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.
Columbus, OH
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Columbus, OH
A named team keeping the store fast, the app stack honest, and the launch template ready before the season that matters.
Delivered remotely for brands across Columbus and Ohio.
Scale · Columbus
Why Columbus brands come to us for this
- App stack scored on cost, script weight and overlap, with fit and size tooling replaced by native metafields where it belongs
- Scheduled pre-peak hardening before August, the autumn weekends, the October gifting start and the March strength season
- Launch-day cover on drops — we watch the first ten minutes with you rather than reading about it afterwards
- Risky theme work explicitly kept out of peak windows and pushed into late spring or the post-holiday quiet
- Named developer and strategist on a Slack channel with defined response times, not a shared ticket inbox
Apparel stores accumulate apps faster than most, because every fit and merchandising problem has an app that half-solves it. A size chart app, a size recommender, a back-in-stock app, a returns app, a bundling app, a pre-order app — each adding a script to the product page, a monthly fee to the P&L and a dependency to the next theme update. The retainer's first job is usually subtraction: score every app on cost, script weight, overlap and actual usage, then replace what is better owned. Structured fit data in metafields does not need a subscription, and it does not slow the page.
The second job is readiness. If your year has hard peaks, someone has to be responsible for the store being ready before them rather than during them — the drop template retested, images and caching checked, the back-in-stock and post-purchase flows verified as live, third-party scripts audited after whatever got added in the quiet months. We run that as a scheduled pre-peak pass rather than as a reaction, and we sit on the first ten minutes of a launch with you so a problem is found by us rather than by your customers.
The third is a shipping cadence. A ranked backlog worked every sprint, custom apps and Shopify Functions built where a stack of subscriptions is slower and more expensive than owning the code, quarterly Core Web Vitals review with dead code actually removed, and a named developer and strategist rather than a ticket queue. The measure is simple: the store should be demonstrably better in December than it was in January, and the report should show which changes did it.
Local context
Peaks you can see coming, prepared for in advance
Columbus gives an ongoing engagement an unusually predictable rhythm, which is exactly what makes a retainer worth having here. August brings the campus return and a compressed merchandise surge; the autumn carries football-weekend traffic; October starts the gifting run for candle, fragrance and beauty brands; January and March belong to strength and fitness, with the Arnold Sports Festival concentrating demand into a single week. We build the maintenance calendar around those instead of around the contract month. That means the pre-peak hardening pass is scheduled weeks before each one, risky theme work is deliberately not shipped inside them, and the quiet stretches — late spring, and the window after holiday returns close — carry the structural projects that need room to go wrong safely. It also means we plan around your receipt plan rather than in ignorance of it, because a sprint that lands on the fortnight your season inventory arrives will not get the attention from your team that it needs.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Columbus 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 Columbus store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Columbus 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 Columbus — your questions
The commonest are a size chart app, a separate size recommender and a bundling app that overlaps with a discount you could write as a Function. Size and fit data belongs in metafields rendered by the theme — it is faster, it is filterable, it feeds your feed and schema, and it stops being a monthly line item. We do not remove anything before establishing what it is actually doing for you; some recommenders earn their place.
That is a large part of why brands here keep us on retainer. We do a hardening pass in the weeks beforehand, agree who is watching what during the window, and are on the launch live rather than reachable afterwards. We also agree in advance what gets switched off if something degrades — which apps, which scripts, which non-essential sections — so a decision under pressure is a checklist rather than an argument.
Often, in a narrower shape. In-house developers get pulled into daily operational work and rarely get protected time for platform maintenance, speed and the awkward integration jobs. We usually take the structural workstream, the pre-peak passes and the specialist Shopify work, while your developer owns day-to-day changes. We work in your repo, to your conventions, with your review process.
When the subscription stack costs more than the code over a sensible horizon, when three apps overlap to do one job, or when the thing you need genuinely does not exist — which in apparel is more common than you would expect, particularly around size-run logic, wholesale ordering grids and returns reason handling. We build the comparison openly, including maintenance cost, and quite often the honest answer is to keep paying the subscription.
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 Columbus 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.