You can filter most of the market with one question.
Ask a Shopify developer how they would build you a custom discount rule. If the word “Scripts” comes out of their mouth in the present tense, thank them and move on.
Shopify Scripts stopped executing on 30 June 2026. You could not even edit or publish one after 15 April 2026. They are gone. A developer who still reaches for them has not shipped anything on Shopify in a year, and they are about to learn the platform on your money.
That is the shape of this whole post. Not “look for good communication.” Actual questions, with the answers a competent person gives.
First, the deadline nobody told you about
Before you hire anyone, go and check something.
If you are on a standard Shopify plan, not Plus, you have a deadline in August 2026 to move your Thank You and Order Status pages off the old system. Plus stores had theirs in August 2025.
Here is why you should care today rather than in three weeks. Shopify started automatically upgrading stores that had not moved. The automatic upgrade strips your customisations and it is not reversible.
So anything living in your Additional Scripts box is at risk. And what usually lives there? Your Google Ads conversion tag. Your Meta pixel. The tracking that tells you which ads make money.
If that silently stops firing, you do not get an error. You get a slow, quiet corruption of every ad decision you make, and you probably do not notice for a month. I would rather you found that out from a blog post than from a bad quarter.
Go and look in Settings, at your checkout configuration, right now. If there is code in Additional Scripts, that is your first job for whoever you hire, and it is more urgent than the redesign you were actually planning to ask for.
Why the rates you find online are useless
Search for what a Shopify developer costs and you will get numbers from about twenty dollars an hour to over two hundred. Every article states its number with total confidence.
They disagree by a factor of ten because almost every published figure comes from a marketplace that makes money placing developers. The number is a sales position, not a survey.
What is actually true is the spread. Rates move with geography and with seniority, and both matter more than any average. A senior developer in the US or UK is genuinely expensive. The same skill level in Eastern Europe or South Asia costs a fraction of it. An agency will charge multiples of a freelancer, and some of that premium buys you real things like project management, cover when someone is ill, and a company that still exists next year.
The more useful way to think about it: you are not buying hours. You are buying a result and the ability to maintain it. A cheap developer who builds you something nobody else can take over is the most expensive option on the table, and you will not find that out for six months.
Understand what the platform fees are doing to your quote
If you are hiring through a marketplace, some of your money never reaches the developer.
On Fiverr, the platform takes a substantial cut from the seller and adds a service fee on top of what you pay. Between the two sides, roughly a quarter of the money can go to the platform. So a five hundred dollar gig has meaningfully less than five hundred dollars of developer time behind it. That is not an argument against Fiverr. It is an argument for understanding what you are actually buying, because the developer has priced their work backwards from what they will receive.
Upwork takes a client fee and a freelancer fee, and the total load lands somewhere around fifteen percent once both sides are counted.
One thing worth knowing, because I assumed otherwise myself until I checked: Codeable, the vetted marketplace people often recommend, does not do Shopify. It is WordPress and WooCommerce only. There is no true Codeable equivalent for Shopify, which tells you something slightly uncomfortable about the state of the Shopify hiring market.
“Shopify Partner” is not a credential
This one matters, because it is the most waved-around badge in the market.
Becoming a registered Shopify Partner is free. There is no vetting. No exam. No minimum standard. Anyone can sign up this afternoon and describe themselves as a Shopify Partner tomorrow.
The higher partner tiers do mean something, but read carefully what they mean. They are earned on commercial activity, which is to say on how much revenue an agency has driven to Shopify. That is a measure of how good they are at selling Shopify. It is not a measure of how good they are at writing code.
Judge the work. Not the badge.
The questions, and what a good answer sounds like
You do not need to be technical to use these. You need to listen for whether the answer is specific.
“How are you building my discount rule, now that Scripts are gone?”
Good: Shopify Functions, deployed as an app. They know Scripts stopped running in June 2026. They may even ask whether you had Scripts and what happened to them.
Bad: anything that treats Scripts as a live option. This single question does more filtering than the rest of the interview combined.
“When you add app features to my theme, do you use theme app extensions, or do you edit the theme files?”
Good: app blocks and app embed blocks. Theme app extensions. And they will explain, without being asked, that injecting code into theme files leaves orphaned junk behind when an app is uninstalled, and that edited themes cannot cleanly take an upstream update ever again.
Bad: “I’ll just drop the snippet into theme.liquid.”
That second answer sounds harmless. It means that from now on, every theme update is a manual merge, and you are locked to whoever wrote it.
“Will my team be able to edit this page without calling you?”
Good: they talk about sections and blocks, and about exposing settings so your content team can change text and images in the theme editor.
Bad: “just message me and I’ll change it.”
That is not service. That is a retainer trap, and it is how you end up paying somebody a monthly fee to edit your own headlines.
“Where is my custom data going to live?”
Good: metafields for structured data attached to products, metaobjects for standalone content types like a designer profile or a size guide. They can explain why that beats hardcoding it into the theme or installing another app.
Bad: they do not know the word metaobject.
“How will you work on my live store without breaking it?”
Good: a development store or a duplicate theme, the Shopify CLI, git for version control, a preview link for you to sign off, then publish.
Bad: “I’ll just work on the live theme, it’s fine.”
It is not fine. It means every mistake they make happens in front of your customers.
“Where does the code live, and who owns it?”
Good: in a git repository that you own, on your account.
Bad: “on my laptop.”
If the answer is a laptop, then you have no history, no way to roll back a bad change, no way to see what was changed and when, and no way to hand the work to anyone else. You are renting your own store.
“How many apps will this need?”
Good: they push back on apps. Each one is a monthly fee, a chunk of JavaScript on your storefront, and a third party sitting in your revenue path.
Bad: every requirement is met with an app install. That is not solving your problem. That is forwarding it, and billing you to do so.
Access: what to give, and what to never give
This is the most practical section here, and the one people get wrong most often.
Never give a developer your store owner login. Not once. Not temporarily.
There is no legitimate reason for it, and Shopify built a whole mechanism so it never has to happen. It is called a collaborator account, and it is what a real Shopify Partner will ask for.
Collaborator accounts are worth understanding, because they are genuinely well designed in your favour.
- They do not count against your plan’s staff limit, so they cost you nothing.
- You choose the permissions. Themes only, if that is all the job needs.
- Shopify requires the collaborator to have two step authentication switched on.
- You cannot make a collaborator an administrator, and you cannot transfer store ownership to one. The platform hard-blocks the worst outcomes for you.
- They are gated behind a request code you generate, and you can regenerate it whenever you like, which kills old requests.
Start narrow. Themes, and nothing else. Add permissions when they ask and can say why. A developer who needs your finances and your full customer list to build a landing page either does not understand the request or is not being straight with you.
Things to withhold by default: payouts and finances, the ability to manage users, your domain settings, and bulk customer export. Domains especially. A transferred domain is one of the very few things in this business that is genuinely hard to undo.
And when the project ends, actually close it out. Revoke the collaborator access. Regenerate the request code. Check which apps got installed while they were working. Confirm you have the repository. It takes ten minutes and almost nobody does it.
The red flags, in one list
- Talks about Shopify Scripts, checkout.liquid or Additional Scripts as things you can still use.
- Wants your admin email and password instead of a collaborator account.
- Works directly on your live theme.
- Keeps the code on their laptop.
- Solves every request by installing an app.
- Edits theme files to add app functionality instead of using theme app extensions.
- Waves “Shopify Partner” around as though it were a qualification.
- Quotes a fixed price on a two line brief with no scoping call. That quote is either padded or it is going to die in change requests, and either way you pay.
- Will not tell you, in writing, that you own the code at the end.
What to actually do this week
- Check whether you have code in Additional Scripts. If you do, that is your most urgent job, ahead of anything cosmetic.
- Write down what you actually want, in outcomes rather than features. “Cut my page load time” not “install a speed app.”
- Ask the Scripts question first. It costs you nothing and it filters hard.
- Ask where the code will live. Insist on a repository you own.
- Set up a collaborator account with themes-only access. Do not send a password.
- Agree milestones and deliverables rather than a bucket of hours.
Hiring a shopify developer is mostly a test of whether the person in front of you keeps up with a platform that changes every year. Two of Shopify’s biggest deprecations landed in 2026 alone. The questions above are not really about discounts or metafields. They are about whether this person was paying attention.
If you want a straight answer about what your store actually needs before you commit to anyone, including me, ask. I would rather tell you the job is smaller than you think than sell you something you do not need.
