Ecommerce marketing that grows margin, not just traffic

The services themselves are unremarkable: paid search and Shopping, paid social with creative production, SEO and content, email and SMS retention, conversion work on the store, and the analytics that ties it together. What separates agencies is the unit of accountability. We work to blended MER and contribution margin after cost of goods, shipping and returns — not to the ROAS each ad platform reports about itself. We also hold market exclusivity: one brand per competing category, written into the agreement.

We work with ecommerce companies across the USA and Canada, from single-brand DTC stores to high-SKU retail and trade suppliers, and our team covers the whole stack in-house: advertising, search engine optimization, creative, email and the store itself. That matters because ecommerce solutions sold separately tend to conflict — the SEO agency wants the collection page restructured, the paid agency wants it left alone for its landing-page tests, and the developer is waiting on both. One team with expertise in all four removes that standoff, and gives you a single service level to hold to account.

Paid media and email move first — measurement, feed and flow fixes usually show inside the first 30 days, because most accounts are leaking rather than under-spending. Conversion work lands in 30 to 60 days. Ecommerce SEO is a two-to-three-quarter programme: collection architecture and content compound, and any agency promising category rankings in six weeks is either bidding on your brand name or about to be replaced.

Published 2026 benchmarks: mid-market ecommerce retainers run $3,000–$15,000 per month, the median across all agency engagements is $6,450, and brands doing $1M–$5M in revenue most commonly land between $4,500 and $12,000. Performance marketing alone medians around $6,800 and SEO with content around $4,200. We scope against your revenue tier and channel count, quote a fixed monthly fee separate from ad spend, and tell you which channels we would not run yet rather than selling the full bundle on day one.

Usually we work with what you have. If the platform is sound, targeted work on product pages, collection templates, speed, search and filtering beats a rebuild at a fraction of the cost. A replatform is worth it when your current setup blocks growth structurally — no usable CMS, a theme nobody can maintain, or a checkout you cannot change. We build on Shopify and WooCommerce and will tell you plainly which situation you are in after the audit.

We stop trying to win that argument inside the platforms. Server-side tracking and deduplicated conversion events first, so one order counts once. Then a blended view: total revenue against total marketing spend, tracked as MER alongside contribution margin by channel, with incrementality tests — geo holdouts or spend-down tests — when a channel's claimed contribution looks too good. Platform ROAS becomes a campaign-management signal, not the scoreboard.

Because sales and profit are not the same, and the plateau most stores hit is structural. Growth stalls when acquisition cost rises faster than customer value, when the feed limits what Shopping can bid on, when collection pages cannot rank so all demand is rented, and when nobody has margin data at product level. Those are fixable, and they are more available than another 10% of ad budget. If the fix turns out to be smaller than a full retainer, we scope to the fix and say so on the first call.

A word on the shape of the engagement, since it is the question most ecommerce companies actually want answered. You get a named senior strategist rather than an account coordinator relaying questions, and the specialists who run paid advertising, organic search visibility, email and the website itself all sit on the same team. Our clients tend to arrive having used two or three agencies in parallel and having spent more time reconciling their reports than reading them. One team, one set of numbers, one weekly review of what the strategies produced.

There is also a technology answer. Most stores are running trusted tools badly rather than missing tools: a product feed nobody has audited in a year, conversion events firing twice, a Klaviyo account with three flows switched off, and Google Merchant Center warnings that have quietly suppressed half the catalogue. The average store we audit is losing more to that than to any strategic decision. Fixing it costs a fortnight and no extra advertising budget, which is why we do it before proposing anything ambitious.