Industries · E-commerce
Scale the store without scaling wasted spend.
Judged on what you keep per order, not on revenue that costs more than it returns.
Who we work with
- Direct-to-consumer brands
- Multi-SKU online retailers
- Subscription and replenishment models
- Marketplace sellers moving to owned channels
- Considered-purchase and higher-ticket retail
- Brands scaling past their first plateau
The economics
What actually constrains growth here.
An e-commerce business lives on the gap between what a customer costs to acquire and what they are worth over their lifetime. Product margin, average order value and repeat rate decide how much acquisition the business can afford — which means the ad account cannot be judged in isolation from the catalog.
Where it breaks
The four failures we see most often.
None of these is a channel problem, which is why buying more traffic rarely fixes them.
01
Revenue growing, margin shrinking
Spend scales into products that were never able to carry the acquisition cost.
02
Checkout friction
Traffic arrives and abandons at the cart, so every channel upstream pays for the leak.
03
Creative fatigue
Performance decays because production cannot keep pace with the platform's appetite.
04
No repeat engine
Every month starts from zero because retention was never built.
Why one partner
Whoever runs the ads has to be able to see the margin.
The standard arrangement gives an agency a return-on-ad-spend target and no view of what anything costs to make, ship, or take back. So it optimizes the number it can see. Revenue rises, the reports look excellent, and the bank balance disagrees.
Return on ad spend is a revenue ratio. It does not know your cost of goods, your shipping, your return rate, or the discount that closed the sale. A 4× month on a 22% margin product with 18% returns is a month you paid to lose money — and nothing in the ad account will tell you that.
We work to what you keep per order instead, which means seeing the catalogue, the checkout and the repeat rate, not just the campaigns. It also means telling you when a product simply cannot carry acquisition cost, which is a conversation a channel specialist is not positioned to have.
How it connects
Five stages, and the handovers between them.
Most practices lose more between these stages than inside any one of them, because the gaps are the part nobody is being paid to own.
01
Attract
Channel mix set against a margin floor rather than a revenue target, with prospecting and retargeting judged separately.
02
Convert
Product and category pages built around the questions that stop people buying — sizing, materials, delivery, returns.
03
Checkout
The highest-impact surface on the site, and usually the least examined. Fewer steps, fewer surprises, no cost revealed late.
04
Retain
Post-purchase and replenishment flows, because repeat revenue is what makes acquisition affordable in the first place.
05
Measure
What you keep per order, what a customer costs to win, and how often they come back — the three numbers that decide whether scaling is safe.
What we build here
The parts of the system that matter most in this business.
Ordered by where the bottleneck usually sits, not by what is easiest to sell.
Conversion
E-commerce Growth
Acquisition, conversion and retention judged on margin rather than revenue.
Demand
Paid Growth
Spend that produces qualified demand at a cost the business can carry.
Conversion
Web + CRO
Websites and landing pages built to convert, then improved with evidence.
Automation
CRM + Automation
The operational layer that stops demand leaking between systems.
What a package can include
Scoped to the bottleneck, not sold as a bundle.
Nobody needs all of this on day one. What you start with depends on which stage the diagnostic says is costing you most.
Demand
- Google Shopping and paid search
- Meta and paid social
- Product-led creative testing
- Organic and category-level search
Storefront
- Product and collection page optimization
- Cart and checkout friction removal
- Site speed and mobile experience
- Merchandising and offer structure
Retention
- Email and SMS follow-up flows
- Post-purchase and replenishment
- Win-back and lapsed-customer sequences
- Loyalty and repeat-purchase mechanics
Intelligence
- Per-order margin modelling
- Server-side conversion tracking
- Cohort and repeat-rate reporting
- Channel contribution against cost per customer
Measurement
What we report on.
Defined in writing before the work starts, including what each number excludes.
- What you keep per order
- Cost per customer
- Conversion rate
- Average order value
- Repeat-purchase rate
Compliance
Claims, pricing and reviews.
Three areas cause most consumer-protection trouble in retail, and all three are marketing decisions rather than legal ones. Reference and strike-through pricing has to reflect a price genuinely charged, for a genuine period. Reviews must be real, unincentivized and not filtered to hide the negative ones — regulators have moved decisively on fake and gated reviews, with meaningful penalties attached. Subscriptions and auto-renewals need the terms disclosed before purchase, not after, and cancellation as easy as signing up. We build campaigns and pages inside those limits and will say so when an offer as briefed would not survive scrutiny.
Next step
Plan Profitable Scale.
Bring the numbers you already have. We will tell you where the bottleneck is and what it would take to move it — before anyone talks about scope.