Hiring an Ecommerce Agency: The Complete navigator

Hiring an ecommerce agency is a huge step for any store owner—but it doesn’t have to be a scary one. There are a wide array of options for partners who can assist construct your app, launch your store, or reach more customers.

If you haven’t hired an ecommerce agency before, though, the procedure can feel pretty intimidating. Is it worth the stake distribution? Should you hire or outsource? What benevolent of agency do you even require?

Ahead, discover everything you require to recognize to make your ecommerce agency hire a huge achievement.

What is an ecommerce agency?

An ecommerce agency is a B2B business that offers a range of professional services intended to assist ecommerce companies meet their business goals. Ecommerce agencies can assist businesses with digital marketing, content creation, SEO schedule, social media management, and tons more.

Why hire an ecommerce agency

There are major benefits to hiring an ecommerce agency, and the most significant is this: As a store owner, you require to focus on running your business without the added stress and job load that comes from tasks that can be easily and expertly handled by an ecommerce agency.

But let’s walk through the other reasons that will make you desire to book your first agency consultation conference.

You’ll get faster results

Hiring an agency is much faster and more efficient than hiring recent employees. This is because you require to train a recent employee, while agencies are talented at hitting the ground running. Also, an agency comes with an entire throng of strategists ready to assist you develop your business.

As an ecommerce business, you require an agency that’s well-versed in working with online stores and can ensure quick results in your industry niche.

For example, footwear brand Jack Rogers hired an ecommerce agency to assist it ramp up direct-to-customer sales. The popular sandal brand had long seen achievement placing its products in department stores, but was hoping to enhance its online sales as well.

Its initial ecommerce platform was clunky and period-consuming, so it brought on Shopify Service associate P3 Media, an agency with encounter migrating ecommerce stores over to Shopify websites.

With this hire, Jack Rogers’ recent and improved online store became one of the business’s top distribution channels: traffic increased by 60%, and conversions improved by 30%.

You get access to specialized expertise

By hiring an agency, you get a throng of experts well versed in the exact job at hand. While it may seem beneficial to make a single hire that can manage everything, marketers who can specialize provide better results in their area of expertise.

Someone who can specialize in Google Ads is going to have a much better grasp of the subject than someone who does Google Ads alongside ecommerce website management, content marketing, email marketing, and more.

For example, let’s declare your online store faces a complicated technical issue with your website. Your in-house marketer who has created and implemented your entire marketing schedule and can handle minor website updates likely won’t have the recognize-how to deal with an in-depth technical issue.

Instead, you can hire an ecommerce agency with web developers who can pinpoint the issue and solve the issue in less than a day’s work—whereas your in-house marketer may require to spend weeks researching, playing around with your website, and pulling out their hair before they’re able to discover a answer.

Shopify’s specialist marketplace can assist you discover a service associate specializing in anything from migrations and internationalization to marketing and analytics.

You get an outside perspective

If you’re running out of ideas, hiring an agency can bring a fresh perspective to your store. Agencies work with a wide variety of clients and bring those best practices to your business.

When you’re running your own business, it can be challenging to view other opportunities available to you, other than what you’ve already been doing. Hiring an agency gives you that essential outside perspective that can open you up to recent ideas and tactics.

You can save money

Agencies aren’t inexpensive, but they’re often much cheaper than bringing on a packed-period employee or throng. With an agency, you can bring on the knowledge and encounter you require, without the expense and commitment of a packed-period employee.

Plus, to have a fully specialized marketing throng, you’d require to hire more than just one single person. And that can add up quickly.

Let’s receive a look at some going rates for marketers:

• Digital marketer: $39,281 to $133,248, depending on their level of expertise
• Social media manager: $53,221
• Content marketing manager: $76,595
• Email marketing manager: $84,244
• Paid search manager: $89,181
• SEO manager: $86,520

And that doesn’t even include benefits, vacation pay, and business perks, as well as monthly fees for marketing software your throng will require access to. If you hire all of the above, you’re looking at an annual expense of nearly $490,000, or more than $40,000 per month.

With an agency—depending on the deliverables you desire—you can get access to a packed throng of experts for anywhere from $2,000 to $15,000 each month, which is far less than you’d pay for the aforementioned in-house throng.

Types of ecommerce agencies

Just like marketers specialize in various services, some ecommerce agencies do as well. Many propose packed-service marketing options, but there are also different types of ecommerce agencies you might desire to hire for something specific.

Ecommerce marketing agencies

An ecommerce marketing agency is typically a digital marketing agency that works solely with ecommerce companies. This specialization in itself is their way of niching down—but everything else they provide helps with any type of marketing campaign across the board.

Brands looking to hire an ecommerce marketing agency typically desire to boost brand awareness, develop a bigger online presence, and turn social media followers into customers.

ordinary services ecommerce marketing companies propose include:

• Digital schedule
• Social media marketing and management
• Content creation
• Search marketing
• Online advertising, like paid social and PPC ads
• Influencer marketing
• throng management
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

Ecommerce SEO agencies

An ecommerce SEO agency focuses on generating organic traffic to a website through search engine optimization (SEO). This schedule typically involves creating landing pages and blog content that is keyword optimized in order to assist ecommerce brands rank at the top of search engine results.

By hiring an ecommerce SEO agency, you’ll construct up the domain authority of your website, increasing your search engine rank and bringing in more website traffic. And more website traffic means more potential customers.

Ecommerce advancement agencies

An ecommerce web design and advancement agency helps retail companies make well-oiled online stores through ecommerce platforms like Shopify. Creating the online shopping functionality and ensuring the website is straightforward to navigate is key for ramping up an ecommerce brand’s sales.

Let’s receive a look at this case study, where Shopify associate agency Able Sense helped shift Stanfield’s website from Magento to Shopify. In doing so, Stanfield’s saw a 168% boost in conversion rate, a 20% growth in average order worth (AOV), and a 59% boost in total transactions.

Ecommerce advancement agencies focus on the user encounter, or UX design, to ensure your website works well for your customers. They’ll set up essential integrations for your remittance processor as well as your chosen marketing channels. Many also specialize in graphic design to ensure they can make stunning visuals for your site.

When is the correct period to hire an ecommerce agency?

If you’re considering hiring an ecommerce agency, there are some inform-account signs that you’re ready—either from a decline in your shop’s act or due to an boost in your day-to-day job load in running your own business.

Let’s walk through some of the top reasons for hiring an ecommerce agency and what they could do to assist.

You’re seeing a decline in sales

If you’ve been doing a great job of growing your business by yourself and watching more and more sales arrive in, but all of a sudden you’re starting to view a decline or stagnation, you might desire to enlist outside assist.

For an issue like this, you can hire a packed-service ecommerce agency that can assist in auditing your website to view if there are any user encounter issues, as well as ramping up recent marketing campaigns to reach even more customers.

You’re launching a recent product

If you’re launching a recent product, hiring an agency can be a better way of generating buzz. While your own marketing efforts can likely make a tiny buzz, enlisting the assist of a throng of professionals can assist make your launch even more successful.

For example, Shopify associate Slicedbread helped air purifier business Molekule validate its product concept and sell out two pre-launches, results Molekule likely wouldn’t have seen anything close to on its own.

You’re lacking the essential skills in-house

When you’re first starting, you’re likely one of the only employees—if not the only—which means you might not have the skills to make your own website design, set up your online store, make social media content, and more.

This is where an agency comes in. Once you’ve built up your business enough to have consistent income, investing in an ecommerce agency can ramp up your sales, putting even more in your pockets in the long run.

You’re breaking into a recent economy

Breaking into a recent economy—whether with a recent product launch or as a part of a localization schedule—can be a tough enterprise. This is why many brands enlist the assist of agencies with encounter in this type of business growth.

Skin worry business The Beauty Chef enlisted the assist of Shopify associate Elephant Room with its globalization schedule. The brand wanted to branch out into US and UK markets, so Elephant Room helped set up and launch the essential web pages to do so.

You’re running out of period to handle things yourself

Running an online business takes up a lot of period—even more so if you’re hand-making the products you sell. As the business owner, you have a lot of other tasks on your plate, from order fulfillment and updating product listings to financial reporting and customer service.

If you’re finding yourself struggling to recall to post on social media or write blog content, you might desire to outsource these tasks to an agency. This way, you’re able to focus on running your business while the agency handles your marketing schedule.

You don’t enjoy marketing

If you despise marketing, don’t force it. economy just enough to get your business off the ground, then immediately outsource it. Finding an agency associate can be a long-lasting working connection that helps exponentially develop your business—and you don’t have to lift a finger.

How to select the best ecommerce agency for your store

Now that you recognize why and when you’d consider hiring an ecommerce agency for your store, let’s focus on the next large question. How do you discover the correct fit? Let’s walk through our step-by-step navigator for ensuring you hire the agency that can receive your business to the next level.

1. Determine what you require

What are your goals?

Goals could include:

• Increasing monthly sales
• Increasing traffic to your ecommerce store
• Improving the user encounter on your website
• Launching a recent product
• Increasing brand awareness
• Generating more online followers

Make sure your agency’s goals align with your overall business goals.

The next step is to do some preliminary research about the work. For example, you can discover instances of other businesses doing something similar to what you desire. This can assist your agency to better assist you, because it gives it a obvious example of what you’re looking to achieve.

Once you have that information, it’s period to clearly define your monetary schedule, timeline, and the desired results. The more specific, the better. Having this information will make sure you weed out any agencies that are out of your monetary schedule, have a waiting list, or aren’t able to display proven results similar to what you’re looking for.

2. Consider your monetary schedule

monetary schedule is crucial when hiring an ecommerce agency because they don’t arrive cheap. You require to be at a point in your business where you’re comfortable spending several thousand dollars per month to hire an agency.

So your first step is to work out how much you’re willing to spend, and how quickly you desire to view results. Different factors will affect your monetary schedule, like timelines, the scope of work, and the overall complexity of the assignment, but keep in mind that many agencies can adjust their engagement to meet your monetary schedule.

3. discover the correct fit

Now it’s period to commence looking for agencies that propose the type of assist you’re looking for. First, commence by browsing through Shopify’s associate list—with agencies hand-picked for their deep knowledge and successful track record—to discover someone that you recognize you can work with or who can migrate you to a Shopify website.

Once you discover a few options by filtering results based on the services you’re looking for, it’s period to commence scouting their websites. Look through history work and reviews to view if any agencies have shared case studies and proven results with businesses similar to yours. Or you can make a job and connect with qualified and award-winning agencies based on your specifications.

Look history technical expertise, as well. A few other things to consider before choosing your agency include:

• Assess cultural and personal fit: Make sure your chosen agency takes the period to listen to your needs.
• Assess location: How straightforward will it be to collaborate with your chosen agency?
• Assess their track record: Have they worked with stores like yours?

Once you’ve pinpointed a tiny handful of agencies you’re most interested in, it’s period to get in touch and commence vetting them directly.

4. Interview your chosen agency

Reach out to your chosen agency or agencies via their website’s contact form. Most ecommerce agencies propose a free consultation or initial conference so the two of you can discover more about each other and how a collaboration might look.

During this conference, you have the chance to interview your agency. Their objective is to make the sale, but you desire to be sure it’s going to be a excellent fit.

Bring along some of these questions to assist gauge whether the agency you’re chatting with is the best one for the job:

• Who (if anyone) are you working with/have you worked with in my industry? What did you do for them and what were the results?
• Who will be working on my account? How does communication with that throng member work? How often do we meet or have planning discussions?
• Is the work all done in-house or do you outsource to freelancers or contractors? How do you decide which freelancers to work with and what is their encounter level?
• What does the onboarding procedure look like?
• What will be expected of me and my throng as a client?
• What does your workflow look like? How will we be informed of the results?
• When was the last period you lost a client? What happened?

Add anything else that you’re curious about to your list and leave to any meetings prepared so you can get the most out of your agency-client connection.

5. Review (and receive) their proposal

Once you’ve had your initial consultation, the agency will put together a proposal based on the services you’re interested in.

The rationale why your first conference with an agency is so significant is to ensure the proposal they provide you with accurately represents the type of work you’re looking to have them do, minimizing miscommunication and the require to leave back and forth before putting together the correct information.

Review the proposal they send over to make sure it matches your goals and your monetary schedule.

6. Make the hire

After the proposal, you should be sent a deal to sign and kick off the assignment! Once that part is done, the agency will get you started with its onboarding procedure, ensuring it has all the information it needs.

Your next step is to sit back and let the agency commence its work. remain on top of communication so it’s able to get anything it needs from you, and make sure to keep an eye on results so you recognize the agency’s strategies are working.

But the biggest thing is that you can now focus fully on running your business and getting your day-to-day tasks done without having to worry about marketing.

Don’t rush the procedure

Hiring the correct ecommerce agency is a large selection. Use the tools available to choose the correct one, inquire lots of questions, and don’t be afraid to receive your period. Working with an agency can be a great selection, helping ramp up ecommerce growth and exponentially boost your reach and customer base.