Most advice about hiring an ecommerce marketing agency assumes you already have traffic history. That advice breaks at launch.
An established retailer hands over six months of analytics and asks for optimization. A new store hands over nothing. The agency's "data-driven approach" has no data to be driven by, so the first 90 days are pure judgment calls: category architecture, schema coverage, speed budgets, channel sequencing.
The test that works costs nothing. Send one staging product URL and ask: what is wrong with this page?
A specialist replies within a day naming the missing Offer node, the absent aggregateRating, the variant handling. A generalist replies with a proposal deck. The answer either contains schema property names or it doesn't, which makes it close to unfakeable.
A few things worth knowing before those calls:
- Google documents two separate product structured data classes: product snippets (can't buy) and merchant listings (can buy). Ship the wrong one and you're invisible in every shopping surface Google runs.
- Baymard Institute puts the global cart abandonment average at 70.19% across 14 years. A new store with a broken checkout doesn't lose a percentage point, it loses the launch window.
- The original GEO study (Princeton, Georgia Tech, IIT Delhi) found statistics, expert quotes, and cited sources lift generative-engine citation rates by up to 40%. None of those require domain authority, which is exactly why a week-old store can get cited in an AI answer while it has no chance of outranking Amazon organically.
That last point is the asymmetry most pitch meetings skip entirely. Ask every candidate to state their AI search measurement method in one paragraph. Most still have none, so they quietly leave the channel unmanaged.
The gotcha nobody warns you about: AI engines cache hard. Content we shipped for one client took ~6 weeks to surface in Perplexity citations and longer in ChatGPT. Anyone promising AI visibility in 30 days hasn't done the work.
Full breakdown, including the 6-step evaluation sequence and what the first 90 days should actually contain:
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