Top 10 Shopify Agencies in the UK

Choosing a Shopify agency is one of the more consequential decisions an ecommerce business makes, and the UK market gives you no shortage of options. The difficulty is not finding an agency. It is working out which one is built for the problem you actually have.

A design led studio that produces beautiful direct to consumer storefronts and an engineering heavy Shopify Plus partner that handles enterprise integrations are both good agencies. They are not interchangeable. Hiring the wrong type costs about as much as hiring nobody.

This guide lists ten UK Shopify agencies, explains what each is built to do well, and sets out how to verify an agency's claims before you sign anything.

A note on our own position. Why Matters is a Shopify agency and we appear in this list. Our guides to WordPress agencies, Magento agencies and PPC agencies are written from outside those markets. This one is not. We have said so plainly rather than leaving you to work it out.

Key Takeaways

• The numbers in this list are not a ranking. The right agency depends on your project, your stage and your budget, not on who appears first
• Shopify retired the Shopify Experts brand in December 2023 and the standalone Shopify Plus Partner programme in December 2024. An agency still advertising either is quoting a badge that no longer exists
• Shopify's current partner tiers measure commercial impact, meaning revenue driven to Shopify and merchants acquired. They are not a measure of build quality
• Almost every performance figure agencies publish about themselves is unaudited, so treat project counts and cumulative sales claims as marketing rather than evidence
• Theme customisation typically costs £2,000 to £5,000, custom builds £5,000 to £20,000 and above, Shopify Plus builds £15,000 to £50,000 and above
• Ask how the agency handles redirect mapping before you ask to see its portfolio. It is the single most reliable way to separate a build shop from an ecommerce partner

Quick Answer

There is no single best Shopify agency in the UK. The best agency for you is the one whose specialism matches your project. For enterprise Shopify Plus builds and complex international work, Eastside Co, We Make Websites and Velstar have the deepest delivery experience. For design led direct to consumer work, Charle and Underwaterpistol are strong. For migrations where organic traffic must be protected, Fourmeta and Kubix Media are worth shortlisting. For merchants who want design, development, SEO, email and subscriptions handled by one specialist team rather than four suppliers, Why Matters is built for that model. Shortlist two or three, ask each how they would approach your specific project, and compare the answers rather than the price.

Table of Contents

• How We Selected These Agencies
• Why Matters
• Eastside Co
• Charle
• Swanky
• We Make Websites
• Kubix Media
• Blubolt
• Fourmeta
• Velstar
• Underwaterpistol
• Quick Comparison Table
• What Do Shopify Partner Tiers Actually Measure?
• How Do You Choose the Right Shopify Agency?
• What Should a Shopify Agency Cost in the UK?
• Why Matters Perspective
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Final Thoughts

How We Selected These Agencies

We selected agencies on four things: demonstrable Shopify specialism rather than Shopify as one service among many, a published body of relevant work, a clearly identifiable strength that makes them the right answer for a particular kind of project, and a verifiable UK base.

The numbering is for navigation only. This is not a ranked list and we have not attempted to place ten agencies in order of quality, because quality is only meaningful relative to a specific brief.

One editorial decision is worth explaining, because it makes this guide read differently from most. We have removed the performance figures that usually appear in agency roundups. You will not find project counts, cumulative merchant sales or awards totals here.

The reason is that none of them are audited. When an agency says it has delivered 3,000 projects or generated £300 million in merchant sales, no third party has checked the number, the definition of a project or the attribution behind the sales. Those figures then get copied from roundup to roundup until they look like established fact. We found the same agency publishing two different project totals on two of its own channels in the same month.

So we describe what each agency is built to do, and we tell you how to verify the rest yourself. Every claim in this guide about Shopify's own programmes is sourced to Shopify's published documentation, which is linked.

1. Why Matters

Location: Brighton, with a London office. Specialism: Shopify design and development, technical SEO, Klaviyo email marketing, Recharge subscriptions. Notable clients: Halo Coffee, Gunna, Photos by Wilbur.

Why Matters is a specialist Shopify agency that combines design and development with in house SEO, Klaviyo email marketing and Recharge subscriptions. We work only on Shopify, so nobody on the team splits their attention across three platforms.

What separates us from most Shopify agencies is scope. The majority focus on design and build, then refer SEO and email marketing elsewhere. We handle the full growth stack in one team: store design and builds, platform migrations, technical SEO, Klaviyo lifecycle marketing, Recharge subscription implementation, and ongoing retainers covering all of it.

We are a Shopify Select partner with Verified Skills held across development and marketing. On our own commercial terms, since this guide asks you to demand transparency: pricing is published on our website, development projects carry a three month guarantee, retainer clients are not tied into long contracts and can leave whenever they choose, and retainers are billed one month in arrears so the work is visible before the first invoice arrives. Video reviews from clients are on our homepage. Founded by Ayo Isinkaye, who has over 20 years in ecommerce.

Learn more about our Shopify packages or our ecommerce agency services.

Best for: merchants who want design, development, SEO, email marketing and subscriptions handled by one specialist team rather than coordinated across several suppliers.

2. Eastside Co

Location: London, with further offices in the UK and internationally. Specialism: Shopify Plus development, UX design, enterprise builds, international ecommerce. Notable clients: Volkswagen, Unilever, Chelsea Football Club, Tropic Skincare, Carex.

Eastside Co is one of the longest established Shopify specialists in the UK and one of the largest by headcount. Its team spans strategy, UX design, development, migrations, international ecommerce and ongoing optimisation, which is unusual breadth for a single agency.

That breadth suits enterprise and mid market brands with complicated requirements. If your project involves multi market international selling, a large Shopify Plus migration or integration with enterprise systems such as an ERP or a PIM, Eastside Co has the team depth to staff that properly rather than stretching three people across it. Multiple offices also help if your business prefers working with people it can meet.

Best for: enterprise and mid market brands needing complex Shopify Plus builds, multi market stores and large migrations.

3. Charle

Location: London. Specialism: design led Shopify and Shopify Plus development, UX, conversion, organic search. Notable clients: Cambridge Satchel, 111SKIN, Billionaire Boys Club, Vollebak, Candy Kittens.

Charle has built its reputation on design led Shopify work for brands where visual identity is a commercial asset rather than decoration. Its approach treats the storefront as a product, so brand expression, user experience, conversion, product discovery, mobile behaviour, merchandising and technical implementation are considered together rather than sequentially.

The agency also sequences organic search and AI visibility into the build rather than treating them as a post launch task. For a brand that depends on organic discovery, that ordering matters. Retrofitting search considerations into a finished storefront is consistently more expensive than designing with them in view.

Charle is a strong fit for direct to consumer brands in visually competitive categories: fashion, beauty, lifestyle and premium consumer goods.

Best for: direct to consumer brands where design quality and brand expression matter as much as the commerce layer underneath.

4. Swanky

Location: UK, with multiple offices. Specialism: Shopify Plus, internationalisation, conversion rate optimisation. Notable clients: Hotel Chocolat, Camden Town Brewery, John Cotton.

Swanky is one of the most established Shopify Plus agencies in the UK, with a particularly strong reputation among mid market and enterprise brands. It combines Shopify Plus design and development with international expansion, conversion rate optimisation, strategy and data.

Internationalisation is its clearest strength. For merchants expanding into Europe or North America, the work quickly becomes more involved than switching on another country in Shopify Markets. Pricing, content, shipping, merchandising, promotions, tax treatment and operational processes usually need to differ by market, and the complexity compounds as markets are added. Swanky has done this repeatedly.

Its conversion work is integrated into the wider proposition rather than sold as a separate service bolted on after launch, which tends to mean optimisation findings get implemented rather than parked.

Best for: mid market and enterprise brands focused on international expansion, or premium direct to consumer brands wanting conversion work integrated with development.

5. We Make Websites

Location: London. Specialism: Shopify Plus, large builds, global ecommerce, headless. Notable clients: Huel, Purina, Dune London, Dymag.

We Make Websites is another long established Shopify Plus specialist and an early adopter of the platform in the UK. It is known for handling large, complex projects for established consumer brands, including headless builds.

Its reputation rests on delivery discipline rather than novelty: strong project management, predictable process, experience working with businesses where the store is commercially critical. That matters more than it sounds. For a large organisation, a delayed launch, a mishandled migration or a failed integration has consequences measured in weeks of lost trading, and the quality of project management is often what determines whether those happen.

Best for: large brands that need dependable, well managed Shopify Plus delivery and are more concerned with reducing delivery risk than with finding the cheapest quote.

6. Kubix Media

Location: Birmingham. Specialism: Shopify Plus, migrations, email marketing, paid search. Notable clients: Lisa Yang, Chickidee, Hoodrich.

Kubix Media is a full service Shopify agency working across Shopify Plus builds, migrations and ecommerce marketing. Its useful characteristic is that technical delivery and marketing sit in the same agency, covering email marketing, paid search and ongoing growth support alongside development.

That matters most during migrations, where several stakeholders, deadlines and technical dependencies have to be held together at once, and where the common failure is organisational rather than technical. The development agency finishes the build, hands over, and the marketing team then has to work out how the new store behaves. Keeping both in one place removes that handover.

Best for: brands migrating to Shopify or Shopify Plus who want one team covering both the technical migration and what happens commercially after launch.

7. Blubolt

Location: UK. Specialism: creative Shopify Plus delivery for established retail brands.

Blubolt is a long established ecommerce agency that moved into Shopify Plus from a broader ecommerce background, and has built a reputation for creative delivery for recognised retail brands.

Its positioning suits established retailers that need strong visual design and technical capability without treating either as secondary. Traditional retailers moving further into direct to consumer ecommerce usually arrive with existing brand recognition, customer expectations, product complexity, internal systems and offline retail processes that all have to be reflected in the Shopify implementation. That is a different problem from building a store for a brand with no history.

Best for: established retail businesses moving onto Shopify Plus, or improving an existing Plus store, while maintaining a strong creative identity.

8. Fourmeta

Location: London. Specialism: ecommerce migrations from Magento, WooCommerce and bespoke platforms, with emphasis on protecting organic search.

Fourmeta has built its position around complex ecommerce projects and platform migrations rather than around design portfolios.

That is relevant to any merchant whose principal risk is not the look of the new store but safely moving an existing business onto Shopify. Migrations create exposure across organic rankings, URL structures, product data, customer records, order history, integrations, analytics and redirects. For an established merchant, those risks are usually more commercially significant than the homepage design.

Here is our own data on why that matters. Of the 80 stores we have migrated, 75 arrived with no redirect map in place from the previous agency or platform. That is not a niche oversight. It is the default condition, and it is the clearest single indicator of whether an agency treats migration as an engineering task or as a commercial one.

If your current store generates meaningful revenue from organic search, an agency that understands migration risk is worth more than one with a better portfolio. Our complete Shopify migration checklist sets out what should be in place before, during and after.

Best for: merchants migrating from complex legacy platforms who need organic search preservation handled as a dedicated workstream rather than a final week task.

9. Velstar

Location: Liverpool, with further UK hubs and a US presence. Specialism: Shopify Plus builds, replatforming, conversion rate optimisation, direct to consumer and B2B.

Velstar is one of the largest Shopify specialists outside London and operates at genuine enterprise scale, with strategy, design, engineering, SEO and conversion work under one roof. Its published case studies cover large replatforms, including work for French Connection and Avon.

Its model is explicitly conversion led. Builds begin with a data audit and a baseline measurement phase, so design decisions are tied to stated conversion hypotheses rather than to preference. For a brand that has previously commissioned an attractive store that underperformed commercially, that ordering is the direct answer to what went wrong.

Velstar also has a substantial replatforming practice covering WooCommerce and Magento moves, with defined processes for catalogue migration, redirect mapping and order history transfer.

Best for: established brands wanting an enterprise scale Shopify Plus partner outside London, particularly where conversion performance or a large replatform is the priority.

10. Underwaterpistol

Location: UK, with team members across several locations and an international presence. Specialism: design led Shopify Plus for direct to consumer, fashion and lifestyle.

Underwaterpistol has been building ecommerce sites since 2001, which makes it one of the longer running agencies in this list, and it now focuses on creative Shopify Plus work.

It combines brand conscious design with technical Shopify development, which suits direct to consumer businesses where the visual experience is a substantial part of how the brand competes. In fashion, lifestyle, premium consumer products and design led retail, a storefront that looks like a lightly restyled template actively undermines the brand proposition it is meant to carry.

Best for: brands wanting a visually distinctive Shopify Plus store and prepared to invest in creative direction alongside development.

Quick Comparison Table

What Do Shopify Partner Tiers Actually Measure?

This is the part of agency selection that is most often misunderstood, including by agencies.

Shopify has retired three programme brands that are still in wide circulation. The Shopify Experts brand and the Shopify Experts Marketplace were retired in December 2023. The standalone Shopify Plus Partner programme was retired in December 2024. The Plus Certified App Program and the Technology Track tier brands were retired in December 2025. Shopify states that these brands should not be used after those dates. You can read this on Shopify's own Partner Program overview.

This gives you a free and reliable buyer test. If an agency's website currently describes it as a Shopify Expert or a Shopify Plus Partner, it is presenting a credential Shopify no longer issues. That does not make the agency bad. Plenty of capable agencies simply have not updated their copy. It does tell you something about how closely they follow platform changes, which is precisely what you are paying a specialist for. You will find several agencies in this guide using retired language on their own sites as you read it.

What exists now is a single programme with five tiers: Registered, Select, Plus, Premier and Platinum. Registered is the entry point. Everything above it is earned, and tiers are recalculated quarterly on 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October, so a tier is a current status rather than a permanent award.

Here is the part that matters commercially. The tiers are earned on commercial impact, not on the quality of the work. Shopify's published tiering guide sets the thresholds as revenue accruing to Shopify plus a minimum count of merchants acquired.

Figures are from Shopify's Q3 2026 Partner Program Tiering Guide. Standard plans means Basic, Grow and Advanced. Shopify has also waived credential requirements for 2026, so this year only commercial activity counts toward tier.

Read the table again and notice what is absent. There is no measure of build quality, no client satisfaction input, no design assessment, no code review. A Platinum agency has driven a very large amount of revenue to Shopify. That is a real achievement and it usually correlates with scale and enterprise experience. It is not a statement that the agency will do better work on your project than a Select partner with ten years in your exact category.

For completeness, and because this guide asks you to demand transparency: Why Matters is a Select partner.

One practical note. The Shopify Partner Directory is not a complete list of good agencies. Shopify states that Plus tier is the minimum for guaranteed directory eligibility, with a limited number of lower tier partners also listed. So a capable agency can be absent from the directory entirely, and its absence tells you nothing about its work. Use the directory to confirm a tier claim, not to build a shortlist. Our guide to the Shopify Partner Program covers this in more detail.

How Do You Choose the Right Shopify Agency?

We have written a full guide on this: how to choose the best Shopify development company. What follows is the short version, focused on the questions that actually separate agencies.

Do they specialise in Shopify, or is Shopify one item on a long service list? A generalist agency can deliver a competent Shopify project. Specialism starts to matter when the work involves Shopify Plus, checkout extensibility, Shopify Markets, B2B and company accounts, theme architecture, custom apps or a platform migration. A specialist also knows the ecosystem well enough to avoid commissioning custom development for something an app already does properly.

Have they done your specific thing? Do not assume that building Shopify stores means experience in every part of Shopify. If your project depends on a migration from a particular platform, on Recharge or another subscription tool, on Shopify B2B, on multi currency international selling, or on protecting existing organic traffic, ask for evidence of that specific work rather than of Shopify work generally.

How do they handle redirects? This is the fastest diagnostic question in the list, and it is why we included our own migration data earlier. Of the 80 stores we have migrated, 75 arrived with no redirect map. Ask any agency pitching for a migration how it builds and tests a redirect map, and who signs it off. The quality of that answer is a reliable proxy for how seriously the agency takes the commercial side of a build.

What does the quote actually include? Two quotes can look similar and cover completely different scopes. Check for discovery, UX, design, development, product and content population, app configuration, SEO, analytics, testing, training, launch support and post launch support. Then ask what is explicitly excluded, which is usually the more revealing question.

What happens after launch? Some agencies are structured around project delivery, others around long term retainers. Neither is inherently better, but they suit different businesses. If you will need ongoing development, conversion work, SEO, campaign pages or email marketing, an agency built for that is a better fit than one optimised for one off builds. Ask what support or warranty period is included and what it covers.

What are the commercial terms? Ask whether pricing is published or quoted case by case, what the minimum contract term is, how notice periods work, and whether you are billed in advance or in arrears. These answers tell you how confident an agency is in its own work. An agency that requires a twelve month lock in is telling you something about its client retention.

What Should a Shopify Agency Cost in the UK?

Costs vary considerably with scope. As an indicative guide:

Treat these as indicative ranges rather than market prices. Complex migrations, custom applications and enterprise integrations push projects well beyond them. Premium Shopify themes typically add £150 to £350 on top of agency fees.

For a fuller breakdown, read our guide to how much it costs to build a Shopify store, or, if you are moving platforms, how much a Shopify migration costs.

Why Matters Perspective

The UK Shopify agency market is crowded, and the depth of genuine Shopify expertise within it varies a great deal. Some agencies are deeply specialised. Others are broader digital agencies that added Shopify to an existing service list. The distinction is invisible on a homepage and becomes obvious the moment a project gets complicated.

The agencies in this guide are not interchangeable. If design and brand expression are your priority, Charle and Underwaterpistol are particularly strong. For large Shopify Plus and enterprise delivery, Eastside Co, We Make Websites and Velstar have the depth. If migration and organic search preservation are central, Fourmeta and Kubix Media are the right shortlist.

Why Matters sits somewhere different. Our model combines Shopify design, development, technical SEO, Klaviyo email marketing, Recharge subscriptions and ongoing optimisation inside one specialist team. That exists because of a pattern we see repeatedly in the merchants who come to us. When clients leave a previous agency, the reason is almost never technical competence. It is that they stopped trusting the agency, stopped hearing back from it, or wanted a closer working relationship than a project shop was structured to provide. Very few merchants change agency because the code was bad.

That shapes how we operate. Pricing is published so you can assess affordability before a call. Retainers are billed one month in arrears so you see the work before the invoice. There is no long contract, so staying is a decision you make monthly rather than one you made once.

There is no universally best Shopify agency. There is a best fit for a particular business at a particular stage. Speak to two or three before deciding, and pay more attention to how they interrogate your brief than to how they present their portfolio.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does a Shopify agency cost in the UK? A Shopify agency project ranges from around £2,000 for professional theme customisation to £50,000 and above for a custom Shopify Plus build. Custom Shopify builds typically fall between £5,000 and £20,000. Ongoing retainers usually run from £500 to £3,000 and above per month. The biggest cost drivers are design complexity, custom functionality, third party integrations, migration requirements and the amount of strategic work involved.

Is Shopify Plus Partner still a valid status? No. Shopify retired the standalone Shopify Plus Partner programme in December 2024, and retired the Shopify Experts brand and Experts Marketplace in December 2023. Shopify states these programme brands should not be used after those dates. The current structure is a single partner programme with five tiers: Registered, Select, Plus, Premier and Platinum. An agency still advertising Shopify Expert or Shopify Plus Partner status is quoting a credential that no longer exists.

What do Shopify partner tiers actually measure? Commercial impact, not build quality. Shopify's Q3 2026 tiering guide sets thresholds based on revenue accruing to Shopify from merchants a partner has referred or supports, plus a minimum number of merchants acquired. Select requires at least $100,000 in new referral revenue or $500,000 in existing merchant revenue; Platinum requires at least $5,000,000 or $25,000,000 respectively. No part of the assessment measures design quality, code quality or client satisfaction, so a higher tier indicates scale rather than better work on your particular project.

Do I need a Shopify Plus agency? Not necessarily. If you are on a standard Shopify plan with relatively straightforward requirements, a strong Shopify specialist is usually sufficient. A Plus focused agency becomes worth the premium when your project involves Shopify Plus itself, B2B and company accounts, checkout extensibility, multiple storefronts, enterprise integrations or high volume trading. Choose on the requirement rather than the badge.

How do I verify what a Shopify agency claims about itself? Check three things independently. Look up the agency in the Shopify Partner Directory to confirm any tier claim, remembering that absence from the directory is not evidence against an agency since Plus tier is the minimum for guaranteed listing. Ask for two client references with projects similar to yours and actually call them. Treat published project counts and cumulative sales figures as unaudited marketing, because no third party verifies them.

Should I hire a Shopify agency or a freelancer? A freelancer is often the right choice for smaller projects, specific technical tasks, theme changes and constrained budgets. An agency makes more sense when a project needs several disciplines working at once, such as strategy, UX, design, development, SEO, migration and email marketing. The larger and more commercially important the project, the more a multidisciplinary team is worth paying for.

How long does it take a Shopify agency to build a store? A straightforward Shopify project can take a few weeks. A custom Shopify store typically takes four to eight weeks. A complex Shopify Plus project involving migration and integrations can run to several months. Timelines depend heavily on scope, how quickly you give feedback, whether your content and product data are ready, integration complexity and the volume of data being migrated. The shortest proposed timeline is rarely the safest one.

Final Thoughts

The best Shopify agency in the UK is not the biggest, the cheapest, or the one with the most recognisable logos on its homepage. It is the one whose experience, services, commercial terms and working style match what your business needs next.

Use this guide to build a shortlist of two or three. Then compare relevant experience, proposed approach, scope, price, communication and post launch support. Ask each one how it would handle redirects, what its quote excludes, and what happens if you want to leave in six months.

The quality of those conversations will tell you considerably more than any agency's homepage will.

If you would like to talk through a Shopify build, migration or ongoing growth programme, get in touch with our team or take a look at our portfolio.

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