Hiring a Shopify agency should be straightforward. Define your needs, evaluate candidates, pick the best fit, and get to work. In practice, the process is littered with traps that cost ecommerce brands months of lost time and tens of thousands of dollars in wasted investment.
These mistakes are not obscure. They happen constantly, across brands at every revenue level. But they are avoidable if you know what to watch for. This article documents the seven most common and most expensive mistakes brands make during the agency selection process, along with the specific steps to avoid each one.
Mistake 1: Choosing Based on Portfolio Aesthetics Instead of Technical Depth
A beautiful portfolio tells you that an agency employs good designers. It tells you almost nothing about their development quality, performance optimization skills, or ability to handle the technical complexity that mid-market ecommerce requires.
A visually stunning Shopify store that loads in six seconds, crashes during high-traffic events, or produces a two-percent lower conversion rate than it should is not a success story. It is an expensive disappointment.
How to avoid it. Ask to see performance metrics alongside the portfolio. What are the Core Web Vitals scores for the sites they built? What conversion rate improvements did their work produce? Can they share before-and-after data from site speed optimizations? A genuine Shopify expert agency will have this data readily available because they track it as a matter of course.
Mistake 2: Hiring a Multi-Platform Agency for Shopify Plus Work
Agencies that build on WordPress, Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, and Squarespace are spreading their expertise across too many platforms. Shopify Plus has become sufficiently complex that meaningful expertise requires sustained focus. The checkout extensibility APIs, the Liquid templating system, the Hydrogen framework for headless commerce, Shopify Functions for backend customization, and the nuances of the app ecosystem all demand specialized knowledge.
When a multi-platform agency assigns a developer to your Shopify Plus project, that developer may have spent the previous three months working on WordPress sites. The context-switching cost is real, and it manifests as slower delivery, missed platform-specific optimizations, and code patterns that work on other platforms but cause performance issues on Shopify.
How to avoid it. Ask what percentage of the agency’s revenue comes from Shopify Plus projects specifically. If it is below sixty percent, they are not a specialist. Check their Shopify Partner status and ask how many Shopify Plus builds they have completed in the past twelve months.
Mistake 3: Not Verifying Partner Status Through Shopify Directly
Many agencies claim Shopify Plus expertise on their websites without holding formal partner status. Shopify agency partners that have earned their certification have met specific thresholds for project quality, client satisfaction, and technical capability. This does not guarantee they are the right fit, but it provides a meaningful baseline of credibility.
How to avoid it. Verify partner status through Shopify’s official partner directory rather than relying on badges displayed on the agency’s website. Ask about their tier within the partner program and how long they have held their current status.
Mistake 4: Optimizing for Hourly Rate
The cheapest agency is almost never the cheapest option. This is one of the most counterintuitive truths in ecommerce, and brands learn it the expensive way more often than they should.
A low hourly rate often correlates with longer project timelines (less experienced developers work slower), lower code quality (which creates technical debt requiring future investment to resolve), missed optimization opportunities (developers unaware of platform-specific techniques leave performance and conversion on the table), and higher bug rates post-launch (insufficient QA processes mean more firefighting).
How to avoid it. Evaluate agencies on projected value delivery rather than cost per hour. An agency charging one hundred fifty dollars per hour that improves your conversion rate by half a percentage point generates far more value than an agency charging seventy-five dollars per hour that delivers a functional but unoptimized store. Ask each agency to estimate the revenue impact of their proposed work, not just the project cost.
Mistake 5: Skipping Reference Checks With Current Clients
Case studies and testimonials are curated marketing materials. They show the agency at its best, and they leave out the challenges, the miscommunications, and the things that did not go well. Relying solely on curated materials for your evaluation is like hiring an employee based only on their resume.
How to avoid it. Ask for references from three to five current clients, ideally at a similar revenue level and in a similar vertical. When you speak with references, ask specific questions: How does the agency handle scope changes? What is their response time when issues arise? Have there been any significant misses, and how were they handled? Would you hire them again?
The best agencies provide references without hesitation because their client relationships are strong. An agency that is reluctant to connect you with current clients is telling you something important.
Mistake 6: Treating the Engagement as a One-Time Project
The most common engagement pattern is the build-and-leave model: hire an agency for a launch or redesign, complete the project, then manage the store internally until the next major initiative. This pattern leaves enormous value on the table.
Ecommerce stores are never finished. They require continuous optimization, performance tuning, feature development, and adaptation to platform changes. The brands that achieve the best results engage their agency on a retainer basis, creating a continuous development and optimization cycle that compounds improvements over time.
How to avoid it. Evaluate agencies based on their retainer model and ongoing support capabilities, not just their project delivery process. Ask how they structure monthly retainers, what is included, and how they prioritize work within the retainer. The agencies like Netalico that serve mid-market ecommerce brands across New York, Los Angeles, and Miami typically build their practice around retainer relationships because they produce better outcomes for both the agency and the client.
Mistake 7: Not Defining Success Metrics Before the Engagement Begins
If you do not define what success looks like before the engagement starts, you have no way to evaluate whether the agency delivered value. Vague goals like “improve the site” or “redesign the homepage” give neither side a concrete target to work toward.
How to avoid it. Before signing a contract, agree on specific, measurable success metrics. These should include conversion rate targets, page load time targets, mobile performance benchmarks, and revenue-per-visitor goals. Build these metrics into the engagement agreement so that both parties are aligned on expectations and accountability.
Review these metrics at regular intervals, typically monthly for retainer engagements or at defined project milestones. If the agency is not tracking toward the agreed targets, the data creates a basis for constructive conversation about what needs to change.
The Common Thread
Every one of these mistakes stems from the same root cause: treating agency selection as a procurement exercise rather than a strategic decision. When brands optimize for cost, convenience, or surface-level impressions, they end up with partnerships that underdeliver.
The brands that get agency selection right invest time in the evaluation process, focus on depth of expertise and measurable outcomes, and structure engagements for long-term value creation. These brands treat their agency relationship as a competitive advantage, and in an increasingly crowded ecommerce landscape, that advantage compounds year over year.