About – ClickBrown

The origin

I joined Army & Outdoors in 2019 as their sole developer. At the time they had one Shopify store. Today they run four — across NZ, AU, US, and EU — with 11 production systems I built from scratch: multi-store sync, live FX pricing, marketplace automation, ERP integrations, checkout extensions. Zero critical failures in 6.5+ years.

The realisation

Working production systems for that long teaches you what actually breaks and what actually scales. It also makes the gap obvious — most other Shopify merchants I talk to are running into exactly the same operational problems, but their agency or freelancer has never built it before. They're learning on the merchant's dime.

Why ClickBrown exists

I started ClickBrown to bring production-tested Shopify operations expertise to mid-sized retailers who've outgrown generic agency work. Not theory. Not learning on your dime. Systems I've already built and proven at scale, applied to your store.

What you get working with me

Direct contact — you talk to the developer, not an account manager. Fixed-scope NZD pricing — no hourly surprises. NZST business hours — same-day responses. And six and a half years of production patterns: HMAC-verified webhooks, rate-limit-aware processing, GraphQL bulk mutations, idempotent retries.

6.5+ Years on Shopify Plus, in production

4 Regional stores (NZ · AU · US · EU)

300+ Orders processed daily, automated

0 Critical failures, ever

Technical depth

Stack I run in production

Shopify Plus (Admin + Storefront API) Shopify GraphQL bulk mutations Shopify UI Extensions (Preact) Shopify Liquid + theme customisation Custom UI features (configurators, popups, switchers) Core Web Vitals (CLS / LCP / INP) Google Search Console Google Merchant Center Klaviyo (API + flows) PHP 8 / MySQL Cin7 Omni StarshipIt Omnivore DataFeedWatch Google Sheets API Webhooks (HMAC-verified)

Business depth

Things I understand from running it

Multi-region pricing & FX Live exchange rates, store-specific multipliers, surcharge by tag.

Customs / HS code compliance Weekly automated HS code uploads across NZ/AU/US/EU stores.

Webhook reliability at scale HTTP 200 immediately after HMAC verification. No retry storms.

Marketplace economics eBay AU, TradeMe, Amazon, OnBuy — fee structures, sell-through rates.

Owning a Shopify store BrandSHD: $80K+ NZD revenue. I feel the same operational pain you do.

Milestones

How we got here

2019

Joined Army & Outdoors as sole developer

Single Shopify store. Started building the foundations.

2021

Built AAosync — multi-store sync engine

Live FX pricing, store-specific multipliers, publication scope. Still running.

2023

Launched BrandSHD — own Shopify store

Fragrance ecommerce. $80K+ NZD revenue. FragranceX API integration.

2025

Built reporting.aaoapi.com

Multi-store reporting dashboard. Per-store FX, compare periods, sortable tables.

2026

ClickBrown rebuild + multi-region

Network of regional sites — NZ, AU, IN. Same specialist, broader reach.

I'm Varun. I build production Shopify systems.