App Stack Audit & Management
Every app scored on cost, script weight, overlap and actual usage. We remove what is redundant and own the relationship with what stays.
Berlin
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Berlin
A named Shopify developer and strategist on a fixed sprint cadence, running a store that has to stay compliant in German and keep selling across DACH.
Delivered remotely for brands across Berlin and Germany.
Scale · Berlin
Why Berlin brands come to us for this
- App stack audited for overlap in the two places German stores always duplicate: tax handling and shipping
- OSS and destination-rate configuration reviewed as you grow, so filings do not arrive at your Steuerberater needing manual correction
- DHL, DPD and Hermes integrations plus parcel-locker and returns flows maintained rather than left to drift
- Accounting export kept in a shape DATEV can consume, instead of a monthly reformatting job for someone in finance
- Legal text, unit pricing and packaging-related storefront rules given a maintenance owner, because they change after launch
German Shopify stores accumulate apps faster than most, because so much of the local requirement arrives as a plugin: an invoice generator, a legal-text service keeping the withdrawal and privacy pages current, a returns portal, a tax tool handling OSS reporting, a shipping connector talking to DHL and DPD, an accounting bridge feeding the Steuerberater. Each was a sensible decision on the day. Together they are a monthly bill nobody has reviewed, a stack of scripts on every page load, and three overlapping tools all claiming to own the order record.
So the first pass is stabilisation. Every app assessed for what it actually does, what it costs, what it loads and whether a native Shopify setting or a small Function now covers it. In German stores the duplication is usually clustered in exactly two places — tax and shipping — where merchants have layered tools during expansion and never removed the one they outgrew. Cutting that is the cheapest speed and cost win available, and it lands before any new feature work.
Then a cadence. A named developer and a named strategist, a ranked backlog you can reorder, and something shipped every sprint: the CRO winners hard-coded, the seasonal merchandising ready before December rather than during it, the Austrian or Swiss market configured properly instead of as a shipping zone, the theme kept clean as Shopify ships platform changes. Compliance work is not a one-off project either — legal text, packaging obligations and product-information requirements change, and a store that was correct at launch drifts.
Local context
The German stack, reviewed as a system rather than accumulated
The support work that a Berlin store actually needs looks different from a US retainer, and most of the difference sits in operations. Tax handling has to keep pace with cross-border growth: once EU distance sales pass the threshold you are charging destination rates and filing through the One Stop Shop, and a store still configured for domestic-only rates will produce filings your Steuerberater has to correct by hand. Shipping is its own layer — DHL, DPD and Hermes labels, parcel-locker delivery, return labels that customers expect to be straightforward, and freight rating for the cargo-bike and furniture-scale orders this city produces. Accounting wants a clean export in a format DATEV can consume rather than a monthly CSV someone reformats. And the legal furniture — withdrawal instructions, privacy text, unit pricing, packaging obligations tied to what and where you ship — needs a maintenance owner, because it drifts as the catalogue and the markets change. We treat all of it as one system with one backlog, and we run the sprint rhythm around the eight-hour gap: standing calls in our morning and your late afternoon, everything else in writing, deploys scheduled for your quiet hours rather than ours.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Berlin brand’s realities.
Full service detailCustom App & Function Development
Private apps, Shopify Functions and admin extensions built when a subscription stack is more expensive or slower than owning the code.
Theme Maintenance & Speed
Quarterly Core Web Vitals review, dead-code removal, dependency updates and regression testing against Shopify's platform releases.
Priority Bug Support
Named Slack channel with defined response times: two business hours for revenue-blocking issues, one business day for everything else.
Monthly Optimisation Workstream
A ranked backlog of improvements, features and experiments, with an agreed sprint capacity so a fixed number of items ship every month.
Quarterly Roadmap Review
A session on what shipped, what it moved, and what the next quarter should target. Priorities get reset against your commercial plan, not a fixed contract scope.
Scoped and quoted for your Berlin store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Berlin engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedHow it runs
From kickoff to results
Store Health Check
App stack, theme code, speed, integrations and open bug list documented in the first two weeks. You get the findings whether you continue or not.
Stabilise
Redundant apps removed, urgent bugs cleared, monitoring and staging environments set up. Usually pays for a chunk of the first quarter in cancelled subscriptions.
Backlog & Cadence
A shared, ranked backlog and a fixed sprint rhythm. You always know what is in flight, what is next, and what capacity is left.
Ship Monthly
Two-week sprints with a demo and changelog at the end of each. Work is visible in your own board, not hidden in an agency system.
Review & Reprioritise
Monthly reporting on what shipped and what it moved, then a quarterly reset of priorities against your commercial goals.
Proof
Apps & Support results
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
Supplements (Subscription DTC)
~$4.2M/yr, 60% subscription revenue, 22 SKUs, US · Shopify Plus (Recharge, Klaviyo)
Monthly subscription churn hit 9.4% and the cancel flow was a single button on a hosted page nobody had touched in three years. Support processed 340 subscription changes a month by hand because customers could not do it themselves. The named constraint: no forced logins. The brand refused to gate account access behind a password reset, which ruled out every off-the-shelf portal.
9.4% → 6.1%monthly subscription churnheld for five consecutive months, not a single-month dip
+34%12-month customer LTV$187 to $251 on the subscriber cohort
19% → 38%of revenue from email + SMScategory benchmark for a healthy program is 25-40%
-71%subscription support tickets340/mo to 98/mo after the self-serve portal launched
Outdoor & Sports Gear
~$7M/yr, 480 SKUs, US + EU via Shopify Markets · Shopify Plus (Shopify Markets, 3 regions)
Paid social carried 81% of revenue and CAC had climbed 44% in eighteen months. Organic sat at 2,100 sessions a month against category competitors doing ten times that, and the EU storefront duplicated the US catalogue with no hreflang at all. The named constraint: three national retailers own the head terms with link profiles this brand could not match in a year, so the plan had to win on query depth instead of authority.
+186%organic sessions2,100 to 6,000/mo, branded queries excluded
+21%conversion rate on organic traffic1.9% to 2.3% after the collection and PDP work landed
$61 → $45blended CACorganic share of revenue went from 8% to 24%
+38%revenue year over yearwith paid media spend down 12%
In their words
Clients on this work
$1,900/mo of app spend cancelled
“First month they cancelled eleven apps we were still paying for, just under $1,900 a month, which covered more than half the retainer before they shipped a line of code. The backlog lives in our own board and we rank it together — it is not a bucket of hours that quietly evaporates. Two years in and I have never had to chase a bug fix twice. We are twenty minutes from their office and they still turn up in person for the quarterly, which I appreciated more than I expected to.”
OwnerSporting goods brand, ~$4M/yr · Albuquerque, NM
Verified client, 2025FAQ
Apps & Support in Berlin — your questions
Tax and shipping, almost every time. A store adds a tax tool during EU expansion, later switches on Shopify's own handling, and keeps both. The same happens with shipping: a connector for DHL, a second for a marketplace channel, and a returns portal that overlaps with both. We map what each one is genuinely responsible for, keep the one that owns the record, and remove the rest before touching anything else.
By designing around it instead of apologising for it. Standing calls sit in the two-hour overlap — your late afternoon, our morning. Urgent issues have a written escalation path with defined response expectations rather than a promise someone is awake. In practice the gap works in your favour for build work: anything briefed at the end of your day is usually back before you start the next one.
The storefront side, yes — that is the part that is engineering. Unit pricing generated from product data stays correct as you add variants, and template-level withdrawal and information blocks stay in place as pages change. The wording of your legal texts is a lawyer's job, and where you use a legal-text service we make sure it is integrated so updates actually reach the live store rather than sitting in a dashboard nobody opens.
Yes, and it is a common use of it. Adding a market properly — pricing and rounding, tax treatment, payment methods, shipping and duty position, hreflang — is a few sprints of work rather than a project, and it fits the cadence well. Switzerland takes more than Austria because it is an export market with customs, so we scope it as its own piece of the backlog rather than folding it into an EU rollout.
A named developer and strategist, an agreed sprint capacity, priority bug support, app stack management and monthly reporting. Capacity is set in hours per month and rolls over one month if unused. Anything outside scope gets quoted separately before work starts.
Three months, then rolling with thirty days' notice. The three months exists because the first month is mostly stabilisation and you would not see the benefit of the arrangement inside a shorter window. We do not do twelve-month lock-ins.
When the subscription cost exceeds roughly $500 a month, when the app injects scripts that hurt Core Web Vitals, or when you need logic no vendor offers. Below that threshold, buying is almost always the right answer and we will say so.
Next step
Apps & Support for your Berlin brand.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.