We read 24 pages currently ranking for ecommerce marketing agency and ecommerce digital marketing agency before writing this one. Twenty one of them publish no price at all. Two say who they are not a fit for.
None shows you the arithmetic that decides whether an agency fee is worth paying in the first place. This page does all three, starting with the number.
Key Observations
Four things worth knowing before you read any further, because they are the four most agency pages leave out.
- Our ecommerce entry point is $500+ a month for a bounded SEO scope, and $600 to $1,200+ a month for paid media management. The market range for a full ecommerce marketing retainer is far higher, and we publish both below so you can see the difference and decide.
- You own every account. Google Ads, Meta, Merchant Center, GA4, the pixel, the audience lists. We work inside your accounts, never ours. Month to month, no lock-in, and a seven day handover if you leave.
- There is a revenue band where this works and one where it does not. If your store is under roughly $10,000 a month in revenue, an agency is usually the wrong spend. We say so below and explain what to do instead.
- A fee is only justified by contribution margin, not by ROAS. The calculation is in the section on justifying the fee, with a worked example you can run on your own numbers.
What this page covers
Commercial questions come first, because those are the ones that decide whether to contact anyone at all. Definitions and channel detail sit further down for anyone who wants them.
What is an ecommerce marketing agency?
An ecommerce marketing agency is a firm that runs the paid and organic channels an online store sells through, and is measured on revenue rather than on traffic. The work usually spans search ads, shopping feeds, paid social, SEO, email and conversion rate optimization, managed together so that spend in one channel is judged against profit across all of them.
The distinction that matters when you are choosing one is narrow versus broad. A single channel specialist runs one thing properly. A full service agency coordinates several and charges accordingly. Most stores under a few million in revenue are better served by the first, and most agency pages are written to sell you the second.
What does an ecommerce digital marketing agency actually do?
Day to day, the work splits into four jobs. Everything else an agency lists is a subset of one of them.
| The job | What it means in practice | How you know it is being done |
|---|---|---|
| Buy traffic profitably | Running search, shopping and social ads against a target that is derived from your margin, not from a platform benchmark | Contribution margin after ad spend is growing month over month |
| Earn traffic you do not pay for | Category and product page SEO, technical fixes, content that answers pre-purchase questions, and now visibility inside AI answers | Non-brand organic sessions and organic revenue rising on a three month view |
| Convert the traffic you already have | Product page structure, site speed, checkout friction, review and trust placement, testing | Conversion rate moving on the pages that receive the most spend |
| Sell to the same customer again | Email and SMS flows, segmentation, retention offers, lifecycle timing | Repeat purchase rate and revenue per customer, not list size |
A good agency also tells you which of the four is currently your constraint, and refuses to sell you the other three until it is fixed. If you have a 1.1 percent conversion rate, more traffic is the expensive way to solve a cheap problem.
What does an ecommerce marketing agency cost?
Twenty one of the 24 ranking pages we read do not answer this. The most common answer, from a directory that at least asks the question in its own FAQ, is that costs vary by scope and most agencies quote after learning your goals. That is true and useless. Here are the real numbers, theirs and ours.
What the market charges
These are published figures, taken from agency pricing pages and from surveys with a stated method, checked on 29 September 2026. We are naming sources rather than linking out, so you can verify any of them yourself.
| Scope | Monthly range | Where the figure comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Ecommerce SEO on its own | $4,500 to $10,000 | Stryde, published on their own costs and pricing page |
| SEO, any industry, agency average | $3,209 | Ahrefs survey of 439 SEO service providers |
| Full ecommerce program, $1M to $10M store | $5,000 to $15,000 | Common Thread Collective, March 2026 |
| Full ecommerce program, $10M to $100M store | $15,000 to $50,000 | Common Thread Collective, March 2026 |
| Custom ecommerce plan | From $3,000 | WebFX, published on their service page |
| Bundled retainer, single channel | From $1,499 | Redefine Web, published on their service page |
| Paid media management as a percentage | 10 to 20 percent of ad spend, usually with a floor | Consistent across Common Thread Collective, OuterBox and Stackmatix |
Two things are worth pulling out of that table. First, the percentage of spend model has a floor, so at low spend you pay the floor and the percentage stops mattering.
Second, every figure above excludes media. A $5,000 retainer on $20,000 of ad spend is a $25,000 monthly commitment. Clutch says this plainly in its own pricing guide, under a heading telling readers that digital marketing fees do not include ad costs.
What we charge
Our numbers sit well below that table, and we would rather explain why than hide it.
| What | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Ecommerce SEO, entry scope | $500+ per month | A defined, bounded scope: technical fixes, category and product page optimization on an agreed page set, and monthly reporting. Not a full program |
| Paid media management | $600 to $1,200+ per month | Google Ads, Shopping and Merchant Center, or Meta, managed as a flat fee rather than a percentage of your spend |
| Combined AI SEO and content | From $600 per month | Covered on our SEO packages page, including how the deliverable count works |
| Full ecommerce program | Quoted | Multi channel, strategist led, scoped against your margin and revenue. This is where we would compete with the figures in the table above |
Why the gap, and what you give up at the entry tier
We are a small team based in India working with clients mostly in the US, UK and Australia, and our cost base is genuinely lower than that of a 250 person agency in Los Angeles. That is most of the difference and there is nothing clever about it.
The rest of the difference is scope, and this is the part you need to hear before you buy. At $500 a month you are not getting a full ecommerce marketing program. You are getting one channel, a defined page set and a named person doing the work. What you give up compared with a $5,000 retainer is real:
- No dedicated strategist on a weekly call. You get monthly reporting and email access.
- No creative production. No UGC, no video, no photography. If your paid social needs new creative every two weeks, the entry tier cannot feed it.
- No lifecycle build. Email and SMS flows are not in the entry scope.
- A narrower page set. We agree which pages are in scope rather than working across the whole catalog.
- Slower pace. One channel moving properly beats four moving badly, but it is still one channel.
If you need all of that, you need a bigger budget, and it may not be ours. We would rather tell you here than three months into an engagement that was never funded to do the job.
Who this is for, and who it is not for
Only two of the 24 pages we read say this at all. Most say they work with businesses of all sizes, which is not a qualification, it is the absence of one.
This works if
- You are doing roughly $10,000 a month or more in store revenue. Below that, the arithmetic in the next section usually does not clear.
- You know your gross margin per order, or you can get it within a day.
- You have product market fit. People who find you buy. If they do not, marketing spend magnifies the problem rather than solving it.
- You are on Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento or BigCommerce and you can grant access to your own accounts.
- You want one channel run properly before adding a second.
This does not work if
- You are under about $10,000 a month in revenue. At that level an agency fee is a large share of your contribution margin and you are better off running basic paid search yourself and fixing the product page. This is the most common reason we say no.
- Your margin is under about 25 percent after cost of goods, shipping and payment fees. There is usually no ad spend that works at that margin and no agency can fix it. The fix is pricing, packaging or supplier cost.
- You need results inside 30 days. Paid media can move in weeks. SEO cannot. If the business needs revenue this month, spend the money on ads and skip the retainer.
- You want a guarantee of a specific ranking or a specific ROAS. We will not give one, and anyone who does is either guessing or describing something they cannot control.
- You want us to own the accounts. We do not do that. See the next section.
If you are under that revenue line, our ecommerce SEO and Shopify SEO guides are free and cover most of what you would be paying for anyway.
Who owns your ad accounts, pixel and data?
You do, all of it, permanently. We work inside accounts you own and we hold nothing that you cannot take back on a day of your choosing. This is the most asked question we found in the research behind this page, and almost no agency page answers it in a way you could hold them to, so here is the specific version.
| Asset | Who owns it | Who holds admin | What happens if you leave |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads account | You | You. We are added as a linked manager account | We unlink. Nothing is removed, no history is lost |
| Google Merchant Center | You | You | We unlink. Feeds and rules stay in place |
| Meta ad account and Business Manager | You | You. We are added as a partner | Partner access is revoked by you, in one click |
| Meta pixel and conversions API setup | You | You | Stays on your site and in your Business Manager |
| GA4 property and conversion history | You | You | Unchanged. We are removed as a user |
| Audience and customer lists | You | You | Stay in your accounts. We never export them |
| Creative, copy and ad assets we produce | You | You | Yours to keep and reuse, with no licence conditions |
| Reporting dashboards we build | You | You | Handed over as a copy you own, or rebuilt in your own account |
The commitments that go with it:
- Month to month. No minimum term, no auto renewing annual contract. Thirty days notice, in writing, by email, and email is sufficient. We will not require a phone call to cancel.
- Handover inside seven working days. From the day you tell us, you get access confirmations, any dashboard copies, a written account of what was running and what we would do next, and what we would hand a new agency on day one.
- A change in budget or scope is not a new term. Agreeing to spend more next month does not restart anything, because there is nothing to restart.
- Media is billed by the platform, to your card. We never invoice you for ad spend and never mark it up. You see what Google and Meta charged, because they charged you directly.
On access, we ask for what the work needs and nothing more. Running ads does not require your theme files or your Liquid templates, and if an agency asks for those to run ads, ask them which specific task needs it. Where we do need store access for technical SEO, we ask for the narrowest role that does the job, and we say which task it is for.
How do you work out whether the fee is justified?
Not one of the 24 pages we read shows this calculation, which is strange, because it is the only calculation that matters. ROAS on its own cannot tell you whether an agency is worth paying. Contribution margin can.
Three numbers and one subtraction:
- Gross margin percentage after cost of goods, shipping and payment fees. Not your markup. The real number.
- Break-even ROAS, which is 1 divided by that margin. At a 40 percent margin, break-even ROAS is 2.5. Below 2.5 you are paying for the privilege of shipping boxes.
- Contribution after ad spend, which is revenue times margin, minus ad spend. The agency fee comes out of what is left.
A worked example
A store doing $40,000 a month at a 40 percent gross margin, spending $8,000 on ads at a 3.0 ROAS.
| Line | Calculation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | Given | $40,000 |
| Gross margin at 40 percent | 40,000 x 0.40 | $16,000 |
| Ad spend | Given | $8,000 |
| Contribution after ad spend | 16,000 minus 8,000 | $8,000 |
| Break-even ROAS | 1 divided by 0.40 | 2.5 |
| Actual ROAS | 24,000 of the revenue from ads, divided by 8,000 | 3.0 |
| Room for a fee | What is left before the store stops contributing | $8,000 |
At a $500 fee, that store keeps $7,500 of contribution and the fee is 6 percent of it. At a $5,000 fee it keeps $3,000, and the fee is 63 percent of contribution.
Both can be the right answer. The bigger fee just has to move the top line enough to cover itself. So put the test in the agreement: what does revenue or margin have to reach for this fee to pay for itself, and by when?
Now run the same thing at $8,000 a month in revenue. Gross margin is $3,200. Spend $2,000 on ads and contribution is $1,200. A $500 fee is 42 percent of that, and a $5,000 fee is impossible.
That is the arithmetic behind the revenue band in the previous section, and it is why we turn work away.
Our SEO ROI calculator and CAC calculator will do this on your numbers in a few seconds.
What happens in month one, two and three?
One of the listicles we read asks in its own FAQ what results you should expect from an ecommerce marketing agency in the first 90 days. Not one agency page answers it. The honest answer is that month one produces almost no revenue change and you should be suspicious of anyone who promises otherwise.
| What we do | What you should see | What you should not expect yet | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Month 1 | Access and tracking audit first. Verify conversion tracking against the platform, fix what is broken, agree the page set or campaign scope, build the baseline report. Launch or restructure one channel | A written baseline you can hold us to, and tracking you can trust. Often a spend reduction, because broken tracking usually means wasted budget | Revenue change. If tracking was wrong, reported numbers may get worse before they get better, because they are finally correct |
| Month 2 | Iterate on what month one measured. Search term and placement cleanup, negative keywords at account level, the first technical SEO fixes shipped, product page work on the highest spend pages | Efficiency moving. CPA or ROAS improving on the same or lower spend. Early ranking movement on long tail terms | Organic revenue. Two months is too early |
| Month 3 | Scale what worked, cut what did not, and decide together whether to add a second channel. First honest read on whether the engagement is paying for itself | Contribution margin after ad spend above the month one baseline, and the arithmetic to prove it | Finished SEO results. Three to six months is the realistic window, and a survey of 75 SEO professionals by Morningscore puts first visible results between months two and six |
The review gate at the end of month three is deliberate and it is written into how we work. It is covered in the section on when we would tell you to fire us.
Which channels should an ecommerce store run first?
There is no universal channel order, and any page that gives you one is selling the channels it happens to run. Your gross margin and your average order value decide which channels can be profitable at all.
Andrew Faris of Common Thread Collective puts it bluntly: at a 40 percent margin, a 2:1 return is not good enough, because you are losing money. Common Thread Collective also notes that Meta usually drives the lowest cost of acquisition but not the highest order value or margin. That is why one blended target across products with different margins quietly funds unprofitable orders.
| Your situation | Start here | Why | Add next |
|---|---|---|---|
| High margin, over 60 percent, low average order value | Paid social | Break-even ROAS is under 1.7, so there is room for cheap traffic that converts on impulse | Email and SMS, because repeat purchase is where the margin compounds |
| Moderate margin, 30 to 50 percent, considered purchase | Google Search and Shopping | Intent traffic converts at a rate that survives a break-even ROAS of 2 to 3.3 | SEO on category pages, then paid social for prospecting |
| Low margin, under 25 percent | Neither, yet | No ad channel reliably clears a break-even ROAS of 4 or more. Fix pricing, bundle to raise order value, or reduce supplier cost | Nothing, until the margin changes |
| Strong brand demand already | Protect brand search, then SEO | You may be paying for clicks you would win free. Check the overlap before scaling | Shopping, then prospecting |
| New store, no conversion data | Google Search on a narrow intent set | Cheapest way to learn what converts before spending on creative | Whatever the data points at |
Merchants themselves disagree about this, and the disagreement is informative. One Shopify Community thread asked which channel produced the first consistent sales.
One store owner said Google, because they could target search intent directly. Another said Meta, because the platform had the richest signals. A third said Pinterest and TikTok took real money and returned nothing. All three are describing different margins and different products. That is the point.
What we do, by channel
Named channels, so you can see what is in scope and what is not.
| Channel | What the work is | Where it sits |
|---|---|---|
| Google Ads, Search and Shopping | Account structure, intent-led keyword sets, account level negative keywords, bid strategy chosen against conversion volume rather than by default, Shopping feed segmentation | Covered in depth on our Google Ads work |
| Merchant Center and product feeds | Disapproval clearing, required and recommended attribute coverage, title and description structure, custom labels for margin based bidding | Feed work is where most Shopping accounts are actually lost |
| Meta Ads | Campaign structure, pixel and conversions API signal quality, audience strategy, creative testing cadence where creative exists | Paid social prospecting and retargeting |
| Microsoft Ads | Import done properly rather than mirrored, plus the settings that differ from Google | Often the cheapest incremental traffic an ecommerce account can buy |
| Ecommerce SEO | Technical crawl and indexation, category and product page optimization, internal linking, structured data, content that answers pre-purchase questions | Covered on ecommerce SEO |
| AI search visibility | Whether your store is named and cited in AI answers, tracked against real buyer prompts rather than invented ones | Covered on AI SEO for ecommerce |
| Conversion rate work | Product page structure, trust and review placement, checkout friction, speed where it affects revenue | Recommendations, and implementation where we have access |
For paid media specifically, our PPC management page covers the management side in more detail, and ecommerce PPC management is the dedicated ecommerce PPC service page.
How does reporting work, and what do you reconcile against?
Transparent reporting is claimed by almost every agency page we read, and it usually means a dashboard screenshot. The sharper question, and one we found asked directly in the Google Ads help community, is how a store owner confirms that the ad spend a marketing agency reports and the platform statements are both real. Here is our answer to that.
- You have direct access to the source. You are the account owner, so you can open Google Ads and Meta yourself, see the billing, and see the change history. Our report is a summary of something you can already verify.
- Media is billed to you by the platform. Nothing goes through us, so there is no number of ours to reconcile against Google’s.
- We report platform numbers and analytics numbers separately, and never average them. Google Ads and GA4 will disagree because they attribute differently. Presenting a single blended figure hides that. We show both and say which one we are managing to.
- The headline metric is contribution margin after ad spend, not ROAS and not traffic. ROAS is in the report, but it is not the number we ask you to judge us on.
- Change log every month. What we changed, when, and why. Short and specific, so a drop or a lift can be traced to a decision rather than explained after the fact.
One short statement on attribution, because pretending otherwise is how agencies lose trust. Platform reported conversions are modelled and will overstate. Post-purchase survey data and first party revenue sit closer to the truth.
Where the two diverge enough to change a decision, we say so rather than quoting whichever number flatters us. Our SEO reporting post covers what belongs in a monthly report in more detail.
What actually differs by platform?
Eleven of the 24 pages we read name Shopify. Not one shows what changes in the work depending on the platform, which suggests the platform name is there as a logo rather than as a method. The differences are real and they decide how much of the work is technical.
| Platform | What helps you | What you spend time fixing | Feed situation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Clean URL structure, fast hosting, reliable indexation, native Google and Meta channel apps | Forced /collections/ and /products/ paths, duplicate product URLs across collections, thin collection pages, app bloat slowing product pages, limited control over some meta output | Native channel app handles the basics. Custom labels and margin based segmentation usually need a feed tool |
| WooCommerce | Full control over URLs, templates and structured data. Anything is possible | You own performance and security. Plugin conflicts, slow queries on large catalogs, attribute and variation markup that has to be built rather than assumed | No native feed. A plugin generates it, and plugin defaults are frequently wrong on identifiers and availability |
| Magento and Adobe Commerce | Strong at large catalogs, complex pricing and B2B rules | Faceted navigation generating enormous crawl waste, cache and indexer issues, layered navigation URLs competing with each other | Extension driven. Feed quality varies sharply by extension and needs auditing before it is trusted |
| BigCommerce | Solid technical base, good variant handling | Variant URL structure, less flexible content editing, fewer app options for feed work | Native integration exists but is coarse. Segmentation usually needs a feed layer |
If you are on Shopify, our Shopify SEO guide covers the platform limits and defaults in detail, and Shopify SEO issues covers the errors that keep stores out of Google.
When would we tell you to fire us?
The complaint pattern in agency reviews is remarkably consistent: eight to ten months of ad spend with no profit, while the retainer keeps billing. Store owners describe losing twenty to thirty thousand dollars before ending it. The mechanism is always the same, which is that nobody agreed in advance what failure looked like.
So we agree it in advance. At the end of month three we look at one number together, contribution margin after ad spend, against the month one baseline.
- If it is up and the trend is intact, we continue and decide whether to add a channel.
- If it is flat, we say which single thing we think is wrong, what we would change, and how long that needs. If we cannot name it specifically, that is an answer about us, not about your store.
- If it is down and we cannot explain it with something outside the account, such as seasonality, a stock problem or a price change, we tell you to stop paying us. In writing. We would rather lose a $500 retainer than be the agency in those reviews.
Two things that are not on that list, deliberately. We do not promise a specific ranking, because nobody controls Google’s results. And we do not promise a specific ROAS, because ROAS is a function of your margin and your prices as much as of our work. What we will commit to is naming the constraint, showing the arithmetic, and telling you when the answer is to stop.
How we compare with the agencies you are also looking at
An honest version, including where we are the weaker choice.
| Hustle Marketers | Typical full service ecommerce agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $500+ a month, published | $3,000 to $15,000 a month, usually not published |
| Who does the work | A small named team. You know who is in your account | Often a pod, sometimes offshore delivery, frequently a different person by month six |
| Account ownership | Yours, with a seven day handover commitment | Usually yours, rarely stated, occasionally contested |
| Contract | Month to month, email cancellation | Three to twelve months is common |
| Creative production | Not in the entry tier | Usually included, and a real advantage if paid social is your main channel |
| Lifecycle, email and SMS | Not in the entry tier | Usually included |
| Dedicated strategist | No, on the entry tier | Yes, and worth paying for above a certain revenue |
| Breadth at once | One channel properly, then a second | Several channels from day one |
| Best when | You want one channel run well at a price that does not eat your margin | You are past a few million in revenue and need coordinated multi channel with creative |
If the right hand column describes what you need, hire from it. We publish a list of agencies that publish real pricing partly so buyers can compare properly, and how to choose an ecommerce SEO agency is our own guide to vetting one.
Frequently asked questions
How much does an ecommerce marketing agency cost?
Published market rates run from about $1,499 a month for a single channel to $15,000 a month for a full program on a $1M to $10M store, and ad spend is separate from every one of those figures. Our entry point is $500+ a month for a bounded ecommerce SEO scope and $600 to $1,200+ a month for paid media management, with full multi channel programs quoted.
Does the agency fee include ad spend?
Not ours, and not most agencies’, though very few say so on the page. Media is billed by Google or Meta directly to your card. A $5,000 retainer on $20,000 of ad spend is a $25,000 monthly commitment, and you should confirm which of the two any quoted number refers to before signing anything.
Who owns the Google Ads and Meta accounts?
You do. We are added to accounts you own, as a linked manager account on Google and as a partner on Meta, and you can revoke that in one click. The pixel, the conversion history, the audience lists and the creative are all yours and stay in your accounts if you leave.
What happens to my accounts if I stop working with you?
You keep everything and we unlink. We commit to completing handover within seven working days of you telling us: access confirmations, copies of any dashboards we built, and a written account of what was running and what we would have done next. Notice is thirty days, by email, and email alone is enough.
Is there a minimum contract?
No. Month to month with thirty days notice. Increasing your budget or adding a channel does not start a new term, because there is no term to restart.
How long before I see results?
Paid media can move within two to six weeks because you are buying traffic immediately. SEO is slower: a survey of 75 SEO professionals by Morningscore puts first visible results between months two and six, with fuller results at twelve to twenty four months. Anyone promising ecommerce SEO results in thirty days is describing something else.
Is an agency worth it for a small store?
Often not, and this is the most common reason we decline work. Below roughly $10,000 a month in revenue, an agency fee takes a large share of your contribution margin. Run the arithmetic in the fee justification section on your own numbers: if the fee is more than about a third of what is left after cost of goods and ad spend, spend the money on ads and traffic instead.
Should I hire an agency, a freelancer or hire in-house?
A freelancer is usually cheaper and often better if you need one channel and you can manage them. In-house wins on product knowledge, which store owners say repeatedly, and loses on breadth and on tooling. An agency makes sense when you need more than one skill set but not a full-time salary for each. Below about $10,000 a month in revenue, none of the three beats doing it yourself.
Do you work with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and BigCommerce?
Yes, and the work genuinely differs by platform. Shopify needs collection and duplicate URL handling, WooCommerce needs performance and feed plugin auditing, Magento needs faceted navigation crawl control, BigCommerce needs variant URL work. The platform section above sets out what changes.
Can you guarantee a ranking or a ROAS?
No, and we would not trust a quote that did. Nobody controls Google’s results, and ROAS is determined by your margin and prices as much as by campaign work. What we will commit to is a stated baseline, a named constraint, monthly change logs, and a review at month three where we tell you to stop if the number is not moving.
Do you require access to my Shopify theme files?
Not to run ads. Ads need the ad accounts, Merchant Center and analytics. If technical SEO work is in scope we ask for store access at the narrowest role that does the job, and we tell you which task needs it. If any agency asks for theme or Liquid access to run ad campaigns, ask them to name the specific task.
What is the difference between an ecommerce marketing agency and an ecommerce SEO agency?
An ecommerce SEO agency runs one channel, organic search. An ecommerce marketing agency coordinates several, usually paid search, shopping, paid social, SEO and retention, and is judged on blended profitability rather than on rankings. If you only need organic, hiring the broader service costs more for the same outcome.
Who will actually be doing the work?
A small named team, and you will know who. This is worth asking any agency directly, because the most consistent complaint in ecommerce agency reviews is account staff who do not know the brand or the products, and turnover by month six. Ask for the name and the seniority, and ask what happens if that person leaves.
How this page was researched
Written on 29 September 2026 after reading the 24 pages then ranking for ecommerce marketing agency and ecommerce digital marketing agency, and after collecting real buyer questions and complaints from store owner communities rather than from keyword tools. Specifically:
- Pricing figures are taken from agency pricing pages that publish them, from Common Thread Collective’s March 2026 ecommerce agency pricing analysis, from Ahrefs’ survey of 439 SEO service providers, and from Clutch’s published pricing data. Every figure is named in the table rather than presented as a market truth.
- Buyer questions and complaints come from Shopify Community threads, Google Ads help community thread titles, Trustpilot and Better Business Bureau complaint records, Indie Hackers, eCommerceFuel and Hacker News. Complaint patterns are only described as patterns where several independent sources said the same thing.
- Time-to-results figures come from Morningscore’s survey of 75 SEO professionals, February 2026.
- Channel and margin guidance draws on Common Thread Collective’s published work on first order profitability and contribution margin.
- Our own pricing, terms and ownership commitments are our own, and are what we will hold to.
Where we could not verify something, it is not on this page. Two figures circulate widely in this topic and neither survived checking.
One is a claim that 34 percent of US internet users use AI search daily, attributed to SparkToro. The other concerns the overlap between Google top ten results and AI citations, attributed to BrightEdge. Neither appears in those publishers’ work, so neither is used here. We also found no documented case of an agency passing white label work off as in-house, so we make no claim about that, only about named staffing.
Prices and figures are point-in-time and we review this page quarterly.
Getting started
The first conversation is a short one and it is mostly us asking questions. What your gross margin is, what your average order value is, what is already running, and what you have tried that did not work. From that we can tell you whether an agency is the right spend at all, and if it is, which single channel to start with.
If the answer is that you are too small for this to pay, we will say so on that call rather than after three months of invoices. Get in touch and we will look at your margin first. You can also read an ecommerce SEO case study to see how we work on an ecommerce store in practice.
