Selling your products through retailers like Amazon, Walmart, or Sephora unlocks incredible reach. You benefit from their audience, logistics, and trust. But this distribution power comes with a painful drawback: you don’t own the checkout.

And without the checkout, you don’t own the data of your customers.

No data means no visibility on what’s working. And if you can’t track conversions, you can’t optimize your ads. Most retail-native brands are stuck asking the same question:

"How do I run Meta ads if I can't see who bought the product?"

Whether you’re directing traffic from Meta, TikTok, or Google, the reality is the same. Ad platforms require conversion feedback to perform effectively. But when you send traffic to retailers, you lose sight of the customer journey.

The result? You spend. You hope. But you don’t learn.

Most brands sell on Amazon. Few know if their Meta ads actually lead to sales there.

1. The broken setup most brands still use

Why retail-first brands struggle to track their ads

Choosing retail distribution makes sense. You get more visibility, faster shipping, and the credibility of a major platform. But the tradeoff is simple: you give up on your customers' data (and so on your ability to track conversions).

Ad platforms such as Meta need to see what happens after someone clicks. Without that, the algorithm can't improve. Your ads run in the dark.

What you can do on your own website (like adding a Meta pixel), you can't do on Amazon, for example. Unless you ask Jeff Bezos to put your tracking pixel on his website, which is none other than Amazon.com.

Because of that and from what we've seen, here's what usually happens:

• Some brands keep running ads without knowing if they work

• Others stop advertising altogether because they can’t prove the return

The core issue remains. The conversion moment is invisible. No optimization events are sent back to the ad platform.

What it looks like day to day

• Ad costs creep up because Meta can’t learn what’s working

• The algorithm becomes less effective without feedback

• Retailers keep asking for traffic, but never return performance data

• You’re spending, but flying blind

You can’t fix what you can’t see. And you can’t scale what you can’t measure.

II. The setup everyone dreams of

Every retail brand dreams of a better way. One where Meta knows exactly what’s working. One where ad clicks turn into retailer sales, and those sales send data right back to Meta.

In a perfect world, it would look like this:

• A shopper clicks your Meta ad

• They land on Amazon, Fnac, or Cultura and buy the product

• Meta instantly sees the sale

• The algorithm learns and optimizes

• Your next ad performs even better

It sounds like a dream. A smooth, direct loop between ad platforms and retailers. One funnel that connects everything.

But today, that dream doesn’t exist.

Retailers don’t share sales data. Ad platforms don’t integrate with them. And even tools like Amazon Attribution fall short — they’re delayed, disconnected, and rarely sync with Meta in a meaningful way.

No pixel. No signal. No feedback loop. Just guesswork.

It’s not that brands don’t want to track conversions. It’s that they can’t.

The current system wasn’t built for retail-first e-commerce. It was built for brands that own their checkout. And most retail-native brands don't.

III. The workaround retail brands have been missing

Until now, retail-native brands had two options. Fly blind with Meta ads or stop running them entirely. Pixamp offers something new. Not a perfect solution, but a better one.

Instead of waiting for retailers to share sales data (they won’t), Pixamp helps you send purchase intent signals back to Meta.

Here’s how it works:

• Create trackable Pixamp Buttons that you'll add to your landing page

• A shopper clicks on your Meta ad

• They land on a custom Shopify page (designed to educate, engage, and route them to your product on the retailer's page)

• When they click the “Buy on Retailer” Pixamp Button, we log that signal and send it back to Meta as a high-intent event

• Meta uses that signal to optimize your campaigns and learn what’s working

You don’t need to own the checkout to guide the algorithm anymore. You just need to show intent.

You don’t own the checkout. But now, you own the signal.

However, this won’t give you perfect attribution. It’s not a full loop. But it’s a meaningful step forward, and it lets you scale retail distribution without giving up on ad performance.

IV. What does this change for retail-native brands

With Pixamp, you finally have a way to run smarter ads without needing to own the checkout. It’s not magic, and it’s not perfect. But it’s a great progress.

You can now make better decisions about your online advertising spend because you’re giving the algorithm something to learn from. Purchase intent signals might not be final conversions, but they’re strong enough to unlock optimization. That means lower costs, better targeting, and a real path to scaling.

Here’s what this unlocks:

• You can confidently invest in ads again. You’re no longer throwing money into the void. Your campaigns send signals that help Meta improve performance over time.

• You support your retail distribution without sacrificing performance. You don’t need to ditch Amazon or Walmart. Pixamp is designed to work with your existing setup.

• You get smarter about what works. Even if you can’t see the full checkout data, you can start identifying which messages, creatives, and audiences drive high intent.

It’s not the perfect funnel everyone dreams of. However, it’s the first real step toward bridging the gap between retail commerce and digital ads.

Selling through retailers shouldn’t mean giving up on growth.

The path forward

Retail-native brands have been stuck between two worlds: powerful distribution through retailers, and a complete lack of visibility when it comes to advertising performance. That gap won’t be fully closed overnight. But with tools like Pixamp, we can start to bridge it. By sending purchase intent signals back to ad platforms, you can finally run smarter campaigns without owning the final sale. You get to support your retail partners while still feeding the data that Meta needs to perform. It’s not about chasing perfection. It’s about finding practical ways to grow in a world where data is hard to get and attribution is even harder. Pixamp isn’t the dream funnel (yet), but it’s a much better starting point.