Notes from work.
I measure what your money — ad spend, apps, tracking — is actually doing, instead of trusting what the platforms and vendors report. The same defect classes keep turning up across stores; these are the write-ups. No funnel, no SEO bait, no listicles. Roughly one piece a month — written when there's something I actually want to say.
Why AI builds a marketing page in minutes and breaks a Shopify product page for a week
AI builds a landing page in minutes and quietly breaks a Shopify product page. The reason is architectural, and it's where judgment still gets paid.
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Weld new rituals to ones that already fire: why the routines you add keep dying
New store routines that stand alone die quietly. The ones that survive ride an event that already fires. A design rule for checks that actually keep running.
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The plan was wrong in the safe direction: why under-promising is how you plan
One morning I pushed three tasks to the following week. All three shipped that same day. Planning errors have a cheap direction and an expensive one, and launch dates, restock promises, and campaign timelines should be planned in the cheap one.
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The accessibility widget on your store isn't protecting you from lawsuits
Install the app, get the floating accessibility button, assume the problem is handled. It isn't. Overlays don't reach the markup a screen reader actually reads, stores running one still get sued, and the largest vendor in the category settled with the FTC over the compliance promise itself.
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The cheapest quote for custom Shopify work is usually the most expensive one
A one-time quote for custom Shopify work leaves the real cost out. Shopify retires the platform versions custom code is built against, so every custom feature is on a clock. The honest quote has a maintenance line.
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Shopify is rebuilding its own tools to assume an AI wrote the code
Shopify and Vercel are rebuilding Hydrogen around AI coding agents. Not a reason to go headless: a signal to move your budget toward judgment, integration, and the seams.
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When a Shopify theme audit takes five minutes, what are you actually paying for?
Tools now audit a Shopify theme in minutes, and AI can generate many of the fixes. The scan was never the deliverable. What you pay for is the read: which findings move revenue, in what order, and why.
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Your dashboard isn't lying, but it isn't telling you the truth either
Meta conversions don't match Shopify. Merchant Center says zero products approved. Nothing is broken, yet the numbers are wrong. The four ways analytics drift, and how to tell which figures to trust.
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Who owns your Shopify tracking when it breaks?
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.
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The Shopify-to-marketplace feed nightmare — and why it breaks on every catalog change.
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.
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Why your Shopify products aren't showing in Google.
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.
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Your reviews may be invisible to Google and AI.
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.
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From 2,053 errors to 9: what a Google Merchant Center recovery actually looks like
A Shopify store carried 2,053 Merchant Center errors. Eight weeks later it had 9. What the errors were, the fix sequence, and which parts you can check yourself.
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When the literal ask isn't the real product spec.
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.
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The Shopify projects I refuse to take.
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.
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The cheapest performance win on Shopify is removing apps.
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.
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The migration most established Shopify brands don't actually need.
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.
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Estimating fairly when you don't know what you'll find.
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.
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