Growth Retainer
A fractional ecom team under one monthly retainer.
The growth retainer is for brands doing $40K to $400K per month that need a full-stack ecom partner but do not need a 12-person in-house team. Design, development, SEO, paid ads, CRO, and email under one fee, one point of contact.
- $40K+
- best fit monthly revenue
- 1 PM
- one throat to choke
- 6 mo
- typical minimum
Why the retainer model fits mid-size boutique brands.
- Hiring one ecom specialist internally costs $85K base plus benefits and they can only do one thing well.
- Juggling 5 specialized agencies means 5 points of contact, 5 reporting rhythms, and a lot of game-of-telephone.
- Project-by-project engagements lose context every time and force you to re-explain the brand every quarter.
- A fractional team gets the benefit of all specialties without the overhead, and keeps institutional memory of your brand.
What's included
What we actually do.
What a retainer covers
- Weekly design and development hours (theme fixes, new pages, apps)
- SEO content production (2 to 4 posts per month)
- Paid ads management (Meta, Google, TikTok as needed)
- CRO tests (2 to 3 running at any time for larger brands)
- Email and SMS campaigns and flow maintenance
- Monthly strategy session + weekly Friday scorecard
What stays flexible month to month
- Hour allocation moves based on where the revenue lever is
- Pause a workstream for a quarter if it is not earning its share
- Swap paid ads focus between Meta and Google based on ROAS trends
- Shift CRO from PDP to checkout based on where friction shows up
Who you actually work with
- One dedicated account lead (your main contact)
- Senior specialists on each workstream (not junior pool)
- Slack channel with your team + ours for fast back-and-forth
- Loom-first communication, not endless Zooms
Reporting rhythm
- Monday morning scorecard in Slack
- Friday Loom recap every week
- Monthly strategy session with revenue attribution
- Quarterly business review with stakeholders
Tools and access
- Shared Notion workspace with roadmap and docs
- Your team has live access to our work logs
- Shared analytics dashboards (GA4 + Shopify + Klaviyo + ad platforms)
- Figma for design, GitHub or repo access for development
What the retainer does not cover
- Custom mobile app development
- ERP integrations beyond standard ecom data flows
- In-house video or photography production
- Large-scale platform migrations (those are scoped projects)
How we work
Our process.
- 01
Discovery + scope
Two-week onboarding: audit existing ecom stack, map priorities for first 90 days, align on tools and rhythms.
- 02
First 90 days
Fix whatever is broken, ship fastest-impact work, establish reporting cadence. You should see revenue movement within 60 days.
- 03
Compound quarters
Quarterly strategy review. Double down on winning workstreams, prune losing ones, adjust retainer mix to match.
Questions we hear most.
Ecom growth compounds. Anything meaningful (SEO, email lifecycle, CRO programs) needs 90 days before you can judge whether it is working, and another 90 days to refine. Shorter engagements produce project-quality work, not compounding outcomes.
Yes, with 30 days notice and subject to capacity. Many clients start at Starter and move to Growth after month 3 once the initial fixes have shipped.
Yes. All deliverables, code, designs, content, and accounts are yours. We operate on your Shopify admin, your Klaviyo, your ad accounts (or we set them up in your name if you did not have them).
Flag it in the monthly review. We reallocate the hours. Common move: kill paid ads for a quarter when ROAS dips below threshold, shift those hours into CRO and email. We would rather cannibalize our own retainer than waste your budget.
BigCommerce, yes. Magento, only for brands already on it who do not want to migrate. We prefer not to take on new Magento builds.
Let's see if we're a fit.
15 minutes. We'll tell you whether this service is the right call for where you are — and if not, we'll name what is.
Book a 15-min call