Fractional Shopify Plus development

Fractional sits between a retainer and a hire. On a retainer, you send me work. On a fractional arrangement, I'm part of how your team works for a set part of the week: in the stand-up, seeing the roadmap before it's final, and able to say that next quarter's plan is going to be a problem while there's still time to change it.

Miller Harris, the London fragrance house, has worked with me this way since 2023. Most months that means Shopify Functions for their gift-with-purchase campaigns, and sales are up 12% since the new gifting flow went in. BuddyBrands use me the same way: when they test a new product page section in Replo, I rebuild the winners as native theme sections, so testing stays fast and the live site stays clean.

Who it's for

Brands with a strong marketing team and nobody senior on the Shopify side. The team has the ideas and the commercial judgement. What's missing is someone who can say what's possible, what it costs and what it'll do to the site's speed, and then build it.

Brands that can't justify a full-time senior developer. A senior Shopify developer is expensive, hard to hire and, on a stable store, underused.

Teams between hires. A developer has left, the search will take months, and the roadmap shouldn't stop.

Agencies that need Plus-level development without hiring for it. That's common enough to have its own page.

If you need someone to run a whole technology function, that's a fractional CTO, which is a different role. Two days is two days: what you get is seniority and continuity.

How it differs from a retainer

A retainer is an amount of work each month, worked through a list. Fractional is an amount of time, spent inside your team.

That means I'm in your Slack, working in your repository and your branching model, joining planning, and available on the agreed days. It also means the arrangement includes thinking about the store as well as changing it.

If what you need is things done to the store, a retainer is cheaper and simpler. If you need a senior developer's judgement in the room, fractional is the arrangement.

What the days look like

Usually a fixed pattern: two days a week, say, or one week a month. Fixed matters, because floating days get eaten by whatever's loudest, and the point is reliability.

Within those days the work is whatever the team needs, and it runs the same way each time.

Tickets sharpened before they start. What the change is, what it touches, how it'll be tested and what done looks like. Half the value of a senior developer in planning is spotting that one ticket is really three, or that it depends on data nobody has checked.

Tested, then released. Changes are built on a development store or an unpublished theme, tested against a written checklist, and released on an agreed day with a way back. Anything touching checkout, pricing or a data sync gets tested in every market.

Watched after release. I look at the numbers and the error logs in the days after a release, so problems are caught before a customer reports them.

Alongside your agency. Plenty of brands keep an agency for big builds. Fractional works well next to that: reviewing their code, writing the tickets they build from, and owning the smaller changes that aren't worth a statement of work.

If I'm unavailable

The fair question to ask of any fractional arrangement is what happens when that person isn't there. Nothing lives only in my head. Architecture, integrations, release steps and the reasons behind decisions are written down as the work happens, in your tools, and the code lives in your repository. Part of the job is making your team more capable over time: pairing on changes, reviewing their work, and handing over parts of the store as they're ready to own them.

How I use AI

AI tools are part of how I work, where they make the work faster without making it worse: coding tools for building and refactoring theme and app code, quick scripts to compare a catalogue export across systems, and first drafts of test plans, reviews and documentation written from the code itself. Every change is still read, tested and owned by me. The time saved goes back into your work.

Want to see whether fractional fits? Book a call and we'll work out what the gap really is.