7 NOVEMBER 2026 · 3 MIN READ · BEN FILDES
Why your Shopify store has three suppliers and no growth plan
Part of Shopify store growth →
Walk into most food and drink stores doing £100,000 to £500,000 a year online and you find the same cast. A freelancer runs the Google Ads and sends a monthly report with a return on ad spend in it. Somebody, often the owner, sends the emails. The agency that built the Shopify site is on a small retainer and answers tickets. Each of them is doing their job. The store is flat.
This is not a story about bad suppliers. It is a story about a job nobody was given.
How it happens
Stores accrete suppliers the way houses accrete extension leads. The site got built, so there is a web agency. Ads needed running, so a freelancer was found. Email was "easy", so it stayed in-house. Each decision was sensible on the day.
Three years on, the ads freelancer reports a 3.1x return. The email open rate is 29%. The site has 99.9% uptime. All three reports are green, and the store sold less this month than last.
The gaps between channels
The money leaks in the joins, because every channel depends on the other two and nobody is looking at the joins.
Ads without flows. The freelancer scales Shopping and the first orders arrive. The welcome, abandoned basket and reorder flows are half built, so the first order is the only order. Every pound of ad spend buys a customer once. Why the second order decides whether ads pay.
A site change without the ads knowing. The agency moves the delivery promise below the fold in a theme update. Conversion on paid traffic drops a third. The freelancer sees the return fall, assumes it is the auction, and cuts bids.
Email without a target. A 29% open rate is a fine number with no meaning. Is it bringing back the people who bought in September? Nobody has asked, because the person sending it is also running the warehouse.
No break-even. The return on ad spend is judged against a round number someone chose years ago, not against the margin of the products being sold. How to work out the real break-even.
What it costs
The cost is not the suppliers' fees. It is the growth that does not happen because nobody is paid for it.
A store converting at the UK food and drink average of about 1.5% of sessions, with ads at a return just below break-even and no reorder flow, is a store that runs flat forever while every report says fine. The 2026 conversion benchmarks, and which one to trust.
The arrangement that fixes it
Not another supplier. One plan.
One target, agreed first. Before anything changes, a revenue and return target for the next quarter, worked out from the store's own margins, that everyone is judged against.
Every channel in one plan. A new campaign is planned with the flows that follow it and the product page it lands on. A site change is planned with the ads that send traffic to it. Email is planned around the reorder window of the products that sold.
One report, every month. Against the target. What moved, what did not, what changes next.
One person to call. Who owns the number, not a channel.
That is what we do for food and drink stores. We took The Original Biltong Company from £96k to £265k in 12 months by rebuilding the Google Ads, the search, the site and the email and SMS, and running them as one plan. Your ads account, your store and your list stay yours; we work inside them with the access you give us.
Keep who is working
If your ads freelancer is good, say so on the call and we work out where they fit. The point is not to replace people. It is to give the store the job nobody had.
The audit is free: every channel, written up before we speak, and the three changes we would make first. Yours to keep whether or not we work together.
Sources
Conversion: IRP Commerce UK index, food and drink, July 2026. Result: The Original Biltong Company, £96k to £265k in 12 months, our own client. Read November 2026.
Questions people ask
- Is hiring a Shopify agency worth it for a small store?
- It is worth it when the agency owns whether the store grows, not just one channel. Most small stores already have an ads freelancer, someone on email and the agency that built the site, and nobody responsible for the number. Adding another supplier does not change that. One plan, one target and one person to call does.
- Why are my Shopify sales flat when every report looks fine?
- Because each supplier reports their own channel and nobody reports the store. The ads freelancer shows a return, the email person shows an open rate and the web agency shows uptime. The money leaks in the joins between them, such as ads that buy first orders with no flows behind them to bring the second.
- What should a Shopify growth plan include?
- One target for the next quarter, worked out from the store's own margins. Every channel planned together, so a campaign comes with the flows that follow it and the page it lands on. Then one report against the target every month, and one person who owns the number.
- Do I have to replace my ads freelancer?
- No. If your freelancer is good, the job is to work out where they fit in the plan. The point is not to replace people but to give the store the job nobody had.
This is one of the long answers behind shopify store growth. If you would rather we ran it for you, book a 1-to-1 and we work out your numbers live.
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