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.
Kansas City, MO
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Kansas City, MO
A standing development and growth team for Kansas City stores that need the app stack trimmed and the peak season to go quietly.
Delivered remotely for brands across Kansas City and Missouri.
Scale · Kansas City
Why Kansas City brands come to us for this
- App stack audit that replaces overlapping bundle, discount and shipping apps with native or custom logic
- Custom builds for weight-break bundles and freight rules where no app handles your product properly
- Gifting and corporate-order infrastructure built and staged in late summer, not patched in November
- A deliberate code freeze through peak, with structural work moved to the winter lull
- Support hours that overlap your entire working day from one time zone behind, with a written escalation route
The app stack is where margin and speed leak out of a Kansas City store. A typical one we inherit has a bundle app, a discount app, a shipping rules app, a subscription app and a wholesale app, several of which are trying to control the same behaviour and occasionally disagreeing in the cart. Each carries a monthly cost, a script on the storefront and a support relationship. The first job on most retainers is deciding which of those earn their place, which can be replaced by native Shopify functionality, and which need a small custom build instead.
After that, ongoing work here tends to cluster around the same recurring themes: shipping and bundle rules that need adjusting as carrier rates change, seasonal merchandising that has to be built and torn down twice a year, wholesale account admin, and a steady queue of improvements from the previous quarter's data. That is a very different retainer from a maintenance contract, and we structure it as a prioritised backlog you help rank rather than a fixed list of tasks nobody wanted.
The other half is readiness. A store that carries most of its year in a six-week gifting window has to be checked before that window, not during it: load behaviour, checkout paths, inventory buffers, cut-off logic, the rollback plan, and a written escalation route so a problem on a December Saturday reaches a person rather than a ticket queue. We freeze non-essential changes during peak on purpose, because the most expensive deploy in this category is a clever one shipped in early December.
Local context
Two peaks a year, and a code freeze around the big one
A Kansas City store usually has two seasons that matter: a grilling and outdoor run that builds through spring and summer, and a gifting run from the Plaza lights at Thanksgiving through late December that can carry a disproportionate share of annual revenue. Ongoing support here works backwards from both. Through late summer we build and stage the gifting infrastructure — gift sets, bundle rules, corporate ordering, cut-off logic, shipping messaging — so it is tested weeks ahead. From late November we hold a deliberate freeze on structural changes and keep the team on monitoring, merchandising and rapid fixes only. Then in the winter lull, when traffic is genuinely low, we do the work that needs risk tolerance: app removals, theme refactors, integration changes. Being one hour behind you in Albuquerque matters most in this service, because a checkout problem at ten in the morning your time is answered in our morning too, not after lunch.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Kansas City 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 Kansas City store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Kansas City 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 Kansas City — your questions
We audit on four things: what it costs annually, what it adds to page weight, whether Shopify now does the same job natively, and what would break if it were removed. Plenty of apps installed three years ago have been made redundant by platform features since. The ones that survive that test stay; the rest get replaced or rebuilt, usually paying for the work within a year.
When your logic is genuinely specific and central to how you sell. Weight-break bundle pricing, freight rules tied to case packs, or a clinic and dealer ordering flow are usually better built than bought, because an app that nearly fits has to be worked around forever. For solved problems — reviews, search, help desk — buying is almost always the right answer and we will say so.
Deliberately conservative. Structural changes are frozen, monitoring is tightened, and the work is limited to merchandising updates, stock and cut-off messaging, and rapid fixes. You get a written escalation route with defined response expectations for anything affecting checkout or fulfilment. The plan for that period is agreed in the autumn so nobody is improvising at the worst possible time.
It works better as a continuous relationship, because the quiet months are when the valuable work happens. January through March is when a Kansas City store can safely do app removals, theme refactoring, integration changes and CRO groundwork that would be reckless in November. Retainers that only exist during peak spend all their time firefighting problems the quiet season could have prevented.
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 Kansas City 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.