Hiring your first ecommerce marketing agency: what to expect

What an agency can take on

Outside help usually covers some mix of the following. Few providers do all of it well, and you may not need all of it.

• Strategy.

  Working out who to sell to, with which offer, through which channels and in what order, based on your numbers.

• Paid advertising.

  Planning, building and managing campaigns on platforms such as Meta and Google, including budgets and reporting.

• Creative.

  Ad concepts, copy, images and video. Some providers produce it; others expect you to supply it.

• Email and retention.

  Automated flows, campaigns and customer follow-up.

• Website and conversion.

  Product page, checkout and site improvements, sometimes a rebuild.

• Reporting.

  Turning platform data into decisions. Ask whether reports use store and business numbers or only platform figures.

The main operating models, compared fairly

None of these is better in general. Each fits a different stage, budget and amount of time you can give to managing it. Outsourcing versus building a team is a subject of its own, and when to outsource ecommerce marketing compares the models in more depth, including the management load each creates.

What stays your job

Hiring help does not hand over the business. Whichever model you choose, these usually stay with you.

• Product, pricing, stock and fulfilment decisions.
• Accurate cost numbers: product cost, shipping, returns, fees and what you pay yourself.
• Approvals on creative, offers and spend, within agreed timeframes.
• Access to your platforms, and ownership of the accounts.
• Customer service, and telling the provider what customers are saying.
• The budget and the cash to run the plan.

What a useful investigation should establish

A good provider will want to understand your business before recommending work. Whether that happens on a sales call, in a paid audit or over a longer engagement, you should come out of it knowing the answers to a few questions.

• Can the business afford its customers?

  What a customer is worth after real costs, and what winning one costs now or would likely cost.

• Can the tracking be trusted?

  Whether the numbers used to judge performance match what the store actually sold.

• What has already been tried?

  And what the results said, measured on the same basis.

• What is the constraint?

  It might be traffic, the site, the offer, the range, retention or capacity. It is not always marketing.

• What would the first piece of work need to prove?

  And how you will both know whether it did.

Be wary of an investigation that only looks at the thing the provider sells. An ad account audit is useful, but it cannot tell you whether the offer can pay for the traffic. It is one reason three providers can find three different problems in the same business.

If nobody asks about your margins before quoting for ads, the quote is for activity, not for results.

Questions about scope, evidence and responsibilities

Ask for evidence rather than adjectives. A case study should say what the starting position was, the timeframe, how results were measured and what it cost. A return figure without a definition is a headline, not evidence.

Be cautious with guaranteed results. Performance depends on your product, margins, stock, site and market as well as on the provider's work. A guarantee either comes with conditions that matter, or promises something nobody controls.

How to compare proposals and take the next step

Put proposals side by side on the same criteria, not on the headline price. The cheapest monthly fee can cost more once production, extras and a long minimum term are counted. What an ecommerce marketing agency costs explains how to separate fees from media and other costs.

If the proposals disagree about the problem, that is the most important thing you have learned. Resolve it before choosing on price. Ask each provider how they reached their conclusion and what evidence would change their mind.

How SSO works, so you can compare

Here is our model, stated plainly, so you can put it in the grid with everyone else.

• Every engagement starts with a paid investigation, the Validation Sprint: four weeks, $4000 + GST, paid upfront. If a new business has no sales data, test media is additional, agreed and capped before it starts. There is no refund.
• We start with whether the business can afford its customers, then the site, then the ads. Two in three founders who ran our diagnostic did not have a marketing problem.
• You keep the plan and every number behind it, whatever happens next. Use it yourself, with another provider or with us.
• A positive finding does not guarantee an offer. Roughly six in ten completed Sprints are not followed by an offer from us (September 2026 record, not a promised future rate).
• If we do work together, there are two routes. Launch is for businesses whose economics need building or repair. Accelerate is for businesses whose economics already work and need capacity. Both start with a twelve-month initial term, and turnover does not decide the route.

Our model will not suit you if you want campaigns running next week without an investigation, prefer a month-to-month arrangement, or need one channel managed to a brief you have already written. In those cases a specialist or a freelancer may be the better first hire.

Our ecommerce marketing work and how our investigation works describe what we do in more detail. More guides on hiring help are in the resources hub.