Pricing
- Up to 8 hours/month
- Product/content updates
- Order ops support
- Monthly health check
- Email response within 1 business day
- Up to 18 hours/month
- All Maintain tier work
- Conversion optimization
- Light analytics & reporting
- Monthly strategy call
- Same-day urgent response
- Up to 30 hours/month
- All Operate tier work
- Active CRO testing
- Email/SMS strategy
- Bi-weekly call + Slack channel
- Same-day urgent response, weekend coverage
Hours roll over for one month. Above-tier work is billed at $175/hour with prior approval — you'll never be surprised by an invoice.
Inside the Hours
- Product catalog work — new products added, descriptions updated, photos swapped, variants configured, discontinued items archived properly (not just deleted)
- Inventory operations — restock alerts, supplier update sync, kitting/bundling configuration, low-stock display logic
- Content updates — banners, promo pages, blog posts, category descriptions, About page edits, seasonal content
- Email & SMS programs — Klaviyo / Mailchimp campaigns, segment maintenance, abandoned cart and post-purchase flows, list hygiene
- Conversion optimization — PDP improvements, checkout fixes, mobile UX, trust signals, page speed work as part of CRO
- Integrations & apps — reviews, search, returns, shipping, accounting/ERP sync. When something breaks I diagnose and fix it.
- Reporting & analytics — monthly written report tying revenue, conversion rate, AOV, and traffic to specific work done
- Incident response — checkout broken, payment processor down, CDN outage, app conflict. I'm the person you call.
- Vendor wrangling — opening tickets with Shopify, BigCommerce, Klaviyo, etc. Saves you hours of "let me transfer you" calls.
Not included
- Paid ads (see Google Ads Management)
- Heavy SEO content production (see SEO Management)
- Major redesigns or replatforms (see Web Design / Platform Migration)
- Customer service / order fulfillment / shipping operations (still your job)
- Wholesale / B2B sales operations
The Process
- Week 1 — Onboarding. Access setup (read/write to platform, GA4, Search Console, Merchant Center, ESP, etc.). Documented in a shared password vault. NDA on file.
- Week 2 — Audit. Full review of your store — product catalog quality, integrations health, conversion funnel, abandoned flows, reporting setup. Output is a written prioritized backlog.
- Week 3–4 — Quick Wins. Top 5–10 fixable items from the audit get done in the first 30 days. Real measurable changes, not theater.
- Month 2+ — Steady State. Weekly check-ins, ongoing work against the backlog, monthly strategy review. You can dial my involvement up or down month by month.
I keep a running log of work done with timestamps. Every month you get a written summary of what hours went where, what shipped, what's queued, and what KPIs moved. No mystery on what you're paying for.
FAQ
If your store is doing $3M+/year and you need 40+ hours of e-commerce work per week, yes — hire in-house. For most small businesses doing $200K–$2M, fractional management at $750–$2,500/month gets you the same operational discipline without the salary, benefits, training time, and "what if they leave" risk. The math flips somewhere around $200K of total comp.
Maintain is reactive — product updates, fixing breakage, keeping things running. Operate is proactive — identifying opportunities, running tests, recommending improvements. If you're not sure which to start with, start with Maintain and upgrade in month 2 if you find yourself wanting more strategic input.
I take vacations. You'll know in advance, and urgent issues still get covered — either by me with a delay, or by a backup partner depending on the issue. This is one of the few advantages of a small operator over a big agency: you have a real person you actually know and can reach.
After the first 90 days, you can move tiers up or down with 14 days notice — or pause for a slow season and resume later. The structure is intentionally flexible because real small businesses don't have steady-state needs.
No — that's a different job and frankly someone closer to the product knows your customers better than I will. I handle operational/technical work; you (or a CS person you hire) handle order questions and returns conversations. I'm happy to set up macros, automation, and shipping/return flows that reduce CS load, but I'm not the front line.
Maintain tier: same business day. Operate tier: same day, including evenings if I'm reachable. Grow tier: same day, including weekends. "Emergency" means actually broken — checkout down, payment processor failure, site offline. Not "the new banner image looks weird."
Examples
I currently run the e-commerce side of a $10M flooring operation in Indianapolis — full operational responsibility, from product onboarding to feed management to reporting. Over the last decade I've built the playbook for keeping a real e-commerce business running smoothly while it grows. The fractional-management version of that work is what I'm offering here.
Most clients in this tier didn't realize how much actual operational debt they were carrying until someone showed up and started clearing it. Slow PDPs, broken integrations, abandoned cart emails not firing, products with empty meta descriptions, free items somehow priced at $0 in the catalog, the abandoned-cart flow disabled years ago and never fixed. Most of that is fixable in the first 30 days.