![[headshot] image of customer](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/68be8fb9ed366e671bd0fff9/6946bb725d271db77776ce88_vladislav_kostov_ecommerce_strategy.jpg)
New channels, new tools, new formats, new promises...
In ecommerce, it is safe to say that we are in no lack of growth opportunities. New ones arise constantly and existing ones keep evolving. Paid social platforms improve their targeting options and constantly introduce new creative formats. Search engines change their algorithms (for better or for worse). Influencers and affiliates want budget and commissions. Your CRM needs fresh blood. AI agents enter every conversation.
The result is familiar. Budgets get fragmented. Teams try to do everything. And despite increasing activity, growth starts to slow.
The problem is not a lack of opportunity. The problem is the lack of a clear investment strategy.
When everything looks like a growth opportunity, focus becomes the most valuable asset.
Most ecommerce budgets are not actively designed. They are inherited or created under a certain pressure. Allocations are often based on last year’s structure, internal ownership or external influence rather than current business needs.
Channels keep receiving spend because they always have. New initiatives get funded because they sound promising. Very few investments are stopped decisively. This creates a familiar pattern:
Without a clear framework, budgets drift instead of compounding.
Before deciding where to invest, it helps to recognize what usually goes wrong.
Trap 1: Spreading budget evenly across channels
Equal distribution feels balanced but growth is rarely democratic. One or two areas usually hold most of the upside while the rest dilute focus.
Trap 2: Following benchmarks instead of context
Industry averages ignore margin, product complexity, purchase cycle and team capability. What works for others may actively hurt your business or simply be plain inadequate for your target buyer.
Trap 3: Chasing cheap traffic
Low CPC or CPA look attractive and get promoted by your performance marketing agency and in-house experts. Without looking at source-level conversion, AOV and repeat behavior, cheap traffic becomes expensive growth.
Trap 4: Trusting platform attribution at face value
Ad platforms are designed to credit themselves. When budget decisions rely on platform-native attribution alone, spend shifts toward channels that tell the best story rather than those that drive incremental growth. This often leads to overinvestment in assisting channels and underinvestment in the ones that actually create demand or close sales.
These traps don’t come from bad intent. They come from the absence of strategic prioritization.
We'll address the last trap first because it can drag the entire decision making in the wrong direction. Even strong teams make poor investment calls when they rely on the wrong data. Ad platforms are incentivized to prove their own value. Each one uses its own attribution logic and assigns credit in ways that favor its role in the journey. When decisions are based solely on platform-native reporting, budgets naturally shift toward whoever tells the most convincing story.
This often leads to:
The issue is not data volume. It is a total lack of clarity, leading to data bias.
Strategic investment decisions require an agnostic view of performance across the full customer journey. Multi-touch attribution tools allow teams to understand how channels interact rather than compete and see which touchpoints create demand and which ones close it
Instead of asking which platform converted a sale, the better question is which combination of touchpoints actually moved the customer forward. Tools like Triple Whale and KLAR help ecommerce businesses create a shared source of truth across paid media, website and CRM data. The value is not in the dashboards themselves but in enabling better conversations and better decisions.
When interpretation improves, budget allocation becomes clearer.
Every potential investment should answer three questions:
Does this directly support our current growth constraint?
Are we clear on the strategic interplay between our three growth levers? If conversion is the bottleneck, adding traffic will not solve it.
Can this scale without breaking margin or operations?
Some initiatives work at small volume but collapse under scale. For example, if we do not have the right content creation resources to support a certain marketing channel, we may want to solve that problem first.
Do we have the capability to execute this well right now?
A good channel executed poorly is still a bad investment. Do we have the internal expertise to get the best out of this channel?
If the answer is no to any of these, it is likely not a priority. The right investment largely depends on where the business is today and what is the long-term plan forward.
Early scale often requires focus on product-market fit, demand quality and conversion fundamentals.
Mid scale shifts attention toward efficiency, attribution and repeat purchase.
Expansion phases demand stronger CRM, international readiness and organizational alignment.
Problems arise when businesses invest in future-stage initiatives before fixing present-stage constraints.
High-performing ecommerce businesses share a few traits:
This is where marketing strategy replaces random acts of marketing.
Once investment priorities are clear, the next question becomes unavoidable: do you actually have the right team, skills and processes to execute them well?
Many ecommerce strategies fail not because the decisions are wrong but because the organization is not set up to deliver them. Channels underperform. Tools go unused. Accountability blurs. And good plans stall.
In the next article (coming soon), we’ll explore how to identify team setup and capability gaps that quietly limit ecommerce growth.
And if you want clarity faster, The Scale Plan’s Discover Phase helps you assess where your business stands today and what needs to change before scaling further.
If you’re ready to replace guesswork with focused decisions and build a plan that your team can actually execute, get in touch with us.