What technical criteria do you use when hiring a shopify ecommerce agency for a custom build?
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Hi community! We have a D2C brand whose site has been outgrowing our very basic shelf shop on a theme. Our backend has become chaos with conflicting apps, slow, messy liquid tricks, and not-so-smooth checkout flow. We think it is time to finally work with some shopify ecommerce agency to start from scratch, and our biggest fear is getting the wrong help, wasting a whole quarter's budget in bad code.
The last agency we worked with basically just purchased a premium template, slapped on our brand colors, and installed bunch of 3rd-party paid appsin order to make the shop do what it should have been made in code within few hours. That has greatly destroyed our site speed and mobile conversions. Can you who have hired an agency to have some serious Shopify site refresh tell us how did you assess the technical knowledge of their people?
Did you request to look at their GitHub account, ask questions about the rate limits management, check on their process of update in staging environment before putting live?
In what way did you set up milestones to pay them? Will they build something that our team can use and maintain post development?
Any tips, contract template, or useful questions would be much appreciated. We want to avoid having another design-only type of agency in town who just install and change some color scheme!