Worked scenario · budget planner
An online shop's £750 a month
By Oliver Wakefield-Smith, Digital Signet. Updated July 2026.
At the 2026 US retail median of $4.14 per click LocaliQ, 2026 data, a $750 Shopping budget buys 181 clicks and about 7 orders. Whether that is good news depends entirely on your margin per order, so this page works the budget forward to orders, then backwards from margin to the click price you can afford.
Budget to orders
The dataset row is Shopping, Collectibles & Gifts, the closest category to a general online shop. Figures are USD as sourced; £750 divides the same way against your own measured CPC.
Lot 01 · retail median, USD
Both the CPC and the 4.01% conversion rate are the category medians LocaliQ, 2026 data. The same $750 is worked on Amazon vs Google Ads with the same result, deliberately: one set of numbers across the site. Category detail on the ecommerce benchmark page.
The margin bridge
Run the maths in reverse and the median gets demanding. To break even at a $4.14 CPC and a 4.01% conversion rate, each order must carry $103.24 in profit, because break-even margin is CPC divided by conversion rate. Flip it round: with £20 profit per order, an illustrative figure for you to replace, the affordable click is tiny.
Lot 02 · what your margin affords
That gap is the whole ecommerce PPC problem. You close it by raising average order value, improving the conversion rate above the category median, or promoting only high-margin lines. Set your own ceiling in the break-even calculator, pre-filled with this scenario.
When to test Amazon instead
Commodity products that people habitually search on Amazon convert harder there, because retail intent arrives wallet-open. Amazon publishes no click rates and no benchmark clears our sourcing bar, so the honest move is a capped test against your Google numbers: the decision framework is on Amazon vs Google Ads and the platform mechanics on the Amazon Ads page. Service-business version of the same maths: the plumber scenario.