Frequently Asked Questions

I offer volume discounted packages on my pricing page. Bigger packages suggest larger projects, greater commitment, and less frequent billing & accounting work.

Hours are ordered in advance. A positive balance of hours is required for service.

Credit / Debit card and eCheck payments are charged during the order placement. Existing clients in good standing may select Net-30 to pay by check after placing an order, which is due within 30-days or as otherwise agreed in writing.

I bill against the account balance in 15-minute increments to the 5-minute accuracy. Hour consumption varies amongst clients and their respective development cycles. I tend to bill 5-10 hours a week per active project.

Only unused hours can be refunded.

Time logs and hour consumption graphs are available in your My Account portal.

All time spent on a client project or property is billable time. Occasionally I spend non-billable time contributing to community software bug reports (except where client has requested a resolution to their situation), or researching technologies in general (except for a use case specifically requested by a client).

I charge a half hour at the beginning of each month for site maintenance. I conduct the maintenance at least weekly. I include multiple sites or properties as long as there’s no more than a few additional sites and they are micro sites. Additional large sites are assessed separately. Support time is billed hourly.

My clients are successful online store owners, operators, and digital marketers. They sell all kinds of different things, from health supplements to helicopter parts, furniture rentals to laboratory test results. Typically they sell tens of thousands of dollars a month or more.

Read testimonials from clients on my home page.

My idea of a proposal is an email outlining what we’ve discussed, or what’s been discovered in the current small project. As I’m a service company, not a product company, I don’t match the kinds of proposals that larger agencies with sales staff tend to provide as those are more product oriented “cookie cutter”.

1. Optionally hold our free half-hour consultation.
2. Please sign-up on my site by ordering your first round of hours.
3. I’ll conduct a small amount of site examination so I’m caught-up with your unique setup. I make a Trello board to keep track of issues that I find, and my recommendations.
4. We hold a kickoff call to go through findings and determine next steps. We’ll identify who will be responsible for weekly site maintenance work.
5. I provide rough estimates and work on approved items.
6. We meet and tackle things whenever we like, typically meeting every other week during development phases.

Somebody needs to be in charge of a site, and they must be doing a good job. Whenever I see outdated components or a mess of one kind of another, I tend to take charge and play “cop” to ensure things get back on track.

I often collaborate with my client’s team. Each party needs clear dividing lines of responsibility, which is reflected by the Shopify and WooCommerce ecosystems separating content, staff/editor access points, collaborator/administrator access points, theme vendor, and App/plugin vendors.

Only for existing clients and when the situation merits. eCommerce tends to make its own priorities. I come across more urgent matters all the time. From realtime customer concerns to security patches and systems disconnecting – there’s no shortage of time sensitive matters. I do my best to address these situations urgently.

I avoid dramatics or those who consider everything an emergency just to get attention. I look for the “red flags” and try to give everybody a chance to behave cordially.

I’ve worked with a number of hosts over the years. I usually inherit the hosting that a client uses. If that service is inadequate then I recommend replacement and conduct a pre-migration as well as an evening window database migration and pointing traffic.

While private servers (VPS) can be a great value for their horsepower and often times low cost, they can face issues with software updates going wrong, traffic spike events overwhelming the server, and security matters. They may also lack an APM tool, which I occasionally need to debug performance problems.

There’s a number of quality managed shared hosting providers and I recommend the best option for each client individually.

Email me to schedule your free half-hour consultation, available Monday-Friday between 8:30am and 4:30pm Pacific time.

I shy away from social media. Read more about me on Meetup.com, WooCommerce.com, and WordPress.org.