E-commerce
Ablyon builds automation and performance marketing for ecommerce brands in the US and UK. Order exception handling, returns triage and catalogue operations as agentic workflows, alongside paid run on creative volume. Both are measured against contribution margin and repeat purchase rather than first-order ROAS.
Two things quietly cap an ecommerce brand. Creative production that cannot keep pace with how fast ads decay, and an operations team spending its week on the small percentage of orders that go wrong: the address that will not validate, the split shipment, the return that needs a decision, the supplier who confirmed nothing. We automate the second and industrialise the first, then work on the repeat purchase that decides what you can afford to pay for a customer.
Where ecommerce growth actually stalls
Four constraints that show up once a store is past its first plateau. Two are in the ad account and two are in the warehouse.
Exception handling eating the operations week
Most orders are untouched by a human and a small minority consume the entire team: address validation failures, split and partial shipments, stock discrepancies, supplier non-confirmations, returns that need a judgement. We build the workflow that reads each exception, resolves the ones with a defensible rule, and escalates the rest with the context already gathered. The gain is labour, and past that it is consistency: the same case stops being decided differently depending on who picked it up.
Creative fatigue outrunning production
Performance decays on a schedule now. A winning ad has a life measured in weeks, and the account producing four concepts a month will always be beaten by the one producing twenty. We build a creative pipeline sized to the spend, with a named hypothesis per concept, so every loss still returns information.
First-order ROAS as the only number
Optimising exclusively for first-order return caps you at customers who buy immediately and cheaply. We model contribution margin including the second and third order, which usually shows more headroom on acquisition cost than the ROAS target allowed, and that some of your best cohorts looked unprofitable on day one.
Catalogue work that scales with SKU count
Product data entry, description writing, attribute tagging, image alt text and feed hygiene grow linearly with the catalogue and get skipped first when the team is busy, which is why merchandising and search both quietly degrade. We automate the generation and the validation, grounded in your actual product data, with review on anything the workflow is not confident about.
Questions
What ad spend do you work with?
For the paid side, enough monthly that creative testing reaches significance. Below roughly ten thousand a month the constraint is usually the offer or the product page, and we will say so. The automation work has no spend threshold, only a volume one: it pays back on repetition.
Do you build on Shopify?
Yes, and on headless architecture in front of it where the storefront needs more than a theme allows. We work on the conversion path either way: product pages, cart, checkout and post-purchase. Full builds and replatforms are in scope, not just optimisation of what you already run.
Can automation handle returns decisions?
The rule-defensible portion, yes, and that is most of them. Policy-clear cases resolve automatically with the reasoning logged, edge cases escalate with the order history, photos and policy context already assembled. Where a decision has a real cost or a fraud signal, it goes to a person by design.
How do you handle attribution?
We reconcile platform-reported conversions with your store data and, where spend allows, an incrementality test. Platforms grade their own homework, so we do not make budget decisions on their number alone.
Do you do influencer and creator work?
Yes, and for ecommerce it often produces the ad creative as well as the reach. Creator content frequently outperforms studio work in the feed, so we treat the two budgets as one.