Fractional
Fractional Shopify Plus development
A set number of days each week or month, worked inside your team and in your tools. The same person every time, at a seniority most brands cannot justify hiring full-time.
Fractional sits between a retainer and a hire. A retainer is work sent to an outside developer. Fractional is a developer who is part of how your team works, for a defined portion of the week.
The distinction matters more in practice than it sounds. On a retainer, work arrives as requests. Fractional means being in the stand-up, seeing the roadmap before it is finalised, and being able to say that the thing planned for next quarter is going to be a problem while there is still time to change it.
Who this is for
Brands with a strong marketing team and nobody senior on the Shopify side. The team has the ideas and the commercial judgement. What is missing is someone who can say what is possible, what it costs and what it will do to the site's performance, and then build it.
Brands who cannot justify a full-time senior developer. A senior Shopify developer is expensive, hard to hire and, on a store that is stable, underused. Two days a week of someone senior is usually better value than five days of someone learning.
Teams between hires. A developer left, the search is going to take months, and the roadmap should not stop.
Agencies who need Plus-level development capacity without hiring for it. This is common enough that it has its own page.
How it differs from a retainer
A retainer is a quantity of work per month, prioritised through a list. Fractional is a quantity of time, spent inside your team.
That means being in your Slack rather than emailing, working in your repository and your branching model, joining planning rather than receiving its output, and being available on the days agreed rather than scheduling around other work. It also means the arrangement includes thinking about the store, not just changing it.
If what you need is "things done to the store", a retainer is cheaper and simpler. If what you need is a senior developer's judgement in the room, fractional is the arrangement.
What the days look like
Usually a fixed pattern, for example two days a week, or one week a month. Fixed matters: floating days get eaten by whatever is loudest, and the point of the arrangement is reliability.
Within those days the work is whatever the team needs. Build work, code review of anyone else touching the store, technical input on the roadmap, working out what an integration will actually involve before it gets committed to, and the ordinary running repairs any store accumulates.
What it is not
It is not a fractional CTO arrangement. This is a senior developer who builds, and who has enough commercial experience to be useful in planning. If you need someone to run a technology function, that is a different hire.
It is not a way of getting a full-time developer part-time and expecting full-time output. Two days is two days. The advantage is seniority and continuity, not volume.
How it works
01
Work out what the gap actually is
Some teams need building capacity. Some need judgement. Some need someone to own the store technically. The right shape depends on which.
02
Agree the pattern
Days per week or per month, which days, and how long the initial period runs before it is reviewed.
03
Join the team properly
Your Slack, your repository, your board, your stand-ups. Access sorted at the start rather than requested each time it is needed.
04
Review
Reviewed at an agreed interval, and adjusted in either direction. Some brands scale up into a build, some scale down to a retainer once the store is stable.
Work with us
Talk it through before you commit.
Tell us what you are working with and we will tell you what the work involves, or say if it is not the right fit. Email hello@graftstudio.com.
Client feedback
“I have worked with developers across overland of platform, one man bands to large agencies. I can say with my hand on my heart, that I will never have to look again for a developer on any project I ever work on. Richard is honest, fast and top of his game. A friend in life and business, feel very grateful to be working with him.”
Ernest Capbert
