Ecommerce and DTC

Marketing for Ecommerce and DTC Brands Where Margin Decides Everything.

Online retailers and direct-to-consumer brands selling real products at real unit costs. The ad platform reports a return figure that ignores your cost of goods, your shipping, and the fact that a customer who orders four times is worth nothing like the one who orders once.

See Your Real Margin Math

We Get It

Return on Ad Spend Is Not Profit.

Every order carries a cost of goods, a shipping cost, payment fees, and a share of returns. None of that appears in the number your ad platform prints on the dashboard, which is why a store can hit its target return every single month and still finish the year wondering where the money went.

Most of the people who added to cart left. The checkout gets blamed, the traffic quality never gets examined, and the retargeting budget goes up either way.
Acquisition costs climb every year while your unit economics stay where they are, so last year's target return quietly stopped being profitable.
The campaign that finally scales sells through the inventory in nine days, and the rest of the season runs on whatever is left in the warehouse.
Shopify, Amazon, and the ad platforms each change the rules on their own schedule, and a business built entirely inside someone else's storefront inherits every one of those changes.
Hundreds of SKUs need hundreds of ad variants, performance decays within weeks, and nothing in the process was built to produce creative at that rate.
Blended acquisition cost gets measured against first-order revenue, which makes every brand with genuine repeat purchase look worse than it actually is.

How We Run Ecommerce Growth From Prospecting to Repeat Purchase

Four phases, run in order. The aim is a customer base that keeps buying, not one good month where acquisition happened to look cheap.

Rebuild the Numbers Around Margin
Before any budget moves, we work out contribution margin per order after cost of goods, shipping, payment fees, and returns. That figure becomes the target every campaign is judged against, because a four-times return on a product carrying a 22 percent margin and the same return on one carrying 61 percent are not remotely the same result.
Structure Campaigns Around the Catalog
Feed and campaign structure get built around how the catalog actually behaves: hero products, margin leaders, slow movers, and lines where inventory is genuinely constrained. Products with different economics stop sharing one budget and one bid target, which is the change that usually moves profit first.
Run the Whole Funnel, Not Only the Bottom
Prospecting, remarketing, and retention get separate roles, separate budgets, and separate measurement. Retargeting a warm audience and reporting the result as performance is the most common way an account looks profitable on paper while the customer base stops growing underneath it.
Measure Blended, Optimize Repeat
Blended acquisition cost across every channel replaces last-click reporting, and post-purchase flows, replenishment timing, and repeat-purchase rate get treated as growth work rather than as an afterthought that nobody owns. The second order is where the economics of the first one finally make sense.

What We Run

Services Built for Brands That Ship Physical Product

Ecommerce PPC

Shopping, search, and paid social structured by product economics, with bids aimed at contribution margin instead of one blanket return target across the catalog.

Ecommerce SEO

Category and product pages built to rank at catalog scale, so the traffic that costs nothing per click stops being the channel nobody got around to.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Product page and checkout work aimed at the specific step where your carts are actually being lost, tested against real behavior rather than guessed at.

Email Marketing

Post-purchase, replenishment, and win-back flows that turn a first order into a second one, on a channel you own outright and nobody can reprice on you.

Proof, Not Promises

We Report on Profit per Order, Not Return on Ad Spend.

Any agency can screenshot a platform return figure and call it a result. Here is the difference between what usually gets presented to a store owner and what actually gets tracked on an account we run.

What Gets Shown Off

Platform-reported ROAS
Impressions and reach
Click-through rate
Add-to-cart count

What Actually Gets Tracked

Contribution margin per order, after cost of goods and shipping
Repeat-purchase rate and the time between first and second order
Blended acquisition cost across every channel, not last-click
Customer lifetime value measured against what it cost to acquire

The Standard

If a number does not survive subtracting your cost of goods, it does not lead your report. A store can hit its return target every month of the year and still be losing money on the products it sells the most of, which is a fact no dashboard will volunteer.

Who This Is For

Built for Ecommerce Brands With Unit Economics Worth Defending

This works best for online retailers and direct-to-consumer brands with a catalog already in market, inventory they genuinely control, and enough order volume that a few points of margin or a lift in repeat rate changes the year. It is not built for a store that wants cheaper clicks and has never worked out what an order is worth after costs.

You know your cost of goods per product, or you are willing to sit down and work it out with us.
Customers could reasonably buy from you more than once, and most of them currently do not.
You spend enough on paid media that the gap between reported return and real profit is a number worth closing.

Recognize Your Store? Let's Talk

The Basics

What Does Ecommerce Marketing Actually Involve?

Ecommerce marketing is the work of getting a product in front of someone likely to buy it, converting that visit at a cost the product’s margin can actually support, and then earning the second and third order that make the first one worth having. In practice that means paid and organic demand pointed at the right parts of a catalog, product and checkout pages tested against real abandonment behavior, owned channels like email carrying the retention load, and measurement expressed in profit rather than in platform-reported return.

It differs from most other categories in one arithmetic detail. Every order carries a cost of goods, a shipping cost, payment fees, and a share of returns, so revenue and profit can move in opposite directions within the same month. A brand that optimizes toward the figure its ad platform reports will reliably scale whichever products convert most easily, and those are rarely the same products that pay for the business.

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What Is a Good ROAS for Ecommerce?

There is no universal figure, because the honest answer depends entirely on your margin. A brand with a 70 percent gross margin can be comfortably profitable at a return most benchmarks would call weak, and a reseller working on 20 percent can lose money at a return that looks excellent in a case study. The useful version of the question is what return your contribution margin requires at your target growth rate. That is arithmetic you can do, not a benchmark you have to borrow.

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What Is the Difference Between CAC and LTV?

Customer acquisition cost is what you spent to get someone to buy for the first time. Lifetime value is what that customer is worth across every order they ever place, after costs. Most ecommerce reporting compares acquisition cost against first-order revenue only, which makes any brand with genuine repeat purchase look far less viable than it is, and quietly makes a one-time-purchase brand look safer than it is.

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Why Do So Many Carts Get Abandoned?

Abandonment is normal across the whole category, and most of it is not a checkout bug. Unexpected shipping cost appearing at the final step, forced account creation, unclear delivery timing, and ordinary comparison shopping account for a large share of it. Some of it is simply traffic that was never going to buy, which is a targeting problem wearing a conversion problem's clothes. Separating those two causes is the first genuinely useful thing to do.

Our Take

Most ecommerce marketing gets judged on the return figure the ad platform prints. The only version worth paying for is judged on what is left after cost of goods, shipping, and returns, and on whether the customers you bought this quarter come back in the next one. That is the standard we hold every account to.

FAQ

Common Questions

Our return on ad spend looks fine but we are not making money. What is going on?

Usually one of three things. The platform figure counts revenue, not profit, so cost of goods, shipping, payment fees, and returns are all missing from it. Or the return is being carried by remarketing to people who were already going to buy, which flatters the average while new customer acquisition quietly stalls. Or the products doing the volume are the ones with the thinnest margin. Working out contribution margin per order, per product, is the unglamorous first step, and it usually explains the whole gap within a week.

We depend heavily on Shopify and Amazon. How much of that risk can marketing actually reduce?

Not all of it, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something. What can be reduced is the share of your demand that only exists inside a platform you do not control. Organic search on your own domain, an email list you own outright, and repeat customers who come back directly all lower the cost of a rule change you did not get a vote on. It is worth treating as insurance rather than as a growth channel, and it takes quarters rather than weeks.

We have thousands of SKUs. How do you handle creative and campaigns at that scale?

By refusing to treat the catalog as one thing. Products get grouped by margin, by how they actually sell, and by whether inventory can support scaling them, and campaign structure follows those groups rather than the site's category tree. Creative gets built as a small number of formats that can be refreshed at volume rather than as bespoke assets per SKU, and the product feed does the heavy lifting across the long tail. The goal is a system a real team can maintain, not a structure that looks impressive in a deck.

Our best months are seasonal. Should we simply spend everything then?

Spend should follow demand, but concentrating everything into the peak is how brands end up paying the highest auction prices at their most expensive moment with no warm audience to draw on. The work that makes a peak profitable happens in the quiet months: building the audience, testing the creative that will carry the season, and making sure inventory and campaign structure agree with each other. A campaign that sells through stock in the first ten days of a six-week season is not a success, it is a forecasting failure.

How long before we can tell whether this is working?

Acquisition-side signals move first. Cost per new customer, contribution margin per order, and conversion rate on the pages we touch usually show movement inside four to eight weeks, depending on your order volume. Repeat-purchase rate takes as long as your natural purchase cycle allows, so a brand whose customers reorder every two months will know far sooner than one where the cycle runs a year. Anyone promising lifetime value proof inside the first quarter has not thought carefully about what the phrase means.

Do we need to be running on every channel?

No, and most brands we look at are spread thinner than their budget supports. It is generally better to run two channels properly, with the tracking and creative volume each one genuinely requires, than to maintain a token presence across six. Which two depends on your product, your margin, and where purchase intent in your category actually shows up. We would rather recommend cutting a channel than funding it badly.

Tell Us What an Order Is Worth After Costs.

From there we can tell you whether your current return target is actually profitable, where the funnel stops between the product page and the cart, and which part of the catalog is quietly carrying the rest of it.

Run the Numbers on Your Catalog