However, if you want to create a truly unique store with exceptional performance and user experience, then it might be worth asking Shopify professionals for advice first. Who are Shopify consultants, and how can they help your online store grow? 

Who is a Shopify consultant?

A Shopify consultant is a professional who specializes in helping e-commerce brands design, launch, and optimize their Shopify e-commerce website for the best performance and growth. Since they know Shopify and its features inside and out and also have extensive experience when it comes to working with e-commerce brands, they can give their advice on pretty much anything related to running an online store. 

Whether you need expert advice on how to choose the suitable theme or apps for a new online store or help with solving various performance issues, Shopify consultants have both the skills and expertise to help you with those.

Why would you need to hire a Shopify consultant? 

Shopify is well-known for how easy it is to launch a store there and later customize it, so why actually would e-commerce brands even need to hire a professional? Most of the technical heavy lifting when it comes to building a site from scratch is already done for them. Plus, there are thousands of themes and plugins they can use to make their own online shop stand out. That might make it look like there’s nothing easier than opening and running successful e-commerce businesses there.

In reality, though, Shopify is a pretty complex e-commerce platform. While you can do a lot of things there yourself, that requires a lot of time and some technical skills. For example, you can customize the ready-made Shopify themes beyond what you can do in the theme settings. For that though, you would need to know how to change the template code lines without breaking the entire theme.

If it’s a simple change and you are confident in your coding skills, then you might try doing this yourself. However, for any more complex changes (such as adding new functionality to the store or remaking the web design) then, it might be better to consult your plans with the Shopify designers first. After looking through your plans and ideas, they can either give you a few practical suggestions on how to smoothly add the changes yourself or direct you to an expert that can handle the task for you, depending on which would be better for you.

Their knowledge can also come in handy when you are struggling with issues in your store. For example, let’s say you noticed a sudden drop in traffic, new customers, and online sales. Dozens of factors could cause this, so you might need to sit down and test all parts of the website to find the culprit. That might be hard to do with so many business tasks you have to do a day though. Not to mention, even if you do find the culprit, you might not know how to fix it. 

Meanwhile, a Shopify consultant has dealt with dozens of similar problems in his work with other e-commerce brands, so they might already have a solution in mind after listening to your needs.

For more complex issues such as conversion optimization, they also usually have tried and tested testing processes so they know what parts of the website they should check and what are the most common issues plaguing e-commerce companies.

Why working with Shopify experts is great for e-commerce companies?

Getting the help of a Shopify consultant does come with some upfront costs since they typically charge on an hourly basis. However, the benefits they can bring to both small and large e-commerce businesses are definitely worth the price. So what exactly can you gain when asking Shopify experts for help? 

They can help you expand your e-commerce store functionality beyond basic Shopify

For small Shopify merchants that are just starting with e-commerce, the basic themes and features available are more than enough to launch their store. After a while though, it becomes pretty clear just how limited the regular Shopify platform is. The in-built tools (for example, for SEO) have only the most basic functionality, and the ready-made themes are difficult to customize. You can enhance your store capabilities with plugins from the Shopify store, but having multiple plugins installed will only slow down the website. 

Shopify consultants know enough about Shopify to help you find a way to overcome those limitations. For example, if you want to refresh the storefront theme, they can either tell you how to tailor the current design to fit your e-commerce brand better or recommend getting a custom-made theme that fits your store like a glove.

So if you are looking for someone who will help you update your web design or functionality but you aren’t a tech-savvy person yourself, Shopify consultants’ skills can be a large help. 

shopify pricing calculator

They are well-versed when it comes to everything Shopify-related

There are dozens of things that need to be taken care of if you want to have your own online store running smoothly:

With so many “moving parts” inside your store, running it might sometimes get pretty confusing. For example, how do I get my website higher in search engines? Why has the page been loading so slowly recently? And how can I bring more customers to my store?

The Shopify consultants know the answers to those questions – and plenty of others. So whether you need someone to look at your brand growth strategy and give you some tips or create a migration strategy, Shopify consultants are the people you need.

But they can help you with all sorts of technical issues: from conversion rate optimization or improving search engine position to picking the right app integrations or e-commerce solutions. What’s more, they are usually on top when it comes to the newest e-commerce website trends or latest Shopify features and will be happy to tell you how you could take advantage of those to make your brand stand out. 

It saves plenty of your time

With all those tasks you need to do a day to keep the store running, you probably don’t have enough time also to read tutorials on how you can update the design or experiment with new plugins. And when there’s an issue that affects how the store works, you probably want to get it fixed as soon as possible rather than spend weeks trying different things out. 

A Shopify consultant, on the other hand, might only need to glance at your website to find where exactly the problem lies since they’ve solved dozens of challenges over the years. That way, they can fix the issue much faster than you could – and also give you some valuable tips on how to prevent those issues from appearing again.

When it comes to more complicated and time-consuming issues meanwhile, like performance or UX optimization projects, you can leave the matter entirely to Shopify experts. While they will work on solving the problem for you, you’ll be free to run your e-commerce business as usual.

It boosts your store’s growth

The experience of Shopify consultants can also be invaluable if you are looking for tips on how to grow your brand further. For example, let’s say your shop has outgrown the platform you are using now, and you are considering migration to Shopify. However, you are worried that something might happen during the move, and then you’ll have to put the entire website on downtime to fix the issues. 

Shopify consultants can help you plan the migration projects in steps and prepare everything you need for a smooth migration. In the same way, they can help you prepare for launching on the international market or upgrade from basic Shopify to Shopify Plus.

Download our free e-book and find out how to migrate to Shopify step by step 

It improves SEO

The better your Shopify store’s ranking in the search engines, the more customers will learn about it and maybe buy something from you. That’s why keeping an eye on search engine position and SEO rankings is so important nowadays.

However, while Shopify does have a few in-built tools to boost your position in the search engines, they are pretty limited when it comes to features. You can find far more powerful SEO apps on the Shopify marketplace, but to use them to their full power, you need to know a bit about search engine optimization rules and practices. 

What if you don’t know a thing about SEO, though? 

Shopify consultants help you with improving the search engine position as well. After auditing your website and looking at the Google Analytics metrics, they can tell you what exactly causes the low position of your store and how you can make it more search-engine friendly. 

Hiring a Shopify expert can save your money

The most significant benefit of hiring a Shopify consultant lies in how much more money they can save you, though. Yes, you will need to spend money upfront to pay for their services – but it will be money well spent.

You could try to figure out which themes or plugins you should use or read guides on how to tailor the design yourself. However, it could be difficult to focus on those tasks when there are so many store-related things that happen every day – and then you might make a costly mistake. 

For example, let’s say you are trying to customize the theme using one of the available guides online. You got distracted by phone calls though, and you made a mistake that caused one of the parts of the theme to stop working – and you don’t know how to turn the theme back to how it was. You will now probably have to hire a professional team who will fix the theme and then customize it for you – so pay double the cost.

If you asked a Shopify consultant about how to customize the theme earlier, you could either get a detailed guide on how to do it yourself or you would be introduced to someone who could do it. That way, you would both save yourself a lot of frustration but also avoid having to pay for fixing the mistakes later on. 

It’s even more important to ask for their opinion when it comes to your store launch or platform migration projects, as the consultants can point out the mistakes or problems you might encounter during the project. That way, you could avoid spending much more on the project than you initially planned – or covering for an unsuccessful e-commerce site launch or migration. 

When to approach a Shopify consultant?

As you can see, a consultant can assist you in various areas and help you avoid multiple issues over time. But when exactly should you reach out to them?

We would say – whenever you need expert advice. Whether you are just starting out and need some tips on design or functionalities, have issues you don’t know how to fix, or are planning for future growth, Shopify consulting services are the best place to start. 

However, before scheduling a meeting with them, you should think about what your specific needs are – for example, creating a custom tool integration, redesigning the website, or improving user experience. This is because the more you tell the consultants about your needs and current problems, the easier it will be for them to find the right solution – for example, connecting you with API development or UX designers.

Once you have noted down the needs for the consulting service, you can start looking for Shopify consulting companies. However, we would advise that you stay careful here.

After you google the “Shopify consulting services” term, you’ll see thousands of pages from people and companies that claim they offer such services – often for a much lower price than Shopify agencies have. Once you take up their offer though, it might turn out that they don’t understand your business niche, don’t have the knowledge or skills needed to help you with a technical issue, or that their suggestions only make the issues at the store worse. 

By hiring a Shopify consultant from a certified agency meanwhile, you can be sure that you are talking with people who have years of experience in everything related to Shopify. While the hourly prices of hiring them will be definitely higher than the prices of some consultant services you can find online, you can be sure that those people will have the knowledge and skills needed to help you with an issue – so paying more for hiring a certified consultant is definitely worth it.

What our consultants can do for your Shopify store

If you’ve been struggling with some issues for a while, or you want someone to take a look at your e-commerce strategy for future growth and give you some expert tips, why not contact the Shopify consultants in the WeCanFly agency? We’ve worked with many e-commerce brands over the years and helped them expand their stores, so chances are we’ll know how to make your e-commerce brand shine too. 

Here’s what we are especially good at:

  • Shopify development and customisation consulting – Whether you need advice on how to build a new Shopify store or how you could implement custom functionality in the existing one, we’ll surely come up with some recommendations.
  • Shopify integration consulting – If you are struggling with integrating your current e-commerce tool stack (like CRM or PIM platform) into the store, we can lend a hand here. We can also build a custom tool integration via our API development services if needed. 
  • Shopify store migration consulting – Moving from a different e-commerce platform to Shopify? We can help with everything related to the migration: from picking the theme and plugins to integrating other e-commerce tools with the store and optimizing the performance and user experience.  
  • Shopify e-commerce store growth consulting – If you need an expert to look at your launch or growth strategy and give you some expert advice, we are here for you. Also, if you’re thinking about moving to Shopify Plus but aren’t sure if it’s the right thing to do, we can clear the doubts.

Conclusion

In Shopify, you can easily modify many things yourself if you have enough time, skills and are willing to learn something new. What if you don’t have the time or abilities though? Then Shopify consultants will be happy to help you – whether you need assistance with online store setup, conversion rate optimization, troubleshooting, growth strategy, or more.

So if you are currently struggling with a technical issue or wondering how should you grow your store, how about booking a call with WeCanFly consultants? Since they know what works on Shopify and what doesn’t, thanks to working with multiple e-commerce brands over the years, they will surely know how to bring your store’s full potential – and keep people coming to your store.