The first month with a new supplier usually goes: a kick-off call, an audit, a strategy deck, an onboarding checklist, and a set of recommendations that begin the following month. You pay for four weeks of preparation and the work starts in week five.
Ours starts in week one, because the preparation already happened. The plan is written before you decide anything, it is free, and it names the fixes in order with the reasoning attached. By the time you say yes, we know what we are doing first and so do you.
So the shape of month one is: build the first fix, measure it, start the second, report. Four weeks, four things, one page at the end. That is the whole rhythm, and it repeats.
This is what each week actually contains, what we need from you, and what a first month cannot do, since the last part matters as much as the first.
Before week one: the plan and the scope
Nothing begins until there is a written plan, and the plan comes before any money changes hands.
It is four pages. Where the revenue leaks, as we can see it from your four numbers and from walking your store. The first three fixes, in order, with reasoning, roughly how long each takes and what we would expect it to move. What we would leave alone, which is often the most useful page. And a scoped quote: a base fee plus growth share for the fixes on page two, month to month.
We write it from the numbers you share and from the store itself. No logins are needed to produce it. If a fix requires a developer, the plan says so rather than implying it is a settings change.
The plan is yours whether or not you work with us. If you take it to someone else, or do it in-house, that is a legitimate outcome and the document is written to be usable that way.
If you go ahead, the scope on page four is what the first month is built from. There is no separate onboarding fee and no ramp-up period to pay for.
A month where we tell you a fix did nothing is a month where the reporting is worth reading.
Week one: the first fix goes in
The first week is the fix at the top of page two, the one aimed at the biggest leak.
What that is depends on your store. It might be putting shipping cost and delivery window on the product page. It might be removing the forced account from checkout. It might be a feed rebuild so shopping ads stop showing for the wrong searches. It might be the post-purchase sequence that does not exist yet.
You see the change before it ships. For anything on the storefront, that means a preview or a staged version with a short note on what changed and why. Nothing goes live on your store as a surprise.
We also set the baseline in the same week, because a fix with no before is a fix nobody can judge. That means recording the numbers the fix is meant to move, at the level it should move them: the step in the funnel, the campaign, the flow, not just store-wide revenue.
Week two: we measure, and we say when it did not move
The second week reads the first. Did the number the fix was aimed at change, and by enough to be a change rather than noise.
Sometimes it is clear within days, particularly for checkout and product page work where the funnel step responds immediately. Sometimes the sample is too thin to say anything yet, and the honest answer is that we need another fortnight. We will say that rather than dress up a small movement as a result.
If it moved, the second fix starts. If it did not, we look at why before moving on. Occasionally the change was right and the measurement was wrong, which is worth knowing. Occasionally the hypothesis was wrong, in which case the plan's order changes and we say so.
This is the week that decides the tone of the relationship. A month where we tell you a recommendation did nothing is a month where the reporting is worth reading. If everything we ever ship works perfectly, you should be suspicious of the reporting rather than impressed by the work.
Week three: the next lever
Week three moves to whatever the plan put second, and it is usually a different lever from the first, because the levers interact.
The practical reason is measurement. Two changes on the same step in the same fortnight cannot be told apart. Two changes on different levers can, because they show up in different numbers: one in the funnel step, one in the flow revenue, one in the feed's impressions.
The second reason is pacing. Some work produces a reading in days and some produces a reading in months. Flows, feed work and search work all need time to accumulate, so they start early and run in the background while faster work happens in front of them.
This is also the week where anything needing a developer gets scheduled, since it is now clear whether it is still the right priority. We do not commission code in week one for a problem we might reorder in week two.
Week four: the report, on one page
The month ends with a report you can read in a couple of minutes. Four numbers: visitors, conversion rate, average order value and repeat purchases. What moved. What we did that relates to the movement. What is next and why.
It is one page on purpose. A forty-slide deck is a way of making a month look busy, and it hides the two lines that matter under a lot of charts. If a number did not move, the report says so in the same size type as the numbers that did.
We compare you with yourself, not with an industry figure. The same store, the same traffic sources, before and after. Where a comparison is affected by seasonality or a change in traffic mix, the report notes it rather than quietly benefiting from it.
And it ends with the decision for next month, which is yours. Because the arrangement is month to month, that decision is real every single month, and the report is what you make it with.
What we need from you
Less than you might expect, but the few things are not optional.
Access to the accounts you already own: store admin at the level the work requires, ad accounts, Merchant Center, analytics and your email platform. Everything stays in your name and access can be removed at any time.
One person who can approve a change to the storefront, and one who can approve budget. They can be the same person. What does not work is an approval chain where every page edit waits a fortnight, because that turns a month of fixes into a month of queuing.
Product economics: gross margin by line, shipping costs, and return rates if returns matter in your category. Without those, any advice about budget is arithmetic performed on the wrong number.
And an hour a week, roughly. Enough to look at what is going live, answer questions about your products that nobody outside the business can answer, and read the report at the end. Stores that give the work an hour a week get noticeably more out of it than stores that give it none.
What a first month cannot do
Some things do not fit in four weeks, and it is better to say so now than to imply otherwise.
Search work does not mature in a month. Product and category pages usually take longer to move, and competitive terms take longer again. It starts in month one because the clock has to start somewhere, not because it reports in month one.
Repeat purchase work runs on your product's own schedule. If customers reorder every ten weeks, a flow built in week three tells you something in month three.
Small stores have small samples. If you take a few hundred orders a month, a fortnight of data cannot separate a modest improvement from an ordinary fluctuation, so some judgements have to wait, and we would rather wait than guess loudly.
And nothing here is a promise about a revenue figure. What we commit to is the work, the measurement and the honesty of the report. The month to month arrangement is what makes that commitment mean something: if the numbers do not move, you are free to stop, and we would rather that than a contract holding the work in place.