September in review — the biggest month on record, and the new site build is underway
September booked $231K across 187 orders, beating June's $219K for the best month MPS has had. That is 2.5× last September. Year to date, revenue is up 53.9%. Our side of the month had two parts. Monthly support took 5.5 hours. The new Flexible Marketing Plan bucket for the site rebuild took 12 hours, covering planning, the staging environment and a sales-tax exemption bug.
The month at a glance
What drove the month
Booked revenue by month
Bigger orders, mostly from new accounts
This month's growth came from order size more than order count. Orders rose 53% year over year while the average order rose 63%. The median order rose too, from $500 to $629, so the increase isn't down to a few outliers. The largest order was $10,116, a softwall cleanroom, at 4.4% of the month.
97 accounts bought for the first time, worth $139K across 103 orders. That is 60% of September revenue. Only June (103) brought in more new accounts.
Repeat accounts brought in $92K across 84 orders, or 40% of revenue. August's share was 48%. Reorders held steady, but new business grew faster.
Return by campaign, September
Gloves needs a review
$25,785 in paid media was 6% above August. It has tracked $122K in conversion value so far, a blended 4.7x. Read that as a floor. August was published at 7.5x on 1 September and has since grown to 8.0x as late conversions posted.
Gloves is the outlier. Across Google and Bing it spent $4,376 and was credited with $1,650, after 1.4x in August. But glove sales on the site were $27.2K across 40 orders, the best glove month this year. So either the ads aren't driving those sales, or they are and aren't getting the credit. A campaign review will tell us which before we change the budget.
Leads were the soft spot. 70 quote and contact submissions against 90 in August, putting cost per lead at $368 (August: $269). Another 28 general "Request a Quote" submissions came in that the dashboard doesn't count yet.
New site build — where it stands
Flexible Marketing Plan bucket
$2,757.50 used (16 hours) through 1 October. That is $2,017.50 in September plus the 4-hour attribute and data-planning session today. Rebuild work and the store fixes that came up this month are drawn from this bucket. Routine maintenance stays in monthly support.
Done so far
Plan agreed and budgeted. We held rebuild meetings on 11 and 18 September. The plan and budget were shared with you, and we tested templates and data against real products.
Staging is live. The site has been backed up and copied to staging, with the Ollie block theme installed. The rebuild happens there while the live store keeps trading.
The product data has been measured. Of 2,085 products, 983 have a PDF datasheet attached and none have structured spec fields yet. 89 attributes are in use. Five are clean enough to filter on today (Cleanroom Class, Warranty, ESD Safe, Wiper Edge, Sterility). Material, Thickness and Length need consolidating first. Material alone has 85 different values.
How launch works: the new theme and plugins go onto the live database. Products, orders and customers never move, so your team can keep editing products throughout the build.
The build sequence from here
Foundation
Plugin consolidation: remove overlapping and dead plugins before anything is rebuilt on top of them. Header and footer: shared on every page, so they set the look for everything after. Bringing old pages in: move the existing content pages across from Divi.
Primary templates — attributes first
The templates read their filters and spec tables straight from product attributes, so the attribute cleanup comes first. Once Material, Thickness and Length are consolidated, we build in this order: Product details → Categories → Shop → Home page. The attribute plan has its own working session and document.
Custom categories
Purpose-built category pages, using the attribute filters from step 2. These come last because they depend on the category template and on clean attribute data.
What we worked on in September — monthly support, 5.5 hours
Product datasheet index 1.75 hrs
We built a temporary admin tool that lists every product with a PDF attached (SKU, product, document link) and checks for dead links. It lets us measure the datasheet and attribute work above.
Sticky mat minimums 0.25 hr
Some sticky mat variations lost their Add to Cart button. When a variation is deleted and re-added, it loses its minimum-quantity settings. The repair time went to the plan bucket (above).
Maintenance & plugin updates 2.5 hrs
Two passes, one mid-month and one at the end of the month. Each pass covered a backup, plugin updates and a WooCommerce template review.
Site copy for staging 1.0 hr
We backed up and copied the site, then added Ollie to the staging copy. This is the first step toward the rebuild environment.
One ask
A review of the Gloves campaign
We'd like to go through the Gloves campaign with you before changing the budget. We'll look at which glove products and search terms the spend is going to, how they compare with what actually sold in September, and whether glove buyers who first came in through an ad are coming back to reorder directly. If the ads aren't doing the work, we cut or restructure. If the problem is credit, we fix the tracking and leave the budget alone. We can cover it in tomorrow's meeting.
What the numbers can and can't tell us
Where September's purchases were attributed
Read the dashboard this way
WooCommerce is the number. GA4 saw $221K of September's $231K, or 95%, which is healthy. $114K of September (61 orders) is still processing or on hold. A small share of that usually cancels.
Leads now come straight from the forms. As of 30 September the dashboard counts each submission on the site's forms, and the numbers in this brief match it. That count is lower than the GA4 figures used before, so August is restated below. The general "Request a Quote" form (28 in September) isn't on the dashboard yet.
Organic is still softening. Search Console clicks are down 19% year over year for 1–26 September. Impressions are level, the first month that hasn't been down. Tracked keywords in the top 10 slipped from 12 to 11, and those showing an AI Overview rose from 28 to 33 of 41. The category and product templates in the build are the main fix here.
What FAME measures. It is one composite score for how visible MPS is each month. It adds up ad and search impressions, social views, email opens, AI mentions, new reviews and new backlinks, with the rarer signals weighted more heavily. September's jump to 865K came mostly from backlinks: Semrush counted 479 new ones in three weeks. Impressions alone are up about 7% year over year.
October
Maintenance & support 2 passes
Two passes, as every month: backup, plugin updates and template review, mid-month and end of month, plus any support that comes up.
Site build: foundation plan bucket
Plugin consolidation, header and footer, and bringing the old pages across. Attribute consolidation runs alongside, so the primary templates can start as soon as the foundation is done.
Sales tax: past orders & accounts open
The fix and its settings are agreed. What's left is reviewing past orders where an exempt customer was charged tax, and updating the existing exempt accounts so they're handled correctly from here on.
Worth doing while you're there sales-side
Last month's nudge list worked. LigentCom and Advanced Thin Films both reordered. Neuralink ($48K lifetime) hasn't ordered in 58 days, and Torrent Photonics ($26K) is at 28 days. In all, 41 repeat accounts are 25–45 days past their last order, worth $126K in lifetime revenue.
Parking lot
Updates to the data & dashboard
Partly done. Leads now come straight from the forms. Still open: tracing the 43% of orders landing in Direct or Unassigned, and tying quote requests through to booked revenue.
Category-level keyword research
Research across the 59 product categories would inform category naming and which filter combinations get their own pages. Both are decided during the custom-categories phase, so if we do it, it should be before step 3.
September spend
Monthly support hours
Maintenance, the datasheet index, and the first staging copy. Work on the build itself is billed to the plan bucket shown above.
Total marketing investment
Paid media is 94% of the total. Across media, tools and support hours, every dollar returned $8.40 in booked revenue. On media alone it was $8.97, up from August's $7.61. The site build is a one-off project, so it isn't counted here.