RETAINER & MAINTENANCE IN DETAIL
What a Shopify retainer actually buys
“Maintenance” sounds like standing still. It means the opposite: keeping a store stable while everything around it changes — theme updates, new apps, new payment rules, new law.
Why a finished store still needs someone
Shopify ships changes continuously, apps update themselves, and payment providers change their flows without asking. A store that was clean at launch accumulates faults over a year that nobody notices — until revenue dips or a customer calls.
The quiet ones are the expensive ones: a checkout step broken on one device class, order confirmation emails landing in spam, a tracking script that stopped reporting purchases after an app update and has been under-reporting your ad performance ever since.
- Monthly checks on checkout and transactional email
- Speed monitoring with an alert when it regresses
- App and theme updates tested before they go live
Hours that do not evaporate
Each plan includes a fixed monthly allocation. What you do not use does not vanish at month end — it stays available across the quarter, because real work arrives in bursts rather than in equal twelfths.
How the hours are spent is your call: bug fixes, new features, campaign build-out, data cleanup or plain advice. We keep the log open and send the breakdown with the invoice.
Response time, not a call-centre promise
We work a timezone that overlaps the European working day, so requests raised in the morning are normally answered the same day. Anything that stops revenue — checkout down, store unreachable, payments failing — jumps ahead of scheduled project work.
What we do not claim is a night shift or 24/7 on-call. If your business genuinely needs that, we will say so upfront instead of leaving it ambiguous in a contract.
Updates applied without gambling
Theme updates overwrite customisation. Anyone who updates a customised theme in place tends to lose weeks of work. So every change runs in a duplicate of the store first, gets tested there, and only then goes live.
Apps get the same treatment. A newly installed app injects scripts that can measurably slow the storefront; we measure before and after rather than assuming it is fine.
What gets measured
A short monthly note: what was done, which hours it took, what broke, and how speed and index coverage moved. Short enough that you actually read it.
The numbers come from Search Console, Lighthouse and the Shopify admin — not from a proprietary dashboard whose figures nobody can check.
Cancellable, without hostage-taking
The retainer runs monthly and can be cancelled at the end of any month. Access stays with you, the theme code lives in your account, and if you hand over to another agency we document what we built.
A contract that only holds because leaving is expensive is not evidence of quality. We would rather keep clients who could leave if they wanted to.
