Choosing the best Shopify agency on published evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to shortlist a Shopify agency

1. Name the job precisely. Write one sentence: a new store on a standard theme, a heavily customised build, a migration from another platform, an integration with an ERP or a subscription tool, or ongoing conversion and growth work. Each attracts a different kind of firm, and mixing them in one brief guarantees quotes that cannot be compared.
2. Check the technical approach, not the portfolio look. Ask how they handle theme updates, whether customisations live in the theme or in apps, how many third-party apps they typically install and why, and how they keep the storefront fast as apps accumulate. App sprawl is the most common cause of a slow, fragile Shopify store, and the answer here predicts your next two years.
3. Ask what happens after launch. Get the post-launch terms in writing: warranty period for defects, hourly rate for changes, response times, and who holds admin access. Many disputes come from an ambiguous handover where nobody agreed what counts as a bug versus a new request. Settle it before the build starts, not after.
4. Confirm ownership of everything. You should own the Shopify account, the domain, the analytics property, the Search Console entry and the code repository, with the agency added as a collaborator. This is standard practice and takes minutes to arrange. Any resistance at this stage is a reliable predictor of a painful transition later.

Build quality is mostly about what they refuse to add

Shopify makes it easy to solve problems by installing something, and every installation adds scripts, weight and a dependency on another company's roadmap. The stores that stay fast and maintainable are the ones where somebody said no repeatedly. Ask a candidate to describe a time they talked a client out of an app or a custom feature, and what they built instead. Firms that only ever add are optimising for the invoice rather than for the store.

Performance is a business concern rather than an aesthetic one, since slow pages cost conversions on exactly the mobile connections most storefront traffic arrives on. Web.dev's Core Web Vitals documentation sets out the user-centric measures Google publishes for loading, interactivity and visual stability, and those are the measurable targets to hold a build against. Ask for a live store they built and check it yourself before the second call.

Migrations and integrations are where budgets break

Moving a catalogue is rarely the hard part. The hard parts are the redirects, the historical order and customer data, the tax and shipping configuration, subscriptions if you have them, and every system that quietly depends on the old platform's data shape. A migration quote that does not mention redirect mapping and post-launch monitoring of lost URLs is a quote from someone who has not done many migrations, and the cost of that omission arrives as a search visibility drop about a fortnight after launch.

Integrations deserve the same scrutiny. Ask specifically who owns the connection to your accounting or inventory system when it breaks at month end, whether it is a middleware subscription or bespoke code, and what the failure mode is. Reliable answers here are worth more than a beautiful portfolio, because a storefront that looks superb and cannot sync stock is a worse business than a plain one that can.

What our index records about each agency

We record what an agency publishes on its own site: stated project or retainer pricing where it exists, disclosed minimum engagement, named clients and the date the page was read. That gives you a floor to filter on and a client list to sanity-check against your own size and complexity. It does not measure craft, which is why the live-store check and the reference calls remain essential.

When you take references, ask two questions that surface the truth quickly: what went over budget and why, and how quickly did they respond the first time something broke in production. Every project has both events. The reference who answers specifically, without defensiveness, is describing an agency that handles problems rather than one that has never had any.

Questions people actually ask

What does a Shopify build usually cost?

It depends almost entirely on customisation, catalogue complexity and integrations, so a single figure is misleading. Ask three firms to quote the same written scope with the same integrations, then compare where the hours sit. Our listings show published starting figures where an agency states them, which gives you a floor.

Should I use a theme or a custom build?

Start with a well-supported theme unless you have a specific commercial reason not to. Themes are cheaper, faster to launch and easier to maintain, and most of what makes a store perform is merchandising, speed and checkout experience rather than bespoke front-end code. Customise where it earns money, not everywhere.

How many apps is too many?

There is no fixed number, but each one adds weight, cost and a dependency. Audit periodically, remove anything unused, and ask your agency to demonstrate the performance effect of a proposed install before adding it. A store that got slow rarely got slow all at once.

What should be in the contract for a migration?

Redirect mapping from every old URL, a plan for historical order and customer data, tax and shipping configuration, a staging environment and sign-off process, and a defined period of post-launch monitoring with somebody named as responsible for fixing what surfaces.

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