Hiring a Shopify Plus development agency can be a great strategic decision to take your store to the next level. 

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This can also be a daunting decision that must be made with care. Just like how hiring the right agency can take your brands to new records, the wrong agency can put your brand months behind projections. 

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There are a lot of different kinds of agencies out there all with different specialties, especially on the website front.

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Some are heavily design focused and specialize in creating art piece style websites. These kinds of agencies create incredible websites, however, these show piece style websites often aren’t the best performing sites and can actually have negative impacts to the bottom line.

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For most ambitious founders, partnering with a performance Shopify agency like 253 Media, can help unlock new profit levels.

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If you think a better performing website could help your brand, keep reading to learn more about the process we take our brands through to consistently grow their businesses.

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To give you a high level overview, here are a few of the key areas that our teams focus on throughout our process.

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1. Website performance: conversion rates, average order value, revenue per visitor, etc…
2. Marketing operations: messaging, landing pages, offer creation, etc…
3. Business operations: product structuring, internal team uses, shipping and logistics, etc… 

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With that in mind, let’s dive into our 6 step process to growing eCommerce brands.

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Discovery And Deep Dive Audit

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“Fail to plan, plan to fail.” - Benjamin Franklin. Our process all starts with our discovery phase where we create a deep dive audit into the inner workings of your brand. 

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This is where we gather all of the information we need to build a high-performance. We start with learning about your vision and plan of attack for the next 6, 12, and 24-36 months. This is how we can future proof your store and build a foundation that can grow with you over time.

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Then we dive into your data. We look at your store analytics, your heatmap and customer journey and even your ad and email performance analytics. This gives us a ton of insight into your customer behavior as well as what is actually important to their buying decision.

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Then we take things a step further and analyze your customer service data and customer surveys. What questions are your customers asking? With this information, we are dial in your messaging and make sure all relevant information is on your website. 

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Remember, your website has one purpose: give your customers the information they need to make an educated buying decision.

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Once we have all of this information, we can build our growth plan.

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Build Your Growth Plan

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The growth acts as the stepping stone from discovery to design and lays the foundation for the rest of the project.

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Remember, the goal is to build something that works seamlessly with your marketing plan while building value with your customers. 

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Taking all of the information from the discovery phase, we can build a complete website strategy that maps out the site architecture and base theme (free, premium, or custom), app stack, and customer journey. The growth plan also outlines messaging and offers that we can use to build the new site.

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Lastly, the growth plans also details how the site will function with marketing efforts: where traffic should be directed from different campaigns, special offer landing pages, bundles, etc…

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Once we have a solid plan of attack, we are ready to get into design!

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Figma To Shopify Design

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Now the fun begins and we can start connecting the dots from strategy to implementation. At 253 Media, we design every Shopify store in Figma before writing a line of code. 

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This allows us to design mobile and desktop specific experiences, map out static and dynamic content, and strategically build the right page templates that make sense for your store both marketing wise and operationally.

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For example, some stores need 1 or two product page templates with meta fields throughout and some need 10 static pages. Every store is different and planning this out in the design phase can save a ton of time in the long run.

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Plus, by using Figma, we can see everything from a birdseye view which makes it clear how everything flows together.

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Last but not least, as we wrap up the design phase, we take your store design through our sectionalization process. By strategically building brand specific sections, we can do two important things:

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1. Develop your store quickly with consistent branding and functions.
2. Create the ability to make additional custom pages and landing pages in the future in record time. 

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Once design is approved with desktop and mobile, we are ready to head to Shopify and get to development!

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Shopify Plus Development

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Because we planned ahead through discovery, growth, and design, development is a walk in the park and typically goes quickly because we know exactly what we are building.

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Starting with our primary pages (home and product pages), we can get a bulk of the sections built out and approved. From there, we can build the rest of the sitemap.

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During the development phase, we often need to update product and collection structures. If you aren’t well versed in Shopify’s ecosystem, this can be risky if you have a live site because your live site can be affected with product changes, so we take extreme care to ensure your live site goes unaffected.

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In addition to the actual store development, this is always when we implement the appropriate app stack.

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Thankfully, this is easy because we mapped out the app stack in the growth guide around exactly what we need to get the most out of your site.

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One thing that’s nice about working with a full-stack development team like 253 Media, we are able to build a lot of custom functionality without needing apps, which saves you time and money in the long run! However, there are definitely areas on your site where it makes sense to use apps such as for reviews, subscriptions, data collection and storage, etc…  

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If you need help with apps, click here to browse our eCommerce Expert approved app stack.

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Once your new store is built, we go through a rigorous testing process to QC everything. In this phase, our goal is to find holes in the store. We get fresh sets of eyes on it and tell our other teammates to break something.

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This is important because we want to test and debug the site as much as humanly possible before going live so we can have a buttery smooth launch process.

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Once everyone is confident, we can take the new site live!

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Monitor

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Once the site is live, our work is far from over. Now it’s time for the monitor phase.

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In other words, this is where we make sure the site is actually performing as we expect it to. 

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Is the site fast? Are conversions and key store vitals improving as we are expecting? How are our new heatmaps and scroll depths looking? 

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Just like with anything in life, there is no guarantee and even the best strategies can fail, so following through and making sure everything is going to plan is crucial for success.

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But what if something isn’t performing as expected?

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We fix it.

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Just like that.

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Remember, our job is to deliver you a world-class product that helps you reach your goals and we do what it takes to get you there.

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Scale Your Store

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Typically alongside the monitor phase, we step into the scale phase as well. Now that your new site is live and performing well, we can start ramping up ad spend and improving email strategies to drive more traffic to your site.

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Whether you do this in-house, with another agency, or with our growth team, we will work alongside your teams to make sure scaling is smooth and efficient.

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This is also when we can start A/B testing other ideas that came up throughout our project. As we go through planning, design, and dev, we always come up with test ideas to try once the new site is built. This allows us to squeeze even more juice out of your site!

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At this point, site improvements come though strategic A/B tests which are really a never ending process, especially as your business grows and expands.

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At the end of the day, every agency process is unique and can work for them, however, after working with 350+ brands since 2017, this is the process we’ve built and fine tuned over the years to consistently deliver winning results for our brands.

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Think your brand could benefit from a revamped Shopify Plus store? Get in touch with our team and learn how our process can help your brand crush 2025 projections.

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