A Shopify agency vs ScaleWise VA
A Shopify Partner agency and a Shopify operations team are both "Shopify agencies" in a search result and almost never the same thing in practice. One builds and leaves. The other stays and runs. Most owners need both at different moments, and pay too much when they ask one to do the other's job.
Hire a design and development agency for the build: a new store, a redesign, a migration, a custom app, a Plus implementation. Hire us for what happens after the launch party: the listings, the inbox, the inventory, the small fixes, the ads, month after month. Asking a build agency to do that is buying senior developer hours for data entry; asking us to build you a custom checkout is asking the wrong team.
Hire a Shopify agency when
- You are launching, replatforming or redesigning and the deliverable is a store, not a month of work.
- The work is custom code: theme architecture, checkout extensions, a bespoke app, an ERP integration.
- You need a strategic brief, a creative team and project management with a defined end date.
- You are on Shopify Plus and the scale of the build justifies agency rates.
Use ScaleWise VA when
- The store is built and the problem is running it: the catalogue, the orders, the returns, the support inbox.
- You want the same people on the store next month and the month after, not a project team that rolls off.
- The fixes are small and constant: a collection rule, a metafield, a Flow, a broken app setting, a price change across 400 SKUs.
- You want ads and email run alongside the operations by the people who also know the catalogue.
Side by side
| Shopify agency | ScaleWise VA | |
|---|---|---|
| The unit of work | A project with a scope, a timeline and a handover. Retainers exist but are priced from developer day rates. | A month of operations, scoped in hours to your volume. Projects (a redesign, a migration) are available but are not the core. |
| Who does the work | Designers, developers, a project manager, an account lead. Senior people, priced accordingly. | Shopify operators: catalogue, support, inventory and ads specialists, with a store fixer for theme and app changes. Senior enough for the daily work, priced for it. |
| After launch | A support period, then a change request process. Small jobs queue behind big ones. | There is no after launch. The daily work is the engagement. |
| Custom development | The core competence. Apps, checkout, integrations, complex theme work. | Theme edits, Flow, metafields, app configuration and small feature work. Not custom apps at scale; for that we would send you to an agency. |
| Pricing | Quoted per project or per retainer; rarely printed, and varies too widely by agency and market to summarise honestly here. | Hourly VA tiers from $4 to $8 an hour on the Hire pages; retainers scoped from a discovery call. |
| Proof | A portfolio of launches. Usually excellent, and usually silent about what happened to the store afterwards. | Fourteen case studies about running stores: what the engagement was, what we did, what changed. |
| Ending it | The project ends by design. Retainers by notice. | A month's notice. Procedures stay with you. |
The month after the launch
A brand pays an agency for a redesign. The launch is good. Then the real work arrives: 60 new products a month to list properly, a returns queue, an inbox that fills on Sundays, a Flow that stopped tagging orders, an app that needs its settings changed after an update. The agency will do all of it, at developer rates, through a ticket queue, behind the other client's launch.
That is not the agency's fault. Their business is built for builds. The owner either does the daily work themselves, hires someone, or brings in a team built for exactly that layer. We are the third option, and we are happy to work alongside the agency that built the store; they get the interesting problems and we get the ones that recur.
What you give up with us
- Custom app and checkout development at scale. We do not build your ERP integration.
- A creative department. We will keep your store consistent; we will not rebrand it.
- A large project team with a named PM for a six-figure build.
- The Shopify Plus partner badge. We are Shopify Certified operators, not a Plus agency.
Questions people ask
- Can you replace our agency?
- For the daily running of the store, yes, and that is usually where the agency retainer was being spent badly. For builds, no; keep them for that, or we will recommend one.
- Do you do redesigns and migrations at all?
- Yes, as scoped projects: the Mistfall redesign and the Sassy Setup build are in the case studies. They are the smaller part of what we do, and we say so.
- Will you work with our existing agency?
- Gladly. The usual split is that they own the codebase and we own the operations, and we raise anything that needs real development with them.
- How is a Shopify operations team different from a virtual assistant?
- A VA is a person; an operations team is the person plus the procedures, the cover, the monitoring and the specialists behind them. The Hire a VA pages are the entry point; the retainer is the team.
Where the figures come from
- Our project work: the Mistfall and Sassy Setup case studies on this site. Hourly tiers: the Hire a VA pages.
- Agency pricing is deliberately not quoted: no single figure would be true across markets, and printing one would be the kind of claim this site has removed elsewhere.
Prices and terms on other companies' pages change. If one of these has, tell us at hello@scalewiseva.com and we will correct it.
Not sure which one you are?
Tell us what the store is and what is eating your week. If we are the wrong fit we will say so and point you at the right one; that is cheaper for both of us than a month that does not work.