kicked off the proceedings with an overview of the latest Shopify stats, news, and product developments to support partners. Shopify now has more than 16,000 partners, 170 experts, and 10 Shopify Plus partners across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and the Shopify app ecosystem is just as dynamic. There are over 1,500 apps in the Shopify App Store, over 1,000 unique app developers, and over 33,000 app downloads in total. Piotrowicz then discussed the many improvements to the Shopify platform over the past year that benefited partners and merchants, including Shopify Card Reader, JS Buy SDK, and Shopkey. Session: ‘Building a Web Agency: Specialization, Scaling and Culture’ A day with Shopify a community making connections.
We make websites We Makes Websites co-founder Piers Thorogood shared insights on building the UK’s leading Shopify agency. Piers Thorogood, co-founder of We Make Websites, spoke about the lessons he learned while growing his agency in London. “The best decision we made as an agency was to specialize,” he explained. “Choosing a niche simplified everything; our Peru Email List marketing became much easier as we had a clear target market, sales were easier to close as all of our clients shared the same problems, and website building became easier as we could reuse more of our code ”. Specialization and finding your own niche is the key to becoming an expert and standing out from the crowd. Pick a vertical you want to cater to (eg fashion) and then define your audience.
Session: ‘around the World in Four Apps
For We Make Websites, the ideal client at the time was a London-based startup or small business that was already familiar with Shopify and wanted to sell design-focused physical products online. Once you’ve defined your audience, put a lot of effort into content marketing and make yourself visible through blogs, meetups, talks, videos, and podcasts. To scale, We Make Websites hired marketers before production staff and built relationships that would nurture leads (partnering with an SEO agency, for example). One way to generate recurring revenue, Thorogood argued, is to simply double prices, which worked wonders for We Make Websites. “One of the key things we’ve done that fueled our growth, and kept things in check as we’ve grown, is make everything a process.
Whether it’s creating proposals, designing and building websites, or hiring new staff, we have a process for everything, and we’re constantly refining it.” Culture is also very important to building a successful agency and something We Make Websites initially neglected, Thorogood admitted. However, building a culture where people care about and enjoy what they do is vital to building a successful agency. Define your values and stick to them, Thorogood suggested. Implementing them won’t be easy, and you can’t please every customer, sometimes you just have to get rid of one customer. Improve and develop your team by conducting post-project reviews, monthly one-on-one meetings, design and code reviews, leading the team to celebrate success and giving them 10 percent of their time to work on side projects.
A Journey Into the Shopify App Ecosystem’
You may also be interested in: 7 years of activity. 7 Tips. How ‘We Make Websites’ Became #1 Session. Around the World in Four Apps: A Journey into the Shopify App Ecosystem. A day with Shopify a community making connections – space squirrel Space Squirrel proved that. You can live a nomadic lifestyle and still produce successful Shopify apps. Space Squirrel’s Dom and Djuro showed the audience that. You can travel the world and work remotely, while producing successful. Shopify apps with very limited resources. Like their image compression and optimization app Crush.pics. It’s important as an app developer to be present on both the backend. And the front end of your app,” Djuro explained. What we mean by this is that once you develop and launch the app. You should stay with it and improve it. How?
