Released on March 31, 2008 , Magento has risen up to be the leading e-commerce platform all around the world. Owing to that, more and more e-businesses now have the need of hire Magento Developer to develop new websites or support their existing sites.

Although there is a large number of Magento agencies and Magento developers for hire, it seems to be difficult to find the right partner who has the wealth of expertise and experience in Magento development as well as offers an acceptable price.

Assumed that you are going to hire Magento developer for your project, how would you do? Would you search on the Google and select a reliable one among 294,000 results?

Actually, 60-70% of the firms will go this way. We don’t say that this is a bad method but if you don’t have a specific list of criteria for choosing your desired Magento programmers, too many choices might make them confused. Therefore, to make the things less complicated, we want to give you 10 fundamental criteria for hiring a high-quality Magento web developer. Let’s get started!

1. Clarify Your Needs and Requirements of Magento Developers for Hire

First and foremost, you have to truly “know what you want” before hire Magento developer/ expert. Let’s ask yourself the following questions:

Do you need that Magento developer to help you to fix a major bug Or handle an ongoing serious of issues?

Do you want to hire Magento developer for developing a custom function/ build a website from scratch/ migrate your site to Magento 2/ continue your unfinished project?

Will you need constant support or just in urgent situations?

How long will you expect to have your task/ project done?

Do you prefer working with a Magento developer freelance or a Magento Agency?

How large is your budget?

Depending on your answers to the above questions, you have gone 50% of the path to look for proper Magento web developers.

For example, if you need to get help to solve several major but not urgent bugs in your site, you can work with some Magento developer freelance. On the contrary, if your site has some critical issues that need solving as soon as possible, we highly suggest you finding professional Magento support services of Magento development companies.

Also, if you need constant support to ensure high performance of your site, working with Magento experts from well-known agencies is more recommended.

Besides, based on your project size that you should need to hire a dedicated Magento developer or an entire Magento development team. The reason is that large projects like developing new Magento site from scratch generally include too much work for one programmer and you should consider hiring a team, in that case, to guarantee your project quality and optimize the total time for the development process.

Another factor that decides your partner is your budget. For instance, if money is not a big problem for you, you can freely to choose any Magento developer/ Magento ecommerce company to work with. On the flip side, if you have a small and medium budget, you should “shake hand” with an offshore Magento development company (e.g.: in Vietnam, India, Singapore, Thailand,…) instead of Magento ecommerce company in the US, UK, or Australia. By this way, you can save your budget while having your work done with high quality.

2. Check the Expertise and Experience of the Magento Developer

After defining specifically your expectations, you now can start searching on Google or other search engines and apply our suggested criteria from this section to hire dedicated Magento developers for your store.

In general, it seems that expertise and experience is the most fundamental thing to consider when you want to hire Magento programmer.

Regardless of hire Magento developer(s) or Magento experts, you should only work with whom possess more than at least 2 years of experience on Magento. With an array of advanced capabilities and mass customization, Magento has created a real challenge to its users, especially to the beginners.

So, how to check the Magento developer’s experience? This is simple.

First, ask them directly. about how long they get along with Magento, how many Magento projects that they have involved in, the toughest issue with Magento development that they had to face and their solutions.

Second, ask them for some advice about your project. A Magento ecommerce specialist will be able to give you sound and proper advice based on their experience. For example, when you want to develop a complex function, an experienced Magento programmer can help you to analyze which parts of this function are Magento default and which parts need customization, and then give you an optimal solution.

Besides, when opting for the Magento developers for a large project, it’s recommended to know their experience with version control tools. A Magento specialist would have significant experience with some version control systems such as GIT.

3. Examine the Portfolio of the Magento Developer

Obviously, you cannot just listen to what the Magento Programmer says to you since sometimes those words are exaggerated.

Therefore, don’t just listen to what they say but see what they do!

Let’s have a look on their previous products, examine the Magento websites they have developed and evaluate whether they can meet your requirements. Since most of the Magento development projects nowadays apply a ready-made theme and template, you don’t need to check out the design too much but focus on the functionality. For example, you have to assess the speed, navigation, responsiveness, checkout process,… of the websites in the portfolio.

For Magento web development company, they often display their portfolio right on their website so you can easily approach it. However, for Magento developers that don’t work for any specific agency, just ask them to send you their portfolio via the email.

4. Find Real Testimonials and Feedback

The next step that we want to suggest you is asking real feedback from previous clients of the Magento developer/ agency you want to hire. Sometimes, a nice portfolio can’t tell you the whole story. For example, although the final website design is perfect, the programmer fails to deliver it on time.

To get the contacts of the previous customers, you can ask the Magento programmers directly or access to the websites on the portfolio to get information. After that, you should email or call those customers to get references. Here are some effective questions that you should ask the past clients:

For what projects/ services did they hire Magento developer/ company)?

Why did they select that vendor?

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

What did they find most impressive/ disappointing about the service?

Did the developers deliver your project on time and within your budget? Are there any extra costs incurred?

Are there any areas where they can improve?

Would they recommend the developer/ company?

It’s crucial to ensure that the Magento expert you gonna hire has delivered high-quality work for their former customers.

5. Ask for Post-development Support & Maintenance

The support and maintenance after delivering services are crucial, especially when you hire Magento developer to develop big Magento e-commerce websites. For example, after the User Acceptance Testing (UAT), you can’t find all bugs in your development site but these occur after the site goes live. In that case, it’s better to work with your initial developers to find out the causes and resolve the problems rather than finding another programmer.

At Tigren, we offer 3-month free support after our clients’ site go live (in Magento website development projects) in order to help them avoid as well as tackle any possible issues timely. As a result, we always get 100% satisfaction from all of our customers. After 3 months of free support, if the clients want to have further help from us, they can consider using our Magento Monthly Support service, which provides 10, 20, and 30 support hours/ month with a very reasonable price.

6. Figure Out Development Process Before Hire Magento Developer

As you might know, the development processes and methodologies applied in a Magento project will decide whether it would be successful or not. There are a lot of things that make a good Magento development process but here are some primary points you need to concern.

To begin with, the Magento ecommerce specialists must give you an intelligent development plan. On that plan, it must show you clearly what they will do in your site, arranged into several major tasks and multiple sub-tasks (minor tasks). Also, there must be concrete completion time for each task. For example, at Tigren we often make a detailed schedule and timeline for each project, including some specific phases such as Planning/Preparation, Website Design (Setup, Customization) & Website Development (Product, Customer Account, Admin Configuration, Shipping, Checkout, Payment, SEO, Data integration, Extension Implementation, …), Testing & UAT, and Launching.

Besides, most of the developers will implement your website on their development servers and only move the site to your server when you satisfy with the product. The thing is that you have to ask them whether they will give you access to their server. If not, it’s difficult for you to follow and control the development progress and give timely comments for improvement.

Another thing you need to make sure is that the Magento agency that you want to hire has dedicated testers to check all functions before delivering the site to you. On the other hand, be clear about how you can report when noticing any issues on the website.

7. Evaluate Magento Developer’s Communication Skills

Many people usually ignore the communication issue but it does matter, especially in case of outsourcing Magento development project when face-to-face meetings are almost impossible. If you go for offshore Magento development, let’s figure out carefully all potential methods to communicate with your partners. For instance, you have to check whether they can use audio and video conferencing, chat tools like Skype, Slack or any special application sharing tool.

Moreover, language can be a barrier although English now becomes more and more popular. Hence, make sure that your chosen Magento developers get a certain level of English fluency.

8. Get the Balance between Your Budget and the Magento Developer’s Offer

In the US, UK or Australia, you can easily find a famous Magento development company just by a few clicks. Nevetherless, to have your Magento website implemented by these firms, you would have to make a huge investment. Most of them will deny development projects that have the budget under 10K and just be willing to accept large projects (from $40K to $100K). Hence, if you can afford to hire a local company, outsourcing your Magento project might be an ideal alternative.

Owing to the cheap labor cost, the Magento web development company in India, Vietnam, Thailand or Singapore can offer you very competitive website development costs. While you have to pay from $75-150/working hour to hire Magento developer from the USA, you need to pay just a half or even lower cost to have your work done by Asian programmers.

Many people doubt about the expertise of developers from Asian countries since they offer very low Magento price. However, the huge gap in pricing between a USA firm and a Vietnamese agency is just due to the enormous difference between their labor costs. In short, it’s up to your budget to hire Magento developer/ company.

9. Define the Developer Specialization

A common case is that although the firm wants to build a Magento website, they just look for general “website design and development companies”. Consequently, they can find multiple famous firms about website development but none of them are specialized in Magento.

And you know what? A big ecommerce development company specializing in Shopify can still help you build a Magento store but they can’t do better than a “truly” Magento ecommerce company.

Therefore, besides the reputation of website development agency, you should also understand their focusing platform.

10. Ask for Magento Certifications (optional)

Now, Magento provides several certifications for its developers and partners such as Magento certified solution specialist, Magento certified professional developer, Magento front-end developer and Magento certified developer and developer plus.

If the Magento developer or Magento web design and development company can show their certifications, it would be a plus. However, we set this step to be optional since you shouldn’t depend heavily on it. In some cases, if you meet a certified Magento developer with a lot of certifications in hand, don’t be rush into signing the contract with him. The reason is that those certifications might be obtained by cheating.

Furthermore, if you have a limited budget and choose to work with Magento outsourcing companies, most of them can’t offer certifications even when they have 5-6 years of experience on Magento. Why? For those programmers, both of the fees and time for joining Magento Certified Exam are considerable. Also, they have done plenty of amazing websites to show with you, which would be even more valuable than those certificates.

Conclusion

It has never been easy to hire Magento developer/ development company that can meet all of your needs and requirements as well as suits your budget. However, if you follow our suggestions, it would definitely take less effort to find a great solution provider for your project.

With more than 5-year experience, Tigren has become the best Magento development company in Asia. Different from some agencies, we just focus on projects built with Magento and deliver optimal solutions for our clients. Now, we provide a wide range of Magento web services, from Magento website development, Magento website design, Magento support, Magento extension development, Magento mobile app development, Magento migration to Magento optimization. Contact us now to get free quotation and consultation for your project!

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