E-commerce / Online stores
Online store marketing that fixes the leak before buying more traffic.
The instinct when sales are flat is to buy more traffic. In most online stores the cheaper answer is sitting in the checkout, in the product pages and in a site that takes six seconds to load on a phone.
How do online stores increase sales without more traffic?
Most online stores have more available revenue in their existing traffic than in any new campaign. The recurring causes are a slow site on mobile, product pages that do not answer the questions that stop a purchase, a checkout that asks for too much, and shipping costs revealed too late.
Fixing those raises the return on every channel simultaneously, which is why it should happen before a budget increase rather than after.
The measurement discipline that matters is contribution rather than revenue. A store can grow revenue indefinitely by spending more, and whether anything remains after cost of goods, shipping, payment fees and returns is a separate question.
Five leaks that cost more than a campaign would add.
These are the recurring findings when we look at a store before recommending any spend.
Speed on a real phone
Not on the developer's laptop. Measured at the 75th percentile of real page loads, segmented by device, which is where the actual customer experience lives.
Shipping cost revealed at the last step
The most common abandonment cause in online retail. Stating it on the product page loses a few sessions and saves a great many abandoned baskets.
Product pages that do not answer the blocking question
Sizing, materials, compatibility, dimensions, what is in the box. A question left unanswered is a purchase deferred, and deferred purchases rarely resume.
See the remaining steps: Five leaks that cost more than a campaign would add.Hide the remaining steps: Five leaks that cost more than a campaign would add.
A checkout asking for more than it needs
Account creation, optional fields presented as required, and address forms that fight autofill. Each one removes a proportion of buyers.
No visible answer on returns
For anything with fit or subjective quality, the returns policy is part of the purchase decision, and hiding it does not reduce returns. It reduces orders.
None of these cost media budget and all of them improve the return on every channel the store runs.
What good performance actually means.
Google publishes these directly, which makes them specification rather than research and unusually safe to plan against.
SourceGoogle, web.dev, Core Web Vitals thresholds
The percentile discipline is the part most often skipped. A store that tests on a fast connection and concludes the site is quick has measured the wrong thing.
A large sample study, from 2020.
Commissioned by Google and run with Deloitte and 55 across 37 brand sites and more than 30 million user sessions. The year is stated because it matters.
SourceGoogle with Deloitte and 55, Milliseconds Make Millions, 2020, 37 sites
These are correlations from a commissioned study rather than a promise about your store. They are quoted because the effect size justifies the engineering time. Results vary by market, budget, competition and other factors. Nothing here is a guarantee of a ranking, a lead volume or a revenue outcome.
Your feed decides whether you appear in shopping surfaces at all.
Structured product data is the least interesting work in e-commerce and one of the highest leverage.
Price, availability, condition, identifiers, shipping and return information are all things search engines can display for a product, and a store that omits them is invisible in comparisons that a competitor appears in.
The failure is usually accuracy rather than implementation. Prices that lag behind the site, availability that is wrong, and variants that do not resolve correctly all produce mismatches, and mismatches between a feed and a landing page are the most common reason shopping ads are disapproved.
The same data increasingly feeds answer engines. When somebody asks an assistant to compare options, it draws on structured information it can read, and a store with an incomplete feed is simply absent from the answer.
Getting it right is a one off engineering job plus an ongoing accuracy process, and the second half is where most stores quietly fail.
What a first time buyer is checking before they enter a card number.
Every item on the left is a reason somebody leaves, and every one is fixable without media spend.
| What they look for | What a store often shows | What converts |
|---|---|---|
| Who you are | No address, no company detail | A real address and company information |
| Shipping cost | Calculated at checkout | Stated on the product page |
| Delivery time | Nothing | A realistic window you can meet |
| Returns | A link in the footer | Plainly stated near the buy button |
| Contact | A form | A route to a human, and a response time you keep |
| Reviews | Uniformly perfect | Real ones, including some that are not |
The bottom row matters more than stores expect. A product with nothing but five star reviews reads as curated, and a small number of moderate reviews alongside the good ones increases credibility rather than reducing it.
What applies to an online store.
- The FTC's rule on fake reviews and testimonials took effect on 21 October 2024. It covers buying reviews, writing your own, and suppressing negative ones. Every review we help collect is first party, requested from a real customer, and never gated on the rating they intend to leave.
- Any material connection between you and someone endorsing you has to be disclosed clearly and close to the endorsement. Paying, gifting, discounting or employing someone all count as material connections.
- The FTC's Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule requires a seller to have a reasonable basis for any shipping time it advertises, and to ship within 30 days where no time is stated. A dispatch promise in ad copy is a legal representation.
- Automatic renewal and cancellation requirements are moving. The FTC's negative option rulemaking record is public and has been through both litigation and fresh rulemaking, and several states impose their own automatic renewal rules on top. Treat the renewal disclosure as a legal question with a marketing surface, not the other way round.
- Email and phone follow up carry their own rules. CAN-SPAM requires accurate headers, a physical postal address and a working opt out honoured promptly, and calls and texts to consumers sit under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Follow up sequences get built to those rules rather than retrofitted to them.
Clear disclosure is the theme running through all of them. Anything that qualifies an offer, including shipping charges, conditions and automatic renewals, has to be visible where the decision is made rather than in a link somebody has to find.
What an order is actually worth, and how to tell the work is weak.
Revenue per order is not margin per order. Contribution after cost of goods, fulfilment, payment fees, returns and media is the figure that tells you whether growth is worth having, and it is frequently the first time a store discovers which products are actually profitable.
Define your acquisition target from that number rather than from a return on ad spend figure a platform reported. Two stores with identical return on ad spend can be in completely different positions depending on their margins and return rates.
Read the full breakdown: What an order is actually worth, and how to tell the work is weak.Hide the full breakdown: What an order is actually worth, and how to tell the work is weak.
Returns deserve their own attention because they are the most under-counted cost in online retail. A category with a high return rate can be loss making at a return on ad spend that looks healthy, and the only way to see it is to attribute returns back to the product and the channel.
How you tell it is being done badly: reporting that leads with platform reported revenue, no contribution figure anywhere, product pages with no answer to the obvious blocking question, shipping revealed at the final step, and a site nobody has speed tested on a real phone.
The vanity metric is return on ad spend as reported by the platform that spent the money. It is the number most stores are managed to and the one most likely to flatter.
Payment options belong in the same review. Enough that the common methods are covered and not so many that the checkout becomes a decision, because every additional logo is also another script on the page. What matters more than the number is whether the chosen method completes on a phone without leaving the flow, which is where most alternative payment integrations quietly lose people.
Two operational numbers belong alongside it. First, the proportion of orders that generate a customer service contact, because a high rate usually means the product pages are leaving something unanswered and the cost of that lands in staff time rather than in media. Second, the time taken to respond to those contacts, which for a store competing against large retailers is part of the product rather than an overhead.
Neither appears in an advertising report and both change the economics of the business. A store that reduces contact rate by answering better on the product page has improved margin, conversion and customer experience simultaneously, at no media cost at all.
Five things that make the second order cheaper than the first.
In most online stores the first order acquired through paid media is close to break even, which means the business is made after it.
Know the repeat rate
What proportion of customers order again, and how long it takes them. Most stores can answer neither question, which makes every acquisition decision a guess dressed up as a target.
Get the post purchase communication right
Order confirmation, dispatch, delivery and a genuinely useful message afterwards. These are the highest open rate emails a store sends and most of them are transactional templates nobody has read since launch.
Time the return prompt to the product
A consumable has a consumption cycle and a durable does not. A reminder timed to when somebody actually runs out performs many times better than a monthly newsletter.
See the remaining steps: Five things that make the second order cheaper than the first.Hide the remaining steps: Five things that make the second order cheaper than the first.
Segment beyond one purchase
A first time buyer and a five time buyer should not receive the same message. This is the cheapest improvement available in most stores and it is usually skipped because the platform makes broadcasting easy.
Fix the reasons people do not come back
Usually delivery that disappointed, a returns process that was harder than it needed to be, or a product that did not match its description. None of those are marketing problems and all of them are marketing costs.
A store that improves repeat rate by a few points can afford to pay considerably more to acquire a customer, which changes what is possible in every paid channel it runs.
Where we would start.
Website Speed Optimization
Core Web Vitals at the 75th percentile, which is where the revenue is.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Finding the step that loses people and fixing it before buying traffic.
E-commerce SEO
Category and product pages built on clean, accurate product data.
Google Ads Management
Search and shopping measured on contribution rather than reported revenue.
Conversion Tracking Setup
Measurement that can be reconciled against what the store actually banked.
Your website works alongside the store platform you already run.
We do not replace your store platform, we do not migrate it, and we do not ask you to change it. The site links to it from the places a customer is ready to act, and embeds the vendor's own widget where the vendor publishes one. Being plain about the mechanism: that is all it is. Nothing is synced, nothing we build reads or writes your records, and the names below are systems our clients run, not partners of ours. Whichever platform a store sits on, the pages that earn search traffic and the pages that take payment are usually maintained by two different people. Most of the damage we find happens in that gap.
Store platforms
The platform owns the cart, the checkout and the customer account, and it should keep owning all three. A custom checkout is a liability and the platform's own is not, so we build around it rather than over it.
- Shopify and Shopify Plus
- WooCommerce
- BigCommerce
- Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source
- Ecwid by Lightspeed
Subscriptions and repeat purchase
The subscription tool owns the hardest page you have, which is the one where somebody manages or cancels. We do not replace it. We do argue for making it easy to reach, because a cancellation somebody cannot find becomes a chargeback instead.
- Recharge
- Bold Subscriptions
Email, SMS and reviews
These already own the messages and the review requests. What the site controls is what they have to work with: whether a product page earns the signup, and whether reviews are shown on the page and marked up rather than left sitting in a dashboard.
- Klaviyo
- Attentive
- Mailchimp
- Yotpo
What we actually change
Not the system: the path to it. Where the button sits on the page, whether it says what happens when you press it, how many taps it takes from a phone, whether it appears again at the point a customer has finished reading and decided, and whether somebody who is not ready yet has a second way to reach you. That path is ours, it is measurable, and in most store audits it is the part doing the damage.
Where the handoff is only a link
Some vendors publish an embeddable widget and some publish nothing at all. Where there is nothing to embed and no deep link worth pointing at, the site sends the visitor to your booking page or your login and stops there. That is a perfectly good outcome and we would rather say so than describe a seam we cannot remove. What we can do is make the destination unsurprising, so nobody arrives wondering whether they are still dealing with you.
Get an online store review.
We look at speed on a real phone, the checkout, your product data and your contribution per order before we discuss any budget.
One caveat on all of that. These are descriptions of rules as they are published today, not legal advice about your situation. They differ by state and they change, sometimes quietly, so check the current wording with your own counsel or compliance officer before you rely on any of it. Where a rule touches your marketing we write to the stricter reading and send it to you for sign off before anything publishes.
Straight answers.
Should we spend more on ads or fix the site first?
Almost always fix the site first, because every improvement there raises the return on every channel simultaneously.
The usual finds are speed on mobile, shipping cost revealed at the last step, product pages that leave the blocking question unanswered and a checkout that asks for more than it needs.
Where should we show shipping costs?
On the product page. Revealing them at checkout is the most common abandonment cause in online retail, and hiding them does not make them smaller.
Advertised delivery times are also representations that need a reasonable basis, so publish a window you can actually meet rather than the best case.
Do we really need product structured data?
If you want to appear in shopping surfaces, yes. Price, availability, identifiers, shipping and return information are all displayable, and omitting them removes you from comparisons a competitor appears in.
Accuracy matters more than implementation. Mismatches between the feed and the landing page are the most common cause of shopping ad disapprovals.
Should we hide our returns policy?
No. For anything with fit or subjective quality, the returns policy is part of the purchase decision, and hiding it reduces orders rather than returns.
State it plainly near the buy button. A clear policy also reduces the contact volume that an unclear one generates.
Is a perfect review score good?
Not as good as a realistic one. A product with nothing but five star reviews reads as curated, and a small number of moderate reviews alongside the positive ones increases credibility.
It is also the safer position. The FTC's rule covers suppressing negative reviews as well as fabricating positive ones.
What should our reporting actually show?
Contribution after media, blended acquisition cost, repeat rate and cohort revenue. Those four cannot be double counted and they reconcile with the bank.
Platform reported return on ad spend belongs in the appendix rather than at the front, because three platforms will collectively claim more orders than the store received.
How do we work out what we can afford to pay for a customer?
From contribution after media and from repeat rate. A store where a third of customers order again can pay substantially more for a first order than one where almost nobody does.
Most stores set an acquisition target from a return on ad spend figure somebody quoted them, which has no relationship to their own margins or return rate.
Which emails actually matter?
The transactional ones, because they have the highest open rates a store will ever see and most of them are untouched platform templates.
After that, a return prompt timed to the product's actual consumption cycle. A monthly newsletter sent to everybody is far less effective than a message that arrives when somebody has run out.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- Google web.dev: Core Web Vitals (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Central: product structured data (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Central: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: complying with the Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: final rule banning fake reviews and testimonials (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: .com disclosures, how to make effective disclosures in digital advertising (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Central: ecommerce site structure best practices (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.