Keep the site rolling.
Even with the best will — and work — in the world, an e-commerce site can hit the proverbial iceberg now and then. If a site is made well, with quality part of the process from the start rather than an afterthought, problems should be rare: code is code — it doesn’t change on its own.
But other things do. Third-party integrations and APIs, add-ons that weren’t tested properly, a poorly mapped migration: there are still plenty of ways to wreak havoc on even the best-behaved site. And all of that assumes the site was well made in the first place — sadly, a lot aren’t. Which is why we offer bench days.
The Workshop is agency-grade help — platforms, code, SEO, copy, design, the lot — in a more flexible arrangement than you’ve probably been offered before. There’s no retainer and no proposal deck: you book the days, we get to work.
It comes from where we come from: eighteen years building and running independent shops, including our own. We know what it feels like when the site misbehaves and there’s nobody sensible to call — we’ve been the maker staring at the admin at midnight. That’s the mindset this service is built on.
What a bench day is
A bench day is a full day of our attention, priced at £500. Booked as a repair, it starts with exploration — reproduce the fault, trace it to the cause — and ends with fixes. But a day is a day, not a job type: bring a question instead of a fault and it works exactly the same. You get the hours, whatever they hold, and a written summary at the end: what was done, what was found, what remains.
One day won’t transform your business, and we won’t pretend otherwise. What it will do is move the thing that’s been sitting still: the fault traced and, more often than not, fixed before the day is out; the decision you’ve been circling given a straight answer. This isn’t an emergency service — it’s a day of experienced attention from a safe pair of hands.
Work starts within two working days of booking. If the day has a date attached — a launch, a campaign — there’s a box to tick at the checkout. It doesn’t cost more; it just tells us who to call first.
Not everything arrives broken
A bench day is as often consultancy as repair. Starting a new business and unsure which platform to build it with? Struggling to reach the next level, with revenue plateauing? Interested in multi-language but don’t know where to start? Confused by endless experts who provide words but not wisdom? Book a day and bring it with you. We bring eighteen years of e-commerce, and the thinking is written down before the day ends. Others book design: one page of the site redesigned properly, the homepage, say, or the product page. We’ve sold days that were nothing but ideas, and they were good days. Whatever the day holds, you leave with the written summary, so none of it is lost.
Bench times
Every job is different, but after eighteen years the patterns repeat. Typical times, from experience:
| The job | Typical bench time |
|---|---|
| Checkout stuck — payments failing or abandoning | 1 day |
| Theme or app update broke the front end | 1 day |
| Site slowed to a crawl | 1–2 days |
| Rankings fell off a cliff after a change | 2–3 days |
| Migration gone wrong — broken collections, dead URLs | 2–3 days |
| Email landing in spam, domain records in a mess | 1 day |
| Analytics telling you nothing you can use | 1 day |
| A second opinion before a rebuild or replatform | 1 day |
| One template redesigned properly — home, product, story | 1–2 days |
| A consultancy day — your problems, our experience, notes kept | 1 day |
| Don’t know what’s wrong — it’s just wrong | 1 day (diagnosis day) |
That last row matters: a single day spent finding out what’s actually wrong is the cheapest decision-making tool we sell. And anything past five days is usually a project wearing a disguise — that deserves a proper conversation and a proper quote, not a checkout.
How it works
Book your days. Choose one to five below and check out with Stripe. £500 a day, plus VAT where applicable.
Tell us what the day is for. A short job card follows the payment: the fault or the brief, what platform, what a good day looks like. No passwords — ever.
Grant access from your side. You invite us in — a Shopify collaborator request, a WordPress admin invite, Analytics access — and you can show us out the moment the job’s done.
We get to work. Diagnosis first where something’s broken; straight to the job where nothing is. When a day is done you get a plain-English summary: done, found, remaining.
The no-passwords point isn’t small print — it’s the arrangement. Every platform lets you invite a collaborator and revoke them; anyone who asks you to email a password instead is telling you something about how they run their workshop.
Book the bench
Stripe checkout · plus VAT where applicable · work starts within two working days · covered by the first-hour rule · the small print
Not sure what to book?
Tell us what’s wrong — or what you’re weighing up — and we’ll write back with a straight read: how many days it looks like, whether it’s a bigger job, or whether it’s not a job at all. A real reply within two working days.