You don't need an agency to start
Most founders don't need a Shopify agency. Not at the beginning. What you need is to get your products online, start selling, and learn what your customers actually want. Everything else comes later.
I say this as someone who runs a Shopify agency. We charge thousands for migrations and builds. That's the right move for established businesses with revenue, traffic, and operational complexity. But if you're starting from zero, spending money on an agency before you've made your first sale is putting the cart before the horse.
This page is for the people at the starting line. The ones with a product idea, a side hustle, a skill, or a small business that isn't online yet. Here's what I'd actually tell you if you sat down in my kitchen.
Start with Shopify Basic. Seriously.
£25 a month. Unlimited products. A checkout that converts better than anything you could build yourself. Free themes that look professional. Built-in payments. No hosting to manage, no security patches, no plugin updates breaking your site at 2am.
You don't need Shopify Plus. You don't need a custom theme. You don't need a developer. Not yet.
Pick a free theme — Dawn, Taste, or Craft are all solid. Add your products, write honest descriptions, upload decent photos (your phone is fine), set your shipping rates, connect Shopify Payments, and you're live. That's it. You can do this in a weekend.
What to spend money on and what to skip
Spend money on
Your domain name. £10–15 a year. Buy it through Shopify or Cloudflare. Don't use the free .myshopify.com subdomain — it looks amateur and you can't build SEO equity on it.
Product photography. If you sell physical products, decent photos are the single biggest conversion factor. You don't need a studio — a white background, natural light, and your phone camera will outperform most product photography. But take the time to do it properly.
One paid app, maybe. If you need email marketing, Shopify Email is free up to 10,000 emails/month. If you need reviews, Judge.me has a free plan. Don't install 15 apps on day one — every app slows your site down and most of them solve problems you don't have yet.
Skip for now
Logo design. Use text. Seriously. Your brand isn't your logo. It's your product, your service, your voice, and how you treat your customers. A logo can come later when you know what your brand actually is.
Paid advertising. Don't run Google Ads or Facebook Ads until you know your unit economics. If you don't know your cost of goods, your margin, your average order value, and your conversion rate, paid ads will burn money. Get organic traction first — social media, word of mouth, local markets, communities.
Custom development. If you're thinking about hiring a developer before you've made your first 100 sales, stop. The free tools are enough. Customisation is for optimisation, and you can't optimise something that doesn't exist yet.
SEO agencies. At this stage, the best SEO is writing honest, useful product descriptions and creating content that helps your customers. That's free. An SEO agency can't rank a site that has nothing worth ranking.
The real costs nobody talks about
People obsess over platform fees and miss the things that actually matter.
Your time. The biggest cost of starting an online business is the hours you put in. Be honest with yourself about how many hours a week you can commit. Five focused hours a week is better than twenty scattered ones.
Payment processing. Shopify Payments takes 2% + 25p per transaction on Basic. On a £30 order, that's 85p. You can't avoid this — every platform charges it, and anyone who says otherwise is hiding the fee somewhere else.
Shipping. Underestimating shipping costs kills more small businesses than bad marketing. Price it into your product or charge at checkout, but know exactly what it costs before you launch. Royal Mail and Evri both have Shopify integrations with discounted rates.
Returns. Budget for them. Depending on your category, expect 5–15% of orders to come back. Fashion is the worst. If your margins can't absorb returns, your pricing is wrong.
When you're not starting from zero
If you already have a business — revenue, customers, an existing website on another platform — you're past the starting line. The advice above doesn't apply to you in the same way.
If you're on Magento, WooCommerce, EKM, or OpenCart and you're fighting your platform more than growing your business, that's when migration makes sense. We do that — we rebuild your store on Shopify, you see the finished result before you pay, and we handle everything including redirects so your search rankings don't tank.
But if you're genuinely starting from scratch, go build it yourself first. Learn what your customers want. Make your first sales. Then come back when you need to scale — we'll be here.
Tools I'd actually recommend
Platform: Shopify Basic (£25/month) — there's a reason 900,000+ businesses use it.
Email: Shopify Email (free up to 10,000/month) or Mailchimp's free tier.
Reviews: Judge.me (free plan) — social proof matters more than almost anything else on a product page.
Photos: Your phone + Canva (free) for lifestyle shots and social media graphics.
Analytics: Shopify's built-in analytics are enough for the first year. Don't overcomplicate it.
Social: Pick one platform where your customers actually are. Instagram for visual products, TikTok if your audience is younger, Facebook Marketplace for local. Don't try to be everywhere.
Accounting: Xero or FreeAgent. Connect them to Shopify from day one — you'll thank yourself at tax time.
One last thing
The people who succeed in ecommerce aren't the ones with the best websites. They're the ones who ship, learn, and iterate. Your first version will be rough. Your first photos won't be perfect. Your first product descriptions will be too long or too short. None of that matters if you actually launch.
The best time to start was last year. The second best time is this weekend.
About the author: Jason Pannell is the founder of Agora Studio, a Shopify development and automation studio in Bath, UK. Before Agora, he built a competition business to £2M revenue. He's launched more things that failed than succeeded, and believes the only wasted effort is the one you never ship.