Founder, Gapstow
Shawn Moreau
eCommerce strategy, technology and implementation from someone who's spent more than 15 years working across the systems behind digital businesses.
Not a specialist in one layer of eCommerce — the useful part is understanding how strategy, platform, operations and implementation affect each other.
Areas of work
- eCommerce strategy
- Shopify
- Platform advisory
- eCommerce operations
- Technology strategy
- Implementation
- Process improvement
- Automation
- Conversion optimization
- Systems thinking
- Entrepreneurship
Why this experience is useful to a business
Most eCommerce problems are misfiled. A conversion problem turns out to be a merchandising problem. A development request turns out to be an operations workaround. A platform decision turns out to be a reporting decision nobody has made yet.
Working across strategy, technology, implementation and operations for more than 15 years is mostly useful for one reason: it shortens the time between a symptom being described and the actual problem being named.
Platform depth, not platform enthusiasm
Shopify is where the majority of the work happens — including more than two years advising MìLà as a Shopify Platform Advisor, an ongoing advisory relationship covering strategy, Shopify Plus, platform optimization, application implementation, analytics and complex promotional periods.
Knowing a platform well enough to say what it shouldn't be asked to do is more valuable than knowing every app in its ecosystem.
Shopify recognizes Gapstow as a Plus Partner. The designation is held by Gapstow as a Shopify service partner, not personally by Shawn. View Gapstow on Shopify
The merchant's side of the table
Shawn co-founded Beard Coalition, helped build the brand and its eCommerce operation, grew the business and ultimately sold it. That experience is the reason Gapstow's advice leans toward restraint: when it's your money, your inventory and your customers, an unnecessary build is not a neutral decision.
Ten years of agency work
Gapstow has operated for more than a decade and worked across hundreds of eCommerce stores — advising, leading, managing and building. That volume matters less as a statistic than as pattern recognition: most problems a brand thinks are unique have been met before, in a slightly different costume.
The point isn't knowing Shopify. It's knowing how an eCommerce business actually works.
How that shows up
Advice you can act on, from someone who can also build it
Plenty of advisers can describe what should happen. Fewer can sit with an internal team, agree the sequence, then implement the part nobody else wants to own.
That combination — judgment plus execution — is what most growing brands are actually missing when they say they need help with eCommerce.
Recommendations feel different when you've had to live with them.
Want a second opinion from someone who's done the work?
Bring the decision you're least sure about.