Shopify Store Operations & Maintenance
lorvae.comOur engagement ran through 2023 and 2024. The store has been in other hands since, so the current site is not our work.
Summary
Lorvae is a luxury eyewear brand built around self-expression and individuality. It started with its founder's own habit of collecting sunglasses, grew into a label with a BIPOC and female-led team behind it, and sits inside the Tigime portfolio alongside the other brands that incubator has launched.
Commercially it runs on Shopify, which is where we came in. Not to design it or rebuild it, but to keep the thing that takes the orders healthy while the brand got on with being a brand.
The Problem
A growing Shopify store accumulates operational debt quietly. Apps get installed for one campaign and never removed. Staff and collaborator accounts keep access long after the reason for it has gone. The theme drifts versions behind the upstream release it was built from. Backups either are not running or have never actually been restored, which amounts to the same thing.
None of that is visible on the storefront, which is exactly why it survives. It stays invisible right up until the moment it is not, and the moment it is not tends to be checkout.
The Solution
We ran the store's operations on a retainer rather than waiting to be called when something broke. Six areas, all of them recurring: the app estate, who has access to what, whether the backups actually restore, whether the store is up and uncompromised, keeping the theme current, and being available for the things that come up in between.
None of this is glamorous work and none of it produces a screenshot. It is the difference between a store that quietly keeps taking orders and one that has a bad week at the worst possible time.
What we built
Six recurring areas. If you are running a store and cannot say with confidence when your last backup was tested or who still has admin access, this is the list worth reading.
App management and optimisation
Regular audit of every installed app for whether it is still needed, what it costs in performance, and what permissions it holds. Redundant and unused apps removed rather than left running.
App estates only ever grow. Each one adds scripts to your storefront, holds access to your data, and quietly slows the pages your customers are trying to buy from. Most stores are paying for at least one app nobody has opened in a year.
Roles and permissions, on least privilege
Staff and collaborator access audited and assigned by job function, third-party app tokens scoped to the minimum they need, and a change history kept for review.
Most damage to a store is not an attack, it is an accident by someone who had more access than their role required. Least privilege limits the blast radius, and the access log means questions about who changed what have an answer.
Backups with verified restores
Automated backups of products, orders, and customers to cloud storage, encrypted with AES-256 and held read-only, with a test restore performed every month.
An untested backup is a hope. The monthly restore is the part that matters, because it is the only thing that proves the file will open on the day you actually need it. Read-only storage means the backup cannot be altered by whatever went wrong upstream.
Security and uptime monitoring
SSL certificates validated and watched, uptime monitored continuously, and weekly scans of themes and apps for injected or suspicious JavaScript.
Skimming scripts hide in themes and third-party apps, and they are designed not to be noticed. Weekly scanning catches what a glance at the storefront never will. Uptime monitoring means an outage reaches you before it reaches a customer at checkout.
Theme updates, tested in staging
The theme kept in sync with its upstream release, patches merged deliberately, and storefront, cart, and checkout regression-tested in a staging environment before anything reaches production.
Shopify's reference themes ship updates regularly, including security and accessibility fixes. Skipping them means falling far enough behind that catching up becomes a project. Testing in staging first means an update never takes checkout down to find out.
Responsive technical support
A defined allocation of support hours each month for troubleshooting, small optimisations, and whatever the store needs answered.
Small breakages get lived with when raising them feels like starting a project. A standing allocation removes that friction, which is how the small things get fixed while they are still small.
The services behind this
This engagement was pure ongoing optimisation, the fourth service, with no build phase attached.
Is anyone looking after your store?
If you cannot say when your backups were last tested, who still has admin access, or how far behind your theme has drifted, that is the work we do. Tell us what you are running and we will tell you what it needs.