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.
London, UK
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in London
A retained team for London brands whose store keeps changing because their markets, tax rules and carriers keep changing.
Delivered remotely for brands across London and United Kingdom.
Scale · London
Why London brands come to us for this
- App stack audit costed as well as tested — native Markets behaviour and Functions often replace three subscriptions
- Duty, VAT and IOSS configuration reviewed as a standing item, not revisited only when something breaks
- Carrier rates, delivery promises and Christmas cutoffs maintained on the storefront before customers find them wrong
- Peak readiness completed in October: load, checkout, stock sync and rollback plan, not fixes during Black Friday week
- Theme and app updates tested in a preview environment, with a change log you can actually read
The London stores that stay fast and stay profitable are rarely the ones that had the best launch. They are the ones where somebody has kept working on it — pruning the app stack, keeping the tax and duty configuration honest as rules and thresholds move, and shipping small improvements every month rather than a redesign every three years.
The app stack is usually the first thing worth attention. A store that has grown across markets tends to accumulate one app for currency, one for translation, one for duty display, one for reviews and two for upsells, each adding script weight, monthly cost and a support boundary. A good deal of that can be replaced by native Markets behaviour, Shopify Functions or a small custom app, and the audit that decides which is a cost exercise as much as a technical one.
The rest is continuous work with an order of operations. Peak readiness before November rather than during it. Carrier and rate maintenance as UK and EU delivery options change. Theme and app updates tested in a preview rather than applied on a Friday. And a prioritised queue where you can see what is being worked on, because the value of a retainer is knowing something is happening, not receiving a monthly invoice and hoping.
Local context
Cross-border upkeep is not a project, it is a standing job
For a London brand the ongoing work has a specific shape. Duty and VAT settings drift as you add markets, change carriers or start selling a product category with different treatment. IOSS handling has to keep matching how your consignments actually go out. Carrier rate cards and delivery promises change, and the promise on your product page has to change with them. Add the UK peak — a Black Friday period that runs into a Christmas cutoff schedule and straight into Boxing Day and January sales — and there is a genuine annual operating rhythm to keep to. We work that rhythm remotely across a seven-hour gap: work lands overnight UK time, urgent issues have a defined escalation path rather than depending on someone being awake, and the standing call sits in the late-afternoon overlap so decisions get made in one conversation instead of three email chains.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a London 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 London store
We do not work off a rate card. Every London 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 London — your questions
With a defined escalation path rather than goodwill. Critical issues — checkout down, payments failing, catalogue not syncing — have a documented route that triggers regardless of local hours, and we agree the definition of critical up front so nobody is guessing at 7am. Everything else runs on the overnight rhythm, where work happens while London sleeps and lands before your morning.
Currency and translation apps that Shopify Markets now handles natively, duty display apps replaced by proper duty collection at checkout, and page builders that a well-built Online Store 2.0 theme makes redundant. Upsell and review apps usually stay, but often one of the two you are running does. We look at script weight, monthly cost and overlap together, because removing an app that costs little but adds 300ms is still a win.
Checking the things that only fail under load and under time pressure: inventory sync accuracy, checkout and payment redundancy, app performance at traffic, and every dated promise on the storefront — Christmas delivery cutoffs by market, carrier deadlines, and what the site says on the day after the last cutoff passes. We also agree a change freeze and a rollback plan, so a bad deploy in peak week has an answer that takes minutes.
When the subscription is a recurring cost for logic you could own, when no app does the specific thing your operation needs, or when three apps are being chained to achieve one outcome. Cross-border brands hit this frequently around bespoke shipping logic and market-specific product rules. We put the build cost against the annual subscription and the maintenance load, and we say when the honest answer is to keep paying the app.
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 London 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.