The store, the pictures, the ads

What does a Shopify agency do beyond setting up the store?

The store is the easy part; Shopify made it so. The work is everything that decides whether the store sells: product pages written for a buyer rather than a catalogue, photographs that show the thing at the size and angle a buyer wants, a checkout with nothing in its way, and ads that send the right people in. Then the monthly reconciliation of what the ad platform claims against what the store actually took, because the two never agree and you have to know which to trust.

How we set a store up

1. 01

   Start from the purchase

   Which product, from which ad, to which page, to the confirmation. We draw that path first and build the store backwards from it. Seyr's storefront was built this way: structure, product presentation and checkout designed around the purchase, not the portfolio shot.

2. 02

   Shoot the products

   Product photography on white for the catalogue, in context for the ads, with the detail a buyer would zoom for. A store built on supplier photographs looks like every other store selling the same thing.

3. 03

   Write the product pages

   The name, the one line that says who it is for, the sizes, the materials, the delivery time and the return terms, in that order. Questions answered on the page are questions not asked in the inbox.

4. 04

   Connect the ads

   The pixel, the catalogue feed and the conversion events set up before the first ad runs, so Meta learns from real purchases and the store and the ad platform are at least counting the same events.

5. 05

   Reconcile every month

   What Meta says it sold against what Shopify took. The gap is normal; the trend is what matters, and we write it down each month so the ads are judged on the store's number.

Why Meta and Shopify disagree

Every month a store owner opens two tabs and finds two businesses. The ad platform says it drove a number of sales; the store says it took fewer orders in total. Nobody is lying. Meta counts a sale if someone clicked or saw an ad within its window and bought later by any route; Shopify credits the last place the buyer came from. The same order can be in both, and some orders are in neither.

We do not pick a side. We reconcile the two monthly, judge the ads on the store's own figure, and use Meta's number for what it is good at, which is comparing one creative against another. There is a longer piece on the reconciliation in the journal, with the method a store owner can run alone.

Do I need ads to sell on Shopify?

Almost always, at the start. A new store has no one walking past it. Search brings buyers later, once the pages have been found; email keeps the ones you have; ads are how the first buyers arrive. The exception is a brand with an audience already, where the store is the catalogue for a sale that happens elsewhere. For The Gallery the checkout was the DM, so the ads were built to start conversations rather than push a product page, and every campaign to July 2026 returned $5.20–$6 for every $1 spent.

What a store from us always has

• A product page that answers size, material, delivery and returns before the buyer asks.
• Photographs we took, at the sizes the store and the ads each need.
• The pixel and catalogue feed connected before the first ad runs.
• A checkout with nothing added to it that was not tested.
• Your name on the store, the domain and every app. We are staff, not landlords.

What it costs

A store build and the photography are priced per project under Tailored. The ads that feed it are Starter's ads option, at $2,000 a month for Meta on one account with four new creatives a month, with the spend separate and in your own account. Many brands start with the store and the shoot, run ads for a quarter, and add content and search under Standard once the store has shown it can sell.

If your store already exists and the problem is the ads, we say so and skip the rebuild. A new theme has never fixed a bad product page.