Retainers
Shopify retainer agency in the USA: some work only pays off when it never stops.
A rebuild is an event. Conversion, speed, deliverability and search are not — they drift the moment nobody is watching, and by the time it shows up in revenue you’ve lost a quarter finding out. Retainers are for the work that compounds when it’s continuous and decays when it isn’t.
5.0 on Shopify Partners · Premier Verified on Clutch
At a glance
Retainers, in plain terms.
Everything below is answered in detail further down the page.
- What it is
- Ongoing monthly engagements across support and maintenance, conversion optimisation, lifecycle marketing, SEO, performance and senior development hours — as opposed to a fixed-scope project.
- Who it's for
- Brands already running on Shopify or Shopify Plus who need continuous engineering attention rather than another build. Works whether or not we did the original build.
- How it's staffed
- A named senior engineer, not a rotating pool and not an offshore team. The person who answers is the person who knows your codebase.
- Commitment
- Three-month initial term, then rolling monthly with 30 days' notice. Long enough to be worth starting, short enough that we have to keep earning it.
- What you get monthly
- An agreed scope of work, a response-time SLA, a written report of what changed and what it moved, and a call to decide next month's priorities.
- Investment
- From $1,500 to $12,000+ per month depending on scope and response time. Priced per retainer, not per hour.
- Do we need the build first?
- No. Retainers are available standalone. We'll audit what you have and work on it.
Why ongoing
A launch is a snapshot. A site is a moving target.
Everything below happens on a live store whether or not anyone is looking at it. The only variable is how long it takes you to find out.
What happens with nobody watching
Six months after launch, on a site that shipped perfectly
- A Shopify platform release changes behaviour your theme depended on
- An app update injects new scripts and Lighthouse drops fifteen points
- Merchandising adds unoptimised hero images and LCP doubles on mobile
- A flow silently stops firing because a tag was renamed in the catalogue
- Redirects rot as URLs change, and rankings leak a position at a time
- Nobody has run a test in five months, so conversion is exactly where it was
What a retainer actually does
The same six months, monitored
- Platform changes are tested on staging before they reach production
- A performance budget is enforced, so a regression is caught the week it lands
- Flows and events are monitored — a silent failure raises an alert, not a quarterly surprise
- Redirects and canonicals are audited on a cycle
- A test is always running, so conversion moves rather than holds
- You get a written monthly report of what changed and what it moved
Six retainers
Pick the ones that match where you're leaking.
Each runs standalone or combines into a single monthly engagement. Most brands start with one and add a second once the reporting proves it.
- View
Support & Maintenance
Platform updates tested before they land, bugs fixed to an agreed response time, and a staging environment that stays in sync with production.
- View
CRO & Experimentation
A continuous testing programme — hypothesis, build, run to significance, ship or kill. Always one test live, never a quarter of guessing.
- View
Lifecycle Marketing
Monthly Klaviyo flows and campaigns, coded in your brand system, with deliverability and list health watched rather than assumed.
- View
SEO & GEO
Organic search plus visibility inside AI answers — structured data, crawler reachability and the fact blocks assistants actually cite.
- View
Performance & Core Web Vitals
A speed budget that's enforced on real field data, with regressions caught the week they land instead of the quarter they cost you.
- View
Development Hours
A senior engineer on tap for whatever the month needs — features, integrations, fixes. Roadmap work without a hiring round.
Shape and price
Three shapes. Priced per retainer, not per hour.
Hourly billing rewards slow work. These are priced on scope and response time, so the incentive is to fix things properly the first time.
Essential
Keep a healthy store healthy. For brands who need cover, not a programme.
$1,500 / mo
from · 3-month term
- Support and maintenance
- Next-business-day response
- Platform updates tested on staging
- Monthly health check and report
- Uptime and error monitoring
Most common
Growth
Move a number every month. For brands with traffic who need it converting harder.
$6,000 / mo
from · 3-month term
- Everything in Essential
- Same-business-day response
- Two retainers of your choice
- Always one experiment running
- Performance budget enforced
- Monthly strategy call
Partner
Act as the ecommerce engineering team. For brands without one in-house.
$12,000 / mo
from · 3-month term
- Everything in Growth
- Priority response with an SLA
- All six retainers in scope
- Dedicated senior engineer
- Roadmap planning and quarterly review
- Direct Slack channel
Prices are starting points for scoping, not quotes. The final number depends on store complexity, location count, response time and how much of the six is in scope. Every retainer is a three-month initial term and then rolls monthly with 30 days' notice — we would rather keep the work by earning it than by contract.
Straight answers.
Do we have to have built with you first?
No. Retainers are available standalone and a good share of them are on sites we didn't build. We start with an audit of what you have so we're working from the real state of the code rather than assumptions, then agree the first month's priorities from what it finds.
What is the minimum commitment?
Three months, then rolling monthly with 30 days' notice. Three months exists because almost nothing meaningful — a test reaching significance, a performance budget holding, deliverability recovering — can be demonstrated in four weeks. After that we would rather keep the work by earning it.
How is this different from buying hours?
Hourly billing pays us more when work takes longer, which is a bad incentive for both of us. Retainers are priced on scope and response time, so we're paid to fix things properly and keep them fixed. You get an agreed scope, an SLA and a written monthly report rather than a timesheet.
Who actually does the work?
A named senior engineer who knows your codebase. Not a rotating pool, not an account manager relaying messages, not an offshore team. On the Partner tier that engineer is dedicated and you have a direct Slack channel to them.
Can we change what's in scope?
Every month. The monthly call exists to set the next month's priorities — if search matters more than testing this quarter, we move the weight. What doesn't change mid-term is the tier, because that's what the staffing is planned against.
What if we just need one thing fixed?
Then a retainer is the wrong purchase and we'll say so. One-off work is a fixed-scope project — see the services, or start with the free CRO audit and find out whether the thing you want fixed is actually the thing costing you money.
Shopify Plus experts
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