Premier Catch is a Pacific Northwest premium seafood brand selling wild-caught fish and specialty products direct to consumers. Running that business on Shopify means more than a polished storefront: cold-chain fulfillment, subscription and gift behavior, paid media that has to pay for itself after product cost and freight, and a leadership team that needs one accountable partner who can own both strategy and the stack.
Ambaum stepped in as fractional ecommerce leadership for the brand (the same role we play for other growth-stage Shopify merchants), with hands on the store, the apps that drive AOV, and the internal tooling that tells the team whether the business is actually making money.
Selling Perishable Seafood on Shopify
Seafood DTC sits in a narrow operational window. Inventory moves fast, shipping windows matter, and the product mix (filets, specialty packs, gifts, subscriptions) has to stay coherent for a shopper who is often buying for a holiday, a subscription, or a one-time treat rather than browsing like fashion.
We treat the Shopify store as the system of record for that complexity: product architecture that supports how customers actually buy, theme and checkout paths that keep subscription and one-time purchase clear, and day-to-day ownership so the brand is not stuck waiting on a ticket queue when something breaks during a peak window.
That fractional model is intentional. Premier Catch does not need a rebuilt theme every quarter. It needs a senior partner who already knows the catalog, the apps, and the ops constraints, and who can move from decision to ship without a handoff tax.
Dynamic Bundling with Rebuy
Bundling is central to how Premier Catch grows average order value and keeps customers coming back for packs that feel like a set meal, not a random cart. We implemented Rebuy’s dynamic bundling so bundles can support subscription and one-time purchase paths without collapsing into a single brittle widget.
The setup uses separate Rebuy Product Page widgets per purchase type, each tied to a custom data source that lists the exact SKUs in the bundle. Shopify gets a dedicated product template per bundle, with the matching Rebuy widget IDs wired into the theme. That pattern keeps merchandising flexible (new bundles can be stood up by duplicating a known-good widget and pointing at a new data source) while still landing individual SKUs in the cart for clean inventory and reporting.
We documented the same approach in our public bundling guide because it is the pattern we keep coming back to for food and beverage merchants who need subscription-aware kits without fighting Shopify’s native bundle constraints.
Merchant Intelligence with Aperchur
Storefront and bundling only tell half the story. Premier Catch’s leadership also needed a clear view of contribution margin after product cost, freight, packaging, gifts with purchase, and discounts, and of paid media spend that actually belongs in CAC, MER, and ROAS once real costs are in the picture.
That need is what we built Aperchur for. Aperchur is Ambaum’s private Shopify app from The Lab at Ambaum, available by invitation, and installed and set up by us. It connects the tools a DTC brand already runs: Shopify, Meta Ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Search Console, Microsoft Clarity, Klaviyo, Recharge, ShipStation, Google Sheets for landed costs, ERP, and the monthly P&L. Every order is joined to its real cost, the ad that brought it, its discount, and any free gift that shipped with it.
For Premier Catch, Aperchur is the operating dashboard leadership reviews. Closed months show a true margin that does not move later. The month in progress shows a clearly labelled estimate until inventory lots and ads settle. Real cost per item comes from monthly inventory lots, with free gifts carried into each order. Gifts with purchase and Rebuy line items land in the same picture as fully loaded ad spend, so CAC, MER, and ROAS are read against contribution margin instead of as a separate conversation.
From that view, Aperchur turns what changed into a weekly plan: a brief of what moved, with a next step for each item, on a weekly or daily cadence. Each store’s data stays separate and is never sold. We built Aperchur first for Premier Catch, then generalized the same system for other Shopify brands by invitation. Brands that want the same operating layer can request access to Aperchur.
Outcome
Premier Catch now runs with a single fractional partner across storefront, Rebuy merchandising, and Aperchur. The brand keeps a focused Shopify operation for perishable DTC, ships bundles customers actually understand, and manages growth against contribution margin instead of top-line alone.
For food and beverage merchants on Shopify, this engagement is a clear example of what fractional CTO work looks like in practice: not a one-off rebuild, but ongoing ownership of the systems that make a specialty brand measurable and scalable, including the Lab product those systems became.
