Methodology

Every page on this site — the national list or a city page — starts from the same question: which agencies have real, verifiable ecommerce design work, and where are they actually based? We identify candidates from search, Shopify's own partner directory, industry listicles, and agency self-reporting, then check every claim independently before it appears here.

Location is the single biggest point of failure we screen for. Dozens of agencies run near-identical “market pages” for cities across the country — Dallas, Houston, Austin, Boston — using templated copy that mentions the city by name while the actual team operates from somewhere else entirely, sometimes overseas. Before an agency appears on a city page, we check its actual office address against independent sources (LinkedIn, business filings, direct contact pages), not just its own marketing copy. For the national list, the bar is genuine US operations rather than a specific city. Where an agency is honest on its own site about not being locally based — and some are — we take that at face value and leave it off the relevant city page.

Every named client, result, and case study on this site is checked against the agency's own site or another independently verifiable source — never a directory profile or self-submitted bio alone. Where a detail couldn't be confirmed, we either dropped it or left it out rather than publish an unverified claim.

• Genuine, named client work, not a portfolio of logos with no case studies attached.
• Design-led positioning. We favor agencies whose core identity is design, brand strategy, or conversion-focused UX — not software engineering shops that mention design as one service among several. We check how an agency describes itself on its own site and LinkedIn to make this call; a firm that leads with “software development company” gets filtered out even if its work is otherwise solid.
• A clear fit signal. Every listing states plainly who an agency is a poor fit for, not just who it's right for.

We exclude firms we can't independently verify have done genuine, named ecommerce work. We exclude agencies whose primary self-description is “software development company,” even when they also offer design services. We exclude an agency from a specific city page if we can't confirm genuine local presence there, even if the agency is legitimate and well-verified elsewhere on the site.

Agency websites change, offices relocate, and case studies get taken down. If you spot something out of date or inaccurate — including a location error — we want to fix it. See the Contact page.