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A Shopify marketing agency should be able to explain how it will acquire customers, improve your store's buying experience, and bring shoppers back. If you are hiring in Los Angeles, location can make collaboration easier. The more important question is whether the team's experience matches your products, economics, and stage of growth.
This is Adnetix Media's practical selection checklist for ecommerce founders. We are based in Los Angeles, California, and work across Meta Ads, Shopify, Klaviyo, and Google Ads.
Start with the problem you need solved
Write down your main constraint before requesting proposals. A store with qualified traffic and weak sales needs a different plan from a store with healthy conversion and too few visitors. A brand with repeat-purchase potential may need email automation alongside customer acquisition.
- Not enough qualified traffic: ask about campaign strategy, creative production, and audience testing.
- Traffic without purchases: ask about product pages, offers, mobile usability, and checkout testing.
- Customers rarely return: ask about post-purchase communication, segmentation, and retention.
- Conflicting reports: ask how the team reconciles channel reporting with store orders.
Ask these six questions before signing
1. What comparable ecommerce work can you show?
Look for relevance beyond an impressive revenue number. Ask about product price, the starting situation, services delivered, reporting dates, and which results the agency can actually support. A campaign for inexpensive impulse purchases may not translate directly to a considered jewelry purchase.
2. Who does the work, and what is included?
Get clear ownership of account management, creative concepts, design, copywriting, landing pages, tracking, and email. If an agency only manages media buying, establish who supplies the ads and fixes the website. Otherwise, a promising strategy can stall between vendors.
3. How will you judge performance?
Ask for an example report and the decisions it would inform. Shopify offers marketing reports with different attribution models; the model affects how sales credit is assigned. That is a good reason to ask agencies to label their reporting assumptions. Shopify explains its marketing attribution models here.
Your review should also cover order volume, customer acquisition cost, returns, and whether the business can afford the growth. A high reported ROAS alone does not answer those questions.
4. What happens in the first month?
Request concrete deliverables: account access review, baseline reporting, a tracking check, prioritized store improvements, and a creative test plan. Ask how the agency will choose what to test first and what would make it pause or change direction.
5. What does the full engagement cost?
Separate management fees from ad spend, creative production, software, and development. Ask about minimum commitments and handover. A lower management quote is not necessarily less expensive if essential work sits outside the scope.
6. Will we retain access and ownership?
Agree on ownership of your store, advertising accounts, customer data, and creative deliverables. Establish how access will be granted and removed and what documentation you receive if the engagement ends.
When does a Los Angeles agency help?
A shared time zone can simplify approvals and working sessions. Local production can also matter if your plan requires an in-person product shoot. Confirm those capabilities explicitly; a Los Angeles address does not automatically include production services.
For an online store selling nationally, campaign targeting should follow customer demand and fulfillment coverage. Hiring a local agency does not mean your ads should target only Los Angeles.
Bring a useful brief to your first call
Prepare your store URL, main products, recent performance, current ad spend, margins or target acquisition costs, email setup, and biggest obstacle. Ask the agency to explain the next decision it would investigate, rather than promise an outcome before seeing the business.
Review Adnetix's ecommerce work, explore our marketing services, or tell us about your store.