How this is built
Most agency directories are pay-to-play and won't say so. This one isn't, so it can afford to publish its rules.
Where the data comes from
The directory was seeded from the public Shopify and BigCommerce partner directories. Those are the two places where an agency's platform credential is verified by someone other than the agency — partner tier, review count and rating are issued by the platform, not self-reported here. Agencies can also submit themselves through Get listed.
What gets published
An entry has to clear four checks before it appears at all:
- A working website URL.
- A description of at least 120 characters — enough to tell what they actually do.
- At least one declared service, so the entry can be found from something other than its own name.
- No open data-quality flag from our ingest (for example, listing no build service at all).
About one in five seeded entries fails and stays unpublished. That is deliberate: a directory whose long tail is dead links is worse than a smaller one that isn't.4,009 entries currently pass.
How the ordering works
Ranking is a single computed score. In priority order it combines:
- Partner tier — Premier/Platinum, then Plus, then Select. This is the platform's own assessment and it dominates, because it is the only signal in the set that a third party staked something on. Shopify's tier called Plus is not a Shopify Plus credential, so our Shopify Plus page lists Premier and Platinum partners only, and says so.
- Rating, weighted by review count. A raw average lets a 5.0 from three reviews beat a 4.8 from three hundred, which is backwards. Scores are pulled toward 4.0 in proportion to how few reviews back them, so volume only helps an agency that is also rated well.
- Review volume, on a log scale, as the final tie-break.
1,932 of 4,009 listings carry a rating — just under half. No rating is treated as neutral, never as a penalty: an unrated agency scores exactly the 4.0 the weighting pulls everyone toward, so it sits above agencies rated below average and below those rated above it. It is an honest "we don't know", not a demotion.
That is worth spelling out because it was not true until recently. An unrated listing used to score zero on the rating term and sort beneath an agency rated 3.1 out of 5 in the same tier — and the effect was not evenly spread. BigCommerce issues no partner ratings at all, so all 157 BigCommerce-only partners here carry none and never can. They were being ranked down for a gap in someone else's data. They are not any more.
The practical consequence for you: a rating on this site is only comparable within a platform. A Shopify partner's 4.9 and a BigCommerce partner's silence are not two points on one scale, and a listing page now says "None on file" rather than leaving the row out, so you can tell "unrated" from "rated badly" at a glance.
What we don't do
- No paid placement. Nobody can buy a position, a badge or a hub page.
- One exception. Epic Design Labs runs this directory and also builds stores, and it holds the first slot on the homepage — which the homepage says in as many words. It earns no advantage anywhere else: in the directory, on a hub, or in search it is ranked by the same formula as everyone else, which currently places it well outside the first page.
- No review syndication. Ratings and counts are shown as numbers with a link to the source profile. We don't reproduce the review text people wrote on another platform.
- No invented price guidance. Where a listing shows a starting rate it is the agency's own stated minimum on its partner profile, which across this directory runs from $30 to $10,000 and means different things to different agencies. It is not a quote, and it is not what your project will cost. Only about one listing in six states one at all.
- No fake scarcity. Counts on this site are the real counts.
Where the money comes from
The matching service. When a brief leads to a signed project, the agency pays a referral fee. That's the whole model, and it's why the matching form asks about budget — it's also why the ranking above deliberately can't be influenced by it. If an agency that pays us nothing is the right answer for your brief, that's the answer you get.
Screenshots and images
3,913 listings show a capture of the agency's own homepage, taken automatically. They're illustrative and can lag a redesign by a few weeks.
Corrections
Something wrong? Tell us and we'll fix it. Agencies can claim their own listing from the same form.