CSS for agencies
For a single merchant, CSS is a setting. For an agency with thirty clients it is a product line: something to sell, onboard, report on and bill for, thirty times over, without thirty times the work.
What changes at scale
Nothing about the mechanism, and everything about the operations. One association is a five-minute task. Thirty associations, each with its own Merchant Center, its own billing relationship and its own monthly report, is a process that either has tooling behind it or eats a person.
What the tooling has to do
- Bulk onboarding. Adding client Merchant Centers without a separate account and login per client.
- Per-client reporting. Showing each client their own saving, in a form you can put in front of them.
- Workspace permissions. Letting the people who run the accounts in without giving everyone everything.
- Centralised billing. One invoice to you, not thirty cards on file.
Cobiro Connect is the multi-client layer for exactly this: one dashboard, bulk onboarding, per-client reporting, workspace permissions and centralised billing.
What to charge
Most agencies charge between 30 and 60 euro per shop per month for CSS as a service. The proposition is unusually easy to make because the client’s side of the arithmetic is public: a client spending 5,000 euro a month on Shopping saves roughly 1,000 euro a month, so 40 euro is not a negotiation.
The margin is real but it is not the main reason agencies do this. The retention effect is: a client whose Shopping costs fell 20 percent the month you took over is a client who stays.
Where whitelabel comes in
Reselling someone else’s CSS means every client’s Shopping ads carry that provider’s name, and the client can go and buy it directly. Running your own whitelabel CSS puts your brand on the ads instead and makes the relationship yours. That trade-off, and the numbers behind it, are the next chapter.