The Ecommerce Audit Nobody Runs Until It Is Too Late

An ecommerce audit costs anywhere from a few hundred dollars for one channel to several thousand for the whole business, and mine run from $250 to $1,500. The price matters less than the scope. I read the pages ranking for “ecommerce audit” before writing this, and every one of them audits the website: speed, crawl, product pages, checkout. Not one of them looks at the ad accounts, which for most stores spending on advertising is where the largest controllable cost and the largest errors both sit.

So this is the version written for an owner whose store takes paid traffic: what a whole-store audit should check, the order to fix what it finds, what it costs, and who should not buy one at all. The full price list is on the audits page, with every tier and what it covers.

What does an ecommerce audit cost?

A single-channel audit from me costs $250, both ad platforms together cost $400, and the full marketing audit covering SEO, Google, Meta and three competitors costs $1,500. Each one is credited in full against the first month if you start a retainer within 30 days of the report, so the audit is free if the work follows and you keep the report if it does not.

For comparison, a full marketing audit elsewhere is commonly three to five thousand dollars. That number is not a scandal. A proper audit is days of work by someone who has run accounts like yours. The low price on mine is a deliberate choice to make the first conversation easy, and I say so on the page rather than pretending it is the market rate.

What is an ecommerce audit actually checking?

An ecommerce audit checks whether the money going into the business and the money coming out agree with what every system you pay for says is happening. The website is one of those systems. So are Google Ads, Meta, your analytics, your email platform and the store itself.

Each of them reports on its own work, and each of them has a reason to report generously. Google Ads counts the sales it touched. Meta counts the sales it touched. Your email tool counts the sales that opened an email. Add the three together and it is common for the total to be larger than what the store actually banked. An audit that only looks at one system at a time cannot see that, because each system is internally consistent. The contradiction only shows up when you put them side by side.

Why most ecommerce audits miss the expensive part

Most ecommerce audits are written by web developers or SEO agencies, so they audit what those businesses sell. The pages ranking for this term cover architecture, security, product content, site speed and on-page SEO. All of that is real. None of it is where a store spending $5,000 to $100,000 a month on advertising usually loses the most money.

A slow product page costs you a share of the visitors who land on it. A conversion tag firing twice costs you every bidding decision the ad platform makes for months, because the platform is optimizing toward sales that did not happen. The first is a leak. The second steers the whole budget in the wrong direction, and it is invisible from inside the website.

How do I know if my ads are actually working?

You know your ads are working when the revenue the platforms claim, added together, is close to or below the revenue your store actually recorded from paid traffic. That is the first check I run on any store, and you can do a rough version of it yourself in a few minutes.

1. Pick last month. Pull total revenue from your store admin, not from any ad platform.
2. Pull the revenue Google Ads reports for the same month, and the revenue Meta reports for the same month.
3. Add the two platform numbers together and set them next to the store total.
4. Ask the obvious question. If the platforms together claim most or all of your revenue, and you also have repeat customers, email, organic search and word of mouth, something is being counted twice.

Some of the gap is legitimate. The platforms credit sales differently: Google Ads uses data-driven attribution by default for most conversion actions, which spreads credit across the ads a buyer touched, and it credits the sale to the date of the click rather than the date of the order. Meta does its own crediting on its own window. Two honest systems can both claim the same sale.

Some of the gap is a setup fault. Meta, for example, only treats a sale sent from both the browser pixel and the server connection as one sale when the event name and event ID match on both. If they do not match, every purchase can be counted twice, and the account reports a return that was never real. The audit’s job is to separate the legitimate overlap from the broken setup, because the fixes are completely different.

The audit, layer by layer

A whole-store audit works through five layers, and the order below is the order they tend to matter for a store that advertises.

Most audits sold as ecommerce audits cover the third and fourth rows well. The first row is the one I would refuse to skip, because a mistake there makes every other number in the report unreliable.

Which problem should I fix first?

Fix measurement first, wasted spend second, and everything else after. That order is not about which problem is most interesting. It is about which fix makes the next decision trustworthy.

If the purchase numbers are wrong, you cannot tell whether cutting a campaign helped or hurt, so every change after that is a guess. Once the numbers are right, the spend can be read honestly, and the usual finding is that some of it is buying sales that would have arrived without it. Cutting that part is the cheapest improvement in the whole audit, because it costs nothing to stop paying for something.

The Petticoat Lane account is the version of this I can show publicly: spend down 32% year over year at a better return. Spending less and earning more is only possible when part of the old budget was not doing any work, and finding that part is what an audit is for.

Site speed, product pages and SEO come next. They matter, and they take longer to pay back. Email comes last in the audit only because it is usually the quickest to set right once someone looks. If your analytics are the part you distrust most, the Google Analytics audit post goes deeper on why GA4 and the ad platforms disagree.

Who should not buy an ecommerce audit?

You should not buy an ecommerce audit if you already know what is wrong. An audit that confirms what you knew is money spent on reassurance. Book a call and talk about the fix instead, which is what I would tell you on the audits page as well.

You also do not need the full version if you do not advertise. A store with no paid traffic has no ad accounts to reconcile, and the right starting point is the SEO site audit, which needs no logins at all. And if you only advertise on one platform, the single-platform audit covers the part that matters, because there is no second platform to double count against.

The full audit earns its price in one situation above all: you spend meaningfully on both Google and Meta and you have a nagging sense that the numbers do not add up. Measurement problems rarely sit inside one platform, and checking each one separately misses the contradictions between them.

How long does an ecommerce audit take?

An ecommerce audit from me takes between three and ten business days, depending on the tier. The SEO site audit is three to five days, the account audit five to seven, and the full marketing audit seven to ten. The ad audits sit inside that range and depend mostly on how quickly read access to the accounts arrives.

The credit window runs from the day the report is delivered, not the day you pay, so a longer audit does not eat into your time to decide.

What you should have in your hands at the end

A report you can act on without me, and a short list of what to do first. Specifically:

• Every claim with its number. Not that tracking is broken, but which tag, what it counted, against what the store recorded, on what date.
• Findings in the order they are worth fixing. A list of everything wrong, ranked by nothing, is what a tool produces. The order is most of the value.
• The limits stated as limits. Where something could not be measured with the access available, the report says so rather than estimating.
• What is working, named. So nobody breaks it while fixing the rest.

If the report you are offered does not do those four things, it is a scan with a cover page. That is a fine thing to buy for a few dollars. It is not an audit.

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