The single most useful question to ask before hiring a Shopify developer is this: if we stop working together next Friday, what do I have? If the answer involves logging into somebody else's GitHub, emailing a freelancer for a theme ZIP, or resetting a password on an app subscription tied to an address you don't control, you've found the problem before you've paid for it. Everything below is a longer version of that one question, broken into the seventeen we ask on the other side of the table when merchants come to us mid-rescue.
Most of these have a correct answer. A good developer will give it to you in a sentence, without getting defensive. That reaction is half the information you're buying.
Ownership: who owns the Shopify theme code after the project
Under Indian copyright law, a commissioned piece of software doesn't automatically belong to the person who paid for it unless the contract says so. Work-for-hire assumptions from US contracts don't transfer neatly. So this needs to be on paper.
1. Who owns the theme code and any custom app code on delivery, and which clause says so? The answer you want: you own it, assigned on final payment, in writing. A developer retaining a licence to reuse generic helper code is normal and fine. A developer retaining ownership of your product template is not.
2. Which Git repository does the work live in, and whose account owns the organisation? Your account. Add the developer as a collaborator. We push to client-owned repos as a default and it has never once cost us anything. Anyone who insists their repo is the only way it can work is telling you something.
3. Is this a custom theme, a paid theme, or your own reused base theme, and what is the licence? Plenty of agencies build on an internal starter theme. That's efficient. But ask whether you can hand that theme to a different developer in two years without a licence problem. If the base is a ₹35,000 marketplace theme, you should know that too, because the price you're paying should reflect it.
Accounts and access: the thing that actually strands merchants
We take over stores where the previous developer's personal Gmail owns the Klaviyo account, the Razorpay dashboard login, the Google Search Console property and four paid app subscriptions. Recovering those takes weeks. Sometimes it takes a chargeback.
4. Whose email will be on every third-party account, and who pays the app subscriptions? Yours, and you. If billing runs through Shopify, that's cleaner still. Never let a developer put a paid app on their card and invoice you for it.
5. Will you work through a staff account or a collaborator request, and what permissions do you need? Collaborator access is free, doesn't consume a staff seat, and you can revoke it in two clicks. Permissions should be scoped: themes, apps, products, yes. Payouts and customer PII, only if there's a reason. Ask them to state the reason.
6. What custom logic will sit outside the theme, and where is it written down? This is the one merchants forget. Metafield definitions, Shopify Flow workflows, discount Functions, checkout UI extensions, a Cloudflare Worker doing a redirect, a Google Tag Manager container with six triggers. None of it lives in the theme repo. If it isn't documented, the next developer will find it by breaking it.
Scope: how to write a Shopify project scope document that survives contact with reality
A scope document is not a proposal. A proposal sells. A scope doc constrains. The version that works is boring: a list of templates, and for each one, the sections it contains and the states it must handle.
So the product page entry reads something like: variant picker with swatches, size chart drawer, pincode serviceability check, COD-eligible badge, EMI text, sticky add-to-cart on mobile, out-of-stock state, pre-order state, bundle upsell block. Ten lines. Now nobody argues in week five about whether the size chart was included.
7. Can I see the scope as a template-by-template list before I pay? If the proposal is three paragraphs and a price, ask for this. A developer who won't write it either hasn't thought about your store or is planning to bill the thinking as change requests.
8. What is explicitly out of scope? Get the exclusions listed. Content writing, product photography, data entry for 900 SKUs, ERP integration, GST invoice PDF customisation, migrating 40,000 customer records with their order history. Each of those is real work. We've seen all of them assumed into a fixed price and then fought over. If you want a sense of what the pieces cost separately, our breakdown of Shopify development pricing in India lays out the ranges honestly, including where a cheaper option is the right call.
Staging and QA: what to ask a Shopify agency before signing
9. Where do I review the work in progress? A development store or an unpublished theme on your live store, shared as a preview link, updated at least weekly. Screenshots in a WhatsApp group are not a staging environment. And ask what happens to the dev store's data at handover, because theme settings and metafields do not move across stores by themselves.
10. What's on your India checkout QA list? This is where generic offshore work falls over. The list should include: a real ₹1 order through Razorpay or PayU or Cashfree on UPI, a card, and a netbanking flow; COD placed and cancelled; the COD fee or partial-prepaid logic if you use it; pincode serviceability against your Delhivery or Shiprocket coverage; GST rate applied correctly per HSN across a multi-rate cart; the tax invoice generating with your GSTIN and place of supply; the order pushing to your shipping panel with the right weight and dimensions. Ask them to name the ones they've broken before. Honest developers have a story here.
11. What mobile speed number are you committing to, on which page, measured how? Most Indian traffic is mid-range Android on a mobile network. Desktop Lighthouse scores are theatre. Ask for a target LCP on the product template, throttled, measured after the apps are installed rather than before, because the apps are usually the problem: a review widget, a WhatsApp button, a chat script and two pixels will happily add 900ms of blocking JavaScript. If you want to watch the number yourself between releases, SwiftStore tracks it and fixes the easy wins, and we go deeper on the hard ones in speed optimisation work.
12. What's the delivery date, and where does it sit relative to the festive freeze? Nobody sane pushes a new theme live in the second week of October. If your build is landing anywhere near Navratri, agree now that the cutoff is a fortnight before your first campaign goes hot, and that anything unfinished ships in November. We have had this argument with clients and lost it, then spent Diwali weekend patching a cart drawer. Once was enough.
Post-launch support: what to ask, precisely
13. What's included after launch, for how long, and what counts as a bug versus a change? Two to four weeks of bug fixes at no cost is standard. A bug is the thing not doing what the scope says. A change is you deciding the thing should do something else. Get the distinction written down or you'll pay for one and call it the other.
14. If checkout breaks on a Sunday, who do I call and how fast do they answer? Ask for the channel, the hours, and the name of the person. Then ask what happens when that person is on leave. A retainer with a four-hour response window during a sale period is worth real money; a promise of "we're always available" is worth nothing.
How to protect a deposit paid to a Shopify developer
15. What does the payment schedule look like, and what triggers each release? Tie money to deliverables, not to dates. Here's a schedule we'd defend on a ₹4,80,000 build: ₹1,44,000 (30%) on signing to cover discovery and design; ₹1,68,000 (35%) when every template is built and reviewable on staging; ₹1,20,000 (25%) at launch; ₹48,000 (10%) thirty days after launch, once the support window closes. That last 10% is the whole point. It's the reason the handover documentation actually arrives.
16. What's on the invoice? GSTIN and 18% GST if they're registered. If they're not registered, ask why not at that project value. Your finance team will also want the TDS position sorted before the first payment, not after. And ask for a written hourly or per-change rate card, because you will have change requests and you don't want to negotiate them from a position of dependency.
17. If your lead developer leaves mid-build, what do I already have? The honest answer is a list: the repo in your org with real commits, the staging preview, the Figma file, the credentials in your own password manager, and a running document of decisions. If all of that is true on day 20, a developer walking away costs you a few weeks. If none of it is true, it costs you the project.
Shopify developer red flags to watch for
- A quote that arrives in under an hour with no questions about your catalogue size, apps, or how COD works for you.
- Refusal to give you Git access, or the phrase "we'll hand over the files at the end."
- Portfolio links that 404, or stores where the credit line at the footer belongs to someone else. Check three.
- 100% payment upfront. Sometimes justifiable for a ₹25,000 job. Never for a ₹5,00,000 one.
- Editing the live theme directly instead of a duplicate. If they do this during the sales pitch, they'll do it in December.
- No named point of contact, and a project run entirely through a group chat with no written scope.
- Promises about ranking, or a specific conversion-rate percentage. Nobody can commit to that and the ones who do are guessing.
Questions to ask a Shopify freelancer that differ from an agency
Freelancers are often the right choice. A capable independent developer at ₹1,200–2,500 an hour will out-work a mid-tier agency on a focused build, and you're not paying for account management you don't need. The trade-off is concentration risk, so the questions shift.
Ask how many projects they're running concurrently right now, and what their notice period looks like if they take a full-time role. Ask who covers them if they're ill during your launch week. Ask whether they carry the Shopify Partner account themselves, which matters for collaborator access. Then keep the deposit small and the milestones tight, because with a solo developer the milestone structure is your only real protection.
With an agency, the useful questions are different: who specifically is on my build, what's their experience level, and will that change without telling me. Bait-and-switch on staffing is the standard agency failure. Ask for the developer's name in the contract. We put ours in. If you're weighing the two routes, we wrote about the actual differences in hiring a Shopify developer in India.
The short FAQ version
Should the handover include documentation, and what kind? Yes, and it should be short. A README in the repo covering the build commands and the theme structure, a list of metafield definitions and what reads them, a list of installed apps and what each one does, and the credentials location. Ten pages, not a hundred. Ask to see an example from a past project with the client details removed.
Can I ask for a paid trial task instead of a full contract? Absolutely, and it's the best filter there is. Pay for one well-scoped piece: a filtered collection page, or a pincode-check block on the product template. Two weeks, real money, real code review. You'll learn more than any interview does.
What if the developer already built my store and I'm reading this too late? Do the audit anyway. Transfer the repo, move the app billing onto your Shopify invoice, replace the collaborator access with a scoped one, and get the metafield map written down while the person who built it still answers your messages. That's a two-day job now and a two-month job later.
If you want a second pair of eyes on a proposal that's already on your desk, send it over with the scope doc and we'll tell you what's missing from it — the audit is free and we'll say so plainly if the quote in front of you is a fair one.