Verify These Five Things Before the First Call

All of it is checkable in about twenty minutes, without speaking to anyone.

What to check Where What good looks like
Partner tier Shopify Partner Directory A listing you can find by name, at the tier they claim
Platform currency Their blog and changelog posts They wrote about the 2026 changes while those were happening
Case studies Their own site Different numbers on different cases, and a named mechanism
Reviews Clutch, Google, the directory Dated this year, naming a project and a person
Who does the work The proposal Named roles and hours, not a headcount for the whole company

The second row matters most. 2026 removed Shopify Scripts on June 30 and force upgraded non-Plus checkouts on August 26, both quietly. An agency with nothing to say about either was not maintaining stores through it.

Expertise: Three Questions That Cannot Be Faked

Credentials describe the past. These describe the last twelve months, and the answers are either specific or they are not.

  1. What did you do about the Scripts shutdown? Shopify deactivated every published Script on June 30, 2026. A real answer names the rules they rebuilt and how they found them.
  2. Did a client lose tracking in August? Non-Plus checkouts were auto upgraded on August 26, 2026, and legacy customizations were removed rather than migrated. The honest answer is yes, then how they caught it.
  3. How do you create custom apps now? Admin created apps ended on January 1, 2026. No mention of the Dev Dashboard, the CLI or OAuth means they have not built one this year.

You do not need technical depth to score these. You are checking whether the answers contain dates or adjectives.

Pricing: Pick the Model, Then Argue About the Number

Published rate ranges travel badly: the same number means different things depending on who sits in the standup. Settle the model first.

  • Hourly. Honest about uncertainty and open ended. Right for discovery and rescue, if someone on your side watches the burn.
  • Fixed price. You buy certainty and pay a premium for the unknowns. Every change becomes a negotiation, so the specification carries the weight.
  • Monthly retainer. Right for continuous work. Without a visible backlog and a monthly report it becomes a subscription nobody reviews.
  • Performance share. Aligned in theory. It works only where attribution is clean and the agency controls enough of the funnel to answer for the result.

Whichever you pick, ask what happens when scope changes. That procedure predicts the next year better than the rate does.

Red Flags

None of these proves anything alone. Two together usually settle it.

  1. The same uplift on every case study. If four cases report one percentage, nobody measured. Real results are untidy.
  2. A firm quote before anyone opened the store. A price from a brief alone is a guess, and guesses come back as change requests.
  3. No clear answer on code ownership. Ask who holds the repository, the app and the deploy access at the end. Hesitation here is the most expensive flag on the list.
  4. No named support arrangement after launch. Ask what happens in the first week after go live, who answers during a sale, and what it costs. A build with no support plan is half a project.
  5. Marketing and development quoted separately. Two teams who never speak will each do their job correctly and still lose you the quarter in the handoff.

The last one rarely feels like a risk at signing. It shows up later as a test that won a month ago and still has not shipped. For what the first flag looks like when answered properly: Carousel Repair cut repair request processing time by 42% with a custom warranty app, and Ansandra went from 153 gift registries to more than 1,000 in eight months. Two cases, two numbers that are not the same number.

Binary Future is a Shopify partner agency in Toronto working with brands in the United States and Canada, with marketing and development in one team. See Binary Future and our Shopify development services for scope, process and the rest of the portfolio.