23 Shopify clients. One growth stack. Four weeks.
How a Shopify Plus partner agency stood up Sumeru once, white-labeled it per client, and standardized attribution + automation across 23 shops — replacing 92 vendor contracts with a single upgrade path. Co-authored with the agency principal. Numbers verified against Shopify admin.
What 23 client shops looks like before consolidation
Every agency hits this wall around 15 clients. By 20, it dominates the operations conversation.
Per-client tooling sprawl
23 clients × ~4 growth tools each = 92 contracts, 92 logins, 92 invoicing cycles. The agency's ops lead was spending the equivalent of a full day per week on tooling administration before any client work began.
Attribution that didn't reconcile
Triple Whale's numbers, Klaviyo's numbers, and the Shopify admin's numbers disagreed — sometimes by more than 30%. Weekly client check-ins started with 45 minutes of "why don't these match" before any decisions could be made.
No portfolio-level view
The agency principal had no way to see which clients were trending up, which were quietly slipping, and where the firm's hours were producing the most marginal revenue. Decisions about staffing and account prioritization were made by gut.
One install. Per-tenant isolation. Portfolio rollup.
The Agency tier was designed for this exact shape — not retro-fitted from a single-tenant product.
One Sumeru install. White-labeled per client.
Deployed Sumeru Agency tier once on the agency's own infrastructure. Each client got their own tenant — branded with their colors and domain — but the underlying engines (attribution, automation, orchestration) ran from a single shared upgrade path.
Shared event bus. Per-tenant isolation.
Every client's Shopify orders, ad-platform events, and email engagement flow through the same Sumeru event bus, but partitioned by tenant_id at the storage layer. Audit logs, PII redaction, and rate limits all enforced per-tenant — no cross-client leak risk.
Portfolio rollup for the principal.
A second-layer dashboard sits above the 23 tenants and rolls up the metrics that matter at the agency level: which accounts are trending, which are at-risk, where account-management hours are landing, and which growth motions are working across the portfolio.
Four weeks, end to end
One agency-side operator plus Sumeru customer success. No bespoke engineering required.
- Week 01Provisioning + first 3 clients
- Single-region Sumeru Agency install on agency's existing GCP project.
- Shopify OAuth + Google/Meta/TikTok platform connections for 3 pilot clients.
- Default attribution model (last-click) live; data flowing end-to-end within 36 hours.
- Week 02Rolling out to 12 more clients
- White-label theming applied per client (logo, accent color, custom domain).
- 12 additional Shopify shops connected — batched in 2 cohorts to surface edge cases early.
- First automation flows live: abandoned-cart, post-purchase, and refund triage. All gated by the 7-day dry-run before any send.
- Week 03Final 8 clients + portfolio rollup
- Last 8 client tenants provisioned (the ones that required custom Klaviyo data migration).
- Portfolio-level dashboard wired up. Principal got the first end-of-week view.
- Model-blended attribution turned on portfolio-wide; surfaced the paid-vs-organic discount.
- Week 04Decommission legacy stack
- Cancelled 23× Triple Whale, 23× Plug-In SEO, and 18× Looker contracts (5 clients kept Looker for finance reporting).
- Migrated Klaviyo flows that still made sense; retired the ones replaced by Sumeru Automation.
- Final agency-level reconciliation: portfolio metrics matched Shopify admin within 0.4%.
The numbers, four months after cutover
All figures reconciled against Shopify admin and the agency's billing system. Co-signed by the agency principal.
What got replaced. What stayed.
- Triple Whale 23 clients · attribution + dashboards
- Plug-In SEO 23 clients · technical-SEO automation
- Klaviyo 23 clients · email + SMS
- Looker (Google) 23 clients · analytics rollup
- Northbeam (3 clients) specialty paid-mix attribution
- Recart / Postscript 8 clients · SMS overlay
- Sumeru Agency 23 client tenants · 1 contract · 1 upgrade path
5 clients kept Looker for finance reporting (CFO mandate, not a Sumeru gap). 3 clients retained Klaviyo for legacy SMS flows that survived migration intact.
We thought consolidation meant losing flexibility. The honest result is that we got more — because everything talks to everything, and we finally stopped reconciling numbers across four dashboards before client calls.
What we'd do differently
Co-authored case studies include the things that didn't go to plan. This is the agency's list, not ours.
Migrate Klaviyo flows in week 1, not week 4
We deferred Klaviyo flow migration to the end because we wanted the attribution layer stable first. In hindsight that meant 3 weeks of agency operators logging into two tools side-by-side. Next time we'd do Klaviyo migration concurrent with provisioning.
Pre-stage the white-label theming
Per-client theming (logo + accent + custom domain) ate more week-2 hours than expected because we hadn't asked the agency for assets upfront. A 20-minute onboarding form would have saved 6+ hours of back-and-forth.
Don't push the portfolio rollup too early
We showed the principal the portfolio dashboard at end of week 1 — with 3 clients' worth of data in it. It looked sparse and undermined confidence. Better to wait until the rollup has signal worth looking at.
We work with agencies one at a time on the cutover.
If you're running 10+ client shops on Shopify and spending more time reconciling tools than running campaigns, this is the conversation. No deck. We'll talk through your portfolio shape and tell you honestly whether Sumeru is the right call.