Pricing, process, and the questions
people actually ask first.

Carryup is a Shopify engineering and AI consultancy — not a generalist digital agency. We work exclusively with D2C brands on Shopify, across six capabilities that span first launch to enterprise scale: Shopify Design & Development, Shopify Deep Engineering, Care & Support Retainers, AI & Automation, Growth & Conversion, and Strategy & Consulting. We keep our team small and senior, and take on a limited number of clients at a time so the quality stays high.

Depth beats breadth. When you try to serve every platform, you become average at all of them. We've chosen to go deep on Shopify because it's the best platform for D2C brands that are serious about growth, and because being Shopify-only means our engineering, our marketing, and our data work are all built around the platform's specific behaviours, limitations, and opportunities. We know things about Shopify that agencies spread across 4 platforms simply don't know.

Small by design. We're a focused team of Shopify engineers, a performance marketing specialist, and a data/tracking lead. We don't have layers of account managers between you and the people doing the work. The people who pitch you are the people who build for you. That's a deliberate choice — not a limitation.

We work with brands globally across the UK, US, Australia, and beyond. Several of our clients operate multi-store Shopify setups across different regions, and we've run performance marketing for brands in multiple international markets. Communication is fully async-friendly — we work with a documented process so timezone gaps never slow things down.

We work exclusively with D2C brands — brands that sell directly to consumers via their own Shopify store. Our client roster includes fashion and apparel, luxury textiles, furniture and home goods, food and beverage, lifestyle accessories, and riding gear. We don't work with B2B, SaaS, or brands that primarily sell on marketplaces and have no intention of building a DTC channel.

Six capabilities, spanning launch to enterprise scale: Shopify Design & Development (theme setup, custom design, new store launches), Shopify Deep Engineering (Plus, headless, custom apps, integrations), Care & Support Retainers (ongoing maintenance and SLAs), AI & Automation (from simple workflows to agentic AI), Growth & Conversion (paid, SEO, email & retention, CRO), and Strategy & Consulting (audits, roadmaps, data & analytics). Most clients combine two or three as one coordinated engagement rather than separate contracts.

Yes. We can take individual service briefs. That said, we're most effective — and the results are most meaningful — when we work across the full stack. When the team running your ads is the same team that built your store and set up your tracking, the compounding effect is significant. Isolated services still produce results, but you won't get the integration effect.

No. We're not a full-service marketing agency. We don't do organic social, content production, PR, or influencer management. Our focus is conversion and revenue: what happens from the moment someone reaches your store, and what makes them buy. For content and organic, we can recommend specialist partners.

Both, but we're selective about headless. For most D2C brands at their current scale, a well-optimised Shopify theme will outperform a headless build in both performance and cost-of-maintenance. Headless introduces significant complexity that adds value only at a specific scale and when you have specific needs (content-heavy, complex personalisation, very high traffic). We'll be honest with you about whether headless is the right call or just an expensive distraction.

It's the diagnostic phase of a Strategy & Consulting engagement, covering four areas: Store UX and CRO (every friction point in your checkout funnel, mapped and prioritised by revenue impact), Tracking and Pixels (every event and tag across GA4, Meta, and Google — what's firing, what's wrong, what's missing), Ad Attribution (cross-referencing your ad platform data against actual Shopify orders to find inflation or gaps), and Technical Health (Core Web Vitals, speed, broken links, app conflicts). You get a written document — not a call.

Store builds start at 80,000 for a straightforward setup using an existing theme with custom sections. A fully custom theme build — designed from scratch, mobile-first, CRO-optimised — typically runs 1.5L–3K depending on page count and feature complexity. Enterprise builds for Shopify Plus with complex requirements (multi-market, custom apps, third-party integrations) are scoped on a project basis.

Retainer pricing depends on scope and ad spend. Our Launch retainer (for new brands) runs 75K–1K/month, covering store build/maintenance, tracking setup, and basic campaign setup. Our Growth retainer (for scaling brands) runs 1.5L–2.5K/month, covering full Shopify dev support, performance marketing (Meta + Google), tracking management, and CRO. Brands at significant scale get a custom package based on ad spend and scope.

For some clients at scale, we do offer a hybrid model where our marketing fee is partly a flat retainer plus a percentage of ad spend (typically 8-12%). This aligns our incentives with your growth. For early-stage brands, a flat fee is simpler and more predictable. We'll recommend the right model based on where you are.

For retainer engagements, we ask for a 3-month minimum commitment. This is because meaningful results take time — particularly for tracking fixes, campaign optimisation, and CRO testing. Any agency that promises transformation in a single month is either lying or working on an already-optimised store. Project work (one-off builds, audits, automation) has no minimum commitment.

Start with Strategy & Consulting. It's a paid engagement, but it's the front door for most clients who aren't sure where growth is stuck — we look at your unit economics, channels, and store, and come back with a prioritised roadmap. From there you decide whether to engage us on execution, and on what.

Yes, and this is actually one of the most common starting points. When we take over an existing store, we begin with a technical audit: code quality, app footprint, Liquid structure, and any technical debt. We'll tell you honestly what we can work with and what needs to be rebuilt. In most cases, we can improve an existing store significantly without a full rebuild — though some stores (especially those built with heavily customised paid themes or low-quality liquid) genuinely do require a clean slate.

For most D2C brands under 5Cr/month in revenue, standard Shopify is sufficient. Shopify Plus adds value when you need: custom checkout scripts (no longer needed with Shopify's checkout extensibility on standard plans), multiple store management, Shopify Markets for international selling at scale, dedicated support, or enterprise-level automation. If you're not sure, we'll assess whether the Plus upgrade cost (currently ~$2,300/month vs $105/month for Advanced) is justified by your specific needs.

A standard store build using an existing theme takes 3–5 weeks. A custom theme build from design to launch takes 6–10 weeks. The timeline depends on how quickly the client provides feedback and content. The most common delay in store builds is waiting on product photography, copy, and founder sign-off at design stages — not engineering time.

Yes. We've integrated Shopify with various ERP systems, warehouse management tools, and 3PLs. The approach depends on what APIs are available on your system's side. Some integrations are point-to-point (direct API connection), some require an iPaaS layer (like Zapier or a custom middleware), and some we build as custom Shopify apps. We'll scope the right approach based on your specific system and requirements.

Our core recommended stack: Klaviyo (email + SMS), Judge.me or Okendo (reviews), ReCharge (subscriptions, if applicable), Gorgias (customer support), Triple Whale or Northbeam (attribution), and Yotpo Loyalty (for brands with a strong repeat purchase model). We actively recommend against bloated app stacks — every app adds JS weight, potential conflicts, and a subscription cost. We audit apps for value vs cost on every engagement.

Yes — Shopify Plus is a core part of our engineering practice. The most valuable Plus features for D2C brands are: Checkout Extensibility (custom checkout UI, post-purchase upsells, and checkout branding without touching checkout.liquid — fully upgrade-safe), B2B Wholesale (company accounts, net payment terms, volume pricing, and custom catalogues per buyer), Shopify Functions (write custom discount logic, payment gating, and shipping rules in code), multi-store management under one Plus plan, and Shopify Flow for advanced automation. Plus costs roughly $2,300/month vs $105/month for Advanced — we'll tell you honestly whether that upgrade is justified for your specific revenue and requirements. For most brands under 5Cr/month GMV, standard Shopify is sufficient.

Hydrogen is Shopify's official React-based framework for headless storefronts, deployed on Oxygen — Shopify's own global edge hosting infrastructure. A Hydrogen build gives you complete frontend freedom: custom React components, complex filtering and UI interactions that Liquid can't express, and performance control down to the component level. We recommend Hydrogen when: your catalogue is large and complex (thousands of SKUs with faceted filtering), you have heavy content requirements (editorial-style pages, video-first UX), or you need performance benchmarks that optimised themes can't hit. We're deliberately conservative about recommending headless — for most D2C brands, a well-built Shopify theme will outperform headless in both speed and cost-of-maintenance. The added complexity only pays off at a specific scale with specific technical needs.

Yes to both. Plus migrations from standard Shopify are clean — products, orders, customers, and metafields transfer intact. We rebuild or extend your theme to leverage Plus-specific features like Checkout Extensibility and B2B. Migrations from WooCommerce, Magento, or other platforms to Shopify Plus are more complex but we've done them multiple times — we preserve order history, redirect URL structure for SEO continuity, and customer accounts. For Hydrogen rebuilds, we connect to your existing Shopify backend via the Storefront API and build the frontend in React from scratch. Timeline: Plus migration is typically 4–8 weeks; Hydrogen storefront is 8–16 weeks depending on complexity and design scope.

Meta (Facebook + Instagram) and Google (Search, Shopping, Performance Max, YouTube). These are the two platforms that drive the overwhelming majority of D2C brand revenue. We don't currently manage TikTok Ads, LinkedIn, or Twitter/X — these are either not cost-effective for most D2C brands at current CPMs or not within our specialisation.

We do creative strategy and briefing — not production. We'll tell you exactly what to shoot (ad formats, copy angles, hooks, calls to action) based on what's working in your category and what the data shows. We partner with video and photography studios that we can connect you with. Having an agency both make the creative and assess whether it's working is a conflict of interest — we'd rather be honest evaluators than invested producers.

There's no honest universal benchmark. ROAS depends on your category, average order value, audience size, creative quality, and the maturity of your tracking setup. What we can tell you: most D2C brands we work with see Meta ROAS in the 1.5x–3.5x range at sustainable scale. Brands that report 5x+ ROAS on Meta are almost always measuring on broken attribution (inflated purchase event data). The first step with every new client is to establish what the real baseline actually is — before setting targets.

The minimum effective budget for Meta ads is roughly $600–1,000/month. Below this, the algorithm doesn't have enough conversion data to exit the learning phase meaningfully, and you end up spending on experiments that can't reach statistical significance. For Google Shopping, the minimum depends on your category's search volume, but $350–600/month is typically the floor for useful data. These are ad spend numbers — separate from management fees.

Usually, one of three things: the tracking was broken (so you scaled on fictional data), the store wasn't converting (so you were paying for traffic that was never going to buy), or the campaign structure was wrong (wrong objective, wrong audience, wrong creative strategy). A Strategy & Consulting engagement will tell us which of these applies to your brand. We'd rather diagnose the actual problem than ask you to trust us based on a sales pitch.

iOS 14.5 (2021) fundamentally changed digital advertising by restricting the Meta pixel's ability to track user behaviour on iPhone and iPad — which is roughly 50-60% of most D2C brand's mobile traffic. The pixel now misses a significant portion of purchases made on iOS devices. This is why a server-side Conversions API (CAPI) setup is now essential, not optional, for any brand spending seriously on Meta.

Meta's Conversions API (CAPI) is a server-side event tracking system that sends purchase data directly from your server to Meta — bypassing browser restrictions entirely. If you're spending more than 1K/month on Meta ads and have not set up CAPI, you are making scaling decisions with incomplete data. We set up CAPI as a standard part of any engagement involving Meta advertising.

This is a common and expensive problem. The most likely causes: (1) Duplicate event firing — multiple tools are sending the same purchase event, inflating the count. (2) Wrong event mapping — an event earlier in the funnel (add to cart, begin checkout) is being tagged as a Purchase. (3) View-through attribution — Meta is counting purchases from people who saw your ad but didn't click it, using a generous attribution window. A tracking audit diagnoses exactly which of these applies and what it's costing you.

Our revenue dashboards are built in Looker Studio and connect to Shopify, GA4, and your ad platforms. A standard dashboard shows: daily/weekly/monthly revenue vs target, CAC by channel (real, from Shopify data), ROAS by campaign (platform-reported alongside Shopify-verified), top performing products by revenue contribution, and conversion rate by traffic source. The goal is to give founders one place to look at the truth, not four dashboards with four different stories.

Yes. A tracking fix is typically a standalone engagement — it doesn't require a store rebuild. We use Google Tag Manager for clean, auditable tag management. The typical tracking fix engagement involves: audit of all existing tags, removal of conflicting/duplicate tags, correct event implementation via GTM, CAPI setup for Meta, validation of all events with test purchases, and a dashboard showing confirmed event quality scores. Timeline is typically 2–3 weeks.

Every engagement starts with a diagnostic phase — we review your store, your tracking, and your ad data before making any recommendations. You receive a written document prioritising what to fix and what the revenue impact of each fix looks like. Delivery follows, based on what we found and what you've agreed to fix.

Yes — you'll have a direct channel (Slack or WhatsApp, depending on your preference) with the people actually doing the work. We're not a large agency where you talk to an account manager who relays everything to a delivery team. We send weekly written updates on Fridays — what was done, what the numbers look like, what's planned for next week. Monthly video calls to review strategy. We don't do unnecessary check-in calls.

Yes. We sign mutual NDAs as a standard part of every client engagement. We treat all client data, revenue figures, and strategic information as confidential. We do ask permission before featuring clients in case studies or mentioning them publicly — as with this website.

We have a clear revision process: two rounds of revisions are included in all deliverables. If there's a genuine failure to deliver against an agreed scope, we fix it at our cost. We'd rather spend extra time getting something right than issue a refund and part ways. We set expectations clearly upfront, in writing, specifically so that this conversation is a short one if it ever needs to happen.

We work with brands globally — UK, US, Australia, and beyond. We invoice in USD/GBP for international clients. All work is done remotely.