eCommerce consulting — Chicago
eCommerce strategy and Shopify expertise for Chicago brands.
Chicago's commerce economy is built on real operations — manufacturing, distribution, wholesale, food. Many of those businesses now sell direct at meaningful volume, using systems designed for a different model.
The work here tends to be integration-heavy: making the storefront agree with the ERP, the warehouse and the wholesale side of the house.
The market
Operationally serious, digitally retrofitted
A Chicago brand often has decades of operational discipline and a comparatively young eCommerce channel. The ERP predates the storefront, wholesale is still the larger business, and DTC has been added on top of processes that never anticipated it.
That's a solvable problem, but it's an ownership and systems problem before it's a design one.
What we're usually called about in Chicago
- ERP and storefront disagreeing daily
- Wholesale ordering still on email and PDFs
- Inventory shared across channels without rules
- Manual order entry absorbing staff time
- B2B pricing hard to express online
- DTC growth capped by fulfillment process
- Reporting split between systems
- No internal eCommerce leadership yet
Adding a storefront to an established operation is an integration project in disguise.
How we work
Remote by design, senior by default
Gapstow is a U.S.-based practice that works remotely with brands across the country, including Chicago. We don't keep a local office, and we won't pretend otherwise — what we bring is senior eCommerce experience, in your working hours, without an account layer between you and the person doing the work.
We work Central hours comfortably, with the same-day responsiveness that operations-led businesses tend to need.
- 01
Direct access
You work with the practitioner, not a coordinator relaying decisions to someone you'll never meet.
- 02
A real operating cadence
Scheduled working sessions, a maintained priority list and written decisions — the things that make remote work better than proximity.
- 03
Engagements sized to the problem
Advisory, fractional leadership, ongoing management or project delivery, depending on what's actually missing.
- 04
Coordination with your other partners
Agencies, developers, 3PLs and internal teams — briefed consistently instead of one conversation at a time.
Credentials
Experience, not proximity
10+
Years running the agency practice
Hundreds
Of stores worked on
15+
Years in eCommerce
Deepest platform experience is Shopify — development, Plus, migrations, integrations and optimization. The strategy, leadership and operations work applies to eCommerce businesses regardless of platform. See the work.
Working on an eCommerce business in Chicago?
Describe what's stuck. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right help.