Tack Media

Marketing for Ecommerce & DTC

Ecommerce marketing lives or dies on contribution margin after CAC, shipping and returns.

Talk to an Expert What it involves
Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles  ·  +13106201141  ·  Since 2009
Marketing for Ecommerce & DTC
The short answer

The constraint is contribution margin, and most brands never compute it. The number that matters is what a customer leaves behind after COGS, shipping both ways, payment fees, discounts and returns. Not ROAS. A 3.0 ROAS on a 45% gross margin product with a 25% return rate can be a loss.

2009
operating since
300+
brands served
2,500+
campaigns run
15+
industries
20 min
to a real price
We say what we do.
We do what we say.
No scope that quietly grows. No report that hides the bad week.
What it involves

What this actually involves.

Everything below is scoped, priced and owned by you. Nothing is a black box.

01

The short answer

Ecommerce marketing lives or dies on contribution margin after CAC, shipping and returns. US online sales hit $340.2 billion in Q2 2026, and 19.3% of online…

02

Who this is for — and who it isn't

This is for you if: You do $2M to $50M in online revenue on Shopify, and paid spend is already meaningful. You can tell us gross…

03

What makes ecommerce marketing different

The constraint is contribution margin, and most brands never compute it. The number that matters is what a customer leaves behind after COGS, shipping both ways,…

04

The channel mix that works

Channel What it does here What good looks like Shopping and Performance Max The workhorse. It runs on your feed, so feed quality is the campaign.…

05

What you actually get

Deliverable What it is When you get it Contribution margin model Margin per order after COGS, shipping, fees, discounts and returns, by category and by channel,…

06

How it works — 1, 2, 3

The 20-minute fit call. Revenue, gross margin, blended CAC, return rate, current spend and what breaks first when you scale. Straight answer on fit and a…

07

What it costs

From $5,000 a month for management, separate from media spend. What moves it: catalogue size, how many markets and feeds, spend under management, whether the store…

08

Where ecommerce marketing budgets get wasted

Optimising to platform ROAS. Every platform reports its own conversions and claims the same order. Judge on net contribution in one dashboard, or you will scale…

In plain language

What this actually means.

A website is a sales asset with a Core Web Vitals score attached. It has to load fast on a phone on a bad connection, say what you do in the first screen, and hand a qualified lead to a human without friction. Everything else is decoration.

What it is built with

The actual stack.
Named, not implied.

Platforms

WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Next.js, headless WooCommerce

Front end

React, Next.js, Tailwind, native CSS, no jQuery bloat

Performance

Cloudflare, image CDNs, AVIF and WebP, critical CSS, font subsetting

Commerce

Shopify Plus, Stripe, Shop Pay, Klaviyo, Recharge

Forms & booking

Native REST endpoints, Calendly, HubSpot forms, honeypot and rate limiting

Accessibility

WCAG 2.2 AA contrast, focus states, semantic landmarks

What it connects to

Tools and apps we integrate with.

If it has an API we have probably already wired it. If it does not, we will tell you before you buy it.

WordPressShopifyWebflowStripeKlaviyoHubSpotMailchimpCalendlyCloudflareGoogle Tag ManagerGA4Slack
The kinds of integrations we build

Concrete, not conceptual.

01

Form → everywhere

One submission lands in your inbox, your CRM, your Slack channel and a spreadsheet, with a stored copy so a mail failure never loses a lead.

REST + webhook
02

Store → email

Abandoned cart, post-purchase and win-back flows wired to real product data, not generic templates.

Shopify + Klaviyo
03

Booking → CRM

Calendly bookings create the contact, the deal and the reminder sequence automatically.

Calendly + HubSpot
04

Content → schema

Structured data generated from the page, so search engines and answer engines read it correctly on day one.

JSON-LD engine
Questions people actually ask

Straight answers.
Including the price ones.

Will a rebuild lose our rankings?

Not if the URLs, the content and the internal links survive. We map every existing URL before anything moves, redirect one-to-one, and keep the copy that is already ranking. Losses happen when agencies rewrite and re-slug at the same time.

How long does a site take?

Six to twelve weeks for a marketing site. Longer if commerce and migrations are involved.

Can we edit it ourselves?

Yes. We hand over a CMS your team can actually use, and we train them on it.

Where we measure it

Visibility isn't one place any more.

Every answer engine builds its index differently. We track them separately, because they behave separately.

Google AdsMetaLinkedInTikTokGA4Search ConsoleHubSpotShopify
AI made us faster.
It didn't make us new.
Why us, not the next one

We've been doing search
since 2009.

Four algorithm eras. This is the fifth. We know which parts matter and which parts are noise, because we were here for the last four times everyone said search was dead.

We're not yes-people. We're going to do what's good for your brand.

How it starts

No deck. No mystery number.

01

Fit call

Twenty minutes. What you are trying to hit, by when, what is in the way.

02

Access

Read-only. Analytics, Search Console, the CMS. We look before we talk.

03

Findings

Where you appear today across every answer engine. Yours either way.

04

Scope

Written, itemised, assumptions listed so you can argue with them.

05

Start

Within a week of signature. You own every account.

In full
The short answer

The short answer Ecommerce marketing lives or dies on contribution margin after CAC, shipping and returns. US online sales hit $340.2 billion in Q2 2026, and 19.3% of online orders come back. The work is feed quality, owned channels and a returns rate you actually model. From $5,000 a month. Who this is for — and who it.

The short answer

Ecommerce marketing lives or dies on contribution margin after CAC, shipping and returns. US online sales hit $340.2 billion in Q2 2026, and 19.3% of online orders come back. The work is feed quality, owned channels and a returns rate you actually model. From $5,000 a month.

Who this is for — and who it isn’t

This is for you if:

  • You do $2M to $50M in online revenue on Shopify, and paid spend is already meaningful.
  • You can tell us gross margin by SKU, blended CAC and return rate by category. Or you want us to build that.
  • Your catalogue is real. Enough SKUs and enough inventory depth for a shopping feed to matter.
  • You want contribution margin reported, not ROAS reported.

This is not for you if:

  • Your gross margin is under 40%. Paid acquisition at scale will not work, and no agency changes that.
  • You are pre-product-market-fit and want ads to find demand that does not exist.
  • You want a media buyer and nothing else. Feed, site and email are where most of the money is.
  • Your budget is under $5,000 a month for management, separate from spend.

What makes ecommerce marketing different

The constraint is contribution margin, and most brands never compute it. The number that matters is what a customer leaves behind after COGS, shipping both ways, payment fees, discounts and returns. Not ROAS. A 3.0 ROAS on a 45% gross margin product with a 25% return rate can be a loss.

Returns are the line nobody models. Roughly 19.3% of online sales were returned in 2025 against 15.8% for retail overall, with total returns worth an estimated $849.9 billion (NRF and Happy Returns data, via Shopify). Apparel and footwear run well above that average. If your media plan assumes gross orders and your P&L records net, the gap is your entire margin. We model return rate by category and by campaign, because paid social frequently buys a worse-returning customer than search does.

The channel is growing and the checkout is still leaking. US retail ecommerce reached $340.2 billion in Q2 2026, 17.1% of total retail sales, up 12.2% year over year (US Census Bureau). Meanwhile the documented average cart abandonment rate across 50 studies is 70.22%, and the top stated reason is extra costs — shipping, tax and fees — at 40%, followed by slow delivery at 20% and forced account creation at 18% (Baymard Institute). Those are shipping-policy and checkout problems, not traffic problems.

Seasonality is concentrated and now includes an AI channel. US online holiday spending reached $257.8 billion in November and December 2025, up 6.8%, with mobile at 56.4% of revenue — and traffic to retail sites from AI assistants rose 693.4% against the prior holiday season (Adobe Analytics). Being quotable by an assistant is now a demand channel, not a science project.

The channel mix that works

Channel What it does here What good looks like
Shopping and Performance Max The workhorse. It runs on your feed, so feed quality is the campaign. Missing or wrong attributes cause disapprovals and limited eligibility (Google Merchant Center) Zero disapprovals, complete GTIN, brand, size, colour and item group data, titles written for query match
Paid social Prospecting and creative testing. Buys reach that search cannot, and often buys a higher-returning customer New-customer CAC inside contribution margin, judged on net revenue after returns
Paid search, non-brand Captures existing demand. Apparel, fashion and jewellery average $4.44 a click and 4.50% conversion (LocaliQ 2026) Non-brand CAC separated from brand, reported apart from it
Email and SMS The margin channel. Ecommerce email averages 29.81% open and 1.74% click (Mailchimp). Flows do the compounding Owned channels at 25% to 35% of revenue, with flows outperforming campaigns
Site, checkout and SEO/AEO Recovers the 70% who leave. Also where AI assistants source product answers Shipping cost shown early, guest checkout, product pages that answer questions in text

What you actually get

Deliverable What it is When you get it
Contribution margin model Margin per order after COGS, shipping, fees, discounts and returns, by category and by channel, with your allowable CAC set from it Day 14
Feed audit and rebuild Every Merchant Center error and warning cleared, attributes completed, titles restructured for search intent Days 14 to 30
Returns analysis Return rate by category, by channel and by campaign, so you stop paying to acquire customers who send it back Day 21
Owned-channel build Klaviyo flows rebuilt — welcome, browse, cart, post-purchase, winback — with revenue attributed by flow Days 30 to 60
Checkout and PDP fixes Shipping cost surfaced earlier, guest checkout, product content that answers the objection that causes the return Days 30 to 60
One dashboard Shopify, ad platforms and GA4 in one view reporting net contribution, not platform-reported ROAS Day 30, then monthly

How it works — 1, 2, 3

  1. The 20-minute fit call. Revenue, gross margin, blended CAC, return rate, current spend and what breaks first when you scale. Straight answer on fit and a real price on the call.
  2. The first 30 days. Access to Shopify, Merchant Center, ad accounts and Klaviyo in week one. Contribution margin model at day 14, returns analysis at day 21, feed rebuilt and first campaigns restructured by day 30.
  3. The ongoing cadence. Weekly creative and budget decisions, a monthly report on net contribution and new-customer CAC, quarterly planning around your peak.

What it costs

From $5,000 a month for management, separate from media spend. What moves it: catalogue size, how many markets and feeds, spend under management, whether the store itself needs rebuilding, and whether SEO and AEO run alongside paid media. A single-market brand with 200 SKUs sits near the floor. A multi-market catalogue with thousands of SKUs and a replatform sits well above it. Pricing is given on the first call.

Where ecommerce marketing budgets get wasted

  • Optimising to platform ROAS. Every platform reports its own conversions and claims the same order. Judge on net contribution in one dashboard, or you will scale a channel that is losing money.
  • Ignoring the feed. Shopping spend on a feed with disapprovals and thin titles is spend on a fraction of your catalogue. This is the cheapest fix in ecommerce and the most commonly skipped.
  • Free shipping thresholds nobody modelled. Extra costs are the top abandonment reason at 40%, but a threshold below your contribution margin turns a conversion win into a loss per order.
  • Discount dependency. A permanent 20% code is a permanent 20% margin cut, and it trains customers to wait.
  • Owned channels left on autopilot. A welcome flow written three years ago is the highest-margin revenue in the business, still running on an out-of-date offer.

Questions we get asked

Why do you keep talking about returns instead of ROAS?

Because 19.3% of online orders come back. If one channel returns at 12% and another at 30%, they have different real CACs at identical ROAS. Reporting gross orders while banking net revenue hides the loss until inventory tells you.

Can you scale spend without CAC rising?

Not indefinitely. CAC rises with reach in every account. The honest goal is holding contribution margin per order as spend grows, by improving creative, feed coverage and repeat rate rather than pretending efficiency is fixed.

Do you rebuild the store or just run ads?

Both, where it earns its keep. If checkout leaks at 70% and shipping cost appears on the final step, more traffic is expensive. We fix what the data says costs the most first.

Do we own the accounts and the email list?

Yes. Shopify, Merchant Center, ad accounts, Klaviyo and every flow built during the engagement stay in your name. Nothing lives behind a Tack login you cannot reach.

How long until it works?

Feed and checkout fixes show inside 30 days. Owned-channel flows compound over 60 to 90. Structural CAC improvement takes a full quarter because you need enough net-of-returns data to trust the decision.

The bottom line

Ecommerce is an arithmetic business. Contribution margin after shipping and returns sets your allowable CAC, feed quality sets how much of your catalogue can compete, and owned channels are the only place margin improves without more spend. Brands that need the whole reporting layer rebuilt should start with marketing systems.

Book a 20-minute fit call at calendly.com/tack-media-agency/talk-to-an-expert or call 310-620-1141. You will get a real price on that call.

Sources

We lock in.
We scope.
We got you.

Twenty minutes, no deck. Tell us what you're trying to hit and we'll tell you straight whether we're the right team for it.

Talk to an Expert +13106201141