Notes from the work.

Your ROAS looks wrong. Conversions stop counting. Somewhere between the ad platform your marketer watches and the pixel your developer installed, the numbers stopped telling the truth — and each side points at the other. That gap is the most expensive seam on your stack.

Your Shopify store and your Amazon or Walmart listings are two systems that have to agree about every single product. They drift apart constantly — and each time they do, the listings that pay your marketplace rent quietly go dark. This is the seam nobody on your team wants to own.

The Google channel says "connected." A customer searching for your products sees nothing. The five places the Shopify–Google connection actually breaks — and why nobody on your team catches it.

You collect reviews and customers see them — but no stars show in Google and AI assistants never cite them. Usually it isn't your theme. It's that your review app skips the native format Shopify, Google, and AI actually read.

Most Shopify briefs describe a symptom, not the spec. Three patterns from real merchant work — and the reframe I run before I'll quote anything, so you don't end up paying for the wrong thing.

Most consultants will quote anything that pays. Four categories of project I won't — the misfit briefs, the un-earned scopes, the committee migrations, and the projects that compound badly.

Most stores I audit are slow because of the apps installed on them, not the platform. What an app actually costs in page weight, and why the cleanup often pays for itself within the first month or two.

Replatforming sounds decisive. Most of the time it's an expensive way to avoid diagnosing the actual bottleneck. The decision tree I run before I'll quote one.

The honest answer to "how long will this take?" on a Shopify project is usually "I don't know yet." The diagnostic pattern I use to get to a real number without padding the quote.