How much should I spend on ads — and when should I run a sale instead? Every guru answers the first question. Merchint answers both, from your actual Shopify data: real margin, real LTV, real sell-through. No platform bias. No guesswork.
Shopify order data is the only truth. Not what Google claims. Not what Meta reports.
Google won't tell you to move budget to Meta. Meta won't tell you to scale Google. Every report you read is written by a company that earns more when you spend more on their platform. You have no neutral advisor.
Every guru calculates max CPA from theoretical gross margin — RRP minus landed cost. Real life has refunds, payment fees, shipping, discounts, and clearance events pulling C-grade stock at 30% margin. They never distinguish between a store where 60% of revenue is repeat customers and one where every order is a first purchase. The same formula applied to two different stores produces two completely different levels of risk.
Daily exports. Pivot tables. VLOOKUP across three platforms. By the time you've assembled the picture, it's yesterday's data in today's market. You're making decisions slower than your competitors.
Google and Meta have the best customer-finding engines ever built. They learn and improve the longer and more consistently you spend. The problem isn't the platforms — it's not knowing what you can safely spend.
Merchint earns the same whether you spend on Google or Meta. The recommendation is based on your data, not platform incentive.
Growth Runway calculates the precise daily spend point where acquisition turns unprofitable — from your actual orders, your real COGS, your real overheads. Updated every sync.
When results drop, most founders cut budget. But if your spend is already within your ceiling and ROAS is falling, the problem isn't the budget — it's the creative. Merchint's dynamic model separates the two: when spend needs to come down, it says so. When spend is right but performance is off, it tells you to look at your ads, not your budget.
What Merchint sees vs what platforms report
Both platforms claim credit for the same sales. Shopify recorded what actually happened. The 2.6x blended number is the one your business needs to act on.
Every dollar you spend is compounding
The platforms learn from your ad spend — what creatives convert for your product, which audiences return, what time of day performs. That learning lives on their servers and makes their algorithms smarter about your customers. Merchint captures the other side: what those dollars actually produced in your store. Your data. Your economics. Compounding.
No analyst required. No agency markup. No waiting for a monthly report that's already a week out of date.
Shopify revenue divided by total ad spend — across Google and Meta together. Not platform-reported. Not last-click. What your business actually earned per dollar spent.
All plansRevenue minus everything: ad spend, COGS locked at time of sale, shipping, payment fees, fixed overhead. The real number left over. Updated daily from live Shopify orders.
All plansThe exact daily spend ceiling where acquisition turns from profitable to loss-making — calculated from your real economics. The answer to "how much can I spend?" No formula required.
All plansTrue cost per new customer, real LTV from purchase history, and payback period. Not industry benchmarks — your actual numbers from actual orders.
All plansOne specific recommendation — scale this campaign, send this email, clear this stock — with the evidence from your own data. One-click to approve. Logged with before/after metrics.
All plansEvery acted-on recommendation is timestamped with before and after metrics, then fed back into the next AI recommendation. Platform depth on Analyst, campaign depth on Media Buyer, ad-set depth on Manager.
All plans"This is what I've been searching for for nine years running two ecommerce businesses."
James Fletcher · Founder, Merchint & Owner, Lulu Funk
Verified by his CA wife.
I have two ecommerce businesses. For nine years I ran them the same way most founders do: daily CSV exports, pivot tables, VLOOKUP between Shopify and Google Ads and Meta Ads, hoping the numbers would tell me something useful before the market moved.
I paid agencies to build me reports. The reports were always last week's data, formatted to justify their fees. I bought analytics tools. They showed me attribution models that disagreed with each other and couldn't tell me whether I was profitable today.
The question I kept asking — how much can I actually spend on ads right now? — nobody could answer cleanly. Not Google. Not Meta. Not the agency. Not the spreadsheet.
So I built Merchint. One dashboard, your real Shopify data, your real costs, your real ceiling. Daily. No exports. No pivot tables. No agency markup on information you already own.
Start with the Analyst. Promote them when the numbers alone aren't enough and you want actions.
Stop overspending — even when margins are tight.
For founders running paid ads who want clear visibility on what's actually profitable.
Know which campaigns to scale, pause, or fix today.
For founders and operators making daily decisions across multiple campaigns.
Daily profit decisions across every campaign, ad set, and market.
For founders running mature ad accounts at scale across multiple markets and creatives.
Billed through Shopify · Cancel anytime · Your data stays intact if you change plans
No. Merchint works with whichever platforms you use. Connect Google only, Meta only, or both. The blended dashboard adapts to whatever you have connected. Shopify data syncs regardless.
Attribution tools try to answer which ad caused which sale — a debate that never resolves. Merchint answers a different question: is your business profitable today, and how much can you spend? Those are more useful questions for most founders.
Google and Meta both claim credit for your sales — often the same sale. Your blended ROAS is calculated from what Shopify recorded, divided by your total ad spend. Not platform conversion value. Actual orders. That's the number that matters.
Merchint reads your variant costs from Shopify and locks them at the time of each sale — so your historical margins are always accurate even if you change costs later. If you haven't set variant costs, the dashboard shows what's possible once you do.
It watches the parts of your business you can't keep your eye on while you're running it. CPM creeping up across your campaigns. A high-performing variant going out of stock while you're still spending on it. ROAS softening in one market while another holds. A platform telling you to hold budget while the real issue is something you already know about — new creative, a logistics delay, a product change. It tracks trends across spend, acquisition cost, contribution margin, and stock signals, then surfaces the one thing that matters most today. You approve or skip — it never touches your accounts without you.
Merchint is built for founder-operated Shopify stores running Google or Meta ads — whether you're spending $500 a month working out if your unit economics stack up, or $50k a month trying to stay across the whole picture. Most founders are either flying blind or drowning in noise. Merchint gives you a smoothed view of your profit position — so you can move without overreacting to daily spikes, and still catch the movements that actually matter.
Yes. Manager tier and above includes performance breakdown across all your markets — NZ, AU, US, or wherever your customers are — included in the base price. You see LTV, CPA, and spend performance split by customer country, so you know which markets are profitable and which need attention.
Every order, every ad dollar, every product cost — sitting in Shopify and your ad platforms. Merchint reads it and tells you what it means. Install in two minutes.
Billed through Shopify · Cancel anytime in two clicks · No spreadsheets required
Merchint