Your store shouldn't be a mystery.

What a Commerce Intelligence Retainer actually is

Most agencies deliver work. We deliver a commercial development programme — a structured, data-driven process of identifying what's holding your store back, fixing it, measuring the result, and moving to the next priority.

The difference starts before we build anything. Every retainer engagement opens with a Commerce Maturity Assessment — a structured review of your store's performance, architecture, and commercial infrastructure that tells you exactly where you sit on a five-level maturity scale, what the specific gaps are at your current level, and what reaching the next level is worth to your business.

That assessment informs the Roadmap. The Roadmap drives the work.

The intelligence layer

Every retainer client has a Store Intelligence Profile — a living document that tracks your store's commercial performance over time. Conversion rate by device and traffic source. Average order value trends. Cart abandonment rate and exit point mapping. Top-performing and worst-performing pages. Page speed. App performance. Revenue trend month-over-month.

This data does two things. First, it sets the Roadmap priorities. Ticket priorities aren't set by what you asked for this month — they're set by what the data shows is the biggest commercial opportunity. Second, it grounds every conversation in your actual performance, not assumptions.

Over time, we build a cross-portfolio intelligence capability that compounds in your favour. We see patterns across more than 80 Shopify stores. We know which issues correlate with conversion suppression in your product category. We know which Shopify apps tend to introduce checkout friction. We know what a store doing 3× your current revenue had to fix to get there. That portfolio intelligence is applied to your store every month.

Three tiers, one framework

The Commerce Intelligence Retainer runs across three tiers — each structured around the same intelligence framework, with different depth, cadence, and development capacity.

Foundation — Monthly Store Intelligence Report, Outcome-Linked Roadmap, monthly Growth Session, and a development execution allocation for the month's priorities. Built for stores that are ready to stop guessing and start moving deliberately.

Momentum — Bi-weekly monitoring, bi-weekly Growth Sessions, deeper proactive advisory, and expanded development capacity. The right tier for stores in active growth with a roadmap that needs regular iteration.

Compound — Weekly intelligence pulls, weekly sessions, the full intelligence layer, and priority access to our Merchant Growth Network for ecosystem coordination. The right tier for stores where the development relationship has become a critical part of commercial operations.

Pricing is not on this page. It shouldn't be. The right engagement is specific to your store's current maturity level, complexity, and growth ambitions — not a menu pick. Let's talk.

Why the intelligence compounds

The single most important commercial property of a long-term retainer engagement is switching cost — and not in the self-serving way that phrase usually implies.

Every month we work together, the institutional knowledge we hold about your store becomes more valuable and harder to transfer. What's been tried. What moved the needle. What didn't. What's planned and why. What your customer data shows about repeat purchase patterns. What your analytics reveal about seasonal performance. Two years of this knowledge is genuinely irreplaceable.

This is by design — not because we hoard information (every insight is documented and owned by you), but because accumulated context produces better commercial decisions than fresh eyes ever can.

A new agency starts from zero. A two-year engagement starts from compound.

What proactive advisory looks like in practice

Every month, before your Growth Session, you receive at least one unsolicited commercial observation from us. Not a report summarising what was done — a forward-looking perspective on what the data is showing and what we recommend doing about it.

This might be: "Your mobile conversion rate dropped 0.3% last month. It correlates with the addition of the new upsell app in checkout. We recommend removing it and testing an alternative approach."

Or: "Your top exit page on mobile is your bundled product page. The add-to-cart is below the fold for every common device. Here's the fix and here's what it should be worth."

You didn't ask for either of those. We identified them because we're watching. That's the difference between a supplier and a partner.

Common questions about the retainer

How is work prioritised each month?

Roadmap priorities are set by the Store Intelligence data, not by what's loudest in your inbox. Before each session, we review the previous month's intelligence report and identify the highest-commercial-opportunity item for the next execution window. You always see the reasoning, not just the output.

What kind of development work is included?

Standard Shopify development work — theme modifications, new sections and templates, app integrations, checkout optimisation, performance improvements, analytics implementation. Larger rebuilds or complete redesigns sit outside the retainer scope and are scoped separately.

What if my priorities change mid-month?

They can, and sometimes they should. If something commercially important comes up, we reassess the Roadmap together. The Roadmap isn't a contract — it's a living commercial plan. We hold it lightly and update it deliberately.

Can I start at Foundation and move to Momentum?

Yes. Most clients do. The Foundation tier is deliberately structured to build the intelligence infrastructure — the Store Intelligence Profile, the Roadmap, the baseline data — that makes higher-tier engagement genuinely valuable. Moving up is a natural outcome of having the intelligence in place.