From first conversation
to long-term growth

You submit the contact form with details about your store, goals, and the specific challenges you're running into. We review your submission and respond within a few hours to confirm receipt and ask any clarifying questions we need.

At this stage we're trying to understand: what kind of store, what's working, what isn't, and whether this is the right engagement for Rigel's current capacity. If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you and suggest what might serve you better.

This is the foundation of every engagement. We conduct a thorough, evidence-based review of your Shopify store — not a templated checklist, but a genuine end-to-end analysis of what we can observe.

We review your homepage, collection pages, product pages, cart, checkout, mobile experience, trust signals, SEO fundamentals, and support structure. Every finding is tagged by category and rated by likely business impact.

The output is a written findings report, structured around what matters most — not a comprehensive list of everything we noticed. We prioritize what we'd fix first, second, and third if we were running your store.

After you've reviewed the audit and we've walked through it together, we align on exactly what to work on, in what order, and how. This isn't a one-way presentation — it's a working conversation.

We factor in your team's capacity, your available budget, your technical resources, and your timeline to build a realistic implementation plan. Some findings you'll tackle immediately. Others get queued for later. A few you'll decide to deprioritize or skip entirely — and that's the right call sometimes.

If we're moving into a full engagement, this is where we confirm scope, agree on deliverables, and set expectations for communication cadence and timelines.

This is where the work happens. Depending on your engagement type, we're either delivering strategy and content for your team to implement, or we're working alongside you directly.

For CRO engagements: we write copy, provide specific design direction, and work with your developer on implementation details. For support optimization: we build the FAQ architecture, write response templates, and set up the structure in your helpdesk tool. For AI workflow design: we map the automation, configure the tools, and document the system.

We check in frequently during this phase — not to add overhead, but because questions come up during implementation that need fast answers. Our async response time during active engagements is typically under a few hours.

After implementation, we don't hand over the deliverables and disappear. There's a follow-up period where we review how the changes performed, identify what's working and what needs adjustment, and refine.

Conversion improvements rarely happen in one pass. A product page restructure might lift performance significantly, but there's often a secondary round of copy refinements or trust signal tweaks that adds another layer of improvement. We build this iteration into the engagement rather than treating it as a scope creep conversation.

Where metrics are trackable, we document them. Where they aren't (SEO timelines, for example), we set clear expectations about when to expect data and how to interpret it.

After the initial engagement is complete, some clients move to an ongoing retainer — a monthly partnership where we continue to identify opportunities, run new optimizations, and support operations as the store scales.

This isn't a commitment that comes with the initial engagement. It's an option for founders who find the relationship valuable and want to keep the momentum going. The retainer scope is defined based on what the store needs at that point — not a fixed package applied to everyone.

For clients who prefer project-based work, we're happy to return when there's a new challenge. Our goal is to be useful when it makes sense — not to create dependency.