Shopify provides enough and more ammunition to a merchant to get started with their online store. Then why does one need Shopify Partners?
Merchants typically need Shopify Partners when they don’t have in-house expertise to design and develop/migrate/manage the website as desired OR when they don't have any bandwidth to do-it-themselves.
Follow these 3 steps to select the best development partner for your business needs:
Step 1: Define Your Needs
What is it exactly that you need help with? Is it design/ development/ custom app development or all?
Being super clear about your ask makes the process of selection easy for you as well as the partners/ agencies involved. Try to pen down the scope of work involved and your wish-list. There will be some must-haves and other tasks that are good-to-have. A lot of times we come across clients who desire their websites to look & feel a certain way with a ton of features that would take a fair amount of time to build. Your development partner can help prioritise this tasklist with you and define tasks that need to be completed in phase 1 vs later phases, based on the impact that it may have on your sales.
Step 2: Look into their portfolio
In my experience, most agencies have a core-skill set that they do really really well. For example, web-development agency partners would typically be really good at bringing your website design to life and solve for your complex integration needs across the board however they might not be as ‘creative’ to build you the best design and vice versa. That being said there are large scale agencies out there that are jack of all trades and offer multiple services under one umbrella.
Check what’s the extent of work done for ‘Shopify’ merchants. One quick way to do that would be by installing built-with or wappalyzer as a chrome extension to check if the portfolio websites are built on Shopify.
At this point if you reach out to us for both design and dev needs, we will probably refer you to partners who are amazing at design and we promise that we’ll take care of your development needs seamlessly. Additionally we can solve for your custom app development needs, since that’s also what we’re good at!
Step 3: Contact and evaluate
You may have seen an extensive display of logos and brands on one’s website but it will be good to understand which projects were done end to end. You could ask them:
- To share their best work on Shopify.
- The process they follow when they land a project
- Best way to communicate with them - tools used etc.
- What is the scale of projects that have been handled by them; a boutique agency may not have dealt with say Multinational largely because of the stakeholder management involved
- Their experience in dealing with projects in your industry
- Pricing - does it fit your pocket?
You could base your decision on how prepared they are on the call- have they done their homework? do they have an understanding of the solutions that would fit your use-case?
Ultimately, you’re not looking for a YES man but someone who can advise you on the best possible solution based on your requirements and also has the ability to be honest and upfront with you.
Hope this helps!
Leave a comment