ECom ran 24/7.
Nobody walked in.
TOCOBAGA FOR E-COMMERCE - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 2 OF 8
Where did the shoppers go?
Daggers resolved in the fine print on page 8.
Tocobaga is a flat-fee, ROI-focused marketing agency for e-commerce brands. No percentage of ad spend. No auto-renewing contracts. Every asset stays yours. Average reported client ROI: 9.7x gross, 7.8x after fees.*
Where did the shoppers go?
Here is a thing that happens, politely, every night.
The store is open. The ads are running. The carts fill.
Then 69.8 percent of those carts get abandoned - 83.4 percent on mobile (Baymard Institute, meta-study of 49 studies).
Across the U.S. and EU, that is an estimated $260 billion a year in recoverable orders (Baymard/Envive) - recoverable being the operative word.
The abandoned-cart email alone opens at 41.8 percent and converts at 10.7 (Triple Whale 2025).
Email as a channel quietly drives about 30 percent of e-commerce revenue, and automated flows generate roughly 41 percent of email revenue from 5.3 percent of sends (Klaviyo 2026).
Meanwhile returning customers convert at three to five times the rate of new visitors, with 60 to 70 percent higher order values (OwlClaw 2025).
In other words: the cheapest growth is already in your list and your checkout, not in another prospecting campaign.
The old machine could run the store all night. Somebody still has to do the Tuesday: the flow, the offer test, the checkout fix, the winback.
We do the Tuesday, and we measure it in MER and contribution margin - not platform-reported ROAS.
What does the usual agency actually sell?
So the brand hires an agency, and the agency does what agencies do.
It bills a percentage of ad spend, which makes scaling your spend its compensation plan - margin optional.
It reports platform ROAS: homework the platform graded for itself, on an attribution model it also wrote.
It ignores the flows, because flows do not bill media.
It ships a redesign on the agency's theme license, so the store you "own" renews annually like a timeshare.
Every November it discovers BFCM and invoices the panic.
The winback never sends. The welcome series is three emails older than your catalog.
And the contract renews itself in Q4, when nobody is reading contracts.
This is not a scandal. It is simply the standard arrangement.
We would like a word about the standard arrangement.
What changes on a flat fee?
Tocobaga charges a flat fee. That is nearly the whole trick.
When the incentive to inflate your ad spend disappears, spend follows contribution margin instead of the agency's invoice.
The contract doesn't auto-renew, so March has to be earned in February - and BFCM gets planned in August, not billed in November.
The store, the flows, the list, the creative, the data - every asset is titled to you from day one.
If we ever stop being useful, you keep everything and walk.
The monthly letter reads in MER, contribution margin, and repeat rate - platform ROAS appears only as a footnote, where it belongs.
Flows and the base get worked first, because that is where the found money is.
Nobody performs. Nobody pads. If a chart needs a legend, we rewrite the chart.
If that sounds ordinary, ask your current agency for the same sentence.
The next six pages explain how the work is done for e-commerce brands, what it costs, and what it returned. Read on; it is your magazine.
*Resolved in the fine print on page 8. The advertisement continues on page 3.
TOCOBAGA FOR E-COMMERCE - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 3 OF 8
First the macro. Then the micro. Then Tuesday.
Every engagement starts the same way, with a question so old-fashioned it feels avant-garde: where does the money actually come from?
We call the method macro-to-micro.
Macro is the market: who buys, what they pay, which three moves change enterprise value.
Micro is the Tuesday work: the page, the offer, the follow-up email, the review reply.
Most agencies sell the Tuesday work without ever asking the first question. We decline to, on principle and on invoice.
First, the macro.
We audit your operation the way a buyer audits a target - traffic, rankings, list, funnel, reputation - and we price every gap in dollars.
The audit is free, it is specific, and it is occasionally embarrassing.
It ends with three levers, not thirty.
That is the whole macro. It fits on one page. The plan is signed by a person whose name you know. Then the calendar starts.
Then we pick the three levers you actually need, and we ignore the rest.
No brand safari. No six-week runway of workshops. No deck about your "why."
The audit lands as a numbered list, and the numbers are dollars.
Lever one is usually the website, because the website is usually rented, slow, and invisible.
Lever two is usually the flows, because 5.3 percent of sends producing 41 percent of email revenue (Klaviyo 2026) is the closest thing this industry has to found money.
Lever three depends on your plan, which is the point of having one.
Strategy is what we are judged on at the quarter. Execution is what we do before lunch.
Pages get rebuilt. Emails get written. Rankings get taken city by city, like a polite land war.
Reviews get answered the day they arrive, by a person, in English.
None of this is glamorous, which is why it compounds. Glamour is a cost center.
Then, the micro.
Each month you receive a one-page letter in plain English: what moved, what it cost, what it returned.
For a store, the letter reads in MER, contribution margin, and repeat purchase rate - by cohort.
No dashboard tour is required to understand it. If a chart needs a legend, we rewrite the chart.
Month by month, the levers get pulled and the letter gets shorter.
Figure 1. The macro-to-micro method.
Shown actual size. Open all night.
Three levers, priced, sequenced, owned. It is not a philosophy. It is a work order.
TOCOBAGA FOR E-COMMERCE - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 4 OF 8
Open 24 hours. Pixel-perfect inventory. One power cable. Nobody walked in. Detail of the screen: the scanlines, the pixels, the empty aisle.
It gets better when you read the fine print.
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| Tocobaga | The Usual Agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | A flat fee. | A percentage of your ad spend. |
| Contracts | No auto-renew. | Twelve months; renews itself. |
| Ownership | You own every asset. | You rent your own website. |
| Footer badge | Never. | A "Site by" credit, in perpetuity. |
| Language | Plain English. | A jargon moat. |
| Exit | We refer you out. | A hostage negotiation. |
The table is unfair. It is also accurate.
TOCOBAGA FOR E-COMMERCE - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 6 OF 8
Test drive Tocobaga.
[Illustrative composite - verified engagement results to come.]
A direct-to-consumer brand came to us doing respectable revenue on paid social and almost nothing anywhere else, with a blended acquisition cost that had been climbing for five straight quarters.
Every dollar of growth was rented. Turn the ads off on a Tuesday and the store went quiet by Thursday.
We rebuilt the category and product pages for the searches people actually run, put lifecycle email and SMS on the owned list, and separated new-customer from returning-customer economics so the math stopped blending.
[Illustrative composite - verified engagement results to come.]
By month nine the share of revenue arriving without a click charge had roughly doubled, and the brand could name the contribution margin of each channel rather than an average of all of them.
Repeat purchase rate was reported separately from new-customer acquisition, which changed which problem the team worked on first.
Total fees for the year: flat, known in advance. The audit that started it took ten days and cost nothing.
“We were not short on traffic. We were short on traffic that came back.”
[Illustrative composite - verified engagement results to come.]
TOCOBAGA FOR E-COMMERCE - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 7 OF 8
How we work.
Every engagement begins with the free Store Growth Audit: ten to fifteen days, no meeting longer than thirty minutes, no deck about your "why."
We audit your operation the way a buyer audits a target, and we price every gap in dollars.
You receive the findings whether or not you hire us. They are yours. That is the theme.
Then the plan: the three levers you actually need, sequenced, with a flat number attached.
Then the work, in monthly cycles, each closed by a one-page letter in plain English.
We would rather be re-hired than renewed.
We aren't for everyone, and we will say so early. If what you need is an operations fix more than a campaign, or a 3PL more than a marketer, we will tell you and hand you the number of someone we trust. The referral is free. So is the audit.
Headquartered in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida. Clients across the USA.
Some straight answers about e-commerce marketing.
Can you fix our cart abandonment?
We can recover a real share of it. The global average is 69.8 percent - 83.4 on mobile (Baymard) - and the standard fixes are unglamorous: checkout friction, shipping-cost surprise, and a cart-recovery flow that opens at 41.8 percent (Triple Whale). We do those first because they pay first.
ROAS or MER - which do you report?
MER (blended) plus contribution margin. Platform ROAS is self-graded homework; benchmarks like 4.5:1 on Google Shopping and 2.8:1 on Meta (OwlClaw 2025) are context, not truth. The monthly letter shows blended spend against real revenue and margin.
How much should email really carry?
Around 30 percent of revenue is the healthy-brand benchmark, with automated flows doing outsized work (Klaviyo). If your email is under 15 percent of revenue, that gap is usually the cheapest growth on the table.
Why a flat fee?
Because a percentage pays us to spend your money, and we would rather be paid to multiply it. The fee is quoted once, in writing, and it stays put for the year.
Who owns the work?
You do - website, copy, data, list, rankings. If we part ways, everything stays exactly where it always was: with you.
New customers or repeat - where first?
Repeat, almost always. Returning customers convert 3-5x higher with 60-70 percent larger orders (OwlClaw 2025), and top revenue-tier brands convert at 6.29 percent overall (Polar Analytics 2026). We defend the base, then buy strangers.
What is a sane CAC for us?
Industry average sits near $70 with payback targets under 6 months bootstrapped, under 12 venture-backed (Phoenix Strategy Group; Futureproof). We calculate yours by channel and cohort, then cut the channels that never pay back.
Do you run BFCM?
We plan it in August, not November: inventory-aware offers, list warming, flow revisions, and a calendar your ops team signs. The season rewards brands whose Tuesday work started in Q3.
Where does the 9.7x figure come from?
Client-reported gross return across engagements, unaudited and rounded down when in doubt. After fees it is 7.8x. The daggers are resolved in the fine print on page 8.
What does it cost?
A flat number, quoted after the free audit and good for twelve months. Call (813) 934-6605 and we will say it out loud, slowly, in English.
TOCOBAGA FOR E-COMMERCE - SOLVINGHOW.COM - PAGE 8 OF 8
YES - send me the free Store Growth Audit.
Or mail to: Tocobaga, 1327 E. 7th Ave, Suite 2, Ybor City, Tampa, FL 33605.
Soon there'll be just two kinds of e-commerce brands. Those that grow, and those that renew.