Every ecommerce marketing agency shows you the same slide: ROAS up and to the right. The useful question is what kind of shop they actually are, because "ecommerce agency" covers at least four different businesses, and hiring the wrong kind is the most expensive mistake a DTC brand makes.
The four kinds of ecommerce agency
Platform specialists live inside one channel, usually Meta or Google Shopping, and squeeze it hard. Full-funnel media shops, Brill Media among them, plan and buy across channels: paid social, search and Shopping, streaming TV, retail media. CRO and retention shops work the site and the email list rather than the traffic. Enterprise ecommerce consultancies rebuild the stack for eight-figure brands. Most growing stores need the second kind first: traffic economics that work across more than one channel.
Companies worth knowing in 2026
Among the ecommerce-famous names: Common Thread Collective publishes the category's most useful DTC math; Power Digital and Tinuiti bring full-service scale; MuteSix built its name on Meta-driven DTC growth. On the retention side, agencies built around Klaviyo do the email and SMS work most media shops skip. The right shortlist depends on your bottleneck: if traffic economics are the problem, hire media; if conversion or repeat rate is the problem, hire the shop that fixes that first.
Where Brill Media fits
We are the full-funnel media kind, with a bias toward measurable unit economics: campaigns get judged on contribution after ad spend, not platform-reported ROAS. Our collagen supplements case study shows the shape of the work: paid social and search run against real margin math for a DTC store. And every engagement starts with a $497 Marketing Diagnostic, your store's economics and channel mix returned as a plain-English roadmap in 14 days, before a dollar of ad spend moves.
The questions that sort the list
Ask any candidate: What is my contribution margin after your fee and ad spend, and will you report it? Which channel do you think is my second channel, and why? What happens in the first 30 days? Who actually works my account? Agencies that answer in your numbers beat agencies that answer in their averages.
Shortlisting, practically
Match the agency's center of gravity to your bottleneck, insist on margin-based reporting, and start with a scoped first engagement rather than a long retainer. A good ecommerce agency proves itself inside a quarter; a wrong-fit one costs you the quarter and the learning.