Retailerboost ‑ Google Ads

Hello,

Thank you for the honest feedback. You're right, and we're sorry for the poor communication.

Your campaign went live on 5 August. We funded £54.52 of Google Shopping spend from our own budget, which delivered 15,251 impressions and 235 clicks to your store, and it did produce one conversion worth £10.65, on which we charged our 12% commission of £1.27. That is the only money you have been charged for.

On 8 August our system paused the campaign automatically, because the commission coming back was far below what we were spending, and that spend is our money at risk. You got our automated notice on the 10th. What you didn't get was a person answering the entirely reasonable question you asked in response.

On that: our CRM failed to route your messages to a person on both occasions. It's affected several merchants and we're fixing it now. The team working on RetailerBoost is small and we rely on those systems to answer merchants the way we would ourselves, so when they fail silently nobody knows you're waiting. It should not have taken a review to find that.

I'd like to try again properly if you're open to it. Your store and the products we advertised weren't the problem. We're still developing our system and bidding rules. The campaign ran for three days with only one conversion flowing back to Google, so it never had a chance to learn. Longer run, working feedback loop, same terms: nothing upfront, and nothing charged unless we generate a sale. If you'd rather not, I completely understand. Your review found real faults for us to work through in our CRM and bidding system. I'm grateful for your feedback.

It is worth highlighting that we can not guarantee results. There are many variables outside of our control happen after we setup and fund ad campaigns including, search volume and intent, competitor pricing (appearing alongside other results in the carousels), your website conversion rate and more. We can guarantee that we will only ever charge if our ads directly lead to an order being placed on your store.

Kind Regards,
Adam

Thanks for the review. I would rather answer with your actual numbers than with generalities.

Your campaign ran on August 26 and 27. In that time we delivered 8,673 impressions and 256 clicks to www.seedheadexotics.com, paid for by us. Our tracking recorded no orders from that traffic. You mention 159 clicks, which was day one. The campaign kept running into a second day and reached 256.

On your data mining claim: the app holds three Shopify permissions, read_customer_events, read_pixels and write_pixels. It cannot query your customers or your order history, and you can verify that on the app listing. What it does is install a pixel that tracks customer journeys (page views and utm data) and reports completed checkouts: order id, order total, currency and product ids. That is what we need to count an order we drove, report it to our Google Ads account and work out the commission. No names, no email addresses, no shipping addresses and no payment details are ever sent to us. We do not sell data, as set out in our privacy policy, and we are subject to GDPR.

On why it stopped: we fund the ads from our own capital and earn only a commission on orders we drive, so every store is assessed for risk on an ongoing basis. An automated rule paused your campaign once it had bought a few hundred clicks with no tracked orders so that our team could review the campaign configuration before continuing. That is not a surprise clause.

Our what to expect page (https://www.retailerboost.com/what-to-expect) states that if campaigns are not converting we adjust or reallocate rather than keep spending. Clause 12.5 of our terms (https://www.retailerboost.com/terms), which you agree to by using the app, states it more formally: campaign decisions rest with us because it is our capital at risk, and no level of spend, clicks or campaign duration is promised or implied.

We have also updated our systems rule so a store in your position now has its spend throttled rather than switched off if it is burning through the designated learning budget too fast.

You are right that we cannot absorb losses indefinitely. Where the model works we increase spend. Where it does not, we dial back, change the campaign structure and bidding, and try again. As was the case here. What we cannot do is guarantee results, because conversion rate, pricing and average order values sit on your side of the line.

Since you have raised another merchant's review, it is worth addressing the assumption behind it. A generated order from one of our campaigns does not mean we broke even on that store. At a 12% commission we need to generate roughly eight dollars of order value for every dollar of ad spend before we make a single cent. For example spending $50 during a learning period, generates one $60 order, and our commission is $7.20 against $50 of our own money. That is a $42.80 loss on our side. The store recorded a sale and paid the $7.20 - no downside or loss to them.

Nor do we always stop the moment a store costs us money. One merchant using this app has had over 288,000 impressions and 2,600 clicks funded by us in the last 30 days, on an account that is still running at roughly half of break even for us. We are carrying that loss because the data tells us it is worth continuing and we can optimize around it as those clicks are converting into orders.

It is a lot more difficult to keep spending when a store produces no sales at all. At a 1% conversion rate we would have expected two or three orders from your traffic, and at 2% closer to five. We recorded zero conversions from the clicks we sent. I do recognise we are operating on a small set of numbers here but we have to draw a line somewhere for every store in terms of how much risk we are willing to expose ourselves to. It is hard for us to continue to invest into a store when we see zero conversions and a conversion rate that looks to be below 0.5%.

That is what a portfolio looks like. We deploy our own capital across hundreds of stores. Some never pay for themselves and we absorb it, some run at a loss for months while we keep working on them, and the ones that clear the bar get scaled: bigger budgets, wider product coverage, and sustained investment for as long as it keeps working. Being disciplined about the first group is what funds the third. In every case the merchant's downside is zero, because the capital at risk is ours and not yours.

For background, I have spent years in Google Shopping, running this model at scale for merchants across Europe: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/adamsturrock

We also have a performance prediction tool that gives a loose idea of what to expect from our commission based Google Shopping campaigns: https://www.retailerboost.com/tools/performance-prediction

Jannie on our support team has already gone through most of this with you in live chat, and that conversation is still open. If you want to walk through the campaign data together, or try again as we continue to improve the system, email support@retailerboost.com and it comes straight to our team. Alternatively you can book time with me directly here: https://calendly.com/sturrock/intro

Adam Sturrock
RetailerBoost

Edit -

On the clicks: the campaign was live for all of August 26 and all of August 27. Our records show it still enabled at 20:01 UTC on the 27th, one minute before it paused. The clicks that appeared afterward were delivered on the 27th while it was still running. We do not pull real-time figures from Google Ads, and Google's own reporting is not final for up to 48 hours, so a day's traffic routinely lands in reporting after the campaign that produced it has ended. Nothing was added after the fact. You were stopped at 256 clicks, not 159.

Clicks and impressions come from Google Ads and they lag. Orders do not. Our pixel records a completed checkout the moment it happens, in real time, and that is the data the pause decision reads. There was no delay on the number that mattered. There were no orders.

On the other merchant: you are right, and I will not pretend otherwise. Their campaign was paused on August 8 after a sale, because the commission on that sale was a small fraction of what we had already spent on that store. It was the wrong call. Their campaigns have been running again since August 17, every day, including today. They had another sale on August 29 and we have kept funding them since. We have spent many multiples of the commission we earned back on that store and have not recovered it. We are still funding them. Google Shopping is not always the right acquisition channel for every store, sometimes the numbers simply do not make sense and we are willing to pay and find out.

That is the part worth understanding: a pause is not a verdict. Our rules exist for a reason and they are arithmetic, not impatience. A few hundred clicks with no orders already tells us a great deal about whether we will break even on a store, and a few weeks tells us more. While the app stays installed we keep collecting conversion data, and when the data says the position has improved, we try again.

I am sorry it did not work out in this case and you uninstalled before our team got a chance to review the campaign configuration.