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.
Detroit, MI
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Detroit, MI
A named Shopify team for Detroit merchants running large catalogs, trade accounts and an app stack nobody has audited in years.
Delivered remotely for brands across Detroit and Michigan.
Scale · Detroit
Why Detroit brands come to us for this
- App stack audited for cost, script weight and overlap with functionality Shopify now ships natively
- Fitment and supersession data maintained on a routine rather than an annual emergency cleanup
- Custom apps and Functions built where owning the code beats stacking subscriptions — interchange lookup, trade pricing, draft-order tooling
- Supplier feed and ERP sync monitored, so a failed Tuesday stock import is caught before customers find it
- Change freezes over salt-season demand spikes and cruise-week traffic, with risky work scheduled into quiet months
Catalog businesses accumulate apps faster than anyone else. A fitment app, a search app, a B2B app that predates native B2B, a bulk editor, two feed tools, a returns portal, a quote form and something installed in 2019 that nobody can identify but everyone is afraid to remove. Each adds subscription cost and script weight, and several now overlap with functionality Shopify ships natively. The first job on retainer is usually an honest audit of that stack.
Then the work that keeps a large catalog healthy. Fitment data does not stand still — vehicle years are added, supersessions replace numbers, applications get corrected — and there needs to be a routine that maintains it rather than a heroic annual cleanup. Feeds need monitoring because a Merchant Center disapproval wave can take out a category quietly. Theme performance needs guarding, because a 40,000-SKU store degrades faster than a boutique when a script is added carelessly.
Where a subscription stack is more expensive or slower than owning the code, we build. A custom interchange and supersession lookup, a Shopify Function for trade pricing rules, an admin extension your counter staff use to raise draft orders from a phone call, a middleware job that pulls stock and lead time from your ERP on a schedule that matches how the shop actually works. Owned code, documented, with no monthly fee attached to it.
Local context
Cover for the weeks the phone does not stop
Support in this metro has to be shaped around two very different pressure periods. The first is winter: a cold snap or a heavy salt week drives replacement demand overnight, and a checkout bug or a feed failure during it costs more than the same bug in October. The second is show season — the spring build run-up and the August Woodward Dream Cruise week — when traffic and order volume both spike on a schedule you can see coming. We run change freezes across those windows, do the risky work in the quiet stretches, and keep response commitments that acknowledge Eastern time even though we are in Albuquerque on Mountain. The other recurring reality is the systems behind the store. Job-shop ERP, an accounting package that has been the inventory source of truth for twenty years, and a supplier feed that arrives as a CSV on Tuesdays — these break in undramatic ways, and the retainer exists so somebody notices the stock file did not import before your customers do.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Detroit 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 Detroit store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Detroit 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 Detroit — your questions
Fewer than you have, almost certainly, but the number matters less than the overlap. We score each app on cost, script weight, real usage and whether Shopify now does the same thing natively — B2B and bundles being the two most common redundancies. Removals happen in stages with monitoring, because pulling a search or fitment app carelessly is how a catalog goes dark.
Either your team with tooling we build, or us on retainer, and it should be decided explicitly rather than drifting. Where you have a supplier data feed we automate ingestion and flag conflicts for human review. Where the data is yours, we build an admin workflow so a counter employee can correct an application in thirty seconds instead of emailing a developer.
Usually yes, provided it is documented or readable. We start by mapping what it actually syncs and where it fails silently, which in job-shop systems is frequently a stock file that stops updating without any error surfacing. Sometimes the right answer is maintaining it, sometimes replacing one fragile piece — we will tell you which before spending your money on either.
That is precisely what the response commitments cover. Revenue-blocking issues get a defined response window, you have a named channel rather than a ticket form, and we hold change freezes across your known peak periods so most incidents never originate with us. We also keep a documented rollback path, because reverting cleanly at 7am beats debugging live while orders queue.
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 Detroit 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.