E-commerce
ROAS looks great right up until payday
Cost of goods, shipping, fees and returns all sit outside the ad platform’s view. That gap is where stores lose money
The number that matters
A 4× ROAS on a 30% margin product loses money
This is the arithmetic that catches out the most stores. Return on ad spend measures revenue against advertising, and revenue isn’t yours — the product cost, the shipping, the payment processing and the refunds all come out first.
Worse, optimising a whole account to one blended ROAS target actively pushes budget toward your cheapest, lowest-margin products, because they convert most easily. The dashboard goes green while contribution margin falls.
And returns are invisible to the platform entirely. It counted the order; it never saw the refund. In apparel especially, feeding return rates back into channel reporting routinely flips which campaigns look profitable.
Recently changed, widely missed
Your review tool might be breaking federal rules
A great many stores are running review software configured the way everyone configured it in 2021
The Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule
- Effective 21 October 2024. It prohibits buying or selling fake reviews, insider reviews without clear disclosure, suppressing negative reviews, and buying fake social media indicators such as followers or views.
- $53,088 per violation is the maximum civil penalty as of 2026 — and individual reviews can count separately, so the arithmetic gets ugly fast.
- Review gating is suppression. Routing happy customers to a public review page and unhappy ones to a private form is precisely the conduct targeted. Several review platforms still ship this as a feature.
- Enforcement is active. The FTC issued warnings to ten companies over the 2025 holiday period, demanding written confirmation of remediation within five days.
The practical fix is straightforward and slightly uncomfortable: ask every customer, publish what comes back, and answer the criticism in public. Stores that do this usually find the middling reviews convert better than a wall of five stars, because they read as real.
Source — FTC, Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule: Questions and Answers. Penalty figure as adjusted for 2026. General information, not legal advice.
What the data says
Three numbers to hold in your head
$53,088Maximum FTC civil penalty per violation of the consumer reviews rule as of 2026, unchanged from 2025FTC Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule, effective 21 October 2024
$5.42Average cost per click across all industries. Retail typically sits below it — which makes cheap non-converting traffic the real risk, not expensive clicksWordStream, Google Ads Benchmarks 2026
The feedShopping and Performance Max match on feed content, not keywords. Most accounts run an auto-generated feed nobody has ever editedTitles, product types, attributes and images are the ranking surface for Shopping inventory
How we run it
The e-commerce playbook
01
Rebuild reporting on contribution marginCost of goods, shipping, payment fees and returns fed back into channel reporting. Everything else is downstream of knowing which products actually make money.
02
Fix the feedTitles written for how people search, correct product types, complete attributes, images that survive being shown at thumbnail size. This is the highest-return hour in most Shopping accounts.
03
Audit the review programmeCheck whether your platform is gating. Reconfigure to ask everyone, and build a response process for the negatives rather than a filter.
04
Segment campaigns by margin, not by categoryHigh-margin products can afford aggressive bidding; low-margin ones can’t. Grouping by product category rather than by economics is how blended targets quietly bankrupt a catalogue.
05
Build the second purchase deliberatelyPost-purchase sequences, replenishment timing, and a returning-customer path. Selling again to an existing customer is several times cheaper than finding a new one, and most stores run one abandoned-cart email and stop.
06
Do the structural SEO, skip the blogCategory pages targeting real search behaviour, product schema carrying price and availability, faceted navigation that doesn’t spawn duplicate URLs, and mobile speed. That’s where organic revenue is in retail.
What we run for online retailers
Where the leverage is
Conversion rate optimization
Checkout, mobile speed and the returning-customer path — usually worth more than the same money spent buying more traffic.
Shopping & paid search
Feed-first campaign management, segmented by margin so the bidding matches the economics of each product.
Structural SEO
Category targeting, product schema, faceted navigation and speed. The parts of organic that move retail revenue.
Paid social
Demand creation for products people weren’t searching for, with creative built to be watched rather than read.
Review programme
Configured to the current rules rather than the 2021 ones, asking everyone and answering the criticism.
Corunit CRM
Lifecycle email and SMS, replenishment timing and win-back — the cheap revenue most stores leave sitting there.
Good questions
E-commerce marketing, answered
Want to know which of your products actually make money after returns? That’s the first thing we rebuild.
What are the rules on product reviews now?
Stricter than most stores realise. The FTC Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials took effect 21 October 2024 and prohibits buying or selling fake reviews, insider reviews without disclosure, suppressing negative reviews, and buying fake social media indicators. The maximum civil penalty is $53,088 per violation as of 2026, and individual reviews can count separately. The FTC warned ten companies over the 2025 holiday period, requiring written confirmation of remediation within five days — so enforcement isn’t theoretical.
Is review gating still allowed?
No. Sending only satisfied customers to a public review page while routing unhappy ones into a private feedback form is exactly the suppression the rule targets. Many review platforms still ship this as a feature, which is why a lot of stores are running it without realising its status changed in October 2024. Ask everyone, publish what comes back, respond to the criticism.
Why is ROAS the wrong number to optimise?
Because it ignores what the product costs you. A 4× return on a 30% margin product loses money; a 2× return on a 70% margin product makes it. Optimising a whole account to one blended ROAS target quietly pushes budget toward cheap-to-sell, low-margin items. Contribution margin after cost of goods, shipping, payment fees and returns is the number that tells you whether to keep spending.
How important is the product feed?
It’s the single most underrated asset in e-commerce advertising. Shopping and Performance Max match on feed content, so titles, product types, attributes and images do the work keywords do in search. Most accounts we look at run a feed generated automatically by the platform and never touched since — which means the campaign is bidding on a description nobody wrote deliberately.
What is a realistic cost per click for retail?
Lower than most service industries, which means volume rather than margin is usually your constraint. WordStream’s 2026 benchmarks put the all-industry average at $5.42 per click, with retail categories generally sitting well below. The trap is treating cheap traffic as free — at low margins, a large number of inexpensive non-converting clicks does more damage than a few expensive ones.
Should we sell on marketplaces or on our own store?
Marketplaces buy volume and cost you the customer relationship, the margin and the data. Your own store costs more to fill and gives you repeat-purchase economics, email and SMS ownership, and pricing control. Most brands need both, with the marketplace treated as paid acquisition rather than a channel you own. The failure mode is building a business entirely on a platform that can change its fees or its algorithm without asking.
What is the highest-return fix for most online stores?
Usually the checkout and the returning-customer path rather than the top of the funnel. Acquiring a new customer costs several times more than selling again to an existing one, yet most stores spend almost everything on acquisition and run a single abandoned-cart email. Post-purchase sequences, replenishment reminders and a genuinely fast mobile checkout are cheaper and they compound.
Does SEO still matter when everything is paid?
It matters more as paid costs rise, and it’s a different job in retail than in services. The wins are structural rather than editorial: category pages that target how people actually search, product schema so results carry price and availability, faceted navigation that doesn’t generate thousands of near-duplicate URLs, and mobile speed. Blog content is rarely the priority it gets treated as.
How should we handle returns in our marketing maths?
As a cost of acquisition, because that’s what they are. A category with a 30% return rate has an effective acquisition cost far above what the ad platform reports, because the platform counted the order and never saw the refund. Feeding returns back into channel reporting frequently reverses which campaigns look profitable — particularly in apparel.
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