E commerce marketing company options, judged on evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to buy ecommerce marketing

1. Establish your real unit economics first. Know your gross margin per order after discounts, shipping and returns, and your repeat rate. Without those two numbers, no return on ad spend target you agree with an agency means anything, and every optimisation argument becomes a matter of opinion.
2. Separate acquisition from retention in the brief. Paid acquisition and lifecycle email or SMS are different disciplines with different economics. Buying them as one undifferentiated retainer makes it impossible to see which half is producing the result, and retention is usually the cheaper half.
3. Fix the measurement before the spend. Agree how orders are attributed, how discount codes and returns are handled in the reporting, and which platform is treated as the source of truth. Platform-reported conversions and your own order data will disagree, and the time to settle that is before month one.
4. Trial on new customer profit, not revenue. Run a ninety day trial with a target expressed as profit from first-time customers at a stated volume. It is the only target that cannot be hit by buying back people who were going to purchase anyway.

What each channel owes you

Paid social is now largely a creative volume problem: the platforms handle targeting and bidding, and the variable you control is how many distinct concepts you test and how fast. An agency without production capacity in this channel will be waiting on your assets, which becomes your bottleneck and their excuse. Paid search splits sharply between branded terms, which mostly capture demand you already created, and non-branded terms, which create it, and the two must be reported separately or the account will look far better than it is.

Shopping and retail media place you at the point of comparison and live or die on feed quality, which is unglamorous data work rather than campaign management. Email and SMS carry the retention half and usually produce the best margin in the account, because the audience is already yours. Organic search earns product and category visibility slowly and is worth buying when your catalogue is stable enough to justify the investment in category pages that do not change every season.

Fee models and how they behave as you grow

A percentage of ad spend is easy to administer and rewards growing the spend, which is fine while spend and profit move together and painful when they stop. A flat retainer is predictable and rewards the agency's efficiency rather than your scale, so it tends to favour the client during a good year and the agency during a quiet one. A hybrid floor plus a spend component is the common middle. Commission on revenue aligns the agency to top line, which is precisely the number that can rise while your margin falls.

Whichever model you pick, add two clauses. First, a review trigger, so that a large change in spend or revenue reopens the fee rather than silently repricing the relationship. Second, an exclusion of branded search and existing-customer revenue from any performance-linked component, because those are the cheapest conversions in the account and rewarding them rewards nothing. Agencies that have run these models before will not object to either clause; the objection itself is informative.

Where margin leaks

The first leak is discounting used as an optimisation tool. A deeper code lifts conversion rate and return on ad spend simultaneously, which looks like skill and is arithmetic, and the cost lands on a line the agency does not report. Insist that discount depth is reported next to performance so the two are read together. The second is returns, which in apparel and furniture can move an apparently profitable cohort into loss, and which almost never appear in an agency dashboard.

The third is attribution double counting, where platform-reported conversions across several channels sum to more orders than you actually shipped. Pick one source of truth, usually your own order data, and hold every channel report against it. Buyers who skip this end up optimising a programme against a number that does not exist, and no amount of agency competence rescues a decision made on invented data.

Questions people actually ask

Should we hire one agency or specialists per channel?

One agency owns the coordination and gives you a single accountable party. Specialists are usually stronger in their own lane and push the coordination onto your team. A reasonable middle is one agency for paid acquisition and a specialist for lifecycle email and SMS, since the second is a different craft and usually the more profitable half.

What return on ad spend target is realistic?

It depends entirely on your gross margin and repeat rate, so any agency quoting a universal number is guessing. Work it backwards: the break-even multiple is set by your margin, and the target is whatever exceeds it enough to fund the business. A store with thin margins and no repeat purchase needs a far higher multiple than a subscription brand.

How long before a new agency shows results?

Expect a first month of measurement and account restructuring, a second of creative and offer testing, and a third where the trend can be read. Faster claims usually rest on inheriting a badly broken account, where quick wins are real, or on rebadging branded search. Ask which of the two applies before you believe the number.

Who should own the ad accounts and the customer data?

You should, in every case: ad accounts, pixels, audiences, the email list and the creative source files. Agency-owned assets convert a change of provider into a rebuild and can cost you the learning history in the ad platforms. Settle it in writing before launch, because it is the least negotiable point at the moment you want to leave.

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