Ecommerce and D2C brands · Retail
Stop paying more for the first order than the first order is worth.
The dashboard says 3.8x return on ad spend. The bank account says something else. Meta counts a view from four days ago and Google counts the same order again. Neither knows what the product cost to make, pick, pack and ship back when it came home in a returns bag.
In one paragraph
Ecommerce marketing is arithmetic before it is creative: what a customer costs to acquire, and what they are worth before the second order. Sales is the part most agencies skip, from abandoned checkouts and subscription cancellations to wholesale and corporate accounts. GullySales works on both, the acquisition arithmetic and the orders that stall after the cart.
Most brands do not have a traffic problem. They have a second-order problem. The first sale is bought at a loss on the understanding that the customer comes back, and then nothing is built to bring her back. Meanwhile Amazon takes a growing share of the revenue and keeps the customer's email address. So the brand buys more traffic, discounts harder, and wonders why a good month leaves nothing behind.
How buyers decide
How ecommerce and D2C brands are chosen.
A first-time customer rarely goes looking for your brand. She sees a video on Instagram or TikTok and does not buy. Two days later she searches the brand name to check whether it is real, and reads reviews on the product page and on Reddit. Then she looks for the same product on Amazon, because delivery is free and returns are painless. If your listing there is worse than your site, or missing, you have paid for a sale someone else fulfilled.
What closes the order is boring and specific. The price with shipping shown before checkout. Whether the size guide is believable. How returns work. Whether a real person answers a question about a sensitive skin ingredient. For considered purchases such as furniture or a mattress, the gap between first visit and order runs into weeks, and email is what carries the customer across it.
The second purchase is decided differently again. It comes from a product that worked, a post-purchase message that arrived when she opened the box, and a reorder prompt timed to when the product actually runs out. Brands that treat the first order as the finish line buy the same customer twice. Wholesale buyers are a separate audience altogether, and they judge you on margin, minimum order and whether your brand sells through without a discount.
The problem
What usually goes wrong for ecommerce and D2C brands.
What owners tell us on the first call, in their words.
“The platforms report a profit and the accounts show a loss”
Meta and Google each claim the same order. Nobody has put the cost of goods, shipping, payment fees and returns against a cohort of customers to see what an order actually left behind.
“Every customer is a first-time customer”
The repeat rate is low and nobody knows the real figure. The email list is large and gets a campaign when someone remembers, with no flow running after a purchase.
“The ad account is starved of creative”
One video is working, it has been running for eleven weeks, and performance falls off every Friday. The founder is shooting the next one on a phone between other jobs.
“Amazon is most of the revenue and we own none of it”
The fees rise, a competitor has tacked himself onto the listing, and the brand cannot email a single one of those customers because it never had their address.
“Discounting is the only lever anyone pulls”
Sales slow, so a code goes out. Customers learn to wait for it, full-price orders shrink, and the margin that was meant to pay for acquisition has gone.
“Returns are eating the category nobody checks”
One size in one colour comes back again and again. It never shows in the ad report, so the brand keeps buying traffic for a product that loses money on arrival.
“The wholesale enquiries sit in an inbox”
A buyer from a regional chain asked for a line sheet in March. Nobody sent it, because the whole team was pointed at paid social.
What we do
What we do for ecommerce and D2C brands.
Everything included for ecommerce and D2C brands, and the result each part is there to produce.
The real number, per order and per cohort
Cost of goods, shipping, payment fees, returns and advertising set against orders by month of acquisition, so you can see what a customer is worth by day 90.
Result: Spending decisions are made on contribution, not on platform ROAS.
Flows built before any more campaigns
Welcome, abandoned checkout, browse abandonment, post-purchase, replenishment and winback written and set live in Klaviyo, each with its own offer logic.
Result: Revenue arrives from people who already know you, at no extra media cost.
A creative production line
A weekly batch of static and video concepts built from reviews, questions and objections, briefed and produced so the ad account never runs on one tired asset.
Result: The account has something new to test before the winner fatigues.
Product pages that answer the objection
Size guidance, ingredients, shipping cost, returns and the comparison a customer is silently making, written onto the page instead of buried in an FAQ tab.
Result: More of the traffic you already paid for turns into orders.
Amazon and marketplace housekeeping
Listings, images, backend keywords and sponsored ads kept current, with the brand registry and listing hijackers watched rather than discovered months later.
Result: The marketplace stops being a leak you cannot see.
Returns and discount discipline
A monthly look at returns by product, size and colour, and at how much of the month's revenue moved at a discount, with recommendations that sometimes mean dropping a line.
Result: Money stops going to products and codes that never paid.
Wholesale and corporate order follow-up
Line sheets prepared, retail and gifting enquiries answered the same day, buyer outreach on Faire and by email, and every account tracked to a reorder.
Result: A second revenue line grows without another dollar of ad spend.
A monthly report against the baseline
Blended efficiency, contribution margin, repeat rate, flow revenue and wholesale orders, reported every month against the baseline recorded before we start.
Result: You can tell a good month from an expensive one.
How the result is measured
- Blended marketing efficiency against contribution margin
- Acquisition cost by channel, and first-order margin
- Repeat purchase rate within ninety days
- Revenue from flows against revenue from campaigns
- Abandoned checkouts recovered
- Wholesale and corporate accounts opened and reordering
Recorded as a baseline before work starts, then reported every month against it.
Worth a page and a campaign of their own
First-order contribution margin · Repeat purchase inside ninety days · Email and SMS flows rather than campaigns · Abandoned checkout and browse recovery · Subscription retention and cancellation saves · Amazon listing quality and sponsored ads · Google Shopping and Performance Max feeds · Creative volume for paid social · Product page and size guide conversion · Wholesale, bulk and corporate gifting orders
Priority campaigns
Campaigns for what ecommerce and D2C brands most want to sell.
Each one planned around when your buyers decide, and measured against the baseline.
Peak season planned backwards from margin
Black Friday and the December run built from what each product can afford to give away, with the inventory, the flows and the creative ready weeks ahead.
Result: The busiest month leaves money behind instead of just volume.
The second-order push
A sequence aimed at the window after the first delivery, offering the product that is actually bought next rather than a blanket discount on everything.
Result: The customer you bought at a loss finally becomes profitable.
Subscription save and win-back
A cancellation flow that offers a pause, a swap or a longer interval before it offers money off, plus an approach to subscribers who left three months ago.
Result: Fewer subscribers leave, and some of the ones who did come back.
Lapsed customer reactivation
A campaign to buyers who have not ordered in six or twelve months, split by what they bought, with a reason to return that is not another code.
Result: A dormant list produces orders instead of sitting there as a vanity number.
Wholesale and gifting season outreach
Outreach to independent retailers and corporate gifting buyers ahead of their buying season, with a line sheet, minimums and lead times ready to send.
Result: Bulk orders come in while the direct channel is quiet.
Beyond search
Where we reach buyers of ecommerce and D2C brands, beyond Google.
Search matters, but it is rarely the only way this industry's buyers find a supplier.
Independent retailers and buying platforms
We prepare the line sheet and work the buyer outreach on Faire and by direct email, then follow each account through to whether it reordered.
Corporate gifting and bulk buyers
Companies buying a hundred units for a conference behave nothing like a consumer. We build a separate enquiry route, a quote format and a follow-up routine for them.
Creators and affiliates
Outreach, briefs and tracking for creators who actually sell, with the FTC disclosure requirements written into the brief rather than left to the creator.
Marketplaces beyond Amazon
Walmart Marketplace, TikTok Shop and category marketplaces each have their own terms and their own economics. We test one at a time and report what it returned.
Customers as proof
A review and photo programme run after delivery, with consent recorded, feeding the product pages and the advertising with something real to show.
Who it is for
This is written for these ecommerce and D2C brands.
- Single-product and founder-led D2C brands
- Apparel, footwear and accessories brands
- Beauty, skincare and personal care brands
- Supplements, food and beverage brands
- Home goods, furniture and higher-value considered purchases
- Subscription and replenishment brands
- Brands selling on Amazon and their own Shopify store
- Wholesale-first brands building a direct channel
- Brands past their first million with no in-house marketing team
Not for
It is not the right fit if.
- You want a guaranteed Google ranking or a guaranteed number of leads. Nobody honest can promise either.
- You need enquiries by next week and have nobody to answer them.
- You want posts and reach reported, not enquiries and orders.
How it works
From your first message to the first monthly report.
No open-ended retainer. Each step has a point in time and something you receive.
01 · Day 1
Free audit call
45 minutes with whoever handles your enquiries: how they arrive, how fast they are answered, where they are lost.
02 · Within a few working days
Written, scored report
Six areas scored, fixes ranked by return and cost. If you want our help, the scope and fee come with it, in writing.
03 · Before work starts
Baseline recorded
Enquiries by source, reply time, conversion and cost per order, written down so every later month has an honest comparison.
04 · Month 1
The first fix goes live
Usually the cheapest one on the report: reply time, a follow-up sequence or the marketing-to-sales handover.
05 · Every month
Report against the baseline
What moved, what did not, and what changes next, in plain words.
06 · Month 3 to 6
Renew on the numbers
The term ends and you decide whether to continue from the results. No twelve-month lock.
How the work runs for ecommerce and D2C brands
- 1
Work out the actual numbers
The free audit call goes through cost of goods, shipping, returns and ad spend against orders, and tells you what your first order is really worth.
- 2
Stop the losses first
The flows that were never built, the product page that loses the order, and the line coming back in a returns bag. None of this needs more media spend.
- 3
Feed the channels properly
A steady supply of creative, a clean product feed, and marketplace listings that match the quality of your own site.
- 4
Open the second revenue line
Wholesale, bulk and gifting enquiries answered and chased, with line sheets and terms ready instead of being written each time from scratch.
- 5
Report on contribution, not on ROAS
A monthly report on what each channel and cohort left behind after costs, set against the baseline recorded before the work began.
Proof
What happened when owners fixed this.
These are Indian clients, with the numbers their published case studies record. We have no US clients yet, and will not pretend otherwise.
Kambar Group
- Situation
- Selling ran on instinct. There was no settled sales process and no objectives concrete enough to measure a month against.
- What we did
- Direction and targets
- The customers researched
- Prospecting and qualification
- Marketing channels developed
- Result
- No numbers were recorded for this engagement. The work is described in full in the case study.
SB Engineering
- Situation
- Buyers searching for laser cutting and sheet metal work in Bengaluru were finding other suppliers first, because the company did not rank for the terms its own customers type.
- What we did
- The site redesigned for mobile
- Search work on the buyer's terms
- Content that shows the work
- Social channels managed
- Result
- Website traffic rose 60% within six months, against a target of 50%.
- High-quality leads rose 45%, with a rise in conversion rates alongside them.
- Fifteen target keywords moved up the rankings, five of them into the top three positions.
Also worked with
Chord Road Hospital · Curtain Label · Difesa Security Services · Felicity Inn · Hands On CSR · Implevista · Kalessi · Kerur Pain Clinic · LL Trust · Lucky Deals · Natural Gases · NavaShakthi Souhardha · NewCom Logistics · Proton Technical Services · Shakthi Foundation · Shakthi Group · Urbanest · Insyde Studio · Venkateshwara Laser Tech · Vivara Studios
Why us
Why owners pick GullySales over an agency.
Marketing and sales, as one job
Most agencies stop at the enquiry. We also fix what happens after it: the reply, the follow-up, the quote and the CRM.
The person on the first call does the work
No account managers in between. You are never handed to someone you have not met.
A baseline before anything starts
Your numbers are written down on day one, so every monthly report compares against something honest.
The fee in writing, split three ways
Our time, your media spend and production on separate lines. You always see what goes to us.
No lock-in, no guarantees we cannot keep
Three to six months at a time. We never promise a ranking or a lead count, because nobody controls those.
Hours that fit your day, agreed up front
Which hours we overlap with yours is settled before any work starts, so you know when a reply is coming and when it is not.
#257, 3rd floor, Sri Nanjundeshwara Complex, Nagarbhavi 8th Block, Outer Ring Road. How we work.
Engagement options
Ways to work with us.
Pick the size of commitment that fits. Every option starts with the free audit.
Option 1
The audit on its own
A 45-minute call and a written, scored report. It says honestly whether you need outside help, and many fixes are ones your own team can make.
Option 2
One fix, scoped
Start with the fix the audit ranks first, such as reply time or follow-up. The fee is in writing before anything starts.
Option 3
A three-to-six-month programme
We run the work month by month, report against the baseline every month, and you renew on the numbers. No twelve-month lock.
Option 4
Guidance for your own team or agency
We plan, brief and check the work of your in-house team or current agency, instead of replacing them.
The offer
Start with a free audit of how you sell.
It is useful on its own, whether or not you hire us.
What you receive
- A 45-minute call with the person who will do the work
- A written, scored report on the six places orders leak, within a few working days
- Every fix ranked by what it returns and what it costs
- The one thing to do first, and why
- An honest line on whether you need outside help at all
- If you do, the scope and the fee in writing
No invoice. No obligation. No sales script.
FAQ
Questions ecommerce and D2C brands ask before they call.
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