From Zero to a Million: The Order I Would Build a Store In

By Brennan Lunin, Founder at BL AdWorks

There is no growth playbook that produces a million dollars. If there were, everyone who read it would have one, and the person selling it would not need to.

What there is, is an order of operations. Most stores that stall did the right things in the wrong sequence, and paid for traffic before they had anywhere worth sending it.

Here is the order I would go in, and what I would refuse to do at each stage.

Stage 1: Prove somebody wants it

Before any ad spend at all. The only question here is whether people who find you buy.

You need a small amount of traffic from anywhere honest, friends do not count, and you need to watch what happens. If your conversion rate on real cold traffic is dismal, no ad budget will fix that. It will just buy you more people to disappoint, faster and at a higher cost.

What I would refuse to do at this stage: scale ad spend to “get more data”. You have data. It says the page does not convert.

Stage 2: Fix the store before you buy traffic

Every dollar of ad spend is multiplied by your conversion rate. Buying traffic into a store that converts badly means paying full price for a fraction of the value.

The things that matter most, roughly in order:

• Shipping cost visible on the product page. Baymard’s checkout research consistently finds unexpected extra cost at checkout is the top reason people abandon. Do not put your worst news at the most expensive moment.
• Enough images that nobody has to imagine anything: hero, scale, in use, detail, what arrives in the box.
• A buy box that works on a phone, tested on a real phone, on cellular data.
• Trust signals next to the button, not in the footer.

What I would refuse to do: a redesign. A redesign is what people buy when they cannot find the actual problem.

Stage 3: Capture the email before you spend on the click

This is the step that gets skipped, and skipping it is why so many stores plateau.

If you send paid traffic to a store with no email capture, you are paying to rent an audience and then giving them back. The person who did not buy today is gone, and you paid for them.

A signup form, and a welcome flow that actually delivers what it promised, immediately. One check: if your storewide banner already shows a public discount code to every visitor, your signup form is asking for an email in exchange for something you already gave away. Fix that first or the form will not work.

What I would refuse to do: buy traffic before this exists. You will pay for it twice.

Stage 4: Now buy the traffic

One platform, not two. If people search for what you sell, Google. If they have to see it to want it, Meta. Splitting a small budget across both gives each too little data to learn from.

And know your line before you start: breakeven ROAS is one divided by your gross margin. At 40% margin you need 2.5x just to break even. Anything below that is a subsidy you are paying your customers, no matter how good the dashboard looks.

WordStream’s 2026 data, drawn from about 13,000 real search campaigns across 23 industries, has cost per click rising for 87% of industries. Assume it keeps getting more expensive, and build accordingly.

What I would refuse to do: judge the channel on a benchmark from a blog. Judge it on your breakeven and on your own last 90 days.

Stage 5: Make the second purchase happen

This is where a store either compounds or grinds.

Klaviyo’s benchmarks across 183,000+ brands report that flows drive about 41% of email revenue from 5.3% of sends, with click rates of 5.58% against 1.69% for campaigns. Flows win because they fire when a person does something, rather than because it is Thursday.

The six: welcome, browse abandon, cart abandon, checkout abandon, post-purchase, win-back. For consumables the post-purchase flow is the one that changes the business, and it is the one most stores treat as a receipt.

Here is why this stage is what actually unlocks scale. If a customer buys once, you have to win the ad auction profitably on a single order. If a customer buys three times, you can outbid the competitor who only gets one purchase, on the same click, and still make more money than they do.

Retention is not the reward for growing. It is the thing that lets you afford to.

Stage 6: Only now, add complexity

A second ad platform. SMS. A loyalty programme. A subscription. Whatever.

Everything at this stage is an optimisation of a machine that already works. Adding any of it earlier is decoration on a thing that does not run.

What I am not going to give you

Revenue milestones with timelines attached, or percentages for what each stage “typically” adds. I went looking for defensible numbers on this and the honest answer is that they do not exist: the figures floating around contradict each other and cite nothing.

Your path depends on your margin, your price point, your category, and how often anyone would reasonably buy your product twice. A blog post cannot know any of that.

What a blog post can tell you is the order. Prove demand, fix the store, capture the email, buy the traffic, earn the second purchase, then get clever. Doing those in a different order is the most common expensive mistake in ecommerce, and it is entirely avoidable.

Sources: Baymard Institute checkout research. WordStream 2026 Google Ads Benchmarks. Klaviyo email marketing benchmarks.