Your online shop has become too important for every technical decision to keep finding its way back to you.

Dear founder,

You started the company to make and sell something worthwhile.

Then the online shop worked. Orders arrived. The team grew. More tools were connected, more agencies became involved and more of the business began to depend on a piece of technology you were never supposed to spend your week managing.

Yet somehow the awkward decisions still end up with you.

Should you rebuild or improve what you have? Is the agency quote reasonable? Does the store need another app? Is the platform really the problem? Will that “small” feature become a large one after work begins?

Everyone around the table has an answer. Most of them also have something to sell.

You listen to the commercial case. You listen to the technical case. You try to spot the assumptions hiding between them. Then you make the call because, eventually, somebody has to.

That is not a sensible use of your attention.

The real risk is not that you know too little about technology.

It is that the people who know the technology often know too little about the business.

A technically correct answer can still be a commercially foolish one. A beautiful rebuild can still solve the wrong problem. A feature can work exactly as specified and make the customer journey worse.

The store does not exist to impress developers. It exists to help customers buy and to let the company operate without creating unnecessary work behind the scenes.

That means the useful question is rarely, “Can this be built?”

It is, “Is this the smallest sensible thing to build, and is it worth building now?”

Answering that well takes technical experience, certainly. It also takes the independence to recommend less work when less work is the better commercial decision.

I sit on your side of the table.

I’m Luke Michael, a UK eCommerce Consultant & Developer with over twenty years spent in-house, agency-side and freelance.

That mixture matters. I understand why an agency scopes work the way it does, what developers need in order to deliver well, and why neither perspective automatically produces the right decision for the company paying the bill.

I work independently. I have no platform commission to protect, no app partnership to promote and no need to turn a focused problem into a transformation programme.

Shopify and Shopify Plus are home turf, with BigCommerce and WooCommerce close behind. But platform knowledge is only useful when it is applied to the reality of how your company sells.

Sometimes I review the proposal before you sign it. Sometimes I join the supplier call and ask the questions nobody realised were missing. Sometimes I find that the apparently strategic problem is one awkward template, one badly chosen app or one fix the existing supplier can make perfectly well.

And when development is the right answer, I can build it rather than handing you another document to interpret.

You may not need a CTO. You may just need their judgement for an hour.

There is an expensive gap between “we can probably work this out” and hiring a senior technical leader.

Founders often fill that gap themselves. Not because they want to, but because they are the only person with enough context to connect the customer, the cash, the team and the technology.

You should keep the context. You do not have to carry the technical judgement alone.

A useful outside adviser gives you another option: senior input when the decision warrants it, without adding a permanent role or another layer of account management.

Bring me the messy version. The conflicting quotes. The feature everybody wants for a different reason. The store that feels slower each month. The agency relationship you do not want to damage but do want to understand.

I will help separate the actual decision from the noise around it.

The first conversation should reduce pressure, not create a new commitment.

Send me the website and a short explanation of what has landed on your desk.

We will arrange a free, no-pressure call. I will ask enough questions to understand the commercial constraint, not merely the requested feature. Then I will tell you what I think the sensible next step is.

It might be a one-off piece of advice. It might be a proposal review, a focused fix or a phased set of improvements. It may be that your current agency already has the right answer and you simply need the confidence to proceed.

If I cannot genuinely help, I will tell you that too.

You will not be passed to a salesperson. You will not be added to a mailing list. You will hear directly from me.