The Store Check is one developer who cares whether your store sells

Why this niche

Most of the money lost on an online store is lost quietly. Nobody emails to say the search returned nothing for “cups”, or that the shipping cost at step three was the reason they closed the tab. The store looks fine, the agency says the campaign is performing, and the conversion rate sits where it has always sat.

I chose e-commerce because those problems are findable and fixable with ordinary care. Open the store on a phone, try to buy something the way a real person would, watch where it gets hard. Then look behind the counter at how orders, stock and promotions are actually handled, because the admin side is where retailers lose hours in the same way shoppers lose patience.

Shopify is the platform I lead with because that is where most Sydney retailers already are, its theme and app model lets improvements ship in weeks rather than quarters, and its APIs make the integration side tractable. If you are on something else, I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person or whether a migration is the real conversation.

How I work

• Evidence before opinion. Every engagement starts with a review on a real phone and a look at your own Shopify analytics. Findings are ranked by how many shoppers hit them and how badly, not by what is fashionable.
• Scope in writing, price before work. The review and the sprint have published “from” prices with inclusions and exclusions. Anything bigger gets a written quote with assumptions listed.
• Nothing breaks the live store. Work happens on a duplicate theme, is tested on current iOS and Android phones, and is released at a time you choose, with rollback explained.
• Measure, then decide. Four weeks after a release we compare numbers with the baseline. If a change did nothing I say so. If the next step is to stop, that is a fine outcome.
• Respect the trading calendar. I ask about promotion dates and change freezes at the first call. Small checks go before your peak; migrations go after it.

What you get from a sole-trader specialist

You deal with the person who scopes the work, builds it, tests it and supports it. There is no account manager translating between you and a developer, no handover document that loses half the context, and no re-learning of your store each time a new project starts. When you call 0466 300 210 during business hours, the person who answers is the one who wrote the code.

The trade-off is capacity. One person takes on a small number of sprints at a time and one migration at a time, so I will tell you the next realistic start date when you enquire rather than promising everything to everyone. I also keep ordinary hours: Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm Sydney, with a reply within one business day. There is no 24/7 on-call offer, and I would rather be clear about that than pretend.

Operator disclosure

The Store Check is a business name operated by Matthew Offen as a sole trader, based in Sydney, Australia. It is not a company and there are no staff; “I” on this site means Matthew. Matthew also runs other specialist software services under their own brands; where a need sits better with one of them, I will say so and explain the referral rather than quietly passing you along. Store-to-inventory and store-to-accounting integration work stays inside your The Store Check engagement.

I do not publish invented clients, testimonials or results. The demo store uses fictional data and says so. Case studies will appear here only with a merchant's permission, with the baseline, method, result and limitations stated.