About
That's me on the left with friend, collaborator and Shopify legend Keir Whitaker
Archer Cooper is a small Shopify design, development and strategy agency based in Manchester, England. We focus on working with our clients for the long term, helping them to build stable, sustainable and profitable Shopify stores.
Introducing Craig, your point of contact at Archer Cooper
Working with Archer Cooper means working with me, Craig. Working directly with me means that you get stability, authority and expertise baked into our engagement. No changes to the team part way through a project (no matter how long that is). No deferring to developers or project managers for information or decisions.
The Archer Cooper team is structured to support that high level relationship because you deserve that level of attention. Most agency business models are built around hiring client service account managers and client delivery teams to service more and ever larger clients. You get sold the project by the A team, and end up working with the B team.
When you work with Archer Cooper you get all A team guaranteed.
Where did we start from?
I started working with Shopify in 2015. Previously I had helped clients working with WooCommerce and similar e-commerce platforms. Most of the time the work was just keeping everything ticking along and working as it should. Plugin updates, security updates, email deliverability. Those tech stacks needed constant work to keep going.
When Shopify came along the game was changed. Suddenly the key aspects of the e-commerce business just worked. Checkouts didn’t suddenly fail, SSL certificates didn’t need to be updated, compatibility with plugins no longer needed to be checked. It freed so much of my time to be able to help clients in more important areas.
How Shopify changed everything for me
No with Shopify taking care of business I was free to help clients in other ways. I could spend time understanding how their customers interacted with their stores and work out how to improve them (knowing it wouldn’t risk breaking the entire shop!). I could look at their full acquisition funnel and see how different advertising sources brought customers to the website. I could run a/b tests to discover what worked and what didn’t.
Over time more and more areas of my clients businesses came into focus, especially as some of them grew at extraordinary rates. Shipping, fulfilment (both in house and third party), automation, workflows – all became areas where I was asked to lend my problem solving expertise.
Understanding e-commerce from top to bottom
The trust that clients placed in me to help solve these problems afforded me the chance to really learn about the full e-commerce business from the client’s perspective. Combined with a continued obsession for delivery the ultimate customer experience I gained a unique position that clients came to value.
I could look at the business both in terms of the likely needs of the client for streamlining their operations and the customer’s point of view of the entire buying experience.
Getting the right perspective on your business
Working with me helps clients to see their business from a perspective that often impossible otherwise. Of course every client knows their own business better than I ever could but from the inside it can be hard to see the forest for the trees.
From the outside I can act as the voice of the customer when required. At other times I can provide the voice of the team members who need to process the orders, list the products or handle customer service requests. I’ve got the experience and top-to-bottom knowledge to help bring clarity to tricky situations.
Getting it executed
I’m not just a thinker though, I still like getting my hands dirty with the code (can code make your hands dirty?). Shopify changes frequently and it’s important to keep up with those changes. When we chat you don’t just get rough ideas and “we’ll ask the developers” you get first hand knowledge that comes from the combined place of “I know how the code works” and “I know how the business works”.
So ultimately this is more than just a talking shop. Together we can make plans and between me and my team we can execute them for you. Because real change doesn’t happen in the boardroom it happens where your customer interacts with your website, your product or your marketing.
Elsewhere
Some interviews I did: