Marketing for e-commerce lives or dies on one thing: whether someone can go from seeing your product to buying it without losing patience along the way. I have watched plenty of business owners pour money into adverts, influencers and clever campaigns while the basics of their online shop quietly sabotage every sale. Good marketing for e-commerce does not fix a broken checkout or a confusing product page. It gets the right person to the right page at the right moment, and then gets out of the way.
What actually works in marketing for e-commerce right now?
The channels that consistently earn their keep are less glamorous than most people expect. Email still outperforms almost everything else for repeat purchase, because you own that list and nobody can change the rules on you overnight. Paid search catches people who already know what they want and are actively looking for it. Organic search brings in people who are still deciding, which is why product pages written for humans rather than algorithms tend to convert better over the long run. Retargeting mops up the people who nearly bought but got distracted by a phone call or a toddler before they could finish checking out.
None of this is new. What has changed is how unforgiving the customer has become. Someone who bought from a major retailer that morning expects your checkout to be just as fast, whether you are a two person operation or a warehouse full of staff. Marketing for e-commerce now has to account for that expectation everywhere it touches the customer, not just in the advert that got them there in the first place.
Is pay monthly e-commerce marketing worth it?
This question comes up a lot, usually from business owners who have been quoted a large upfront fee for a website rebuild or an advertising setup and want to know if there is a way to spread the cost. The honest answer is that pay monthly arrangements exist and can work well, provided you are clear on what you are actually paying for each month and what happens if you decide to leave. I would rather a client pays a fair monthly amount for ongoing work than hands over a lump sum for a website that then sits untouched for two years. If you are building or rebuilding a shopfront and want to look at what pay monthly options look like for websites specifically, our sister site Pay Monthly Pro Websites covers that in more detail.
Do you need an agency for marketing for e-commerce, or can you run it yourself?
Neither answer is automatically right, and I say that as someone who runs a consultancy. Some of the online shops I work with already have a marketing team or an agency in place, and what they need from me is senior oversight, someone checking that the strategy actually holds up rather than just producing activity. Other clients have nobody at all doing marketing, and for a smaller operation with a manageable order volume, that is often perfectly fine. In that case I will either set the strategy and coach them to run it day to day, or take it on and run it myself, depending on time and appetite.
What I would push back on is the assumption that you need a big team before marketing for e-commerce is worth doing properly. A one person shop selling a well made product can outperform a business ten times its size if the fundamentals are right and someone is paying proper attention to them, rather than a large team producing activity nobody has checked works.
Signs your current marketing for e-commerce set up is not working
- Your cost per acquisition has crept up steadily for months and nobody can explain why.
- Repeat purchase rate is low even though the product itself gets good reviews.
- Most of your traffic arrives on the homepage rather than the product page it was advertised for.
- Email open rates have been falling and nobody has changed the approach to try to fix it.
How often should you review your marketing for e-commerce strategy?
I tell clients to look properly at what is working at least twice a year, and to glance at the numbers monthly so nothing drifts too far before anyone notices. E-commerce moves fast enough that a channel performing well in spring can quietly stop earning its place by autumn, and if nobody is checking, the budget just keeps flowing to it out of habit. If it has been a while since anyone gave your approach a proper look, our marketing strategy review post covers what that process should actually involve.
Email deserves a special mention here because it is the channel most online shops neglect once the initial welcome sequence is set up. A list you have built yourself, of people who have already bought from you, is worth more than almost any amount of extra ad spend. If you want a fuller look at why this channel keeps outperforming flashier alternatives, I wrote about it in our newsletter marketing strategy guide.
What does good marketing for e-commerce actually look like day to day?
It looks unglamorous. It looks like checking which product pages have the highest bounce rate and rewriting them properly, rather than adding another advert to compensate. It looks like sending a considered email around a seasonal peak rather than a generic discount blast, something I cover in more detail in the piece on seasonal marketing strategy. It looks like pausing an advert that is technically “working” because the sales it brings in are not actually profitable once returns and postage are accounted for.
The businesses that do marketing for e-commerce well are not usually the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones who treat the whole customer journey, from advert to inbox to unboxing, as one connected thing rather than a set of separate jobs handed to different people who never talk to each other. That kind of joined up thinking is what our services are built around.
Which numbers should you actually watch?
Most online shops track far too much and act on almost none of it. The dashboard fills up with impressions, clicks and open rates, none of which tell you whether the business made money this month. A smaller set of numbers, looked at properly, will tell you more than a report nobody finishes reading.
- Profit per order after returns, postage and payment fees, rather than revenue per order. A product that comes back often is a different business to one that does not.
- Repeat purchase rate within ninety days, which tells you whether you are building a customer base or renting one advert at a time.
- How long a new customer takes to pay back what you spent acquiring them. If that period is longer than your cash flow can carry, growth becomes a problem rather than a win.
- The share of revenue that comes from email, because that is the part you own and the part that keeps working when advertising costs rise.
- The single page people abandon most often before buying, which is usually cheaper to fix than any campaign is to run.
Impressions and engagement are not useless, but they belong underneath those, not above them. If a channel cannot be tied to profit, it needs either a clear reason to exist or an honest conversation about stopping it.
How do you stop discounting from eating the margin?
Discounting is the first tool most shops reach for and the easiest one to become dependent on. Run enough sales and you teach your customers to wait for the next one, which turns a full price business into a permanent clearance business. The damage does not show up in the sales figures, which look healthy enough. It shows up in the margin, months later.
If you are going to discount, tie it to something other than a quiet month. A genuine seasonal reason, a bundle that lifts the order value, early access for people on your list, or clearing stock you actually want gone. What I would avoid is the rolling site wide discount that never quite ends, because it removes any reason to buy at full price and makes your advertising work harder for a smaller return each time.
The alternative is less dramatic and usually more effective: better product photography, delivery information that answers the question before it is asked, a returns policy written in plain English, and a follow up email that arrives while the customer still remembers you. None of that costs a share of every order for the rest of the year.
If you want a plain explanation of what e-commerce actually covers as a term, Wikipedia’s overview of e-commerce is a reasonable starting point, though the practical side of running one is where the real work happens and where most of the money is either made or quietly lost.
There is no single trick that makes marketing for e-commerce easy, and anyone promising one is selling you something. What works is attention: to the numbers, to the customer, and to whether the money you are spending is actually earning its place. If you want a second opinion on what is working in your business and what is quietly wasting money, get in touch and we can go through it properly.