How to find ecommerce clients: a guide for CRO and growth agencies

To find ecommerce clients for CRO work, filter a store database for brands with about 500 or more orders a month, live paid ads and a recent change such as a new theme, find the founder or head of ecommerce on LinkedIn, and open with a specific finding about their own store that they can check on a phone. Referrals from clients and partner agencies were the top 2 sources of new business for agencies in 2025, so build them alongside outreach.

CRO and growth agencies win ecommerce clients in 3 moves: they choose brands with enough orders to test, reach the person who decides, and open with a finding about the brand’s own store that its team can check on a phone.

Prospect pipeline has been the most pressing challenge in Agency Management Institute’s Agency Core study for 3 years running. Most of the signals that show whether a brand fits CRO work are public, so a strong list can be built before anyone is contacted.

Which brands fit CRO work

A brand fits CRO work when it has enough orders to test, pays for traffic, runs on a platform you know and has a recent reason to change. Choose a niche before you build the list. In AMI’s companion Agency Edge study of 400 client side decision makers, 67% said a niche gives an agency an advantage, while 46% of agencies said they had strongly committed to one. A niche can be a vertical, a platform such as Shopify Plus, a size band or a market.

Treat signals 1 to 3 as required, and the rest as reasons to contact a brand this month. The order threshold comes from Intelligems, a testing vendor, which says a store doing 500 or more orders a month has enough volume to run meaningful tests, and that a test with 10,000 sessions and 50 orders takes a long time to give a result, so estimate orders.

Store Leads says it tracks 3,163,099 active Shopify stores, each with its creation date, estimated monthly sales, theme, pricing plan and installed apps, with the date of each install.

Meta’s Ad Library contains every active ad shown across Meta’s apps, and anyone can search it. For ads delivered to the UK or the EU, it adds the dates each ad ran, its targeting choices and its total reach. The help page lists no spend figure for commercial ads, so use the number of active ads and how long they have run as the signal.

Where to find ecommerce clients

Each channel costs time, money or both, and yields a different kind of lead, from a warm introduction to a list of domains.

Referrals and partner agencies

Referrals from clients and from partners were the top 2 drivers of new business for agencies in 2025, in SparkToro and Paddy Moogan’s State of Digital Agencies survey, and 15% of agencies named partner referrals their top driver. Retention, Shopify build and paid media agencies work with the same brands, so a partner without a CRO service can refer that work to you, and you can refer email, builds or ads back. Agree in writing what each side refers, how fast you reply to an introduction and any referral fee. Ask each client, when a project has worked, for 1 introduction. Costs: your time, plus any fee you agree. Yields: introductions to brands that already trust the person introducing you.

Partner directories and programmes

The Shopify Partner Directory lets merchants filter partners by service, including conversion rate optimisation, by location and by tier. A guaranteed listing needs the partner programme’s Plus tier or above, which Shopify’s eligibility page sets at $500,000 a year of revenue to Shopify from merchants acquired in the last 5 years, or $2.5 million from merchants you collaborate with, plus at least 2 Plus or 40 Standard shops.

Klaviyo’s agency directory lists only Silver, Gold, Platinum and Elite partners, and brands filter it by service, budget and location. Testing and subscription tools run their own, such as Convert’s, which lists 176 experimentation and CRO agencies, and Recharge’s. Costs: none of these pages shows a listing fee, and the tiers take client revenue and time to reach. Yields: enquiries from brands already looking for help.

Store and technology databases

To find Shopify clients that match the fit signals, filter a store database by platform, plan, country, apps and estimated sales. Store Leads does this from $75 a month, with exports and API access from $250 a month. BuiltWith is free for single site lookups, and its plans, from $295 a month, add lead lists, technology history and estimated revenue for ecommerce sites. Costs: the plan. Yields: a list of stores. Store Leads gives only non personal contact details and connects to other vendors for named people.

Finding ecommerce clients on LinkedIn

Use LinkedIn to find the people behind the stores. Sales Navigator adds more than 50 search filters and 50 InMail messages a month, with the Core plan from US$119.99 a month or US$1,079.88 a year. Search for founders, heads of ecommerce and growth leads at brands in your niche, save those that pass the fit signals, and read their recent posts and job listings before you write. Among social platforms, 73% of agencies in the SparkToro survey said LinkedIn worked best for new business.

LinkedIn’s User Agreement bans bots and other unauthorised automated methods to add contacts or send messages, and software that scrapes profiles, so write and send each message yourself. Costs: the licence and your time per message. Yields: names and context, without an email address.

Contact data and enrichment

Contact databases add names, titles and emails to the stores on your list. Apollo has a free plan with 900 credits per seat a year, and paid plans from $49 per seat a month billed annually. Clay runs enrichment and prospecting workflows in tables, with a free plan of 100 data credits and 500 actions a month and a Launch plan at $185 a month, or $167 a month billed annually. Verify every address before you send and record where each contact came from, because UK and EU data rules apply to named people. Costs: the plan and its credits. Yields: named people and addresses to check.

Agency marketplaces

On Clutch, buyers request quotes, read client reviews and shortlist agencies by budget, industry and location. A basic profile is free, the Verified tier costs $499 a year, and advertising is priced on a call with a 12 month commitment. Costs: free to $499 a year, more for placement. Yields: requests from buyers who are comparing several agencies.

Content and events

Published work builds trust before the first contact. In Agency Core 2026, 48% of the group AMI calls Confident Differentiators build trust with prospects before first contact, against 8% of the group it calls Pressured and Uncertain. Speaking at events and conferences rose from 6th to 4th among sources of new business in the SparkToro survey. For a CRO agency, useful pieces are specific: a test with its numbers and what changed, or a checklist a brand can run on its own store. Costs: hours each week, for months. Yields: brands that arrive knowing your work.

Opening the first conversation

Open with a finding about the brand’s own store that its team can check on a phone in a minute: a time, a page and what happened, found through the public path any customer uses. Demonstrating differentiation is joint second among the challenges in Agency Core 2026, and a finding of this kind shows what your agency notices before it asks for anything.

Instantly, a cold email platform, reports in its 2026 benchmarks, from its own data, that 58% of replies arrive on the first email of a sequence, so put the finding in the first email.

1. Choose a page paid traffic reaches

• The page behind a live ad. Find the brand in Meta’s Ad Library, open the ad’s link and check the product, price, offer and stock on a phone. The morning check for ad landing pages covers it in full.
• The mobile product page. Run it in PageSpeed Insights, which shows field data from real Chrome users over the previous 28 days. A Largest Contentful Paint over 4 seconds counts as poor.
• The pop up and its code. Sign up, wait for the welcome email and try the code on a sale item at checkout. Auditing a prospect’s email and SMS without a Klaviyo login gives the full method.
• Basket and checkout. The shipping cost, delivery date and payment options shown before payment.

2. Use it as a customer, on a phone

Use only the paths any customer has. Record the time, the device and a screenshot at each step. Open ads from the Ad Library’s link instead of clicking them in your own feed, so that the brand doesn’t pay for your visit. Stop at checkout without paying, and never enter invented payment details.

3. Write the finding so they can check it

Write 1 sentence with the time, the page and what happened, and attach the screenshot. Leave out judgement words and revenue estimates, which the brand’s team can work out from its own numbers. Check the page again on the day you send, in case it has changed.

4. Send it from your own name

Send it to the founder or the head of ecommerce from your own address, say in 1 line who you are and what your agency does, and offer 1 next step. A follow up a few days later can carry a second finding.

By hand, each brand needs a phone, a new email address for any sign up, a sheet and up to 48 hours of checking the inbox, so the hours grow with every brand on the list. Obsession’s Funnel QA for CRO agencies uses AI agents that follow a brand’s live ad as new customers, sign up through the pop up and take the code to checkout, then report what happened, with proof.

Qualifying and the first call

Confirm the fit signals before the call, then use the call to test what public sources could only estimate. Ask about what has happened, with numbers:

• Orders and conversion. Orders a month, conversion rate by device and average order value.
• Testing so far. What they tested in the last 6 months, with which tool, and what they learned.
• Who ships changes. A developer, an in house team or another agency, and how long a change takes to go live.
• Recent changes. The last theme, app or checkout change, and anything that broke after it.
• Who decides. Who signs, who else has a say, and the budget range.
• Dates. Their code freeze, Black Friday on Friday 27 November 2026, and their next agency review.

A brand below about 500 orders a month, or with no one to ship changes or sign, suits a fixed price audit or a later call. End every call with a dated next step: a scoped audit built on the ecommerce CRO audit template, or a short test plan.

The pipeline sum

Work back from the clients you want to the prospects you need to contact, using your own records for each rate. Where you have none, start with a published benchmark and replace it after a quarter.

1. Clients to sign = new clients you want this quarter + clients you expect to lose.
2. First calls needed = clients to sign ÷ your close rate from first call.
3. First calls from outreach = first calls needed, minus the first calls referrals, partners and inbound brought last quarter.
4. Replies needed = first calls from outreach ÷ the share of replies that become a first call.
5. Prospects to contact = replies needed ÷ your reply rate.

The reply rate is the 3.43% average in Instantly’s 2026 benchmarks, where the top quartile reaches 5.5%. At 5.5%, the same agency needs 727 prospects, about 56 a week, so a reply rate about 2 points higher removes 439 prospects from the quarter. A higher close rate on first calls lowers every line after it.

Consent and privacy basics

Rules for cold email to businesses differ by country. This is not legal advice, so check your own case with a lawyer.

• United States. The FTC’s CAN-SPAM guide says the law makes no exception for business to business email. Use accurate sender details and subject lines, say the message is an advertisement, include a valid postal address and honour an opt out within 10 business days. Each email that breaks the law can carry a penalty of up to $53,088.
• United Kingdom. The ICO says you can email any corporate body, such as a limited company or an LLP, if you don’t conceal who you are and you give a valid address to opt out. Sole traders and some partnerships count as individuals and need consent. Emailing a named employee can still raise data protection questions, and the ICO says this guidance is under review after the Data (Use and Access) Act.
• European Union. The GDPR says direct marketing may be regarded as a legitimate interest (Recital 47), and Article 21 gives every person the right to object to it, which you must point out in your first message at the latest. Email rules for businesses vary by country. In Germany, section 7 of the Act against Unfair Competition treats advertising email sent without the addressee’s prior express consent as an unacceptable nuisance, for businesses as well as consumers.

Ways to find clients compared

Several of these cost only time. We make Obsession, which does some of this, so every line about another tool is taken from that tool’s own pages, checked on 23 October 2026.

For an agency that writes to 10 to 20 brands a quarter, the by hand method and a Store Leads or BuiltWith list cover the work, with Sales Navigator or Apollo for the people. An agency whose referrals fill its calendar needs none of the paid tools. Partner directories suit agencies with a record on the platform.

Limits and next steps

Allow for these 5 points before you act on a list or a finding.

• Database figures are estimates. Store Leads and Similarweb estimate sales and visits, so confirm orders on the call.
• Ad libraries show no spend for commercial ads. A budget is an inference from the number of ads and how long they run.
• A finding covers 1 moment. The brand may fix it the same day.
• A fit is a starting point. Budget, timing and who decides only show on the call.
• Benchmarks are averages. Replace every borrowed rate with your own after a quarter.

This week, choose a niche, build a list of 50 brands that pass signals 1 to 3, check the page behind a live ad at your top 10 and send 5 messages. Many stores freeze code from about 20 November, before Black Friday on Friday 27 November 2026, so work agreed now is likely to start after the sale or in January.

Questions about finding clients