Retained Shopify Plus development

Every new developer spends the first hours of every job working out how your theme fits together. On a retainer, that's already done. I know the store, the apps and the quirks, so the time goes on the work.

It's the arrangement most of my clients end up on. Brew Tea Co has worked with me since 2022. TOG Knives put it this way: "Richard has become a vital member of the team here at TOG Knives. He is fast to respond to enquiries and fast to complete the work too."

What a month includes

Development work on your store, in the order you choose. In practice a month is a mix of four things.

Things that broke or drifted. An app update that changed the cart, a Liquid error in one market, a payment method missing where it should show.

Things the marketing team needs. Landing pages for a campaign, a new section so the team can build pages without asking, a change to how a collection sorts, tracking for a new event.

Things that make the store faster or simpler. Removing an app that costs more in script weight than it returns, tidying a section that has grown six variants, moving logic out of Liquid and into a Function.

Advice before things become projects. Whether a feature is worth building, what an integration will really involve, whether a new app is going to cause problems.

That last one is the part people underuse. The conversation is part of the retainer, so asking whether something is a good idea costs nothing extra.

How work is prioritised

We keep one shared list. You order it, and I work down it. If something urgent comes in, it goes to the top and something else moves down, and we agree that in a quick message.

The list is visible to both of us at all times, so you always know what I'm working on and what's next. Most clients run it in their own project tool, and I work in your tools by default.

Response times

Urgent work, meaning the store is broken or losing orders, is picked up within 24 hours. Everything else is scheduled into the month, because a developer who is interrupted constantly does good work on nothing.

A retainer is a set amount of time, and it's worth being honest about what that means. If a month's requests go over it, we either move something to next month or agree extra time for that month. Work never gets quietly dropped.

Why a flat rate

There's one developer, and it's the same one every month, with no ticket queue and no first-line agent in between.

The rate is flat, so a fifteen-minute job doesn't get estimated, approved and invoiced. That matters more than it sounds: hourly billing quietly discourages the small improvements that keep a store in good shape.

And you're free to leave whenever you like. Everything is documented as it's built, held in your own Shopify and GitHub accounts, and written so another senior developer could pick it up.

Who it suits

Brands doing enough volume that changes to the store matter, with a marketing or ecommerce team who have more ideas than development time, and no Shopify developer in-house. If you already have a developer in-house, fractional is usually the better fit.

If you're not sure what your store needs month to month, the Shopify Plus audit is a good place to start, or book a call.