Becoming A Shopify Developer With Shopify Partners?? Here’s The Fastest Way

Are you looking into the Shopify partner program? So are you an agency or Freelancer who's offering websites or marketing services consulting services? Are you considering offering Shopify products as an affiliate? 

Well, in this video, I'm going to explain to you exactly how to join the Shopify program, what it looks like officially, and you know, on paper versus reality, and the fastest way to get in it and how to get started. So why should you believe anything that I'm talking about? Well, I'm currently working with dozens of econ agencies. And I have pretty good insider knowledge of the whole industry that I've accumulated over the past six years, here's some proof of you know, some of my clients. 

So before we get into how to get into the Shopify partner program, click the bell notification and subscribe link, so that you get future updates on videos on this topic, because I keep releasing them several times a week. So since you're watching this, the odds are that you're a developer, and you want to start offering Shopify as a service on a freelancing platform or with your existing e-commerce clients. 

So here's what to do next, go to the Shopify website, go to their partner page and sign up as a partner, just signing up as a partner is super easy. Just fill in the registration form, and you're in as a partner, it's different from partner plus, but that's a different conversation that we're gonna have in a few minutes. So the partner program, the best thing about it is that you'll be able to access their training. 

So if you have no idea how Shopify works, and you're, for example, switching your service, from offering WordPress sites to Shopify sites, you'll be able to watch their developer training videos. They're not like the best training videos in the world, but they will get you started. There's an A to Z training that you can access through the Shopify partner Academy, which explains how their development process works, what are the best practices A to Z theme development and stuff like that. 

So go check it out on their Shopify partner academy website, their marketing material, like how to sell Shopify sites and stuff like that. I'll be honest with you, I'm not a huge fan. They're not you know, that's not your strength. They're just an ecom kind of website and platform. They're not there to train you on marketing and how to sell stuff. It's not really amazing. It's a little bit generic, as you could expect from a big company like that. For that, you may as well learn from someone you know, who's actually doing it. 

So here's a list of the types of companies that Shopify generally partners up with, especially with their partner plus programs. So there's the custom website development agencies, as we've mentioned before, things like migration from other platforms, which is a big deal right now, marketing, branding, and ongoing strategy, which is well marketing agencies UX and design, system and app integrations, enterprise resource planning digital marketing solutions, which is pretty much media buying, and business planning and consultation. So those are the types of agencies and consultants that Shopify currently partners up with. 

Now, here's the thing about the Shopify partner Plus program that you need to know. So the Shopify partner Plus Program seems to be on the back burner and the company right now internally, since they've grown a lot, they grow like crazy this year, go check their stock on the stock exchange, it's getting ridiculous. It's becoming hard inside of their company, in my opinion, at least I'm definitely not affiliated with them, but in my opinion, is becoming hard for them to communicate from a single voice, right? It's just too many split opinions. So what's going on now is they've been changing the Shopify partner Plus program for the last four years repeatedly. 

And there was an idea that they're going to do stuff internally, they're going to have all these developers, I guess, and that must have not worked out because now they're relying in agencies more than ever. So theoretically, okay, this is not officially mentioned that our website but I've been told by insiders, that theoretically, to get into the Shopify partner plus Academy, you essentially need five Shopify store referrals. And these are I think Shopify plus referrals as well. 

And you need to have edited at least 250 to 500,000 hours to Shopify is revenue now and then to remain a member, theoretically, they verify every so often that you maintain this high level, high standard of quality and all that kind of stuff. But again, it's become very hard or nearly impossible to join the partner plus Academy over the last few years, I really think they're not really running it. With new applicants in mind. It's just the existing companies that are internally and it's become a little bit political of how it works. 

So they get like internal communications with agencies of “let's introduce this program”, “listen to us that program”, and that department is brand new, so they don't really know exactly how to deal with the agencies yet. So they assign the agencies to managers and it's a little bit of a mess right now. So I wouldn't try to get into the Shopify plus partner Plus program right now. It seems to be on the backburner. 

Okay, so the benefits for those who do get in is access to education, which I mean honestly, you already have that online for free anyway, but okay to have access to education Shopify, plus sales opportunity, which means sometimes you get referred leads of various quality. And I've seen, you know, people get sales of $12,000 and $50,000 or so from that. 

But, you know, the leads are of various qualities, because they're not very good leads or anything like that, as far as I know, but I wouldn't rely on that. That's not to say I don't recommend that access to a chat group, public recognition as a Shopify Plus partner. Yeah, I mean, it could be worth something. But again, I wouldn't bet on it. It's. It's apparently pretty hard to get in right now, essentially, as a partner, you're able to refer as a normal partner as a plus partner, you're able to refer new store owners to Shopify merchants basically at a higher rate, right. 

So depending on the type of thing that you sell, so Shopify plus for a normal partner, get only 10% of the Commission, as a commission rider and a Shopify partner, plus, they get 20% on the Shopify Plus commission, right. So confusing, I know. But they have, like all these different tiers of how much you get as an affiliate. But ultimately, it's, you know, I wouldn't rely on that for your business. Here's what I would do. 

Okay. So if you're looking to start with Shopify, forget all this partner plus partner, like Forget all that stuff, here's what to actually do to succeed as an agency or freelancer, when you want to sell Shopify services, because they're really amazing. It's a huge market right now. And you could make a lot of money selling Shopify services. 

So I would ignore all of this. And instead, learn the basics using the Academy in terms of technical knowledge, and then start a business. Here's how to do that. So you need to go to freelancing websites like upwork.com and fiverr.com. And there's a bunch of clients or prospects coming on there to get their Shopify needs handled. So they want to start a Shopify store, and they don't know how to do it, and you need to sell them that service. 

So to do this, I have the next video for you right here that explains how Upwork works for selling Shopify, so click right here and watch this exclusive Shopify video. 

And if you have any questions do comment below and I usually respond to the best comments myself. So you see in the video right here on how to get clients for your Shopify business.