What is a Shopify Expert? Should you hire one?

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The role of an expert has been widened to cover many areas outside of just website designs. Other than being a full stack developer with competency in various programming languages, growing your business with web applications, email marketing, integrating with various social media platforms, and engaging in various digital media is now a web development job. Content marketing for SEO and search engine is another skillset within the team, but still, a part of the Shopify Experts team set to enhance your social media site with the right keywords, and bring your organic traffic to increase.

About Shopify

Shopify is an amazing cloud-based platform with the ability to support almost all business models when it comes to online store building. With thousands of Shopify Apps, Shopify Themes, and tools, your ability to build your online store the way you need it takes some planning, knowledge of the platform, and its capabilities and at times an expert to bridge the gap between your business and its tools. The addition of all the online marketing methods over traditional marketing brings a new competitive advantage to your digital marketing strategy.

Defining your Business Architecture

Some businesses have a clear understanding of their processes, how to ensure reliable operations to its sales and this allows them to change/grow in a controlled fashion. Business Architectures gives your business the ability to look at things like a map, to which you can see how to integrate the tools of Shopify and apply it the way you need it to fit. This is extremely important for businesses that have a way to sell, handle a client in a particular way, or deal with product deliveries that are not common with a good user experience. Your architecture needs to consider off-platform tools for your products and services to be found on popular search engines, reaching out to social media marketing and connect to your digital channels.

What qualifies a developer or agency to be a Shopify Expert?

They are individuals and companies that are vetted by Shopify to be experts in their various fields that are described in their Shopify Experts Profile. With this is mind, the platform is ever-changing and growing with new features and capabilities, these experts continue to keep up with these changes and are up to date on the current capabilities of the platform. Expertise can range from designers and developers knowing HTML and css to App Developement with the Shopify API. They can address customising your responsive design, or get your site ready for search engine optimization (SEO) with Google Analytics. Whatever Web Design needs may be, an Expert will be right for you, and their reviews will point out which are the ones highly recommended.

Planning with a Shopify Expert

A lot of times a Request for Quote (RFQ) is what’s needed to get a Shopify Expert to evaluate what you are looking to accomplish, it will be reviewed, sized, and priced. However, for Store Migrations or setting up a store with a particular business model, planning is required to identify the various tools, apps, and possibly API requirements to get to an RFQ. Getting your requirements in a precise and concise format will not only save time but also get you quotations from Shopify Experts that are more realistic and will deliver better results. See Expert Guidance/Business Strategy Guidance below.

How to hire a Shopify Expert?

By going to the Shopify Experts (https://experts.shopify.com/) page, you will find all the registered Shopify Experts on their database and can be searched for different categories and skills.

· Store Setup

· Visual Content and Branding (Design)

· Development & Troubleshooting

· Marketing & Sales

· Content writing

· Expert Guidance

When selecting the category of interest, a list of Shopify Experts will be listed with base statistics of Jobs Completed, Rating for the Jobs, and Starting price. You can filter down to a country, price range, and region to refine your search further. Most companies cater to international inquiries, but for some companies, a local provider is important to capture their needs more accurately – meeting face to face always has a strong appeal.

When selecting one of the Shopify Experts you will be able to drill down into the following information on that entity:

· Links to Past Work of Shopify stores: checking to see the relevance to your needs, and if it is the direction you are looking for.

· Services offered: There are 9 available tiles to describe various skills and capabilities with a summary description.

· Starting Price: Usually based on the type of work that’s performed, keep in mind in getting a Request for Quote is based on your requirements/

· Testimonials: Here the clients are usually store-owners/merchants that have hired this Shopify expert and share their experience with the community.

Alternatively, if you cannot identify a Shopify Expert easily, you can just “Create a Job” and post it where various Shopify Experts can identify with the type of work and reach back to you on what needs to be done.

Shopify Experts Interview

Much like hiring a Contractor, duty-of-care regarding the skills required and the understanding of the job to be completed in the timeframe required for the budget is what’s usually needed. It is advised to consider future work would be important to flush out since changes are inevitable in most systems and development.

Conclusion

While there is a tremendous amount that can be done by a business to set up their Shopify store, however, beyond a theme, content, products, and marketing – the operations, customer experience, and interaction can bring that store into spaces that require some expertise. Differentiation is a key tenet for a store to stand out amongst the competition, to then take the positive experience to the client’s friends and family on social media. To execute your business vision might require a Shopify Expert to your team to make that vision a reality.

Information that might help with "Web Development with Shopify Stores" is available at this link.