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.
Houston, TX
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Houston
A named Shopify team on retainer for Houston merchants whose store is run by two people who already have other jobs.
Delivered remotely for brands across Houston and Texas.
Scale · Houston
Why Houston brands come to us for this
- App stack scored on cost, script weight and actual usage — most stores we take on are paying for six they cannot describe
- Documented hurricane-readiness routine: notice banners, freeze policy, storm merchandising presets
- ERP and 3PL sync monitored with alerting, so a silent failure never runs for a week during turnaround
- Custom Shopify Functions replacing stacked subscription apps where the annual maths favours building
- Mountain-time coverage that starts before your Central-time morning and runs through your afternoon
The typical Houston merchant does not have an ecommerce department. There is an operations manager who inherited the website, a marketing coordinator who updates it, and an ERP administrator who fields every integration question. That team is competent and completely out of hours, which is why the store drifts: apps accumulate, the theme collects undocumented edits from three freelancers, and the backlog turns into an argument for another rebuild eighteen months after the last one.
The retainer exists so that does not happen. We audit and own the app stack, replace subscription tools with Shopify Functions or a small custom app where the maths favours it, keep the theme clean and documented, monitor the ERP and 3PL sync, and work a prioritised backlog every sprint.
You get a named developer and strategist, a monthly report, and a store that is measurably better in December than it was in January — plus somebody to call when a spec change, a price list update or a storm forecast means something has to move today.
Local context
Support built around Houston's operational calendar
Ongoing work here has to bend around events that do not appear on a national agency's calendar. Hurricane season from June to November requires a documented readiness routine: verified storm messaging templates, shipping and will-call notice banners ready to publish, a deployment freeze policy, and the ability to switch merchandising when demand pivots to preparedness goods inside a few hours. Refinery turnaround windows in spring and fall change order volume and put pressure on ERP sync accuracy exactly when errors are most expensive. Rodeo season reshapes February and March for consumer categories. And because we run on Mountain time, one hour behind Houston, we are online before your Central-time morning and available through your afternoon — which matters more than it sounds when an inventory sync fails at 7am and your first order is already wrong.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Houston 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 Houston store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Houston 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 Houston — your questions
We follow a pre-agreed routine rather than improvising. Deployments freeze, storm notice banners and shipping messaging go live, storm-relevant merchandising switches on if your catalogue supports it, and we stay reachable through landfall and recovery. It is agreed in writing during onboarding, in April, not negotiated the week a system forms.
Yes, and most of our retainers start that way. The first six weeks are an audit and stabilisation pass: theme documentation, app rationalisation, integration health check and a prioritised backlog. We would rather tell you honestly that a rebuild is cheaper than a rescue if that turns out to be true.
Usually when you are paying more than a few hundred dollars a month for something narrow, or when an app's script weight is measurably hurting page speed. We run the annual maths and show it. Sometimes the answer is that the $49 app is fine and we should spend the budget elsewhere.
Directly, and it is usually the most productive relationship in the engagement. They know what the system does when it gets an order it does not expect. We handle the Shopify side, the middleware and the alerting, and we document the ownership boundary so nothing sits unclaimed between the two teams.
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 Houston 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.