The starting point

Small Planet is an established outdoors retailer in Queenstown. Strong walk-in trade, good product knowledge, and a website that was doing about $30k a year in online revenue: present, but not really a store. The gap between the in-store experience and the online one was wide, and the instinct was to close it with ad spend.

We didn't start with ads.

What we did

The first phase was the site itself. We worked through the BigCommerce build systematically: site structure, product data, photography requirements, checkout friction, and the small copy and UX decisions that add up to whether someone finishes a purchase or bails. The work was unglamorous, iterative, and took most of the first few months. Only once the conversion rate was moving in the right direction did we start running Google Ads.

From there, the programme ran for 18 months in total, with ongoing CRO iteration alongside the paid search account. Each round of changes fed the next. The team stayed close to the data and we kept making small calls rather than waiting for a big insight.

Results

Online revenue passed $300k inside 12 months. The site that had been a $30k-a-year brochure became a genuine sales channel, and it got there without the ad spend doing work the site couldn't support.

What made it work

Ads pour water into whatever bucket you have. If the bucket has holes, more water just means more waste. The right order is: fix the conversion rate, then scale spend. We knew that going in, held the line when the pressure to run ads early came up, and it paid off. Ten times the revenue, and most of it earned before the first ad dollar went out.