--- tytul: "How to Increase Sales in Your Online Shop" opis: "How to increase sales in an online shop: a data warehouse shows real profit instead of just ROAS. Discover the methodology JustIdea uses." adres: https://justidea.agency/en/blog/how-to-increase-sales-in-your-online-shop/ serwis: "JustIdea Agency" jezyk: pl zrodlo: automatyczny odpowiednik strony HTML, generowany przy każdym buildzie --- Article # How We Scaled an Online Shop to €320k in Monthly Revenue How to increase sales in an online shop: a data warehouse shows real profit instead of just ROAS. Discover the methodology JustIdea uses. [![Mateusz Haber](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/mateuszhab-ea59408f.webp) Mateusz Haber CEO / Marketing & E-Commerce Specialist](https://justidea.agency/en/author/mateusz-haber/) 1 December 2023 9 min read 2 sections ![How We Scaled an Online Shop to €320k in Monthly Revenue](https://justidea.agency/_astro/1695210824735-cb46e410.C2D1l5f3.webp) Case Studies Trusted by ![LPP](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/lpp-logo-2-b64d3a02.svg) ![House](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/logo-house-c706eeae.svg) ![Toyota](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/toyota2-1-63c6570a.webp) ![Fame MMA](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/fame-ffb4e0d0.webp) ![Surf Inc.](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/surfinc-91e5b73d.webp) ![LyoFood](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/lyo-cb899d46.webp) ![ExpertSender](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/expert-ca00548d.webp) ![Purinova](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/purinova-217da6ab.webp) ![Mennica Gdańska](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/mennica-98166c12.webp) ![Group IB](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/group-ib-b711171e.webp) ![Smart Kids Planet](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/smart-kids-151311c5.webp) ![SuperSonic](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/supersonic-a35404fe.webp) ![Wierzynek](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/wierzynek-1-d027e7cc.webp) ![RegoBis](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/regobis-a8b446e3.webp) **In this article** 1. 012. Data Warehouse? 2. 02Is ROAS Dead? Is PROFIT King? How to Increase Sales in an Online Shop? Share If you run an **online shop**, let us ask you a simple question: - Do you know how much money you made today? - How much did you make yesterday? - How much did you make the day before yesterday? And we don't mean revenue here. By earnings we mean profit after deducting correlated costs such as: advertising costs, product manufacturing costs, returns, packaging costs, shipping costs, payment commissions, agency commission, and so on. At JustIdea, we know that **running an online shop** is a constant challenge and a constant search for new ways to increase profits. That's why we want to share with you the story of how an [**online shop**](https://justidea.agency/en/services/e-commerce/), working with us, achieved a record monthly turnover of €320,000. This article is aimed at small and medium **online shops** that, over the last few years, have been wondering whether all the actions they take still "pay off". ![profit analytics, what makes up a shop's profit](https://justidea.agency/_astro/profit-analytics-co-sklada-sie-na-profit-sklepu-1024x570-57bed59a.azBsaKxE_2jsIDc.webp) profit analytics, what makes up a shop's profit The PROFIT formula should be adapted strictly to the characteristics of your e-commerce shop. If you're an **e-commerce business** at the €0-7M GMV (gross merchandise value) per year level, we're willing to risk saying you might not know that. Let's be honest, most **e-commerce businesses**, and businesses in general, find out about their profit on the 20th day of the following month, when the accountant closes the balance sheet and sends it back to them (if they even send it at all?). **➡️ If the owner of an online shop only finds out about their results almost a month later, how is their performance agency supposed to know whether its actions are effective and profitable?That's the biggest paradox of today's marketing world.** Of course, the agency will ask you about your margin. Then, on that basis, it will set target ROAS figures. However, most likely, in reality you don't have a single margin, so right from the start you'll be operating on averaged values, which will change with the very first order anyway. Why? Because every larger **e-commerce business**, in the age of marketing automation, sends the customer some discount code every few minutes, with a value that depends on their stage in the sales funnel, on top of that there are influencer codes, free shipping above a certain amount, and constantly changing promotions on your products. Your margin changes with every order, there's no way to calculate that by hand! Add to that expansion into foreign markets, which will dramatically change your shipping costs, payment commissions, advertising costs, and also your return rate, depending on whether you sell and ship a product to Poland or to the United States. If you've ever tried to calculate the profitability of activities in one of your markets by exporting individual data from every system and totalling it in Excel, you know yourself how time-consuming and ineffective an undertaking that is, so much so that it's pointless. ## 2. Data Warehouse? Fortunately, there is the **DATA WAREHOUSE** concept, that of collecting business data from all sources in order to merge it and work with it for analytical purposes. ![data warehouse](https://justidea.agency/_astro/data-warehouse-hurtownia-danych-1024x575-984fd308.B5JR6CJY_EXbVP.webp) data warehouse In the implementation for one of our clients, we chose BigQuery as the database space, into which we pull data in real time from the following sources: - [PrestaShop](https://justidea.agency/en/services/e-commerce/prestashop-stores/) - BaseLinker (indirectly Comarch Optima and Zalando) - [Google Ads](https://justidea.agency/en/services/marketing-agency/google-ads/) - [Facebook Ads](https://justidea.agency/en/services/marketing-agency/facebook-ads/) - Google Analytics 4 - Google Search Console ![data warehouse, diagram](https://justidea.agency/_astro/data-warehouse-hurtownia-danych-schemat-1024x573-892e086f.Bi2loVad_ZBoGmV.webp) data warehouse, diagram We then process the data and extract into Google Looker (formerly Google Data Studio) the most important indicators affecting the growth of the online shop, such as: revenue, advertising costs, product manufacturing costs (COGS), shipping costs, payment costs, packaging costs, gross/net ROAS, number of orders, number of products sold, average basket value, gross margin (first-degree margin), operating margin (second-degree margin), return on investment (ROI), net/net ROAS (MER), value of returns, number of returns, return percentage, and above all, **PROFIT**! ![Main Profit Analytics Dashboard, data warehouse](https://justidea.agency/_astro/looker-studio-dashboard-1024x516-d5cbfde5.ByOWUizy_ZDyvcI.webp) Main Profit Analytics Dashboard, data warehouse **Looker Studio** by design lets you work with all this data over any chosen time range: month, week, day. And it's precisely PROFIT calculated day by day that allows for a complete shift in the concept of analysing the profitability of your advertising campaigns. For our own needs, we built a day-by-day chart, which you can see below. The blue bar is revenue, the red one is returns (assigned to the day the order was placed, rather than the day the product was received back into the warehouse, as accounting usually reports it based on the dates of issued credit notes, such reporting makes no sense, since it distorts the effectiveness of advertising campaigns run during periods of higher returns), while the green bar is precisely the profit, the earnings after deducting all costs correlated with a given day and order. ![Day-by-day Profit Analytics dashboard, data warehouse](https://justidea.agency/_astro/dashboard-dzien-po-dniu-1024x516-0d50d29c.jFQ6CTDJ_Zj6Rn6.webp) Day-by-day Profit Analytics dashboard, data warehouse The data is updated every 15 minutes and also shows results from the current day, which matters because today, even in GA4, it isn't possible to check your daily turnover, let alone your profit. Google Analytics 4, at the time this article was published, has not implemented the ability to import product manufacturing costs (COGS), something that was still possible in the old Analytics (Google Universal). Will this be implemented in Google Analytics 4? That's a hard question to answer, but it's difficult to treat GA4 today as a tool for full e-commerce analytics, especially since GA4 was designed from the start so that data could easily be natively sent to BigQuery, and it's precisely there that you're meant to work with it. ## Is ROAS Dead? Is PROFIT King? How to Increase Sales in an Online Shop? The concept of focusing all marketing activities on ROAS has existed since the very beginning of performance marketing and tools like Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Unfortunately, it has one key flaw, it doesn't give you the full picture of your business, your online shop. The graphic below illustrates this perfectly: ![Simplified visualisation of the difference between ROAS and POAS metrics](https://justidea.agency/_astro/roas-vs-poas-fd7c158a.DrahGT8Y_2fALm9.webp) Simplified visualisation of the difference between ROAS and POAS metrics The analysis above, though deliberately exaggerated and simplified, is based on the assumption that a single ad leads exclusively to the purchase of a single product. It only covers some selected costs, while the actual number of associated expenses may be much larger. In such a scenario, even a high return on ad spend (ROAS) may not mean real profit, and in some cases, it may even lead to losses. A **profit on ad spend indicator** (POAS) below 100% points to an unprofitable business! On top of that, the marketing industry is grappling with growing challenges related to privacy and regulations such as GDPR. Restrictions are appearing, such as AEM on iOS 14 on iPhones, along with shortened conversion windows caused by changes to cookie policies in web browsers. Facebook openly admits that conversion data in the ads manager panel can be modelled. In practice, conversions may be attributed to ads that had no real impact on users' purchasing decisions. The most extreme example is attributing conversions to ads targeted at countries where no transactions were recorded on a given day. ![google ads and meta, performance marketing](https://justidea.agency/_astro/modelowanie-konwersji-80d7b925.bJq8T-Pk_ZcLCGm.webp) google ads and meta, performance marketing **Google Ads uses similar practices, though it appears to be somewhat more effective, this data can also be modelled.** Of course, it doesn't work in a way where Google or Facebook invents transactions that never happened in your **online shop**, but they'll happily take credit for them. This happens even in extreme cases, where an ad was targeted at a different country than the one where the order was actually placed. The problem intensifies when both systems start claiming credit for the same conversions, which creates ambiguity in the attribution process. It's hard to determine how often and to what extent this happens, or whether there's any abuse involved. Conversion estimation models aren't transparent, and transactions attributed this way aren't clearly marked in the reports. **Google Analytics**, though you'd expect it to provide accurate attribution data, runs into difficulties, because Facebook uses its own in-app browser and a "Link Shim" mechanism to redirect traffic, which makes it harder for Google to collect data. This leads to Organic Social and Direct traffic being overstated in Google Analytics reports, at the expense of the real source, which is paid social traffic. This never-ending rivalry between Google and Facebook means that attribution analysis in multichannel marketing is now very complicated, and even not very effective. As a result, it's necessary to adopt a more holistic approach to performance marketing, focusing on analysing total spend relative to total revenue and final profits. ![ROAS and profit in an online shop](https://justidea.agency/_astro/roas-i-profit-1024x575-19a78acc.NAdTnHm8_LM5rP.webp) ROAS and profit in an online shop Of course, the **ROAS** metric still remains a useful tool for comparing different campaigns within the same **advertising platform**. It lets you assess how changes in a campaign affect its effectiveness, whether by improving it or worsening it. However, a key aspect is monitoring the overall impact of the changes made to campaigns over time, daily, weekly, monthly, using tools like **Data Warehouse**. It's precisely this kind of in-depth analysis that provides clear answers to the question of the effectiveness and profitability of actions such as scaling or expansion. **➡️ One example is the effect of activities in the shop of one of our clients, where, over 5 months, thanks to the use of a data warehouse, we managed to increase e-commerce sales from €80,000 GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) to €320,000 GMV. We achieved this by aggressively increasing the advertising budget from €13,000 net to €75,000 net, which, despite lowering the MER (global ROAS), contributed to profit growth of as much as 320-350% in value. However, without constant profit monitoring, this wouldn't have been possible.** ![data warehouse profit](https://justidea.agency/_astro/zrzut-ekranu-2023-11-28-o-01-12-08-2877a381.CdTOk6zB_yOK6V.webp) data warehouse profit Our unique [**Data Warehouse**](https://justidea.agency/en/services/marketing-agency/ecommerce-data-warehouse/) concept, called **"Profit Analytics"**, was designed specifically with medium-sized **online shops** in mind. After implementing it for our partners, with whom we work on performance marketing, we're able to report results in terms of profit or turnover, rather than just media cost. This lets us evaluate campaigns using the figure that actually stays in the till, and scale them consciously. If this topic has caught your interest, [get in touch with us](https://justidea.agency/en/contact/)! We'd be happy to arrange an individual presentation, during which we'll discuss in detail how the tool works and you'll get the chance to see it in action! ? ![Mateusz Haber](https://justidea.agency/obrazy/mateuszhab-ea59408f.webp) Written by [Mateusz Haber](https://justidea.agency/en/author/mateusz-haber/) CEO / Marketing & E-Commerce Specialist Have a question about this article? Write to us. Want this in your business ## Let's turn this knowledge into results in your store 30 minutes about your numbers. The call starts with someone from sales, and we bring in the channel specialist once we get into the details. The call is free of charge. Book a call about your numbers [See projects with numbers](https://justidea.agency/en/case-studies/) Client reviews ## Ratings of the agency that runs this blog Clients gave them after working with us, and you can read each one on the site where it was posted. They cover the work of the whole agency, not this one article. 4.96 / 5 weighted average of 224 reviews across three platforms [Read the reviews](https://justidea.agency/en/justidea-reviews/) [![Google](https://justidea.agency/assets/logo-google.svg) 4.97 / 5 156 reviews on our Google Business Profile](https://www.google.com/search?q=JustIdea+Agency+Krak%C3%B3w+opinie)[![Facebook](https://justidea.agency/assets/logo-facebook.svg) 5.0 / 5 33 reviews on our Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/justidea.agency/reviews)[![Clutch](https://justidea.agency/assets/logo-clutch.svg) 4.9 / 5 35 B2B reviews, each verified in a call with the client](https://clutch.co/profile/justidea-agency) Statuses awarded by the platforms: PrestaShop Expert ★★★, Google Premier Partner 2025, Meta Business Partner, Microsoft Advertising Elite Partner 2025. [All certificates and awards](https://justidea.agency/en/our-awards/) Read on ## See also [Case Studies 11 August 2026 SEO for an Agricultural Shop: 104% Traffic Growth | Case Study MHR Wojciech Wabno](https://justidea.agency/en/blog/agricultural-shop-seo-case-study-mhr/)[Marketing 16 April 2024 How to increase conversion in an online shop? Paweł Seruga](https://justidea.agency/en/blog/how-to-increase-conversion-rate-online-shop/)[SEO 5 August 2026 E-commerce Seasonality: How to Plan SEO in Advance Małgorzata Walo](https://justidea.agency/en/blog/ecommerce-seasonality-seo-planning/) Contact ## A conversation about your numbers: 30 minutes The call is led by a new business specialist. When we get into the details of an account, the specialist for that channel joins in. We reply within one business day. 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