Guides
A few things worth actually reading.
Not a blog and not a publishing schedule. A short set of evergreen answers to the questions small store owners ask us most, each written to be useful whether or not you ever hire anyone. Every guide leads with its conclusion.
Access · 6 min read
How to let someone work on your Shopify store without handing over the keys
Never share your own login. Invite a staff account with only the permissions the work needs, or accept a collaborator request, which does not consume a staff seat and can be revoked by you in two clicks. Turn on two-factor authentication, skip granting Customers and Finances unless the job genuinely requires them, and check the access log afterwards.
Read the guide →Cost · 7 min read
What does it cost to have someone manage your Shopify store?
Expect roughly $25 to $120 an hour from a freelancer, $2,500 a month and up at a full-service agency, and $58,000 to $88,000 a year all-in to hire someone. Managed plans for small stores sit between those. A store with a few hundred products needs four to eight hours of maintenance a month once it is in order, which is the number that decides which option makes sense.
Read the guide →Diagnosis · 8 min read
Your Shopify store gets no sales. Here is how to tell why
There are only three reasons: nobody arrives, people arrive and leave, or nobody wants what you sell. They need completely different fixes, and most store owners guess wrong about which one they have. You can tell them apart in twenty minutes using free data you already have.
Read the guide →Getting started · 6 min read
You have not touched your Shopify store in a year. What now?
Do not start by redesigning it. Work through it in a fixed order: stop it charging you for things you do not use, make sure it can take an order correctly, fix what is wrong rather than what is ugly, and only then think about growth. Most of it is a weekend of work, and the first hour saves the most money.
Read the guide →Findability · 8 min read
Why your products are missing from Google Shopping, and how to get them listed free
Google shows product listings for free, and most small stores are ineligible for a boring reason: missing product data. Every item needs a brand, a product category, a condition and a valid GTIN or an explicit declaration that it has none. Fill those, connect a clean feed, clear the disapprovals, and listings usually appear within a few days at no cost per click.
Read the guide →Cost · 6 min read
How many Shopify apps do you actually need?
Fewer than you have. Most small stores we open are paying for between four and ten apps, and typically two or three are doing nothing at all. Audit them by asking what breaks if it is removed, uninstall anything with no answer, and check the theme afterwards, because an uninstalled app often leaves code behind that keeps slowing the store down.
Read the guide →Canada · 7 min read
Selling into Quebec: what a Shopify store actually needs in French
Translating the theme is the easy quarter of the job. What decides whether a Quebec customer buys is whether the product pages, sizing, shipping and returns information, checkout and follow-up emails are all in French. Partial bilingualism is the most common failure, and machine-translated product copy is usually worse than none because it reads as though nobody cared.
Read the guide →Free, no signup
Work it out yourself.
Three things you can use right now without talking to anyone. None of them ask for your email first, and the last one is us doing the work by hand.
Instant · No email
Store management cost calculator
Move four sliders and see what every option costs for the amount of work you actually need: doing it yourself, a freelancer, hiring, an agency, or a plan. Includes an estimate of what leaving it alone costs.
Open →Work through it yourself · No signup
Store health checklist
The 20 things we check on a neglected store, in the order we check them, each with where to look and why it matters. Ticks save in your browser so you can come back to it.
Open →Free · No call
Free store check
Not a tool, a person. Send your store address and we look at it by hand, then email you a written list of what is costing you orders, ranked worst first. No call required.
Open →Why so few
A few pages, not forty.
Most business blogs exist to publish rather than to answer, which is why so many of them restate the same generic advice in slightly different words. A small site cannot afford that: every thin page spends crawl budget and dilutes the pages that are actually good.
So these get added when there is genuinely something to say that nobody has said properly, and updated when the facts change rather than on a schedule.
Next step
Find out what is actually wrong with your store. Free.
Send us your store URL. You get a written check of the things costing you orders right now, in plain English, with the fixes ranked by what they are worth. No call required, no obligation, and you can take the list to anyone.
Access you can revoke · No contract · A real person replies within one business day