Open the Shopify Partner Directory, search the agency's name, and see what comes back. That single step settles most of the question. If there's no listing, they are either a brand-new partner account with nothing on it or they are not a Shopify Partner at all, and the logo on their homepage is a JPEG someone downloaded. If there is a listing, it will show you a tier badge, a review count with dates, a service list and a location — all of it published by Shopify rather than by the agency. Everything else in this article is about the checks you do after that, because the directory tells you whether they exist, not whether they're any good.
The directory check, done properly
Search by the legal or trading name. Agencies sometimes list under a holding company that doesn't match their website, so if the first search fails, try the founder's name or the domain. Once you're on the listing, three things are worth more than the copy:
- Review dates. A listing with a hundred reviews clustered into two weeks in 2022 and nothing since tells you more than the average score does. You want a steady drip over years. Ours shows 4.8 from 807 reviews built up since 2015, which is the shape you should be looking for on anyone you shortlist: continuous, not a burst.
- What the reviews describe. Read twenty. If every one of them says "great communication" and none names a piece of work, the merchant relationships were thin. Reviews that mention a specific migration, a checkout extension, a subscription build — those came from someone who was actually in the project.
- The service tags. Shopify lets partners pick these. An agency that has ticked every box, from branding to ERP integration to paid social, is telling you they subcontract. Not automatically a problem, but ask who does what.
One blunt fact that most merchants don't know: becoming a "Shopify Partner" is a free self-serve signup. Anyone with an email address can create a partner account this afternoon and put the words on their website tonight. So the phrase on its own certifies nothing. The parts that are earned are the tier badge and the review history.
What a partner tier actually means
Shopify grades partners into levels, and the badge on a directory listing reflects that grade. It is assigned by Shopify based on the business the partner has actually driven and how those merchants have fared, not on a form the agency fills in. You cannot buy it, and you cannot ask for it. That is precisely why it's the one badge worth checking.
What it does not tell you is craft. A higher tier means volume and merchant outcomes at scale; it does not mean the developer assigned to your build knows Liquid well enough to keep your collection pages under a second. Treat the tier as a floor, not a verdict. We hold Select Partner status and I'd still tell you to interrogate the individual team, because that's where a project is won or lost.
Verifying a Shopify Plus partner is a separate exercise
Plus is its own programme, and "we work on Plus stores" is not the same claim as "we are a Plus partner." Three checks that work:
- Ask them to screen-share their Partner Dashboard and filter for Plus stores. Managed stores show up there. Nobody who has genuinely done the work will hesitate, and the ones who hesitate have answered you.
- Ask who their Shopify partner manager is and whether they'll copy them on an intro email. Partners at the higher tiers have a named person at Shopify. Fabricating that is a bad idea and they know it.
- Ask what they've done with the Plus-only surfaces: checkout extensibility, Functions, B2B, Flow, Launchpad for a festive drop. Anyone who has shipped a checkout UI extension will start talking about the API version and what broke. Anyone who hasn't will talk about "enterprise-grade scalability."
Worth saying as an aside: plenty of Indian D2C brands get sold Plus a year before they need it. If your monthly GMV doesn't justify the platform fee, a good agency tells you to stay on Advanced and spend the difference on a faster storefront. If the agency pitching you Plus has never once suggested you wait, that's data too. We wrote up where the line actually sits on our Plus agency page.
Partner, Expert, Marketplace: the same thing under old names
The "Shopify Experts Marketplace" was the older hiring surface, and Shopify folded that experience into the Partner Directory. A lot of agency marketing copy still says "Shopify Expert" because it's been sitting on the site since 2019 and nobody updated it. That's laziness, not fraud. The practical point: whatever word an agency uses, the artifact you verify is the directory listing. If they call themselves an Expert and have no listing, the word is decorative.
Spotting a fake badge takes under a minute
Right-click the badge on their site. If it's an image served from their own domain with no link, that means nothing on its own — most agencies self-host the image. The test is whether the claim survives a directory search. Two specific fakes we see:
- A tier badge on the website that the directory listing doesn't show. The agency was at that tier once, or never was. Ask directly and watch the answer.
- "Shopify Certified Developer" or "Certified Shopify Agency" as a standalone credential. Shopify runs Partner Academy courses and issues certifications to individuals who pass them. There's no blanket certification that covers a company. So the honest follow-up is: which person on my project holds it, and can they join the first call?
Read the portfolio as code
Screenshots prove nothing. A live URL proves a fair bit. Open a store they claim, view source, and search for Shopify.theme in the page markup — you'll get the theme's name and ID. A custom theme name is a decent sign somebody built something; "Dawn" with a version number means the work was configuration, which is fine if that's what you're buying and misleading if they billed it as a custom build.
Then look at the asset paths under /cdn/shop/t/, check which apps are injecting scripts, and run the homepage and a product page through PageSpeed Insights. If an agency's showcase store has a 4-second LCP on mobile, they either didn't own performance or they don't measure it. Cross-check the redesign date with the Wayback Machine: if they claim a 2024 rebuild and the layout hasn't changed since 2021, ask.
GitHub is a softer signal but a real one. Public repos, forks of Dawn with actual commits, issues filed against Shopify's CLI or Hydrogen — that's a team that writes code in the open. An empty org page isn't disqualifying. Plenty of good agency work lives in private client repos. It's a bonus check, not a gate.
Apps are the hardest thing to fake
If an agency says it builds apps, go to any of their App Store listings and click the developer name. You'll get every app that publisher has shipped, with last-updated dates, support email domain, privacy policy and review history. Abandoned listings that haven't been updated in two years say something about how they treat maintenance. A support email on a free webmail domain says something else. Our own published apps sit on this page if you want a sense of what a publisher profile should look like when you land on one.
Five questions that make a portfolio call worth having
- Which of these did you build from scratch and which did you inherit and maintain? The answer is almost never all-build, and agencies that pretend otherwise are hiding retainer work, which is the work you actually want to hear about.
- Who owns the code and the repo at handover? Get it in writing before the SOW is signed.
- What was the store's PageSpeed score the week before launch and the week after?
- Can I email one of these merchants directly, without you on the thread?
- Who, by name, will be writing my Liquid? Not the account manager. The developer.
On question five, do this arithmetic on whatever quote you receive. Say an agency proposes a ₹6,00,000 migration over ten weeks with "a dedicated team of five." Five people, ten weeks, forty hours: 2,000 hours. ₹6,00,000 ÷ 2,000 = ₹300 an hour. That is below what a competent mid-level Shopify developer in Bengaluru costs in salary alone, before overhead. So the team of five is one developer part-time and four names on a slide. The quote might still be fair for the scope. The staffing claim isn't. We've broken down what the numbers should look like in this cost guide.
Claims to discount entirely
None of the following can be checked, so weight them at zero: percentage uplifts with no baseline ("increased conversions by 340%"), project counts, award badges from bodies you've never heard of, "trusted by 500+ brands," stock team photos, and any case study where the client is anonymous and the metric is spectacular. Google Partner and Meta Business Partner status are checkable in each company's own directory, so check them there rather than accepting the logo. Omnisend, Klaviyo and similar partner tiers are listed publicly by those vendors too.
The checks that only matter in India
Ask for the GSTIN and run it through the GST portal — it takes thirty seconds and confirms the legal entity, registration state and status. Look up the CIN on the MCA site if they're a private limited company; you'll see incorporation date and whether filings are current. An agency that has been "in business since 2016" but incorporated last year is running a rebrand or a spinout, and you deserve to know which.
Then the domain-specific ones. Have they shipped Razorpay or Cashfree on Shopify, including the webhook edge cases when a UPI payment succeeds after the session drops? Have they built a COD flow with an OTP or partial-prepaid step to cut RTO? Do they know what a GST-compliant tax invoice needs on it, and which app produces one that your CA won't send back? Have they run a store through a Diwali traffic peak? A partner who has only ever worked US-market stores will be excellent at things you don't need and blank on things you do. Same principle in reverse if you're selling into the Gulf.
Run a small paid engagement before the big one. Two weeks, a fixed scope, something real — a speed pass, a filters and search rebuild, a theme section you've been waiting on. You will learn more about how an agency handles a Friday evening bug than any reference call will tell you. If you'd like a neutral read on your store before you brief anyone, our free audit covers the same ground we'd cover in week one.