More traffic doubles the ad bill. A better conversion rate doesn't.
Acquisition gets more expensive every year and conversion rates don't improve on their own: so the same store quietly pays more per customer each quarter. Before we recommend spending more, we find out what the traffic you already have is worth. Frequently that's the cheaper half of the growth.
Two ways to double revenue. One of them is free.
Same store, same products, four scenarios. Substitute your own numbers as you read: the conclusion holds at almost any conversion rate under about four percent.
Which is why we'd rather look at your store than your ad account first.
Most agencies open with a media plan because media plans are what agencies sell. But if 98 of every 100 visitors leave without buying, the constraint isn't how many people arrive, and doubling the arrival rate makes the leak more expensive rather than less.Six leaks, in the order they happen.
Fixing a checkout problem while your product pages are losing people is doing the hard work in the wrong order. We work down this list, not up it.
Eight services. Usually in this order.
The sequence is the strategy. Fixing the store before scaling into it is what separates growth from an expensive plateau.
eCommerce optimization
Product pages, cart and checkout. The work that makes every other line on this list worth more.
Optimization TheneCommerce SEO
Category and product pages built to rank, plus the technical work large catalogues need to get crawled properly.
eCommerce SEO TheneCommerce PPC
Shopping, Performance Max and paid social, structured around margin rather than platform-reported ROAS.
eCommerce PPC AlongsideMerchant Center
Feed quality, disapprovals and attribute completeness. Unglamorous, and it decides whether Shopping works at all.
Merchant Center PlatformShopify SEO
The specific quirks of Shopify's URL structure, collection handling and app-induced bloat.
Shopify SEO PlatformShopify web design
Themes built for conversion rather than for a portfolio, with the app count kept deliberately low.
Shopify design If rebuildingeCommerce web design
WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce and headless builds where the platform is the constraint.
eCommerce design RetentionEmail & SMS
Abandoned checkout, replenishment and win-back. The cheapest revenue in eCommerce and the most often neglected.
Email marketingROAS is the number that flatters everyone at once.
Meta claims the sale. Google claims the same sale. Your email platform claims it too. Add up the platform-reported revenue in most stores and it exceeds what the store actually took.
None of those numbers subtract anything. Not cost of goods, not shipping, not payment fees, not returns. A 4x ROAS on a product with a 30% margin is losing money, and the dashboard will report it as a success every month until someone checks.
We report contribution margin after all of it. It's a smaller, less impressive number, and it's the one that tells you whether to spend more.
Four phases. We don't scale spend in phase one.
Each phase ends with a decision you make before we continue. Nothing is locked in beyond the phase you've approved.
Store and account audit
Funnel drop-off by step, product page review, checkout walkthrough on a real phone, feed health, and what your actual contribution margin is. You get the leak list whether you continue or not.
Weeks 1–2Conversion work first
The leaks ranked by impact against effort, then fixed. Usually the fastest measurable revenue change available, and it costs nothing per order.
Weeks 2–6Acquisition and retention
Shopping and paid social structured on margin, SEO on the pages that carry commercial intent, and the email and SMS flows that make repeat purchase happen.
Month 2+Spend into what works
Only once the store converts and the margin maths holds. Scaling before this point buys the same leak at higher volume : which is how most eCommerce budgets get wasted.
OngoingWe work on all of them. Replatforming is rarely the answer.
Most stores blaming their platform have a conversion problem the platform didn't cause. A migration costs months and resets things that were working: worth it occasionally, worth checking first always.
Built for stores with traffic and a margin problem.
Conversion work needs volume to measure against. Below a certain amount of traffic there isn't enough data to tell a real improvement from a good week.
Before you call.
Shouldn't we just spend more on ads?
Only once the store converts. If 98 of every 100 visitors leave without buying, doubling traffic buys the same leak at twice the price: you get more revenue and a proportionally larger ad bill, and your cost per customer doesn't improve at all.
A one-point conversion improvement produces revenue at no additional media cost, and it makes every dollar you spend afterwards worth more. The arithmetic above is worth running on your own numbers before approving a bigger budget.
Our ROAS looks good. Isn't that enough?
ROAS doesn't subtract anything. Not cost of goods, not shipping, not payment fees, not returns. A 4x ROAS on a 30% margin product loses money, and the dashboard reports it as a win every month until somebody checks.
There's also double-counting: Meta claims the sale, Google claims the same sale, your email platform claims it too. Add up platform-reported revenue in most stores and it exceeds what the store actually took. We report contribution margin after everything: a smaller number, and the one that tells you whether to scale.
Do we need to replatform?
Almost certainly not. Most stores blaming the platform have a conversion problem the platform didn't cause, and a migration costs months while resetting things that were working. We'd check the store before recommending a rebuild, and the answer is usually that the same problems would follow you across.
Genuine reasons to move exist: outgrowing pricing logic, needing multi-store architecture, hitting a hard platform limit. "It feels slow" isn't one of them, because that's normally apps and images.
How long before we see results?
Conversion fixes show up fastest: a checkout or product page change can move revenue within two to four weeks, because the traffic is already arriving. Paid channels respond in weeks once restructured. eCommerce SEO takes three to six months on new pages, less on existing ones being improved.
Most engagements pair a fast lever with a slow one, so there's something measurable in month one while the durable work builds.
What does it cost?
Engagements start at $5,000/month, and we charge a flat fee rather than a percentage of ad spend: a percentage model pays us more when you spend more, which is precisely the wrong incentive for a page arguing you should often spend less. Media is billed to you directly at cost.
If you want the leak list without a retainer, the CRO audit is a fixed-fee one-off and plenty of stores start there.
Do you work with our existing developers?
Yes, and it's often the better arrangement. They know your stack and your deployment process; we specify the changes and they implement them. Where you don't have a developer, we handle it. Everything we change is documented and verifiable by someone else: nothing depends on us being the only people who understand it.
Which channel matters most for eCommerce?
Wrong question, in a useful way. The channel that matters most is whichever one is currently broken: and for most stores that's not a channel at all, it's the store. After that: paid social and Shopping for acquisition, email and SMS for margin. Retention is consistently the most profitable and consistently the most neglected, because acquisition is more interesting to talk about.
Looking for one specific thing?
Send us the store. We'll find the leaks.
Your URL and read access to analytics is enough. We'll walk the funnel on a real phone, find where people are dropping and what it's costing, and tell you what your contribution margin actually looks like after everything. The leak list is yours whether you work with us or hand it to your own team.
Free · No obligation · Findings are yours to keep