Platform strategy, stack pruning, and small-team leadership for $3M to $30M ecommerce operators. Advisory from $5,499/mo.
- Audit
- Architect
- Scale
monthly retainer
Who this is for
You're running a DTC or multi-brand ecommerce brand doing $3M to $30M. The tech setup that worked at $1M is now a patchwork of 20+ apps, two agencies, and a dev who leaves every other year. Nobody owns the overall picture. I work as a fractional CTO for ecommerce operators in exactly this phase.
The pain today
- Storefront, ops, and customer data live in 10 to 20 disconnected tools
- Tech decisions happen by accident or by whichever vendor pitches hardest
- Black Friday prep is stressful because nobody knows where the bottlenecks are
- Replatforming feels overdue but the risk of getting it wrong is too high
- Investors or board asking for a tech roadmap and no one can produce one
The outcome you get
- Fractional CTO for ecommerce at $5,499 to $9,499/mo
- Platform strategy and stack audit delivered in 60 days
- App and vendor count cut by 30 to 50 percent without losing capability
- Peak-traffic readiness before Q4 so Black Friday doesn't break anything
- 12-month roadmap and hiring plan the board can actually read
Where growing ecommerce brands need a real CTO
Three phases of ecommerce growth need fractional CTO leadership, and they need it differently.
$3M to $10M is the stack-pruning phase. Most DTC brands reach this range with 20 to 50 apps, two or three agencies, and no single person who understands how all the pieces connect. Platform decisions get made by default — you stay on Shopify because switching feels scary, you add another app because it's only $99/month. The fractional CTO for ecommerce role here is diagnostic and strategic: understand what you have, cut what you don't need, and set a clear direction.
$10M to $30M is the replatforming phase. Shopify headless, composable commerce, or a full platform migration become real questions. A team starts forming in-house. Vendor relationships get complex. The fractional CTO here is a decision authority — the person who can evaluate headless vs. traditional, argue the case with the board, and manage the build.
$30M+ typically needs a full-time VP Engineering for day-to-day team management and a CTO for strategy. I help figure out when that transition is right — usually when the engineering team grows past seven or eight people.
Fractional CTO for ecommerce at $5,499 to $9,499/mo
Stack audit and vendor consolidation
A typical DTC brand at $5M to $15M runs on Shopify plus 20 to 50 apps plus two to five agencies. Most founders cannot name which apps are essential. The stack audit is the first concrete deliverable.
Every app and agency goes through the same filter: what does it actually deliver, what does it cost, and is there a cheaper or simpler alternative already in the stack. Typical outcome is cutting 30 to 50 percent of the app count without losing any capability that matters. That usually saves $500 to $3,999 per month in subscription fees and — more importantly — removes script bloat from the storefront, which directly improves page speed and Core Web Vitals scores.
Vendor management is the ongoing version of this. I set clear scope documents, enforce SLA expectations, and run quarterly reviews. For poorly-performing vendors I manage the replacement process. For strong ones, I deepen the relationship and push for more.
120k+: Properties indexed and searchable.
Platform strategy: headless, composable, or stay put
The headless question comes up at almost every ecommerce engagement. My honest answer is that most $5M to $20M brands should not go headless yet. Headless builds take five to eight months for a proper implementation, they require frontend engineering capacity you probably don't have, and the performance gains are only material if your storefront already has clean architecture underneath.
For brands where specific blockers are real — complex B2B checkout, multi-brand storefronts, advanced subscription logic that Recharge cannot handle — a headless Shopify approach (keeping the commerce backend, rebuilding the frontend in Next.js) is usually the right first step. Full replatforming to something like Medusa or a custom Laravel build is rare and expensive; I recommend it only when a specific growth path is genuinely blocked.
Composable commerce is a useful concept for planning, not a reason to rebuild. I help teams understand the actual tradeoffs rather than following what agencies pitch. The decision framework is simple: what is the specific blocker, what is the cheapest path that unblocks it, and what does the team need to look like to maintain it.
Peak-traffic readiness and Black Friday prep
Black Friday is when ecommerce tech debt becomes visible to customers. Slow checkout, app conflicts, third-party scripts that time out under load — these are engineering problems that accumulate quietly and then surface at the worst moment.
Peak-traffic readiness is a concrete deliverable I build into Q3 for any ecommerce customer. Load testing against realistic traffic profiles, script audit and deferral, CDN and caching review, third-party checkout dependency mapping. At bolttech I shipped payment integrations across 40+ providers in Asia and Europe, running at 99.9% platform uptime under demanding transaction volumes. The discipline of building for that kind of reliability transfers directly to ecommerce checkout and storefront performance.
The goal is that Black Friday is boring. No war room, no last-minute hotfixes, no 3am Slack messages.
Team leadership and the 30-60-90 day plan
The first 30 days are about understanding. Stack audit, team capacity assessment, vendor mapping, and a technology health report with a clear prioritization of what needs to change.
Days 31 to 60 are about decisions. Platform strategy, hiring plan, vendor restructuring, and a 12-month technology roadmap. For most ecommerce brands, this is the deliverable the board actually needs — a document that explains the tech situation in plain language and shows the path forward.
Days 61 to 90 are about execution. First quick wins delivered, vendors realigned, in-house team with clear accountability and working rhythms.
For brands with one to five in-house engineers, I do code reviews, set standards, manage sprint cadence, and handle performance management. At W2O I led 15 engineers across 30+ customers for five years, so team leadership is not new territory. For brands with five to ten engineers, I typically pair with a tech lead hire. Beyond ten, a full-time VP Engineering is the right call.
Ecommerce case: high-volume catalog and search
At Imohub I served as CTO and rebuilt a property portal with 120,000+ listings. The engineering problem was the same one that hits ecommerce brands at scale: large catalog, fast browse, smart search, and hosting costs that don't balloon with traffic.
The approach — Next.js for the storefront, Meilisearch for catalog search, MongoDB for the data model, AWS with Docker for infrastructure — delivered sub-500ms query response and a 70 percent infrastructure cost reduction. The same playbook applies to ecommerce brands running large product catalogs: search performance, clean data architecture, and cost-disciplined hosting matter more than platform choice.
I'm not selling a particular stack. The decisions were made against specific constraints and growth targets.
Pricing and what you get
CTO Advisory is $5,499/mo. One to two days per week. Strategic input, platform decisions, vendor management, hiring guidance. Built for brands that have an existing tech lead and need senior oversight above them.
Fractional CTO is $9,499/mo. Three days per week. Full CTO role: strategy, team management, vendor ownership, technical execution, board communication. Built for brands that need the CTO seat filled, not just advising.
14-day money-back guarantee. Cancel anytime. Typical engagements run six to eighteen months, transitioning to a full-time hire as the company scales and the team can sustain itself. I take one customer at a time by design, so availability is limited.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Rebuilt a real estate portal at a fraction of the cost
Rebuilt Imóveis SC's real estate portal as ImoHub, a faster, more scalable successor, handling 120k+ properties with sub-second search and drastically reduced AWS costs.
Read the case studyFrequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
For ecommerce, the work is platform strategy, stack auditing, peak-traffic readiness, and vendor management — not generic "technical leadership." In the first 60 days I typically deliver a full technology health report, vendor consolidation recommendations, and a 12-month roadmap. If there are in-house engineers, I manage them directly. The ecommerce-specific layer is understanding Shopify architecture, checkout performance, catalog search, and the app ecosystem well enough to make real decisions.
Most $5M to $30M brands should stay on Shopify. The exceptions are specific: complex B2B checkout, multi-brand storefronts that Shopify's multi-store setup can't handle cleanly, or advanced subscription logic that Recharge won't support. Even then, a headless Shopify approach — keeping the commerce backend, rebuilding the frontend in Next.js — is usually the right first step. Full replatforming to Medusa or a custom build is rare. I evaluate in month one and recommend the cheapest path that unblocks the specific growth blocker.
Shopify Plus unlocks checkout customization, multi-store management, and advanced B2B features. At $2,999+ per month, it makes sense if you are hitting one of those specific blockers. If you want it for more apps or better themes, the upgrade rarely pays. I evaluate based on what's actually blocked. The honest answer for most brands below $15M is: stay on Advanced until a Plus-exclusive feature becomes the specific bottleneck.
Peak-traffic preparation is a concrete Q3 deliverable. Load testing against realistic profiles, script audit and deferral of non-critical third parties, CDN and caching review, checkout dependency mapping. The goal is knowing exactly where the bottlenecks are before traffic finds them. Most ecommerce outages on high-traffic days are caused by third-party scripts, not the core platform — and those are fixable with a disciplined audit.
An interim CTO is a full-time, temporary role — typically filling a leadership gap after a departure while a permanent hire is found. A fractional CTO is a part-time, ongoing engagement. Fractional makes sense when you need senior technical leadership but don't yet have the engineering team size that justifies a full-time seat. Interim makes more sense when a CTO has just left a team of 10+ engineers who need someone full-time immediately.
Yes, though I'm honest about where it's premature. Meaningful AI personalization requires clean purchase history data, a catalog with good attribute tagging, and enough traffic to make the model useful. For most brands below $10M, the better investment is search and browse performance. Above $10M with clean data, integrating recommendation logic — through tools like Bloomreach or custom API calls to an LLM — starts to produce measurable lift. I help evaluate whether the data foundation is ready before recommending any build.
Transition planning starts at the beginning of the engagement, not the end. The 12-month roadmap includes a hiring milestone tied to team size and revenue. I write the job description, participate in interviews, and handle knowledge transfer. Most ecommerce brands hit the full-time CTO inflection point somewhere between $25M and $40M revenue, or when the engineering team reaches seven or eight people. The fractional engagement closes cleanly — the goal is to make myself unnecessary.