Almost all Shopify development is remote now, often across borders. That's normal and it works — but it puts more weight on the boring parts: what the contract says, how money moves, and how you give someone access to the system your business runs on. Get those right and geography stops mattering. Here's the checklist.
Timezones: overlap beats proximity
The number that matters isn't distance, it's overlapping working hours. Four hours of shared day is plenty for most projects; under two gets painful, because every question costs a day. A twelve-hour gap can still work for well-defined, batch-style work — you send a list, it comes back done — but it's poor for anything exploratory where you need to iterate.
Ask directly: what hours do you work, and when can we reliably talk? Then agree an expectation for urgent issues. "Site is down" needs a different response path than "can we change this heading."
The contract: five things that must be in it
It doesn't need to be long, and for smaller jobs a clear email exchange both sides have agreed to is better than nothing. Cover these:
- Scope. What's included, what isn't, what "done" means.
- Price and schedule. The amount, the currency, milestones, and who absorbs transfer fees.
- Code ownership / IP. State plainly that work produced for you belongs to you on payment. Without this, ownership can be ambiguous — and ambiguity favours whoever holds the code.
- Confidentiality. They'll see customer data, revenue and possibly supplier terms. An NDA or a confidentiality clause is normal and rarely resisted.
- Post-launch fixes. How long, and covering what. Define it now, not when something breaks.
Cross-border enforcement is realistically difficult for small amounts, so treat the contract as clarity first and legal recourse second. Which is exactly why payment structure matters.
Paying someone in another country
Structure protects you more than any payment method:
- Milestones tied to delivery. A deposit, then payments as things are demonstrably done. Never the full amount before you've seen working code.
- A sensible deposit. Somewhere around a quarter to a half is standard practice for freelance work; 100% up front is a red flag.
- Method. Bank transfer is standard for established relationships; services built for international invoicing keep fees predictable. Cards and some platforms offer more recourse but cost more. Be wary of anyone insisting on irreversible, untraceable payment.
- Currency and tax. Agree the invoicing currency up front. Ask about VAT/sales tax treatment — a business-to-business cross-border invoice often carries no VAT, but your accountant should confirm for your jurisdiction.
Milestones do more for you than any contract clause. If each payment follows something you can see working, your maximum exposure at any moment is one milestone — no matter which country the invoice comes from.
Giving store access — properly
This is where merchants take real risk casually. Rules:
- Never share your own login. Create a staff account for them, or accept a collaborator request if they work through a partner account. That way actions are attributable and access is revocable without changing your own credentials.
- Least privilege. Grant themes, apps and products if that's the job. Withhold finance, customer data exports and payout settings unless there's a reason.
- Keep the audit trail. Shopify logs staff actions. That's only useful if each person has their own account.
- Revoke at the end. Close the loop when the project finishes. Old accounts with live access accumulate silently.
- Third-party systems. Same logic for your ERP, accounting or 3PL — a scoped API credential for the integration, not an admin password over email. Rotate anything shared in plain text.
Working rhythm that survives distance
Agree a single place for project conversation rather than four scattered channels, and a fixed update cadence — a weekly written summary is usually enough. Insist on a staging environment so you can see progress rather than take it on trust. And write decisions down: remote work fails on "I thought we agreed," and a shared list of decisions with dates costs nothing.
Handover: the step everyone skips
Before you make the final payment, collect: access to the repository with the final code, a short document covering what was built and any credentials or configuration involved, and confirmation that any accounts created for the project are yours. Then remove the access they no longer need. Half an hour here is what makes changing developers later an inconvenience rather than an archaeology project.
Bottom line
Prioritise working-hour overlap over location. Put scope, ownership, confidentiality and post-launch fixes in writing. Pay in milestones against visible progress. Give access via a scoped staff account and revoke it at the end. Do these and hiring someone three time zones away is no riskier than hiring locally — and gives you a far bigger pool of people who've actually solved your problem.