How to get the most out of your ecommerce agency

Great clients get great work. 

And this article is about being a great client. 

Of course, the quality of your agency team is really important too. But besides selecting a great agency, the next best thing to improve the outcome of projects with your agency is to help them do a great job. 

Whether you’re selecting a Magento agency, an ecommerce development agency or more broadly an ecommerce agency to help you across the board, you need to do what you can to make this relationship thrive. 

Find below some tips to bring your agency relationship to the next level.

Ask many questions 

Asking questions should be priority number one, especially during the selection process and the first few days. There is so much to clarify and understand. 

Yet often, clients ask no questions to their agencies. 

The biggest barrier?

Self-consciousness. 

It can feel apprehensive to ask a question in front of a group of experts. 

This is understandable, especially if you are newer in your company, or lack experience in ecommerce.  

Asking questions however is not only very useful but can also be a great opportunity to improve the outcome of the project, develop yourself personally and impress your peers and agency partners. 

Great clients know this. 

Because to ask is to be in control of the situation. 

What should you ask your ecommerce agency? Anything you’re not sure about. 

During the selection process: 

• What is your experience working on briefs like this one? 
• Which clients are you currently working on in my sector? 
• Who will be my team? What roles will each person play? 
• How likely is my team to change? 
• How does the commercial agreement work? 
• What is included / not included in the scope being discussed? 

During the first few days: 

• What will you need from me? 
• How often do you think we should be getting together? What would be the rough agenda? 
• What would you like to understand about our products or ecommerce operation that you don’t yet understand? 
• What documentation would you find useful? 

Reviewing a new roadmap or sprint:

• What are your expectations of results or outcomes? 
• How will you deliver on this sprint? 
• How can we help you deliver on this sprint?
• What risks are there? 

Reviewing a report:

• When you say X did Y, what do you think it’s telling us? 

Understand your contract and scope of work documents

The contract deserves special attention. For obvious reasons. 

Agencies and clients will have many conversations about how the project or programme will work, what will be done and what it will cost. This might happen in conversations facilitated by the agency, usually with the help of a presentation. 

However, only the contract or signed documents such as the scope of work documentation are legally binding. Sometimes, a particular element of service level might be verbally referenced during the proposal stage, but not make it to the scope of work. Honest mistakes happen all the time. 

As a client, your mind is on website improvements, features and return on investment. When you receive the contract, you may be too busy or simply not in the right mindset to read it word by word. You may think “well, I trust my new partner”. 

However knowing what the agency has agreed to deliver will keep you in control of the situation, make you more prepared during negotiations and better able to provide feedback on how the agency delivered on its promise. 

Write a good brief 

At the start of the relationship, or when a new project approaches, it can be really useful to write a brief to communicate your business objectives, wider context and any requirements. 

A good agency will be great at fleshing out a brief through conversation, helping you form a clear idea of what you want to do. 

However, without a written brief, miscommunication is possible. You meant X but the agency heard Y. You said Z but the agency doesn’t seem to remember hearing it. It happens. 

All of this can be avoided by the simple discipline of collating all the information on a piece of paper that is sent to the agency. Even if you want to use the agency to discuss the brief and shape it with you, write it afterwards. 

The written brief is also incredibly helpful to your agency. Because most agencies won’t write a brief for a client that hasn’t written one, the project’s purpose and context can be floating in the minds of your agency team. This makes it likely to be forgotten, evolved and changed as time goes by. 

By giving your agency a written brief, you are also sending a strong message: you care about this project, and you care about how it’s delivered. This will get your agency more engaged. 

Onboard them to your brand 

You love your brand and you need your agency to love it too. 

Don’t be afraid to make us as passionate about your brand as you are. The more information you can give us, the easier it is for our team to deliver solutions that meet your brand strategy. 

At the bare minimum, you need to start with Brand Guidelines, including extensive instructions on how to use brand assets such as colours, fonts and images. 

The tone of voice is also important, as the agency will write micro-copy for crucial user journeys. You need your agency to make good decisions around copy, and to understand what a good homepage looks like, either things are impossible to do properly unless they understand your brand strategy. 

What does your agency need to know about your brand: 

• What is your audience? Are there any different market segments? What attributes do you use internally to define audiences? 
• What are your competitors? How do they relate to you in terms of market positioning? And what about market share? 
• What is your value proposition to your customers? How does the brand communicate this?
• What is your brand’s visual identity? What are do’s and don’ts? 
• What is the tone of voice? What example words should we avoid using? 

Be available

Some people are really busy. Maybe you are one of them. 

Getting into a new agency relationship means you will get extra help, and more will get done. 

However, agencies are not magicians, and they can’t support you without you being available for sign-off, feedback and to steer the project. 

It is a waste of resources to pay an agency to then have them blocked because you don’t have the time to send something they need or approve a new design on time. 

Before you commit to a new relationship (or before your boss does it for you), make sure that you have the time to be available, clear their path, help them navigate your organisation and of course, engage with them directly. 

Agencies love responsive clients. Your work will really improve by being available. 

Be kind 

We’re human too – be considerate to team members and rest assured that we will always do everything we can to ensure any issues get resolved as quickly as possible. 

In ecommerce projects the stakes are high. A rushed deployment gone wrong can cost the business a lot of money and a damaged reputation. 

Your agency team really cares about your project (if you are sure they don’t, it’s time to change agency!) and they are used to working in this kind of situation. 

When things go wrong, it’s very tempting to escalate internally and give your agency a tough time. And, hey, maybe they “deserve it”. Maybe you did everything you were meant to do, and they didn’t.

But being tough and fair is one thing and being aggressive is another one. If your agency expects the client team to turn their backs when things don’t go the way they were planned, they can switch off. They can burn out too. 

The best clients have a good balance between assertiveness and kindness. 

Agencies love these clients and will work a lot harder for them. 

Communicate: Keep them in the loop 

Treat your agency as an extension of your team – the more communication and updates you can give us, the better we can help you create an amazing experience for your customers online. Don’t forget to introduce us to any other agencies you might be working with (e.g. SEO, Social Media Marketing) so we can all work together to deliver a unified ecommerce operation. 

If in doubt, over-communicate. Agencies will feel honoured that you share internal news and developments, even if they don’t absolutely need to know. 

What to definitely communicate: 

• Everything that needs to be in a brief: objectives, business context, requirements, timelines. 
• Who are all the stakeholders and the relationship to the project. 
• New KPIs the wider business has in mind, for example NPS.  
• Communicate when things change: someone has left, team reorganisation, new themes in the corporate agenda (eg. is the CEO curious about NFTs), competitor developments (eg. is a new entrant concerning you?)
• New research or pieces of work that improves your understanding of the landscape. 
• Feedback. How the agency is seen by senior stakeholders. 

 Be clear about your budget

OK, this is a big one. 

Agencies need to know the budget but some clients can avoid being upfront about it. 

And some agencies allow clients to do this, to avoid rocking the boat. 

Imagine going to an estate agent and asking to buy a house without a budget. It would make the estate agent’s job really hard. 

Some clients can be concerned that if an agency knows the total available budget they will mark up their costs to reach that figure, even if a lower cost could have served the purpose. 

Instead, they think the agency should be able to propose a figure (the right figure) based on what the client wants. 

This is a fallacy, really. 

The two most important parameters in a client brief are the objectives and the budget. 

Just like you can meet “house objectives” (eg 4 rooms, garden, 20mins walking to the beach max.) with wildly different houses at very different prices, the agency can propose different scope depths to meet your objectives. 

How good you want it is up to you.

The more budget, the better the project. Even if there are diminishing returns. 

This is not to say the agency can’t help you set the budget by giving you some estimations based on their experience. If you need the agency to tell you what is an acceptable range for what you have in mind, by all means, ask. 

But eventually, the annual and project budgets need to come from you and be set in the brief. 

The problem for clients in not giving budgets is not so much the potential of time wasted, but in sending away good agencies who demand clear parameters and retaining worse agencies who are happy to work on loose briefs. 

To make these awkward dynamics work for you, consider:

• Be clear about the budgets before you engage any agency. Very often clients don’t give an indication of budget because they don’t know it themselves. It might be that a CFO or CEO is keeping budgets close to their heart. Solve that internal problem before you rope an agency into it. 

• Work out what is the expected business value from the brief. If you expect to make £1m profit in Year 1, then spending close to a £1m (or even more) is sensible (of course depends on the risk aversion in your company). This exercise will also help you straighten the brief. 

• Once the budget has been rationalised and signed off internally, put it in the brief. 

• However if you are interested in spending less (for any reason), ask the agency to give you two alternative quotes. Agencies will see this as a bit of wishy-washiness but there’s no harm in being honest about being in two minds about budgets. Money is hard, we get it.

Meet in person, sometimes 

The post-pandemic world has agencies and clients start and build their relationships over videoconferences and Miro boards. 

But nothing beats meeting in person to get to know a group of people. A little effort, especially at the beginning can pay huge dividends over time. 

Come and say hello – there’s nothing like meeting your team in person. We’re happy to come to you, but if you can travel to us, it’s a great opportunity to meet everyone you work with from support engineers to developers. 

Celebrate together 

It’s now been a few months and all the hard work is starting to pay off. Your customers show higher satisfaction scores, your page speed is faster and your conversion rate higher. 

Nothing energises an agency team more than feeling part of successes (because we certainly feel part of failures when they occasionally happen). 

Treat your agency as part of your team by letting them know when successes are celebrated internally when you’re getting credit for the work of the agency or simply when things are looking up and you’re feeling great about it all. 

Agencies love kind clients who rejoice in shared victories together.