Ecommerce and Retail
Most online shops do not stall because nobody can find them. They stall because advertising is judged on revenue instead of margin, the product feed is left to drift, the checkout loses people on a phone, and stock and orders are held together by retyping. We work on the whole path, from the search to the delivered order, because the fault is usually in the join.
What is included
- A review of margin by product group, tracking and checkout before any spend is recommended
- A product feed audit, with rules for titles, data quality and product groups
- Category and product page recommendations, covering structured data and filter handling
- Campaign structure and margin-based targets for Shopping and paid social
- A map of the systems behind the shop and which of the joins are still manual
On this page
- What does an ecommerce growth agency actually do?
- How does an online shopper's journey map to the work?
- Should you sell through marketplaces, your own store, or both?
- What is a product feed, and why does it decide Shopping results?
- How do you run paid media when margins differ by product?
- How should category and product pages be built to rank?
- Which systems sit behind an online shop?
- What can we show from an ecommerce build?
- Where do ecommerce growth plans usually go wrong?
- When is an ecommerce growth agency the wrong first step?
- What should you ask an ecommerce marketing company before hiring one?
- What does a sensible engagement look like?
What does an ecommerce growth agency actually do?
An ecommerce growth agency works on the whole path from search or advert to delivered order: the traffic, the store that converts it, and the stock, order and accounting systems behind it. Prabhu Solutions does that as one team, because most stalled online shops are held back by the join between those parts, not by any single one of them.
The test of a good one is that it tells you which part to fix first. Sometimes that is advertising. More often it is a product feed with poor titles, a category page with no copy, a checkout that loses people on a phone, or stock that is wrong by the time the order arrives. Buying more traffic into any of those makes the problem more expensive, not smaller. That is why our ecommerce development and our wider digital marketing work are run together rather than sold as separate projects.
It is not for every shop. If your products lose money once discounts, delivery and returns are counted, no channel will fix that, and a sensible agency says so before it takes a fee.
The point
If your products lose money once discounts, delivery and returns are counted, no channel will fix that, and a sensible agency says so before it takes a fee.
How does an online shopper's journey map to the work?
A shopper moves from a problem or a category search, to comparing products, to a basket and checkout, to delivery and perhaps a second order. Each stage has a different channel and a different way to fail, so the work is organised by stage rather than by tool.
| Stage | What the shopper is doing | What decides whether you win | Where the work sits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finding | Typing a category or a problem into a search box, or meeting a product on social while doing something else. | Category pages that match the search, and a product feed good enough to be shown at all. Paid social only creates demand if the product is easy to understand at a glance. | Category and product page SEO, Shopping campaigns and paid social. |
| Comparing | Opening several tabs and looking at price, delivery cost, reviews and whether the product is actually in stock. | Honest product data, delivery terms that are visible, and stock that is right. Price is not the only thing compared, but a surprise at checkout is the quickest way to lose the comparison. | Product pages, structured data and the stock integration behind them. |
| Buying | Usually on a phone, often interrupted. Basket, address, delivery option, payment. | Few steps, a payment method they already use, no forced account, and no new cost appearing late. | Checkout and conversion work. |
| Waiting | Looking for a dispatch email and a tracking link. | Orders reaching the warehouse or fulfilment process without anyone retyping them, and delivery information that is accurate. | Order flow into fulfilment and accounting. |
| Coming back | Deciding whether to reorder, return or recommend. | How easy a return is, whether you know who they are, and whether anything reaches them that is worth reading. | The customer record, which is a CRM question as much as a marketing one. |
Should you sell through marketplaces, your own store, or both?
Sell through a marketplace when you need buyers quickly and can live with someone else owning the customer, the fees and the rules. Sell through your own store when repeat custom, margin and control of the brand matter. Many retailers do both, using a marketplace as a shop window. This page covers how that choice affects your own store; we do not run marketplace accounts.
| Marketplace | Your own store | |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns the customer | The marketplace. You usually see an order rather than a relationship, and its rules limit what you can do with the buyer afterwards. | You do. The email address, the order history and the permission to contact them are yours, within data protection law. |
| Speed to first sale | Fast, because the buyers are already there. | Slow at the start. Nobody knows the store exists, so traffic has to be earned or bought. |
| Margin | Reduced by the marketplace's fees, and often by pressure to match other sellers on price, on a page where price is the main comparison. | Reduced by advertising, payment processing and platform costs instead. More of the margin is yours to decide, but only if the cost of winning a customer is under control. |
| Brand and presentation | Your product sits in someone else's template, next to alternatives. | You control the page, the story, the delivery promise and what appears beside the product. |
| What it demands from your systems | Stock and orders must stay accurate in more than one place, or you oversell. | One catalogue, but you are responsible for the whole experience, the tracking and the customer service. |
| What it does for search | A listing can appear for a product search, but the page belongs to the marketplace. | Category and product pages you own can rank, and every page you earn stays your asset. |
| What we do | We do not manage marketplace accounts or marketplace advertising. | Build, search, Shopping, paid media, conversion and the systems behind the shop. |
What is a product feed, and why does it decide Shopping results?
A product feed is the structured file of titles, descriptions, prices, availability, identifiers, images and categories that Google reads to decide when to show your products in Shopping results. If the feed is thin or wrong, the best campaign structure has nothing good to show, which is why feed work is most of the job.
Three faults come up repeatedly. Titles written for the shop's own navigation rather than for the way people search. Prices or availability in the feed that no longer match the page, which gets products disapproved or sends people to something they cannot buy. And no way to separate products by margin, so a best seller that earns little is advertised on the same terms as one that earns well.
All three trace back to where the data lives. Managing the Shopping feed and campaigns goes more smoothly when the same team controls the store the feed is generated from, because a stock or price fault can be fixed at its source instead of being reported to someone else.
How do you run paid media when margins differ by product?
Set the target from contribution margin, not revenue. Work out what each product earns after cost of goods, discounts, delivery, payment fees and returns, and the most you can pay to win an order follows from that. A single return-on-ad-spend target across the whole catalogue overspends on thin-margin lines and starves the profitable ones.
In practice that means grouping products by margin before building campaigns, so budget and target differ by group. It also means treating new and returning customers differently. A first order that only breaks even can still be a good buy if the customer comes back; a first order that loses money on someone who never returns is not. Repeat purchase has to be known rather than guessed, which depends on recording it properly.
The platform's reported return is a starting point, not the answer. It counts revenue, and it does not know which orders were returned or which products were sold at a discount. The number to read is cost per order against margin, and a managed Google Ads account should be able to show it by product group. Whether to advertise at all, or put the money into organic first, depends on the same arithmetic, which search against paid clicks works through.
Under all of it sits the arrangement covered on our paid advertising page: the account in your name, your payment method on it, and no markup on media.
The point
Under all of it sits the arrangement covered on our paid advertising page: the account in your name, your payment method on it, and no markup on media.
How should category and product pages be built to rank?
Build the category pages first, with real copy, a clear heading and filters that do not create endless duplicate URLs, then make each product page distinct enough to stand alone. Most searches are for a type of product, not an individual item, so the category page is usually the page that earns the visit.
Product pages need what the manufacturer's text does not give: a description written for the buyer, honest specifications, structured data for price, availability and reviews, and a plan for products that are discontinued, redirected or kept rather than deleted. Filters and sort options can generate a very large number of near-identical URLs unless they are handled when the store is built, which is a technical SEO job as much as a content one.
The full method sits on the ecommerce SEO page. What matters here is the connection to everything else: category pages are also the landing pages for Shopping and search ads, so the work done to make them rank improves paid results too.
Which systems sit behind an online shop?
Five matter: the store, stock, orders and fulfilment, accounting, and the customer record. They fail at the joins, where one system hands data to another by hand. Connecting them is where an online retailer's time and errors actually go, and it decides whether growth is manageable or just busier.
- The store and its catalogue. On Shopify, WooCommerce or a custom build, with product data kept somewhere clean enough to feed the store, Shopping and anything else that needs it. Choosing between the platforms is a decision about your team and your volume more than about technology.
- Stock. Live quantities from wherever stock is really counted, so the shop does not sell what you do not have. Several locations make this harder, not different.
- Orders and fulfilment. Orders reaching the warehouse, courier or fulfilment partner without retyping, with tracking returned to the customer.
- Accounting. Orders, refunds, payments and VAT reaching Xero, Sage or QuickBooks in a form your bookkeeper can reconcile. When this is manual, month end is where growth turns into admin.
- The customer record. Who bought what, from which source, so repeat purchase can be planned instead of hoped for. This is where a CRM built around how you sell earns its place.
- Anything that does not fit the above. Trade pricing, made-to-order items, or a production system that has to talk to the shop is bespoke software work with a shop attached, and is worth scoping honestly before a platform is chosen.
What can we show from an ecommerce build?
One named project, described only as far as we can stand behind it. Aama Jewellers, a 2023 project, needed a new ecommerce platform to replace an outdated website, with a focus on conversion and on joining social media marketing to the store. We built a modern storefront with a streamlined checkout and integrated social campaigns to drive traffic into it.
That is the whole of it. We are not quoting any conversion, revenue or traffic figure for Aama here. What the project does show is the shape of the work this page describes: a store build and the marketing that feeds it, delivered as one piece of work rather than two suppliers each blaming the other. The two services involved were ecommerce development and social media marketing, and you can look at the project itself and judge the storefront directly.
It is one project, not a sector track record, and our delivery record to date is international rather than UK-based. Treat the rest of this page as how we would approach your shop, and check it against what you can see.
The point
Treat the rest of this page as how we would approach your shop, and check it against what you can see.
Where do ecommerce growth plans usually go wrong?
They go wrong when spend rises before the foundations are sound: a feed nobody maintains, a checkout that leaks on mobile, discounts that buy revenue without profit, and reporting that counts sales rather than what was kept. Each is cheaper to catch early than to discover in the accounts.
- Scaling ad spend over a leaky checkout. More clicks into a page that loses buyers just buys the loss faster.
- Treating the feed as set and forget. Prices, stock and titles drift away from the store, and products are disapproved or advertised when they cannot be bought.
- Discount-led growth. Revenue rises, margin falls, and the customers acquired are the ones who only buy on offer.
- Judging by revenue. Platform-reported return ignores returns, delivery cost and fees, so a campaign can look healthy while the business loses money.
- Leaving faceted navigation to chance. Filters that generate huge numbers of near-duplicate pages dilute crawling and make ranking harder, and they are far cheaper to prevent at build than to unpick afterwards.
- Marketing a catalogue the systems cannot support. Selling faster than stock, fulfilment or accounting can keep up produces cancellations, which cost more than the sale was worth.
When is an ecommerce growth agency the wrong first step?
When your products lose money after discounts, delivery and returns, when stock is so unreliable that selling faster would only mean more cancellations, or when the store cannot cope with the traffic it already gets. The right first step in those cases is the unglamorous one: margin, stock accuracy or the checkout. We would rather say so than take a fee for marketing a shop that is not ready for it.
What should you ask an ecommerce marketing company before hiring one?
Ask how they set targets from margin rather than revenue, who owns the advertising accounts, who looks after the feed, whether they can change the store or only advise, and what they refuse to do. Specific, slightly unglamorous answers are a good sign; a vague answer usually hides a package.
- How do you set an ad target? Look for contribution margin and product groups, not one return figure for the whole catalogue. How to choose an ecommerce SEO agency covers the search side of the same questions.
- Who owns the accounts? Advertising and analytics accounts should be registered to you, with you as administrator, so the history stays with you if you leave.
- Who looks after the feed, and what happens when stock or prices change? If the answer is that someone updates it occasionally, the feed will drift.
- Can you change the store, or only advise? Many agencies can diagnose a slow checkout and cannot alter it, which leaves the fix in someone else's backlog.
- What will you refuse to do? No bought links, no scaling spend over a broken checkout, no reporting revenue as if it were profit.
- What decides what this costs? Catalogue size, data quality, the number of channels and the number of systems to connect. Anyone quoting before seeing the store is guessing.
What does a sensible engagement look like?
It starts with your numbers and your store as they are today, not with a package. We look at margin by product group, how orders are tracked, the state of the feed and the checkout, and the systems behind the shop, then recommend the one or two things most worth doing first. Scope is agreed in writing before any build or campaign work starts.
Most retailers need repair work and marketing work at the same time, and the order matters: measurement and the feed first, then the channel, then conversion work once there is real traffic to learn from. What determines how long each step takes is the cleanliness of your product data, the number of systems to connect and how much your platform lets us change, not a fixed schedule. If you already run Shopify or WooCommerce we start from it; a move is a recommendation only when the platform is the constraint.
Work runs remotely by default. If you want to talk it through, tell us what you are trying to change and we will say whether it is a fit.
The point
If you want to talk it through, tell us what you are trying to change and we will say whether it is a fit.
What Ecommerce and Retail covers
Not a menu to pick from. Most projects use some of this and ignore the rest, and the scope conversation is mostly about working out which half you actually need.
Product feed and Shopping
Titles, data and rules built from your catalogue and your margin, so the right products are shown and the wrong ones are not. Most Shopping results are won or lost in the feed.
Category and product page SEO
Category pages with real content, product pages with structured data, and filters that do not generate endless near-identical URLs.
Margin-aware paid media
Targets set from contribution margin by product group, instead of one return figure applied to the whole catalogue.
Checkout and conversion
Where shoppers leave, what the basket costs them, and how the store behaves on a phone. Fixed, not only reported.
Stock, order and accounting integration
Live stock, orders reaching fulfilment, and sales reaching Xero, Sage or QuickBooks without anyone retyping them.
Store build and migration
Shopify, WooCommerce, custom and headless builds, and migrations planned from a URL map so the rankings the old store earned are protected.
Customer record and repeat purchase
Who bought what, and from which source, held somewhere that follow-up can actually happen.
Why this is worth doing properly
Targets come from margin, not revenue
A campaign can report a healthy return and still lose money once discounts, delivery, fees and returns are counted. We start from what each product group earns.
The store and the campaigns are one job
The team running the advertising can also change the store, so a feed fault or a slow checkout gets fixed rather than written up and handed to someone else.
Your advertising accounts stay yours
Registered to your business, paid by you directly to the platforms, with no markup on media. If we part company you keep the account and its history.
Honest about marketplaces and platforms
We tell you what a marketplace is good for, we do not pretend to run one, and we recommend a platform move only when the platform is the real constraint.
Systems are looked at before spend scales
Selling faster than stock, fulfilment or accounting can keep up produces cancellations and admin. We check the plumbing before raising a budget.
What you are handed, and who this suits
Deliverables
- A margin and measurement review setting out what each product group earns and whether the tracking can be trusted
- A cleaned, structured product feed with rules by product group
- A category and product page plan, with rewrites and validated structured data
- Campaigns structured by product group, with targets set from margin
- A checkout and mobile review, with fixes made or specified for your developers
- Integrations between store, stock, fulfilment and accounting, tested with real orders
- Conversion tracking and reporting that lead with orders and cost per order against margin
Everything on that list is yours on final payment, in your own company's accounts — the handover is written into the contract, not offered as a favour at the end.
Usually a fit for
- Retailers with a working shop that has stopped growing
- Stores spending on Shopping and social without knowing which products earn money
- Retailers whose stock, orders or invoices are retyped between systems
- Shops with large catalogues whose category pages cannot rank
- Businesses deciding how much to lean on marketplaces and how much on their own store
- Merchants planning a replatform who want to keep their search visibility
Built with
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
- Google Merchant Center
- Google Shopping and Performance Max
- Google Analytics 4
- Product and Offer structured data
- Xero, Sage and QuickBooks integration
- REST and GraphQL APIs
Chosen per project, not per fashion. If your team already runs something else and can maintain it, that usually wins.
Ask what this would involve for youFour gates, and you sign off at each one
Every stage ends with something you can read and approve — read the numbers, fix the plumbing first, pick one or two channels, judge it on profit. Nothing moves to the next stage until you say so.
- 01
Read the numbers
Margin by product group, how orders are tracked, the state of the feed and the checkout, and the systems behind the shop. Where the money is made, which is often not where the shop assumes.
- 02
Fix the plumbing first
Measurement, product data, stock accuracy and the checkout, before the channel is scaled. Advertising into a leaking shop only makes the leak more expensive.
- 03
Pick one or two channels
Shopping, search, paid social or organic, chosen by margin and by how your customers already find you, and run properly before a third is added.
- 04
Judge it on profit
Cost per order against margin, repeat purchase and returns, not platform-reported revenue. Move budget to what earns, and stop what does not.
Explore Related Services
Aama Jewellers
A modern storefront replacing an outdated site, with a shorter checkout and social campaigns feeding it — built and handed over as one piece of work rather than two suppliers pointing at each other.
View Case StudyFrequently Asked Questions
What does an ecommerce growth agency do?
It works on the whole path from search or advert to delivered order: the product feed, category and product page SEO, paid media, checkout conversion, and the stock, order and accounting systems behind the shop. A good one starts by finding which part is holding growth back, which is often the plumbing rather than the traffic.
How is an ecommerce digital marketing agency different from a general marketing agency?
A general agency optimises channels. An ecommerce one also has to care about margin, stock and checkout, because those decide whether a sale is worth having. If an agency cannot discuss which products deserve advertising, whether the feed matches the store, or whether orders reach your accounts, it will report clicks and revenue while profit goes unmeasured.
Should I sell on marketplaces or only on my own store?
Marketplaces bring buyers quickly but keep the customer relationship, set the rules and take fees. Your own store is slower to start and gives you the customer, the margin decisions and the brand. Many retailers use both. We work on the own-store side and do not manage marketplace accounts.
Is return on ad spend the right number to optimise?
Not on its own. It measures revenue rather than profit, and ignores returns, delivery, discounts and payment fees. Set the target from contribution margin by product group, then judge campaigns on cost per order against that margin. One catalogue-wide figure overspends on thin-margin products and underspends on the profitable ones.
What decides what ecommerce marketing costs?
Catalogue size and data quality, how many channels you run, how much content and technical work the store needs, and how many systems have to connect. Ad spend is separate and paid by you directly to the platforms. We do not publish prices and we scope the work before quoting, not after.
Do I need to change platform before you can help?
Usually not. Shopify and WooCommerce both support good feeds, category pages and checkout work. We recommend a move only when the platform is the real constraint, such as a checkout you cannot change or an integration it cannot support. Replatforming is the highest-risk project in ecommerce, so it needs a reason.
When is it too early to hire an ecommerce growth agency?
When products lose money after discounts, delivery and returns, when stock is too unreliable to sell faster, or when there are no sales yet and no evidence anyone wants the product. Fix margin, stock or the offer first. Marketing multiplies whatever is already there, good or bad.
Can you connect our store to stock and accounting software?
Usually. Xero, Sage and QuickBooks have workable APIs, as do most modern stock systems. Older or industry-specific software varies: some offers an API, some a database we can read, some only a scheduled file exchange. We check during discovery instead of assuming, because the answer changes the shape of the project.
Do you work with ecommerce businesses outside the West Midlands?
Yes. The work runs remotely by default, and Prabhu Solutions is registered at 14 Chester Rise, Oldbury, B68 0SS, if you would rather meet. Our delivery record so far is international rather than UK-based, and we say so plainly. Our West Midlands page explains how local work differs.
Can you handle the SEO and the ads, or only one?
Both, plus the build. Search compounds slowly while Shopping and paid media buy volume straight away, so most shops need some of each. We would start with one or two channels done properly instead of launching everything at once, because a shop running four channels cannot tell which one worked.
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