Most Shopify stores in Australia do not have a traffic problem. They have a margin problem wearing a traffic problem’s clothes. Spend goes up, revenue goes up, and the owner takes home the same money. That is what “growth” looks like when an agency reports ROAS and nobody looks underneath it. This is the plan we run instead, in the order we run it, so you can hold us to it.
First fortnight: tracking and a margin map
Before a dollar of ad spend moves, we wire conversion tracking properly (server-side where the store warrants it), reconcile Shopify’s numbers against your ad platforms, and build a margin map: landed cost per SKU, postage reality by state, payment fees, returns rate. The margin map decides everything after it. It tells us which products can afford paid acquisition, which ones only make sense as a second purchase, and where your free-shipping threshold is quietly a discount you never planned to give.
Month one: stop the leaks before buying more water
Every store leaks in the same four places. The product page that does not answer the question the shopper arrived with. The shipping estimate that appears too late. The checkout step that asks for something it does not need. The mobile menu that hides the collection people came for. We fix these first because every leak fixed makes every later dollar of traffic worth more, and because it is the cheapest growth you will ever buy.
We measure this in conversion rate by device and by traffic source, not a single site-wide number that averages your loyal email subscribers with cold TikTok traffic and tells you nothing.
Month two: the retention engine
A Shopify store without a working retention engine is a bucket with a hole in it, and paid traffic is the hose. We build the flows that pay for themselves for years: welcome (segmented by what they browsed), abandoned checkout and abandoned browse, post-purchase (the sequence that turns one order into two), replenishment where the product allows it, and win-back for the customers who have gone quiet. We run these in Klaviyo, and we report email as a share of total revenue, because that share is the single clearest read on whether a store is building an asset or renting an audience.
Merchandising sits in this month too: collection order, bundles built from the margin map, the first-purchase offer that recruits customers without training them to wait for sales.
Month three: scale acquisition against contribution margin
Now, and only now, we scale paid. Meta, Google Shopping and Performance Max, TikTok where the creative and the audience justify it, all measured against one number: contribution margin per new customer, with the retention engine’s expected second-purchase revenue counted honestly, not optimistically. ROAS is reported, but underneath it sits the new-customer count and what each one cost after product, postage and fees. If a campaign is producing revenue but not margin, we say so, and we turn it down.
What “good” looks like for an Australian store
Australian e-commerce has its own physics. Distances are long, so shipping promises make or break conversion, and a Perth customer will forgive three days but not a surprise at checkout. Buy-now-pay-later is normal here in a way it is not in most markets, and it tends to lift average order value when it is presented on the product page rather than discovered at payment. The calendar runs EOFY, then the long run-up to Black Friday, then Boxing Day, then a January that is quieter than owners expect. We plan stock, cash and creative around that calendar rather than being surprised by it every year.
Shopify or Shopify Plus?
Plus is worth it when you need checkout customisation, B2B pricing, multiple stores under one roof, or the automation headroom of a store doing serious volume. It is not worth it as a badge. We tell brands honestly which side of that line they are on, and we have moved brands in both directions.
The honest limits
Retention cannot rescue a product nobody buys twice. Paid acquisition cannot rescue a margin that is thin before postage. And no amount of CRO fixes a store whose price is wrong for its market. When we see one of those in the audit, we say so before you spend a cent with us, because the alternative is a retainer that produces reports instead of money.
Australian-owned, Australian-run. Sellevate is headquartered in Geelong, Victoria and owned by the people who do the work. Several of the agencies ranking for this search are UK or US companies with an Australian landing page. Ask any agency where the decisions get made, and in which time zone.
What this costs
A flat monthly fee scoped after the free audit, scoped to your revenue band (see our programs) and stated plainly on the audit call, never a percentage of your ad spend, never a markup on media. Everything in your build plan is live within 90 days or you stop paying us until it is. After that it is month to month. That commitment is on every page of this site because no other agency ranking for this search is prepared to make it.
