Jobs to be done · Agency

How to onboard a new brand as an agency.

New client signed Monday. By Friday, you need a Week-1 baseline report showing current AI visibility, top opportunities, and a 90-day roadmap — in your agency's branding, at your agency's quality bar.

Quick answer

Connect the client's Shopify store via eCommerce Insights agency auth, run the full-catalog scan, export the branded PDF, and deliver a 90-day roadmap from eCommerce Insights's template. Hours, not weeks. See eCommerce Insights for agencies.

How agencies do this without eCommerce Insights

The manual onboarding burns one to two weeks. You ask the client for Ahrefs or Semrush access, or you buy a seat for the project. You run a site audit, pull the schema report, eyeball the crawl issues. You export the Google Search Console data. You manually probe ChatGPT and Perplexity for ten or twelve buyer prompts and screenshot the answers. You stitch three data sources into a Loom walkthrough, write a 12-page PDF, present it.

By the time you deliver, half the client's questions are "what should we actually do Monday?" The audit has answers buried in it, but the handoff is heavy, and the roadmap is implicit. You spend another week turning the audit into a prioritized action list.

Worse, the onboarding doesn't repeat easily across clients. Each agency onboarding becomes bespoke because the tools are generic and the AI visibility angle is specific. You lose margin on every new engagement because the setup eats the first month.

How to do this in eCommerce Insights (the Week-1 SOP)

Day 1: Connect the Shopify store. Send a Shopify Partner connection request from eCommerce Insights. The client approves it inside their Shopify admin; no credentials change hands. Read access is default; write access (schema push) is optional and explicit.
Day 2: Run the full-catalog scan. One click triggers the AEO audit. Every PDP scored, every AI engine queried for hero SKUs, every schema field validated. A 2,500-SKU catalog scans in roughly 40 minutes. You can run it end-of-day Monday and walk in Tuesday morning with fresh data.
Day 3: Identify top opportunities. Filter the scan for the ten highest-revenue SKUs scoring below 60. Layer on the three biggest structural gaps (usually: aggregateRating missing, material metafields empty, llms.txt absent). These become the Week-1 story.
Day 4: Draft the 90-day roadmap. Use the eCommerce Insights agency roadmap template. Month 1: foundations — schema cleanup across the catalog, llms.txt published, robots.txt verified for AI crawlers. Month 2: hero SKU rebuilds for answer-coverage. Month 3: long-tail PDP cleanup, programmatic where possible.
Day 5: Present the branded PDF. Export from eCommerce Insights with your agency logo, your primary color, your footer. Walk the client through baseline, opportunities, and roadmap. Book the first sprint review for Week 2. Done in one meeting.

Typical SOP template for an agency kickoff, shippable to new team members:

Mon: send Partner connection request + kickoff call
Tue: run AEO scan, export raw data
Wed: internal opportunity review, rank fixes
Thu: draft 90-day roadmap, prepare deck
Fri: client presentation, first-sprint kickoff

What "good" looks like

Week-1 deliverable in under 8 agency hours. Down from 20-40 hours on the manual onboarding path.
Client has clarity on three things: current AEO score, top five opportunities, and the next sprint's three fixes.
Branded PDF matches agency quality bar. Not a generic eCommerce Insights export. Custom logo, custom intro copy, custom footer.
Sprint rhythm is established by end of Week 2. First three fixes shipped, first rerun scheduled, client expectation set for the quarterly check-in.
Repeatable across clients. The same SOP runs for the next brand, the next, and the next, with only the scan data changing.

Ask AI about agency onboarding

Have your favorite AI engine summarize this for your specific use case.

Frequently asked questions

How does agency auth work on Shopify without admin credentials?

eCommerce Insights uses Shopify Partner auth. The agency sends a connection request to the merchant, the merchant approves it inside their Shopify admin, and eCommerce Insights gets read (and optionally write) access scoped to what was approved. No admin passwords or credentials move. The client can revoke access anytime. This is the standard Shopify app pattern.

Can I white-label the onboarding report?

Yes. The agency plan includes branded PDF exports. Replace the eCommerce Insights logo with your agency logo; the footer credit line is customizable. Most eCommerce Insights-using agencies present the Week-1 report as an agency deliverable, mentioning eCommerce Insights only in the appendix if the client asks about tooling.

What should be in the 90-day roadmap?

Month 1 focuses on foundations — filling missing schema fields, publishing a valid llms.txt, cleaning canonical tags, adding review aggregates where apps exist. Month 2 rebuilds the top 10-15 hero SKU PDPs for answer-coverage and content depth. Month 3 tackles the long tail programmatically, batching similar SKUs. The ordering matters: foundations first, because they amplify downstream work.

How many brands can an agency manage in eCommerce Insights?

The agency plan supports unlimited brands with shared seats across your team. Pricing scales with total SKU count across all managed brands, not per-brand. Multi-store dashboards aggregate all clients in one view, with drill-down into individual brand performance. Typical agency use: 5-15 brands under active management with the agency plan.

Related jobs

Agency

Related tools

eCommerce Insights for agencies — multi-brand dashboard, branded reports, agency pricing.
AEO Grader — free preview for client pitches and prospect conversations.

See eCommerce Insights on your clients' catalogs.

Week-1 onboarding in hours. Repeatable across every brand you manage.

Start free trial See agency plan