Free Expert Agency Matchmaking Service for Shopify Merchants, Bold Match Launches

Bold Match, a new agency matchmaking platform, today announced its official launch, offering Shopify merchants and e-commerce retailers ready to make the move to Shopify free access to vetted expert agencies without commission fees or middleman markups. The platform addresses a persistent gap in the e-commerce ecosystem. The challenge that small store owners to mid-sized merchants face after they've outgrown the extant freelance expert finding and hiring alternatives but before they've developed the network of community contacts necessary to find and hire a reliable Partner Agency that they can trust.

Unlike freelancer focused platforms that monetize making merchant-agency connections, Bold Match operates on what founders Eric Boisjoli and Jay Myers describe as a "nonprofit org" model that does away with the expected referral fees but maintains the rigorous agency vetting standards and adds a personal touch because it's for "the kinds of referrals or recommendations that're currently mostly being made by the friends and associates of the online retailers in need."

"What we realized was that neither of us gets asked for anything professionally as much as we get asked for reliable referrals by Shopify store owners stuck in an unfortunate, uncomfortable, and almost untenable middle ground," said Myers, during a break between recording episodes of his Shopify1Percent podcast. "They've outgrown the bandwidth and capabilities of solo freelancers but don't have the time to build the network to get reliable referrals to specialized agencies. Meanwhile, expert agencies struggle with lead generation costs that ultimately get passed to clients."

The platform's approach diverges from industry norms by focusing on personal plus strategic fit rather than transactional volume or simple skillset matching. Bold Match's vetting and vouching process evaluates agencies across technical competency, client communication standards, and shopify specific ecosystem expertise rather than on their comparatively generic portfolio metrics.

The "You Don't Know What You Don't Know" Problem

Bold Match's positioning is a direct response to the problem that Boisjoli calls the industry's "knowledge asymmetry thing" ... i.e. The difficulty some e-commerce retailers have evaluating an agency's capabilities when they can't really know everything that will be involved themselves.

"Merchants know they want to migrate to Shopify or need a site redesign that improves UX and boosts conversion rates for mobile users, or just that they have an older online store that can't handle how much they've grown. But they don't know that replatforming involves SEO not just dev and design or that improving engagement and performance equals UX and UI experts plus an expert developer or that redesign, redevelopment and relaunch often requires two different kinds of design, three different varieties of development and at least two shades of marketing besides," Boisjoli explained. "That's why we have human matchmakers instead of an algorithm."

Free Model Challenges Industry Commission Structure

By making the service free, Bold Match challenges an industry standard where expert agencies typically pay lead gen platforms 10-15% commissions and merchants pay them an additional 10-15%.The founders describe their "not for profit" approach as both philosophical and practical.

"Commission-based matching creates inherent conflicts," Myers noted. "Platforms have financial incentives to promote the experts willing to pay higher referral fees rather than those best suited for an individual retailer's needs and the store owners have to be wary of profit driven movies behind recs. We're betting that removing that dynamic produces better outcomes for everyone."
The platform doesn't generate revenue through premium content or selling spots on the list of vetted agencies its founders are willing to vouch for or consulting services ... It is free. Full stop.

"We're not trying to build the fastest-growing platform," Myers concluded. "We're trying to build the most useful one. We're trying to build a resource that we wish we'd had access to when we were first starting out in this industry. If we consistently connect merchants with expert agencies that actually solve their problems, then Bold Match succeeds. Everything else follows from that."

Bold Match. 50 Fultz Blvd, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3Y 0L6, Canada
Contact: Ryan McDermott - ryan.mcdermott@boldcommerce.com

Bold Match is a free specialized agency matchmaking platform connecting Shopify retailers with vetted Shopify Expert Design, Development and Marketing Agencies. Founded by e-commerce industry veterans and Bold Commerce co-founders Eric Boisjoli and Jay Myers, the company operates on a commission-free model designed to align incentives with Shopify merchant success. Bold Match is headquartered in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

This release was published on openPR.