E-commerce & retail

Retail and e-commerce engagements have a few characteristics that shape every aspect of the work. Margins are usually thinner than in service businesses, which means marketing efficiency matters more and small improvements in conversion or average order value compound quickly. Catalogs change constantly, which means the operational discipline around product page updates, redirects, and inventory-driven content has to be excellent. Seasonality is often the dominant pattern in the data, which means programs have to be planned months ahead of seasonal peaks. And the channel mix (organic search, paid search, paid social, email, marketplaces, retail media) is more complex than in most other categories, which means measurement has to be sophisticated enough to support real allocation decisions across channels rather than just within them.

The retail and e-commerce buyers we work with vary widely in size, but the questions they ask before signing engagements are remarkably consistent. They want to know whether we understand their platform's quirks, how we handle SEO during a replatform, what we'd do differently from their previous agency, and whether the team they meet in the pitch is the team they'll actually work with. We answer those questions plainly: we'll tell you what platforms we know well and which we'd bring in a partner for; we'll walk you through specific replatforming risks rather than promising it'll be fine; we'll critique the previous engagement honestly only where it helps; and yes, the team you meet is the team you work with. None of that is a competitive secret, it's just the floor of what a serious engagement should look like.

For most retail and e-commerce brands we work with, the highest leverage early work is rarely a redesign or a new acquisition channel. It's usually some combination of: a category and faceted-navigation audit (which often surfaces substantial organic opportunity left unclaimed), a checkout and PDP conversion review, a lifecycle email program that's missing two or three obvious flows, and a paid-search account structure that's quietly wasting budget. None of those are exciting on their own. Together they tend to move the business meaningfully before any larger initiative starts.

We sequence retail engagements to handle the leakage first, prove the gains with clean measurement, and only then move to the larger investments, replatforming, brand refresh, expansion into new channels. The order matters: the larger investments are far easier to justify and far less risky once the basics are working.