How to become a freelance Shopify developer

hello hello youtube and welcome to another one of my videos today we're going to talk about how you become a shopified developer [Music] [Applause] so you've gotten pretty good at web development you know the basics html css javascript and you've been seeing all these e-commerce stores popping up a lot of them powered by shopify and you start to wonder to yourself you know maybe i could start building some of these and let me tell you shopify stores are a profitable venture people need ecommerce stores that sell well and if you can deliver that then you can charge what your value is worth so how do you get started building shopify stores well that's exactly what i'm going to talk to you about today we'll talk about the skills that you need and some of those soft skills that you also should have or try to develop in order to become a shopify developer so first off you need to decide whether you want to develop on the front end of shopify or on their back end okay so the front end of the shopify platform you would be doing what they call a theming so you're a theme developer if you want to develop on the back end of shopify then you would be a app or well an app developer is what they call it but there's different types of apps and we'll get into that let's say you want to be a front-end developer you're pretty good with design and you're pretty good with ui ux and you like to you know design stuff that converts well these are all assets or traits that would be very well geared towards becoming a front-end shopify developer if you understand how to make a website sell you will have no problem building amazingly converting websites for shopify store owners so you decide okay i'm going to become a theme developer i'm going to make custom themes for shopify stores heck maybe you can even build up a library of your own like i plan to do and sell those themes for other people to use as templates as starting points for their shopify store so what do you need to know to become a theme developer well first there's the basics html css javascript you need to know these three languages or markup syntax in order to actually build the core components of the theme on top of that you need to understand something called liquid liquid is shopify's templating language if you haven't worked with a templating language before it's basically a programming language with sort of a subset of features that you normally expect in a programming language just built for adding html repeating html hiding html doing these kinds of things inside of your front end now there's a couple different versions of liquid the original liquid templating language was developed by shopify but there's other versions of liquid being used out there some that are also used for a static site generator called jekyll so if you're working with shopify liquid there are objects in this shopify liquid that are available to give you data from the shopify store so you also want to become comfortable with shopify liquids specifically and what objects you can access you can access this product data and stuff like this through liquid objects and once you become comfortable with this and quick with it and you're not always having to reference the docs you can actually start building front-end shopify themes very quickly so once you get the hang of liquid and if you're a strong html css and javascript developer you should have no problem building front-end themes for shopify stores okay maybe you're not so tech savvy or well maybe you're maybe you're more tech savvy but you're not so design savvy or you don't have that eye for design or you're not necessarily super comfortable with building high converting websites then maybe you're more in line with a back-end shopify development role so if you're looking at building apps for shopify's back-end then you would be looking at building things that merchants can use inside of their shopify admin panel or outside of their admin panel that will help them either speed up management of their store improve sales on the front end do things that allow them to integrate custom features that shopify might not have all this kind of functionality can be built with shopify apps now there's a couple different types of shopify apps there is a standalone app where the user would go to your website or your domain and access the app and then that app would talk to their shopify store there are integrated apps so these apps are built into the shopify backend and they install in the back end of shopify so if you log in as a store owner in your admin portal you'll see the app there you can work inside of the app there and then you can even use things called extensions in these integrated apps that allow you to integrate with shopify's admin functionality that already exists so they have a product selector for example there might be an extra option where to say more options and you might have your app there as an option of something that they can do on that product so those they call embedded apps now if you're interested in shopify's pos system you can also build apps for that so you know depending which area of app building you're interested in for shopify or maybe you're interested in them all you will need a slightly different skill set so to build apps on the back end if they're standalone you really can pick your own framework your own server-side language and your own front-end or client-side language for that app it doesn't really matter shopify sort of recommends to use either ruby or node as the server framework because those are the things that they sort of support the best and they have lots of informational videos tutorials and all their docs are based around those but you're sort of free to use what you want as long as you know how to access shopify's api which is a restful json api or a graphql api so you can use either or it looks like they're sort of favoring the graphql api now which which makes sense it's where everything is going as far as apis so you know it might not hurt to start working with the graphql api right away but if you're very comfortable with rest i don't see them deprecating that anytime soon either so you could work with the rest api as well now you pick a framework that you want to build your app with then you need sort of the client side of that app that the end user is going to interact with so if you're building it as a standalone you can pick whatever client-side framework you want they recommend react just because react is what they show all their tutorials and whatnot in you can pick any front-end framework really for this if it's a standalone app if you're building an app that's going to be embedded so in the shopify admin then you're best to use react because shopify has provided a component library which they call polaris and this component library is built in react and it gives you all of the components that you would expect to see in the shopify dashboard so all the buttons all the lists all the grid views this kind of stuff is available to you through this react library so you can build an embedded app that looks just like the rest of their shopify admin portal so that's perfect because then it's completely integrated the user doesn't even notice they're using an app and that's a great user experience for that shopify store owner now if you're gonna be building an embedded app or a pos app both require you to use the shopify app bridge framework so the shopify app bridge framework allows you to actually integrate your app into their dashboard and hook into all of the little settings and whatnot of the shopify dashboard okay so just keep that in mind you need to know polaris if you're going to be doing an embed app you don't have to but you should use polaris if you're doing an embedded app you do have to use polaris if you're building a pos app and then both for embedded apps and pos apps you need to know the shopify average framework or how that works so back end a little bit more to know there really on the front end if you're a front-end web developer already all you need to do is add liquid to your skill set which by the way i'm going to have a course on in this youtube channel so you can go check that out for free but if you do learn liquid you have all the skills you need to be a front-end theme developer for shopify assuming you already have your basic html css and javascript skills backend again you would need to have a server framework that you want to use preferably note or ruby and then a front end framework to use preferably react so you can use shopify's polaris component library the final piece of development that you could do for shopify is with shopify integrations so they call these channel developers and these aren't specifically either back end or front end they're more in between and they're and they're more integrated with the different sales channels that shopify offers so you can integrate with shopify's shopping cart you could have a external sales channel where you sell stuff on a website for example and then that uses uh that sends it into shopify's cart and then you do a checkout with shopify you can also build a custom front end for a shopify store that's not built on the shopify platform so this could be a front-end framework of whatever you want it could be a static site generator it could be built in gatsby could be built in whatever you name it it could be built in grid some if you're if you're a view developer it could be built in angular it could even be built in html5 css javascript just just a vanilla html project and then you can take using shopify's front-end api you can take products embed them into your site and then do a checkout through shopify's cart so that's another channel integration that you can do and the final one that you can do with the channels developer docs is purchasing from multiple merchants and adding all those purchases into one cart so if you have a couple of merchants that want to work together you can have them all check out at once in a single cart that's another channel that you can develop for so these channels are sort of integrations between shopify and external platforms and it's also an option an area where you can get into developing and for the most part you just need to know shopify's api fairly well to integrate with a channel okay those are sort of the technical skills you need to know to become a shopify developer but what else should you have so you can market yourself and so that you can actually sell and build storefronts right or or apps or themes right like it's great to know all these skills but if you can't sell them to anyone then maybe maybe you can build yourself a shopify store but you're not gonna get anything in return other than that so first you're gonna need a portfolio okay people don't trust their potentially multi-million dollar brands or large online businesses with someone who's brand new especially shopify it's a fairly complex platform and they don't want somebody building their site that they're going to be trusting their livelihood to because this is how they make all of their money online is through their online store with just anyone right they're gonna want someone who's vetted someone who they can trust and know is gonna do a good job and build them a high converting online store so what do you do you how do you build up this portfolio right you're brand new you've just learned to become a shopify developer nobody wants to work with you so how are you going to build up a portfolio well there's a couple different ways you can do that one is build yourself a shopify store just start drop shipping something or just try something out for fun but build yourself a store so you can show off that store ask a family friend someone who runs a small business hey would you like to sell online you know it hardly costs them a thing it's the minimum shopify plan i think is 30 bucks a month or if you want to do like a front-end store integration you can even go with their minimal plan which is only ten dollars it's like a light plan sort of a secret plan that they don't tell anybody about but that allows you access to their api and their admin dashboard just not a front-end site so you can integrate that with your own front end if you want to do like the channel development route but this will basically give you some projects you can work on for family friends yourself maybe you're doing them all for free but it's giving you that experience and building up that portfolio which is really worth worth your time right it's worth even more than the money when you're first starting out is that portfolio these stores that you can show to people to say look this is what i can build and if you build a solid portfolio with good sites then that almost speaks for itself when you're trying to go sell so that brings us to our final thing you need to be able to sell right you need some skills to try and sell sure you could post yourself up on the internet and say you know i'm a freelancer i can do i can do work and you might get some work that way but if you really want to bring in these higher ticket items and keep improving your shopify skills then you need to be able to sell yourself to some of these clients that actually need these larger shopify stores and how do you sell so if you're not in business or you're just starting out in business this might be a daunting task it might seem like it's you know a difficult thing to do to sell yourself or to sell your your services but it's really not you just need to get comfortable with it like anything else like you learned how to build a website developing a website with different technologies you practice those to get used to them right it's the same thing with selling you just need to practice it might not go so great at the start but over time you'll get much better at it you'll get more experience you'll get more comfortable all right so when you're selling what do you try and sell in a sales meeting for a shopify store right they're not a sales meeting but you know your first interaction with the client what are you telling them what are you bringing to them that you can offer them to improve their store or or really make their money worth what they're paying you right so a couple things you can talk about is site speed okay so if you're good with building performant websites that is one thing that all shopify store owners would love a lot of shopify stores are actually fairly slow they're not very performant just because they haven't been updated in a while or the developers who built them were really good at design but maybe they didn't know the technical aspects to make sure that those sites would be performant liquid the language itself can actually be fairly slow if you do a lot of looping and stuff like this again we talk about that in the course that uh that i've developed but you know there's there's different things that you can say and say you know this is how i can make your site faster than your competitors right and you can even show them case studies on how sites that are faster sell more and then this is true right and then you can sell them on your expertise and user experience potentially maybe you're really good at designing solid user experiences that lead to high conversion rates you know sell them on that if you can say to them your store is going to sell x number of units or it should sell x number of units more just because we're making this so much easier for the customer you're not going to have as many bounces at this point in your checkout flow you know that is that's dollar signs in their eyes right the more they can make off their site it justifies them spending higher dollar with you to build the website accessibility you know you can sell them on accessibility is really important these days that we think about not just those of us who are fully able body but also those who you know might have a disability and we need to think about those consumers and make sure that you can sell them product just as you can tell anybody else right if someone's looking for shoes they shouldn't have be at a disadvantage to buy these shoes just because they have a disability so make sure that you know your accessibility and make sure that you can sell that to your clients say look i can build you a site that's accessible for everyone and then professional design right everybody wants a nice looking store so sell them on that make your portfolio amazing do awesome design maybe you're not amazing at design yourself get someone to help you with the design and then you you program up the design right like i'm not a great designer but i have people who i work with that are great designers and i use what they give me and i tweak that to how i like it and then i do the technical aspects of coding it up okay so outside of the technical aspects and the design aspects what else can you sell your value on well you can sell them on brand awareness right every store owner wants their brand to be known and you can you can talk to them about this and explain how you can make their site tell a better story or how you can make it give off that vibe for their brand or that feeling that they want to portray on their customers you can tell them that you know we can improve the imagery on your site to really show off your brand these are all things that store owners want to hear and they're things that if you can deliver on you will have no problem selling much bigger deals to your clients that are much more worth their money than the smaller the smaller deals that when you don't have as much experience it's a lot of it comes down to experience at the end of the day but a lot of this experience can be built up quickly if you know what you're doing and what you should be focusing on for e-commerce stores finally you can sell them on saving time especially if you're building back-end apps for them you know this app is going to save you 20 minutes every day when you do your invoicing you know multiply that by 365 days in the year and look at how much time you've saved and and a lot of storms will realize what their time is worth and they'll value that and they'll say well that makes that makes it a no-brainer you know if i'm going to save this much money in a year then why would i not work with you right for this one-time fee or whatever you sell them on that and and also the ability to offload work so if their store is easier to manage maybe they don't have to be managing it themselves they can have someone else managing it for them because they know that your app will take care of majority of the heavy lifting and then they can just have someone else who will administer that okay so that's how you can really sell value when you're trying to sell a shopify store so you've got the technical skills you've got the portfolio and you've got the selling value to the client or the shopify store owner those are the three things that you really need to become a solid shopify developer so what are you waiting for get out there check out our liquid course if you want to become a front end developer that will be down in the videos very shortly and also give this video a thumbs up if you think that it helped you i appreciate you hanging out with me and i hope this video was useful for you let me know if you want to hear other topics on or around shopify development thanks have a good one [Music] you

Channel: Brayden Girard

Views: 2,641

Rating: 4.9432626 out of 5

Keywords: Shopify career, freelance developer, web development

Id: lMQgb1iKAns

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020