How We Saved $107,000 in Shopify Marketing Spend by Using an App

At INSO.codes, we work with a variety of medium to large-scale businesses, with daily marketing budgets ranging from $10,000 to $150,000. Many of our clients are DTC brands based in the US, and over the years, we’ve seen firsthand how critical it is to keep a close eye on every detail as teams and businesses scale.

A missed detail that cost us $10,000

A few months ago, we experienced something that most growing businesses eventually face: a small mistake that ended up being expensive. In this case, a QA oversight. A tiny detail got missed during a routine process, and by the time we caught it, $10,000 had already been spent without generating any return.

It was frustrating. We realized that as teams grow and more people handle different parts of the business, it's surprisingly easy for things to slip through the cracks. The bigger the team, the easier it becomes for these small details to get lost, and before you know it, those losses can add up.

A need for better monitoring

After that incident, we knew we had to change how we monitored our clients’ conversion rates. We needed a system that could provide real-time updates and flag issues before they spiraled out of control. We tried different solutions—tools like Hyperping and Status.io—but they weren't fully integrated with Shopify. They required a lot of workarounds and custom setups, which didn't give us the level of confidence we needed.

That’s when we came across Alertly Shopify App. Unlike the other tools, it was much more tailored for Shopify stores, which meant fewer headaches for us in the setup and better insights into the user journey on our clients' websites.

When the warning signs paid off

In Aug 24, we had an interesting incident that proved its worth. One of our clients had been running a promotion where customers would receive a gift item with every purchase. Everything was going smoothly until the night of August 21st, when the gift item unexpectedly went out of stock due to a supply chain issue.

No one noticed at first. The logistics team didn’t flag it beforehand, and we were not ready for it.

Three hours later, Alertly detected an unusual dip in the site's conversion rate. It immediately flagged us through Slack and SMS. Normally, we might not have noticed something like this until the morning, but because of that notification, we were able to act quickly. Our team removed the out-of-stock product from the checkout process, and by doing so, the website went back to functioning normally.

Had Alertly not flagged the issue, it’s hard to say how much money we could have lost by the time anyone noticed. We estimated that we avoided wasting $107,000 in marketing spend that night, money that would have gone toward campaigns driving traffic to a checkout process that wasn't working.

Lessons learned

What struck me most about this incident was how easily something like this could have gone unnoticed. When you're managing a business with so many moving parts—marketing, logistics, promotions—it's hard to stay on top of everything. Without a reliable system in place, it's inevitable that things will get missed.

In our case, having a tool like Alertly in place helped us catch the problem before it could spiral out of control. It wasn't some grand strategy or perfectly executed plan that saved us that night; it was simply a small piece of technology doing its job and alerting us when something seemed off.

For us, this was a reminder that even the best-run teams can benefit from a little extra help, especially when the stakes are high.

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