Compare · A Shopify agency
A Shopify agency versus us
Full-service Shopify agencies typically start around $2,500 a month and go well beyond it, and they sell strategy, creative and campaigns. We start at $249 and sell maintenance and execution. If you need someone to decide what to do, hire an agency. If you know what needs doing and need it done, that is us.
Choose a shopify agency when
Go to an agency when you need positioning, creative, paid media and a growth plan as well as execution, when you are replatforming or rebuilding, and when your budget makes you a meaningful client rather than the smallest account in the building.
Choose E-Store Manager when
Use us when the store mainly needs maintaining and fixing, when you have been an agency's smallest client and felt it, or when your budget is under a thousand a month and an agency would either decline you or under-serve you.
Side by side
The differences that actually matter.
| E-Store Manager | A Shopify agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting cost | $249 a month | Typically $2,500 a month and up |
| What you are buying | Execution and maintenance | Strategy, creative, campaigns, execution |
| Contract | Month to month | Often three, six or twelve months |
| Who does the work | The people you talk to | Often juniors, behind an account manager |
| Being a small client | Our whole business is small clients | You are the account most likely to be deprioritised |
| Brand and creative | Not what we do | Usually genuinely good at it |
| Paid media | We do not run ads | Core service |
The longer answer
Agencies and this kind of service are often compared as though they were the same product at different prices. They are not, and the difference matters more than the money.
An agency sells decisions. What should we sell, to whom, at what price, with what creative, through which channels. That is genuinely valuable and genuinely hard, and it is why the retainer is what it is. A good agency will change what your business does.
We sell execution of decisions that already exist. Your product data should be accurate. Your abandoned carts should get a reminder. Your store should not throw errors. None of that requires strategy, all of it requires someone to actually do it, and it is the half that goes undone in a small business.
The failure mode worth naming is a small store buying strategy it cannot act on. A $3,000-a-month agency delivers a growth plan, and the store has nobody to implement it, so twelve months later there is an excellent deck and an unchanged store. That is not the agency's fault. It is a mismatch between what was bought and what the business could absorb.
The reverse mismatch is real too. If your problem is that nobody wants what you sell, or that your brand is indistinct in a crowded category, we cannot fix it. Maintaining a store nobody wants to buy from produces a well-maintained store with no sales. In that situation an agency, or a strategist, is the right spend and we will say so rather than take a monthly fee.
The practical test: can you already write down what needs doing? If yes, you need execution. If the list is "I don't know, we're just not growing", you need someone to figure that out first.
Questions
What people ask when deciding.
Why are you so much cheaper than an agency?
Because we sell less. No strategy, no creative, no paid media, no account management layer. We do the operational work across many stores, which makes each hour cheaper to supply than a bespoke engagement. It is a narrower product at a lower price, not the same product discounted.
Can we use both?
Yes, and it is a common and sensible arrangement. The agency decides and creates, we execute and maintain. Our Technical Team plan exists for exactly that shape, where a marketing function is permanently blocked waiting on implementation.
We had a bad agency experience. How is this different?
The usual complaints are being handed to a junior, slow turnaround, and paying a retainer for unclear output. Structurally we avoid the first by having you talk directly to whoever does the work, and the third by there being no contract, if a month goes by and you cannot see what you paid for, stop paying. What we cannot promise is that we are better at things we do not do.
Other options
Compare the rest.
Next step
Find out what is actually wrong with your store. Free.
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