Articles · Agency & Vendor Guides
What is an ecommerce agency?
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The label covers three genuinely different businesses, and most of the confusion when hiring one comes from not knowing which you are talking to. Here is the actual breakdown, not the marketing version.
The short answer
Ecommerce agency, meaning: a company you pay to build, run or grow an online store on your behalf, instead of doing it in-house.
That is the ecommerce agency definition everyone starts from, and it is wide enough to cover three businesses that do almost nothing in common day to day: one writes code, one buys ad space and writes SEO content, and one claims to do both. The word "agency" on its own tells you nothing about which.
The three types
Every ecommerce agency you find is some mix of these three. Most lean heavily toward one and describe themselves as full-service anyway, which is the first thing worth checking rather than taking on trust.
Build agency
Designs and develops the store itself: theme, checkout, product and collection templates, app and system integrations, migrations between platforms. A build agency's output is a working store, and its ongoing relationship with you, if any, is maintenance and further development rather than driving traffic to what it built.
Marketing agency
Runs the channels that bring people to a store that already exists: SEO, paid social and search, email and SMS, conversion rate work. A marketing agency does not usually touch the platform itself beyond what a channel needs, a tracking pixel, a landing page template, and its value shows up in traffic and revenue numbers rather than a finished build.
Full-service agency
Does both under one roof, in theory so the build and the marketing inform each other rather than working against one another. The real test of a full-service ecommerce agency is whether the same senior people cross both disciplines, or whether it is two separate teams sharing an invoice. Ask who actually attends both the build kickoff and the marketing planning call.
Which one you need
If your store does not exist yet or needs rebuilding, start with a build agency and worry about marketing once there is something working to send traffic to. If the store already converts reasonably and the problem is that not enough people find it, a marketing agency alone is usually the cheaper, faster fix. Full-service earns its premium when the two genuinely need to move together, a replatform timed against a campaign launch, for instance, and costs more than it is worth when they do not.
Where we sit, honestly
We are a full-service ecommerce agency, mostly on Shopify, and we run our own two stores the same way we would run yours: build, search, paid media and retention under one team. If your brief genuinely only needs one slice of that, a build with no ongoing marketing, say, we will scope it that way rather than sell you the whole practice.
Common questions
- What does an ecommerce agency actually do, day to day?
- Depends which kind you have hired. A build agency designs and develops the store itself: theme, checkout, integrations. A marketing agency runs the channels that bring traffic and repeat purchase: SEO, paid ads, email. A full-service agency does both under one roof. Ask which one you are talking to before you ask what they charge, because the answer changes what "done" looks like.
- Is there a difference between an ecommerce agency and a digital agency?
- In principle, scope. A digital agency’s remit can include a brochure site, an app, a piece of internal software, anything with a screen. An ecommerce agency’s whole job is a store that takes payment, which pulls in a narrower, deeper set of concerns: checkout, catalogue, inventory, payment compliance. In practice the labels blur, so ask what they have actually built rather than trusting the name on the door.
- Do I need a full-service ecommerce agency, or should I hire separately for build and marketing?
- A full-service ecommerce agency earns its fee when the build and the marketing genuinely inform each other: a product page built for the SEO strategy, not against it. If your store already exists and works, hiring separately for the marketing slice is often cheaper and just as effective. The failure mode to watch for either way is the same: nobody owning the whole customer journey.
- What ecommerce agency services should be included as standard, not billed as extras?
- Basic performance monitoring, a documented handover of what was built and why, and honest advice about what you do not need yet. Anything billed hourly for "just checking in" is a sign the retainer was underscoped at the start. Ask what is included before you sign, not after the first invoice surprises you.
- How is an ecommerce agency ecommerce specifically different from one that only occasionally builds a store?
- Depth of pattern recognition. An agency ecommerce-focused as its whole practice has already hit the checkout edge case, the payment gateway quirk, the inventory sync bug your build will eventually surface. A generalist agency meets those for the first time on your project, at your cost.
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