup is typically three to four weeks, a premium build six to ten, and a custom theme three to five months. Anything dramatically faster usually means a template underneath, which may be perfectly fine, but it is worth knowing which you are buying.
Should I choose a large agency or a small one? Large agencies bring capacity, formal process and cover when someone is away. Small agencies bring senior attention and speed. Neither is better in the abstract. The useful question is which trade suits you, and whether the agency is honest about which one it is.
Do I need a Shopify Plus partner? Only if you are on Shopify Plus or heading there. Plus Partner status means Shopify has vetted the agency for enterprise work, which is a useful signal, but it is not a requirement for a standard build.
What if I already have an agency and it is not working? Very common, and worth diagnosing before switching. Is it capability, communication or fit? Those have different fixes and only one of them needs a new agency. If you do move, expect the new team to want to review the existing code before quoting.
Can I hire an agency for one small job? With some, yes. We take single tasks with no minimum, partly because it is often how a good working relationship starts. You give us one job, you see how we handle it, and you decide from there.
Closing
The right agency for you probably is not the one with the most impressive homepage. More likely it is the one that understood your problem quickest, was straight about what it could not do, and told you something you did not especially want to hear during the sales conversation rather than after the contract.
If you would like that conversation, tell us what you are trying to do. If we are not the right fit, we will point you towards someone who might be.
