Mark W. Lewis did not take the usual road into ecommerce. He started as an engineer, including work at NASA and HP Enterprise Services, where the job was to solve hard technical problems and ship things that had to hold up under real pressure. Those years left him with a standard he never let go of: code that is scalable, secure, fast, and carefully built. Later he added an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, which gave him the operator’s lens to go with the engineering. That pairing, an engineer who is also a business person, is rarer in this industry than it should be, and it shapes everything about the company he runs.
That company is Netalico, the Shopify agency Mark founded in 2013 and grew into a Shopify Plus Premier Partner, an elite distinction held by only a small group of agencies and one of the highest tiers in Shopify’s partner program. Since the beginning, Netalico has served more than 100 brands, including recognizable names like Oatly, Big Green Egg, Feetures, Audio Advice, Crossrope, Mijenta Tequila, and Sheets & Giggles.
The Third Option for Growing Brands
The idea for Netalico came from a problem Mark kept watching growing merchants run into. They had two unappealing choices. They could build an internal tech team and absorb the overhead, the politics, and the constant training that comes with it. Or they could stitch together a rotating cast of freelancers and hope the work held together. Neither fit a lean team trying to move fast.
Netalico was built as a third option. Not a vendor you hand things off to, and not a hire you have to manage and train, but an ecommerce department you plug into. In practice, that means acting as a fractional CTO and CMO for growing brands, filling the gaps a small team cannot cover and making the calls a busy founder does not have time to make.
Two beliefs have run through the work from day one: share knowledge freely, and never gatekeep. Plenty of agencies guard what they know to keep clients dependent on them. Netalico does the opposite, teaching a client’s team as it goes and aiming to leave those people stronger than it found them. It helps that more than half of the team has worked in-house for merchants. They have owned the revenue number and felt the pressure of a launch, so they understand that world from the inside.
Enterprise-Grade Work, Right-Sized
The technical bar is the part Mark is least willing to compromise on. Netalico brings enterprise-grade engineering as the default: scalable code, fast and secure storefronts, clean architecture, structured data, and disciplined handling of complex migrations and integrations. It has proven that caliber on large, recognizable brands, and it brings the same rigor down to mid-market and smaller businesses.
The result is a kind of right-sizing. A growing brand gets enterprise-level engineering and standards without the enterprise overhead, and a larger brand gets a senior, nimble partner. The service list reflects that range, spanning UX and UI design, conversion rate optimization, custom development and app integrations, platform migrations to Shopify Plus, Klaviyo email and SMS marketing, and Shopify 2.0 theme development.
The approach shows up in the client relationships. The large majority stay on long-term monthly retainers, and many have worked with Netalico for years. When people keep choosing to stay, Mark figures, that tells you something the marketing cannot.
Selling the Work, Not the Tool
Ask Mark where AI fits, and he is careful to draw a line. Netalico does not sell AI services. It sells outcomes, faster sites, better conversion, healthier email and SMS, real growth, and it uses AI to deliver that work at a high level. The way he frames it, the work is the product and the software is not. Every improvement in AI simply makes the work faster and sharper, and harder for anyone else to match.
The through-line stays human. AI does the heavy lifting across development, conversion work, and email, while experienced people who have actually run stores own the strategy, the craft, and the relationship. A senior human is always accountable for the result. As Mark sees it, AI raises the floor for everyone, so the real edge becomes senior judgment, taste, and trust.
Getting Ready for Agentic Commerce
The reason this matters now is a shift Mark calls agentic commerce, where AI agents increasingly help shoppers discover products, compare options, and even complete a purchase on someone’s behalf. That world rewards clean, machine-readable product data, fast sites, and automation-friendly back ends, exactly the enterprise-grade foundations Netalico already builds.
His goal for the next few years is to make any brand agent-ready, from enterprise names to ambitious smaller businesses doing roughly $2M to $100M a year, without forcing them to bloat their teams to get there. He wants Netalico to keep living at the leading edge of Shopify and AI so its clients never have to wonder whether they are falling behind, and to do it the way the agency has always worked. AI does the heavy lifting, and experienced humans make the calls.
There is an anecdote Mark tells that captures the philosophy. A founder once came to him convinced the brand needed to rebuild its store headless, a push coming from internal developers who argued it would be easier to build on. Mark had seen this before. For that brand, headless meant more moving parts, higher costs, slower timelines, and a store only one or two people could safely touch. So he laid out the tradeoffs in plain language, with no upsell attached, and recommended they stay on a clean native build. They shipped sooner, spent far less, and kept a store the whole team could own. The founder later said the most valuable thing Netalico did was tell them the truth.
If that sounds like the kind of partner you would want in your corner, you can learn more about Mark and the team at netalico.com.
