About
An ecommerce growth company, not a marketing agency
CartKernel works only with companies that sell products online. We improve the system behind their revenue, from the search result and the product feed to the checkout and the repeat order, and we build the changes ourselves.
What CartKernel is
The kernel is the core of the system
A kernel is the part of a system everything else depends on. In an online store, that is the chain that turns a visit into an order: how products get discovered, how category and product pages present them, how the cart and checkout close the sale, how tracking reports it and how retention brings the customer back.
Most ecommerce growth is sold as channels: an SEO retainer here, an ads account there, a developer somewhere else. Each one optimises its own metric and none of them owns the number the business cares about. CartKernel was built to own that number.
We are engineers, search and feed specialists, conversion researchers, analysts and retention marketers who have spent years inside ecommerce businesses. CartKernel was founded in 2026 by the team behind SearchPod, a Canadian performance marketing agency, to focus exclusively on companies that sell products online. We work with brands across Canada and the United States, remotely and on site where it helps.
Principles
How we decide what to do
The whole system, or nothing
We do not take on one channel for a store whose tracking is broken or whose product pages fail on mobile. The diagnosis comes first and decides the order of work.
Measured in margin
Revenue per session, contribution margin, MER and repeat rate are the scoreboard. Channel metrics are inputs. If a number cannot be reconciled to orders, it does not go in the report.
We ship the change
Theme code, feed rules, tags, Functions, flows. The people who find the problem fix it inside your platform, so nothing waits in a ticket queue for a quarter.
Nothing invented
No fabricated case studies, no ranking guarantees, no promised AI citations. Every claim on this site is something we can show or something we explicitly cannot promise.
Platform-native
Shopify, Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and headless stacks each behave differently. We work with the grain of the platform instead of fighting it with apps.
Technology
Built inside your stack.
Recommendations that wait months for a developer are where growth programmes die. Our team ships the theme change, the feed rule, the tag and the Function ourselves.
Platforms
- Shopify
- Shopify Plus
- WooCommerce
- BigCommerce
- Hydrogen
- Next.js
- Astro
- commercetools
Ads and feeds
- Google Ads
- Merchant Center
- Performance Max
- Meta Ads
- Microsoft Ads
- DataFeedWatch
- Channable
- Feedonomics
Data
- GA4
- Google Tag Manager
- Server-side tagging
- Consent Mode v2
- BigQuery
- Looker Studio
- Search Console
Email and retention
- Klaviyo
- Omnisend
- Attentive
- Postscript
- Recharge
- Yotpo
- Okendo
Infrastructure
- Cloudflare
- Workers and edge functions
- REST and GraphQL APIs
- Webhooks
- ERP, PIM and 3PL integrations
Who we work with
Stores with real volume and real constraints
- Growing Shopify stores that have outgrown a theme, an app stack or a freelancer and need the foundation rebuilt before scaling spend.
- Established ecommerce companies on WooCommerce, BigCommerce or Shopify Plus with a catalog large enough that architecture, feeds and tracking decide the outcome.
- Multi-million-dollar retailers and Plus brands that need checkout, B2B, international and measurement work done by people who ship it.
- Enterprise and headless teams that want an ecommerce growth partner who can work inside a codebase, not just a dashboard.
If you sell products online and growth has stalled or gotten expensive, we would like to look at the store.
How an engagement runs
Diagnose. Fix. Grow. Compound.
Diagnose
The Growth Analysis: visibility, product data, templates, checkout and tracking measured with your data, and every opportunity sized in revenue.
Fix
The leaks that cap everything else go first: tracking, speed, feed disapprovals, index bloat, checkout friction. This is where most stores see the first movement.
Grow
Channels opened in the order the diagnosis supports: category SEO, Shopping, AI visibility, paid search, retention flows.
Compound
A monthly cycle of testing, expansion and retention that turns one-time gains into a rising baseline, reported against margin.
Find the leak.
A free Growth Analysis ranks what your store should fix first, by revenue at stake.