At the heart of our consultancy style is the idea of being customer first. But “customer first” is one of those phrases that gets used so often that, on its own, it doesn’t really mean much.
For us, it means trying to align ourselves with your business as if we were stakeholders in it. We’re not there simply to recommend the solution that creates the biggest development scope or gives us the most work. We’re there to help you understand the problem, understand the options available, and make a decision that makes sense for the business.
In practice, our approach to ecommerce consultancy is actually pretty simple: context, education, options, then a recommendation.
We Don’t Just Tell You What to Do
A lot of ecommerce decisions aren’t black and white. There usually isn’t one technically correct solution and everything else is wrong. There are different ways of solving the same problem, each with different costs, limitations and implications.
A common example in Shopify consultancy is the decision between using the platform’s native functionality and building something custom.
We could simply look at the requirement, recommend a custom solution and send through an estimate. Sometimes custom development genuinely is the right answer. It might give you more flexibility, create a better customer experience or solve a business requirement that Shopify can’t handle natively.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean it is the best decision for your business.
Instead, we’d rather explain what the native Shopify solution looks like, where its limitations are, and what you would have to compromise on by using it. Then we can explain what a custom solution would look like, what additional flexibility it gives you, how much it is likely to cost and what the longer-term implications are.
That includes things beyond the initial development cost. Does the solution need ongoing maintenance? Are you introducing additional complexity into the store? Are you taking ownership of custom code? Is that complexity justified by the value the feature creates?
Once you have that information, you’re in a much better position to make the decision.
Context Before Recommendations
It’s a little bit like going to a doctor and being handed medication without being told what the issue is, why that particular medication has been prescribed or whether there are other options available.
You might trust the recommendation, but you don’t really understand the decision.
We think good ecommerce consulting should be different. Part of our job is to give clients enough context to understand why we’re recommending something, rather than expecting them to blindly follow our advice.
This is particularly important with Shopify because there are often multiple ways to achieve the same outcome. You might be choosing between native Shopify functionality, a third-party app, a custom integration or changing the business process itself. Each option can be completely valid depending on the circumstances.
Our role is to make those trade-offs clear.
Then We Give You Our Recommendation
None of this means we sit on the fence.
Once we’ve explained the situation and laid out the options, we’ll tell you what we think you should do.
We’ve been around the block enough times to have seen a lot of ecommerce projects, platform decisions, integrations and custom builds play out over the long term. That experience is valuable, and part of what you’re paying us for is our recommendation.
Sometimes we’ll recommend spending more because we think the additional investment is justified. Other times we’ll recommend using the native Shopify functionality and saving the development budget for something more important. In some cases, we might recommend doing nothing at all.
The important part is that you understand the reasoning behind that recommendation.
Ultimately, it’s your business and your decision. Our job as an ecommerce consultancy is to make sure you have the context, education and options required to make that decision properly, and then give you our recommendation based on what we would do if we were sitting on your side of the table.