Picture two quotes for the same Shopify shop. Both say “Shopify web design” across the top — word for word — one a few hundred pounds, the other a thousand more, and nothing on either page tells you why. The confusion is completely reasonable, because the part you’re paying for is the part you can’t see.
That gap is what I want to talk about this week.
“Shopify web designer” isn’t a qualification. It’s three words anyone can put on a profile. The person who’ll recolour a free theme for two hundred quid uses exactly the same phrase as the person who can move twenty-four thousand customers onto Shopify without losing a single ranking. The title tells you nothing. The work is everything, and almost all of it is invisible on the call.
Choosing a theme and changing the colours takes an afternoon. It’s the smallest part of the job and the only part you can see on the call — which is exactly why the weak end of the trade spends all its energy there. The work that actually decides whether a shop makes money sits underneath: how the products are structured so customers and Google can both make sense of them, the Merchant Centre feed that decides what your ads show, the checkout and shipping where the money either lands or quietly doesn’t.
A beautiful store that leaks at checkout is the most expensive website there is. You pay for it twice — once to build it, and again in every sale it quietly loses.
The reason it’s so hard to spot up front is that the failures are silent. A buried product looks identical to a findable one until you check the rankings. A broken feed looks fine until you check what your ads are actually showing. None of it turns up in a nice mock-up. All of it turns up in your sales.
You don’t need to follow the technical side to sort the builder from the decorator. You ask one question and listen to where the answer goes: when something breaks at checkout, who fixes it, and how fast? The decorator handed over a theme and moved on. The builder owns the thing that takes the money. I’ve written the whole thing up — the three questions that do the sorting, and what each price point actually buys — in how to choose a Shopify web designer.
And if you’re a step before that, not even sure Shopify is the right place to land, I’ve put the honest version of the platform question next to it: WooCommerce or Shopify and Wix or Shopify, written for the person actually weighing it up rather than for whichever platform I’d rather sell.
That’s the thread through all of it. The title’s the same on every quote. The work isn’t — and now you know where to look for the difference.
Tony Cooper
We Build Stores
tony.cooper@webuildstores.co.uk
07963 242210
P.S. If you’ve got a quote in front of you and you can’t tell what you’re actually buying, forward it to me. I’ll tell you straight which parts are real work and which parts are just the afternoon on the colours — no charge, no pitch.
