Services/industries/Retail

Ecommerce & BrandsSelected engagements

Retail

Ecommerce and DTC brands stuck on a Shopify install that’s outgrown them — and a paid-media spend that stopped scaling six months ago. We treat ecommerce as an integrated channel, not a separate practice.

09industries/retail.ts

our_take_on_retail

Most retail agencies split into camps — the “brand” people who hand off Shopify to a developer, the performance shop that ignores merchandising, the “growth” partner who can’t fix the PDP. We run all of it as one practice. Agent-augmented merchandising, conversion-tuned PDPs, paid media measured against contribution margin (not ROAS theater), and the Shopify or headless rebuild when the platform is actually the bottleneck. The retail brands that compound past $10M typically have one thing in common: their site, their inventory data, and their ad accounts are all telling the same story.

whats_broken_here

Common challenges.

01
Shopify migrations that lost more than they fixed — apps re-installed without the original tuning, custom logic ported badly, SEO equity bleeding out for six months after launch.
02
PDPs that read like spec sheets — every product the same template, no merchandising hierarchy, no answers to the questions buyers actually ask before checkout.
03
Paid scaling hitting a wall — ROAS softens, CAC creeps, and the team can’t tell whether it’s creative, audience, or the post-click experience. Usually two of the three.
04
Email + SMS treated as broadcast — same flow to everybody, no real segmentation, an inbox of unread Klaviyo campaigns that should have been five focused ones.
05
Headless ambitions, monolith reality — leadership wants composable; the team has neither the engineering bandwidth nor a partner who can ship the migration without breaking trade.

how_we_work_in_retail

Our channels applied here.

Agentic Development

Shopify rebuilds, headless commerce migrations, custom checkout tweaks, and the agent-augmented merchandising tooling that lets a lean team run a deeper catalog.

Paid Performance

Meta, Google, TikTok, and retail-media campaigns measured against contribution margin and incrementality — not against the ROAS number the platform reports back to itself.

Content Engineering

PDP copy at catalog scale, email + SMS segmentation flows, and editorial content that compounds search visibility on the queries buyers run before they convert.

SEO / AEO

Category-page SEO, product-schema tuning, and AEO formatting so answer engines route product-discovery queries to your catalog rather than Amazon’s.

how_an_engagement_runs

A typical engagement.

PHASE 01

Commerce audit

Site, paid accounts, email + SMS, inventory data. Find the three biggest leaks — usually a broken PDP pattern, an audience-creative mismatch, and a segmentation gap in flows.

week 1

PHASE 02

Foundation fixes

PDP rebuild, category-page restructure, schema across the catalog. Email + SMS flows segmented. Paid accounts cleaned up — wasted spend killed, working spend reweighted.

weeks 2–6

PHASE 03

Scale

Paid layered on the cleaned foundation. Editorial content for organic compounding. New-product launches built into a repeatable playbook the internal team can run.

weeks 7–14

PHASE 04

Replatform (when needed)

Headless migration only when the platform is actually the bottleneck — and only with a launch plan that protects SEO equity, trade revenue, and the team’s sanity through cutover.

as needed

what_success_looks_like

Catalog

agent_augmented

PDP copy and merchandising rebuilt at scale with agents drafting against a brand-tuned style guide.

Margin

true_north

Paid measured against contribution margin and incrementality — not the platform-reported ROAS theater.

Headless

when_warranted

Composable migrations shipped without breaking trade during cutover — equity protected, not bled.

questions_we_get

Honest answers.

Do you do Shopify or headless?

Both — and we’ll tell you honestly which one your business actually needs. Most brands do not need headless. The ones that do usually know they do, and the question is how to migrate without breaking trade during cutover. We’ve shipped both.

How do you measure paid media?

Contribution margin and incrementality, not platform-reported ROAS. The Meta ROAS number is a closed-loop attribution that flatters itself; we measure against the P&L number that actually funds the business.

Can agents really write PDP copy at brand standard?

First draft, yes — against a brand-tuned style guide, with merchandising context, and inside a structured template. An editor who knows the catalog reviews and ships. Throughput goes up 5–10×; the bar stays where the brand needs it.

What about wholesale, B2B, retail media?

All in scope when they matter. We’ve worked across DTC, B2B ecommerce, marketplace operations, and hybrid models. The principles port; the tactics adapt to the channel mix.

Ready to put The Nine to work in Retail?

next_step

~$nine init --audit

Start with an Insight Genesis audit. Six weeks. Fixed scope. A written diagnosis of where your marketing actually stands — plus a working agent prototype tailored to your business.

Start an audit→↵Book a discovery call⌘ B