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.
Zurich
Shopify Apps & Ongoing Growth Support in Zurich
A named team keeping a multi-language Swiss store clean, fast and shipping improvements, on a working rhythm built around an eight-hour gap.
Delivered remotely for brands across Zurich and Switzerland.
Scale · Zurich
Why Zurich brands come to us for this
- App stack scored on cost, script weight and overlap, with translation, currency and duty apps replaced by native features
- Custom Shopify Functions for market-specific shipping, payment visibility and export logic instead of stacked subscriptions
- Theme changes regression-tested in German and French before release, because one storefront breaking is not obvious
- Fixed weekly call in your late afternoon plus written updates waiting at the start of your day
- Documented runbook for the failures that actually stop a Swiss store: payment methods, export documents, market routing
Multi-language stores decay faster than single-language ones, and Swiss stores tend to have small internal teams. Every app that touches the storefront has to be checked in German and in French. Every theme change has to be verified in both. Every market-specific shipping or payment rule is one more thing a well-meaning app update can quietly break. Left alone for eighteen months, a Zurich store accumulates six subscriptions doing overlapping jobs, a French storefront with three untranslated strings nobody reported, and a Core Web Vitals score that drifted down a point a month.
Retained work is what keeps that from happening. We audit and own the app stack, scoring each one on cost, script weight, overlap and actual usage — and Swiss stores usually carry a specific kind of bloat: a translation app doing what the theme should do natively, a currency app duplicating Markets, a duties calculator that a checkout function could replace. Removing those is often the fastest performance work available.
Then a shipping cadence. A ranked backlog worked every sprint, custom apps and Shopify Functions built where a subscription stack is slower or more expensive than owning the code, quarterly Core Web Vitals review across every storefront, and regression testing against Shopify's platform releases before they reach you rather than after a customer finds it.
Local context
Working an eight-hour gap on purpose rather than pretending it does not exist
Zurich runs eight hours ahead of Mountain Time, so the honest description of this relationship is that most of the work happens while you are not at your desk. That is not a benefit we will oversell, but it does have a shape that works: you write the priority or the bug report at the end of your day, we work it during ours, and the fix or the answer is waiting before your morning coffee. Live conversation lives in a fixed window in your late afternoon, roughly four to seven, held weekly rather than scattered. The part that requires discipline from both sides is written detail — a bug report with a URL, a storefront language and a screenshot gets resolved in one cycle, while a one-line message gets resolved in three. For genuinely revenue-blocking issues we keep a defined response commitment and an escalation path that does not depend on someone being awake by luck, and we hold a documented runbook for the things a Swiss store cannot afford to have broken: checkout payment methods, export document generation, and the market and language routing that decides what half your customers see.
Scope
What Apps & Support includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Zurich 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 Zurich store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Zurich 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 Zurich — your questions
It depends on severity and we would rather be precise than reassuring. Revenue-blocking issues — checkout down, payment method failing, catalogue not rendering — trigger an escalation path with a defined response commitment that does not wait for the overlap window. Everything else is picked up during our working day and normally resolved before you are back at your desk. A detailed written report with URL, language and screenshot is what makes that single-cycle turnaround possible.
The three we remove most are translation apps duplicating what the theme and Shopify Markets do natively, currency converters that fight with market-level pricing, and duty or landed-cost calculators that a checkout function and Shopify's own import tax features can replace. Each carries a subscription and a script, and the native equivalents are faster and more reliable. We quantify the saving in page weight as well as cost before recommending removal.
Regularly, and it works best when ownership boundaries are written down. A common split is that we own the theme, app stack and growth backlog while a local partner owns brand design or an ERP integration, with a shared branch strategy and an agreed review step. What does not work is two parties editing the same theme without process, which is precisely how the stores we inherit ended up needing a rebuild.
It changes shape rather than volume. In the run-up to Christmas or Easter gifting we shift capacity from new development to stability: a code freeze on the theme from an agreed date, monitoring on checkout and payment paths, and a faster escalation posture. New features move into January. That is a planning conversation we have in advance, not a call we make on your behalf.
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 Zurich 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.