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.
Chicago, IL
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Chicago
A named Shopify team for Chicago companies that do not have — and do not want — an in-house eCommerce engineering department.
Delivered remotely for brands across Chicago and Illinois.
Scale · Chicago
Why Chicago brands come to us for this
- App stack audit that usually removes more than it keeps, cutting both subscriptions and page weight
- Custom Shopify Functions replacing the freight, MAP and case-pack apps you are renting monthly
- Named developer and strategist in Slack on Central time, with defined response windows
- Sprint capacity freed ahead of holiday food and spring outdoor ramps, by plan not by panic
- January and February trough used for speed work, dead-code removal and integration cleanup
The most common store we inherit in this market belongs to a company with two hundred employees, a real warehouse, a strong brand in its category, and exactly one person handling eCommerce alongside three other jobs. Twenty-two apps are installed. Six of them nobody can explain. Three freelancers have edited the theme and none documented anything. The store works, technically, and it has not improved in two years.
That is what a retainer is for. We audit and own the app stack, scoring every app on cost, script weight, overlap and actual usage — and in Chicago the removals are often larger than elsewhere, because inherited stores accumulate one-off apps installed to solve a distributor, freight or MAP problem that a Shopify Function now handles natively for free.
Then the work becomes a cadence. A prioritised backlog that ships every sprint, quarterly Core Web Vitals review, regression testing against Shopify's platform releases, and a named developer and strategist in a shared Slack channel. Two business hours on anything revenue-blocking, one business day on everything else, in Central time, from people who already know your catalog.
Local context
The store nobody owns
Chicago's merchant base skews toward established companies rather than venture-funded DTC startups, and that produces a specific staffing pattern: the store is owned by a marketing manager or an operations lead who inherited it, not by a product team. There is no in-house developer and there will not be one, because hiring a Shopify engineer into a manufacturing or distribution business is hard to justify and harder to retain. The consequence is that small fixes queue for months and the store decays until someone proposes another rebuild. A retainer is the cheaper path, and it works best here when it is scheduled around the operational calendar — freeing capacity before the holiday food rush or the spring housewares and outdoor ramp, and using the January and February trough for the speed, cleanup and integration work that nobody has time for in season.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Chicago 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 Chicago store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Chicago 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 Chicago — your questions
It is the normal situation for a Chicago manufacturer or distributor, and the retainer is designed around it. You get a named developer and strategist who know your catalog and your integrations, so requests do not start from zero every time. The alternative — a rotating cast of freelancers — is exactly how stores end up undocumented.
It varies, but most inherited stores are running four to seven apps that duplicate each other or are no longer used. Chicago stores often carry extra: apps bought to handle freight quoting, MAP display or case quantities that Shopify Functions now do natively. Removing them is usually the cheapest speed win available and it pays for a meaningful share of the retainer.
The unglamorous work that never gets scheduled otherwise. Speed and dead-code cleanup, integration hardening, metafield and taxonomy improvements, accessibility fixes, and building the seasonal mechanics before the season needs them. In Chicago that means January and February are the most productive months of the year, not the slowest.
No. The theme is yours, the documentation is yours, and every custom app or Function ships with a README and a named owner. We work on a rolling agreement because a retainer that has to be enforced by contract is one that stopped earning its place. If we stop being useful you should be able to leave cleanly.
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 Chicago 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.