Everything on a studio's website is evidence chosen by the studio. The portfolio is the good work, the testimonials were asked for, and the case studies end at launch because that is where the story is flattering. None of that is dishonest. It is simply not the information you need.
What you need is a way to find out how the last ten clients are getting on now. Here is how to do that without anyone's cooperation.
Open the stores. On a phone. Today.
Ask for live URLs rather than screenshots, then open them on a phone on mobile data, which is how most of your customers will arrive. Screenshots are renders of a moment; a live store is the current truth.
Three things to look at. Does it load quickly on a normal connection? Does it look maintained — current products, working search, no placeholder text in the footer? And crucially, has it changed since launch? A store that has plainly grown since the agency left is the strongest possible signal, because it means the handover worked and the client was not stranded.
That last one is worth more than any testimonial, and it is the check almost nobody runs. When we point people at the Team Concept store, the number we want them to notice is not the design — it is that the catalogue has reached 675 products and 10,784 variants across 45 collections, and that the client has run all of that themselves since we handed it over.
Ask what happens the day you leave
This is the single most revealing question, and it should be asked in the first call rather than the last.
Whose Shopify account is the store on? Whose domain registration? Who holds the theme repository, if there is one? Who is the technical contact on the payment gateway? The answer should be "yours" every time, with the agency as a collaborator that can be removed in a click. Any hesitation here is the answer to a much bigger question, and it will not improve later.
Then ask the practical version: if we stopped working together next month, what would we need to hand to the next developer? A studio that has thought about this will describe a repository, a documented theme and a handover call. A studio that has not will describe a conversation they would like to have with you first.
Find out how they feel about apps
App strategy tells you more about a studio's judgement than any portfolio piece.
Reaching for an app for everything is fast, and it leaves you paying a stack of monthly fees for functionality the theme could carry natively, with each one adding weight to every page. Refusing apps on principle is the opposite error and produces expensive custom versions of solved problems.
The answer you want is a rule of thumb with a reason attached: apps for things that genuinely need a vendor — reviews with moderation, a real subscriptions engine, tax calculation — and native sections for the merchandising and layout work that the theme editor should own. Ask them which apps they would remove from a store they had just inherited. Anyone who has done this work has a list.
Have them look at something before you pay
Ask for a short written read on your current store or your plan. Not a proposal, a read: what they would do first, what they would leave alone, and what they think is the biggest risk.
This tells you three things at once. Whether they looked at all — a generic response is a generic response. Whether they will disagree with you, which is the trait you are actually hiring and the one that is hardest to assess in a sales call. And how they write, which matters more than people expect, because most of your communication with them for the next six months will be written.
We do this as a free written teardown and it regularly ends with us recommending something that is not a project for us. That is not generosity; it is the cheapest way for both sides to find out whether the fit is real.
The questions that actually separate studios
Ask who does the work. In smaller studios the person selling is often the person building, which is a strength. In larger ones it frequently is not, and the honest answer is fine as long as you get it. Ask to speak to whoever will be on your project.
Ask what happens after launch. Two weeks of bug fixes is normal. What is not normal, and what you should push on, is whether anyone is responsible for the store three months later when a theme update conflicts with a customisation.
Ask what they would refuse to build. A studio that will build anything you describe is a studio with no opinion, and you are partly buying their opinion. Every good answer we have heard to this question involved a feature the client wanted and did not need.
Ask about the last project that went badly and what changed afterwards. Everyone has one. The answer separates people who examine their own work from people who have been lucky, and only one of those is safe to hire.
What a good answer sounds like, in short
Live stores you can open, still being run by the people they were built for. Accounts in your name from day one, with no argument. A defensible position on apps rather than a reflex. Willingness to tell you something you did not want to hear before any money changes hands. And a plain description of what happens after launch, including who to call.
None of that requires trusting anyone. It is all checkable in an afternoon, which is roughly what this decision deserves given what a bad one costs. If you want to see how we answer these ourselves, they are answered at length on the page describing how we build stores, and market by market for British merchants and American ones.
