How to Tell a Real Shopify Specialist From a Generalist
Anyone can say they build Shopify stores. These eight questions tell you within ten minutes whether the person across the table has actually done it.
Contents
- 1. How would you add a size guide to every product?
- 2. What do you do when a client wants the checkout changed?
- 3. How do you make a change without risking the live store?
- 4. A page has become slow. Where do you look first?
- 5. How do you handle a catalogue with a lot of product options?
- 6. What breaks when we start selling into another country?
- 7. How do you decide whether to build something or install an app?
- 8. What happens to the code when we stop working together?
- The one thing a portfolio will never show you
- Where we stand on this
A good web developer and a good Shopify developer are not the same person, and the difference does not show up in a portfolio.
Both can produce a store that looks right. The specialist produces one that survives Black Friday, keeps working when Shopify changes something underneath it, and does not need them personally present to make a small edit.
These are the questions we would ask. Each takes a minute, none of them need you to be technical, and the answers are hard to fake.
1. How would you add a size guide to every product?
What you want to hear: metafields, or a metaobject if the same guide is shared across many products.
What should worry you: pasting it into each product description, or installing an app for something this small.
This is the fastest test on the list. Structured fields versus loose text is a basic Shopify concept, and anyone who reaches for the description field has not built anything of size.
2. What do you do when a client wants the checkout changed?
What you want to hear: a straight answer about what is and is not possible on your particular plan, and the currently supported way to extend checkout, which is through a Shopify app rather than by editing checkout templates directly.
What should worry you: promising that anything is possible, or proposing to edit the old checkout template, which Shopify has moved away from.
Checkout is the most restricted part of Shopify and the most frequently oversold. Somebody who tells you the limits before you hire them will tell you the truth afterwards too.
3. How do you make a change without risking the live store?
What you want to hear: duplicate the theme for small edits, a development store for anything larger, version control for the code, and a way to roll back.
What should worry you: editing the live theme directly, or any answer where the safety net is being careful.
4. A page has become slow. Where do you look first?
What you want to hear: measure before changing anything, then look at leftover code from removed apps, image sizing, and scripts that block the page from rendering.
What should worry you: an immediate recommendation to install a speed optimisation app, which usually means adding another script to a page that already has too many.
5. How do you handle a catalogue with a lot of product options?
What you want to hear: awareness that Shopify limits how many variants one product can have, and a plan for what happens when a catalogue goes past it.
What should worry you: no awareness that a limit exists. This is exactly where large catalogue builds fail, and it is usually discovered after the design has been approved and paid for.
6. What breaks when we start selling into another country?
What you want to hear: a real list. Prices and rounding per market, tax display rules that differ between the EU and the US, shipping zones, and which parts of the theme have text that needs translating.
What should worry you: just turn on multi-currency. That is one setting out of many, and the others are where the problems live.
7. How do you decide whether to build something or install an app?
What you want to hear: a genuine trade-off. Apps are faster and cheaper up front and cost you monthly fees and page weight. Custom code costs more now and is yours afterwards. The right answer changes with how central the feature is to the business.
What should worry you: always build, which is expensive, or always install, which is how stores end up slow.
8. What happens to the code when we stop working together?
What you want to hear: it is yours, it is already in your repository, and here is what the handover looks like.
What should worry you: hesitation, or code that lives only on their systems.
Ask this early rather than at the end. How somebody answers a question about leaving tells you a great deal about how they will behave while they stay.
The one thing a portfolio will never show you
Every portfolio shows finished stores at their best. None of them show what happened six months later.
So ask for a reference from a client whose project went badly at some point. Everybody has one. A developer who can talk plainly about a build that went wrong, what caused it and what they changed afterwards, is worth more than one with an unbroken record, because an unbroken record usually means you are not being told everything.
Where we stand on this
We would rather lose a project than take one that does not fit. If your build needs checkout logic Shopify does not allow on your plan, we would rather tell you before you spend money than after.
Our Shopify developers go through the same kind of technical screening described here before they ever reach a client, and you can read how we vet developers rather than taking our word for it.
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