What should I ask a Shopify developer before hiring them?

The six questions, and what you are listening for

1. Which live stores can I visit, and what exactly did you do on them? Not screenshots: URLs. And the second half of the question matters more than the first, because several people have worked on any given store. A good answer sounds like “this order table and the location picker”; a bad one sounds like “we handle this account”.

2. Which part of this needs no apps and no code? This is where you find out whether they know the platform or only their own trade. A lot of what gets sent to development in B2B is configuration: quantity rules, volume pricing, catalogs. Somebody billing you to build what already ships either does not know, or prefers not to.

3. Which Shopify plan does this leave me on? If what you are asking for needs Plus and nobody mentions it, you will find out at the end. It happens most with custom Functions and with per-account pricing.

4. How do you hand over the code, and where does it live? The right answer includes a repository you have access to. If the only place the theme exists is your store’s admin, your supplier is your backup.

5. What happens when something breaks in three months? Do not look for an eternal guarantee: look for the question not surprising them. Somebody who has maintained stores will talk about theme updates, API versions and which part stays theirs.

6. Which of the things I asked for do you recommend I skip? The most useful of the six. Somebody who says everything is a good idea will say yes to a fourth catalog you do not need and to a custom app that could have been a metafield.

What I would answer

To the first: twenty projects with their URL, and each entry says what I did. To the fourth: a repository of yours from day one. And on the sixth, the answer I give most often on a first call is that order flow pays off more than changing plan.