Ecommerce marketing
built to scale

Growing an ecommerce business profitably is one of the hardest things to do in modern marketing — not because the channels are complicated, but because most businesses only address part of the funnel. They run paid ads and ignore their conversion rate. They focus on acquisition and ignore retention. They obsess over ROAS and ignore contribution margin. They optimise individual channels in isolation and miss the interactions between them.

We see the same pattern constantly: a business scaling its ad spend, watching ROAS drop as it scales, panicking, pulling spend back, and concluding that paid advertising doesn't work for them above a certain budget. In most cases, the problem isn't the ads — it's everything the ads are sending traffic to. A leaky website, a weak email programme, poor product page conversion, and no retention strategy mean that every customer acquired is expensive to acquire and unlikely to come back. Fixing these issues before scaling ad spend isn't optional — it's prerequisite.

The businesses that scale ecommerce profitably tend to have three things in common: a website that converts consistently, an email programme that generates 25–40% of revenue passively through automation, and a paid strategy that's genuinely efficient at the unit economics level — not just an impressive ROAS number that doesn't survive contact with a profit and loss statement.

Most ecommerce agencies report on ROAS, click-through rates, and cost-per-click. These metrics are real but they don't tell you whether you're making money. We build a reporting framework centred on the metrics that actually reflect the health of your ecommerce business — and we have an honest conversation about what the numbers mean for your specific unit economics.

The metric we care most about is MER — marketing efficiency ratio. This is total revenue divided by total marketing spend across all channels. Unlike ROAS, which is platform-reported and affected by attribution window choices and platform self-reporting biases, MER is calculated from your actual revenue data. It tells you whether your marketing programme as a whole is generating returns worth the investment.

We also track contribution margin by channel — what's the margin per order once product cost, shipping, returns, and channel-specific spend are accounted for? Some channels that look profitable on ROAS are unprofitable on contribution margin. Knowing this changes every strategic decision you make about where to invest.