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.
Minneapolis, MN
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Minneapolis, MN
A named developer and strategist on a fixed sprint cadence, working Central time, with your peak season protected by a written freeze.
Delivered remotely for brands across Minneapolis and Minnesota.
Scale · Minneapolis
Why Minneapolis brands come to us for this
- Stabilisation pass that retires the legacy wholesale ordering, duplicate shipping and orphaned review apps still billing every month
- Structural work scheduled into spring and summer, so peak season is spent monitoring rather than deploying
- A declared change freeze through the openers and Q4, with a named on-call contact and a documented rollback for anything urgent
- Custom Functions and light custom apps built where fitment, freight or channel pricing rules outgrow what an app can do
- Named developer and strategist working Central time, so a Monday morning question does not wait until Tuesday
The app stacks we inherit here have a particular archaeology. There is a wholesale ordering app installed before Shopify B2B existed, a fitment or compatibility app someone added for one product line, a shipping rate app bolted on when freight became a problem, a second one added when the first did not handle oversize, and two review apps because the first was never uninstalled. Every one of them injects script, several duplicate each other, and at least one is still billing for a store feature that was removed a year ago. The first stabilisation pass is mostly subtraction.
After that it becomes a cadence. A named Shopify developer and a named strategist working a fixed sprint rhythm against a ranked backlog you can see and reorder: theme performance held to a budget, the merchandising and CRO backlog shipped, custom Functions built where an app is the wrong answer, and a monthly optimisation workstream that is agreed rather than assumed. No ticket queue, no rotating account manager, no discovering in March that nobody has looked at your Merchant Center since October.
What makes the retainer shape different here is the calendar. The work has to be front-loaded. Structural changes, new templates, app migrations and integration work all belong in the spring and summer, so that by the time the openers, the first freeze and the Q4 run arrive, the store is under a change freeze and the team is on standby rather than mid-deploy.
Local context
Front-load the year, then defend the peak
We run Twin Cities retainers on an annual shape rather than an even monthly one, because the risk profile of a code change in this market is not constant. Roughly: winter and early spring for audit, stabilisation and planning; spring and summer for the structural work — app migrations, B2B build-out, template changes, integration rebuilds, catalog restructuring; early autumn for load and failure testing, fulfilment logic checks and a rehearsal of the peak; then a declared change freeze covering the openers and the Q4 run, during which we run monitoring, uptime and merchandising changes only, with a named on-call contact and a documented rollback for anything that must go out. Practically that also means we get the boring work done while your team can engage with it: nobody is going to make a good decision about retiring three hundred SKUs or replacing a shipping rate app during the second week of November. The retainer is deliberately weighted so the quiet months are the productive ones.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Minneapolis 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 Minneapolis store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Minneapolis 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 Minneapolis — your questions
Usually, if you are on Plus. Native B2B now covers company accounts, price lists, payment terms, tax exemption and quantity rules, which is what most of those apps were installed to provide — with the advantage of running on the same inventory and admin as your retail storefront. We migrate account by account with order history intact rather than switching everything on one date, and we keep the legacy path available until the largest accounts have moved.
Freeze applies to planned changes, not to fixes. A named on-call contact covers your peak, critical issues get triaged the same day, and every emergency deploy goes out with a tested rollback and a written record of what changed. What the freeze prevents is discretionary work — a new template, an app migration, a nice-to-have feature — landing in the week your revenue depends on nothing moving.
Yes, and for seasonal brands it often should. Shipping cutoff configuration, holiday delivery messaging, pre-order and backorder logic for broken size runs, freight rate updates and the operational rehearsal before peak are all inside scope. That work is unglamorous and it is the difference between a peak your team survives and one they spend recovering from.
Often, in a defined split. Internal developers usually own integrations and business logic and are stretched thin; we take the Shopify-specific surface — theme, app stack, Functions, performance budget, platform changes — and work against a shared backlog with clear ownership. We work in your repo, follow your review process, and document everything so a handover is possible whenever you want one.
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 Minneapolis 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.