E-commerce consulting: is your store actually making money?

It is work in which someone from outside goes through a store's numbers, its range, platform and sales channels, and then points to the decisions that raise profit, not just turnover. It ends with a document of recommendations set in order, with an estimated cost and a note on who should carry out each of them.

Marketing consulting settles decisions about channels and the ad budget, meaning what you spend money on for promotion. E-commerce consulting settles decisions about the store itself: margin, range, prices, logistics, platform and sales channels, meaning whether the store makes money at all. With a store you usually start with the second, because without a healthy margin even the best-run campaign only speeds up the losses.

Yes, in the option with on-call support. One person on our side runs the consulting project and then stays available during implementation, billed monthly. We do not replace a full-time role and we say so plainly: at a large scale your own head of e-commerce is cheaper, and we work best where such a position cannot be justified.

A strategy consultation with our CEO costs €250 net per hour, less for clients whose channels we already run. Consulting spread over a longer period is priced by scope and the number of working days, so we give the amount after a conversation in which we agree what exactly needs to be decided. The conversation itself is free, and the quote does not depend on whether you order the implementation of the recommendations from us.

An ecommerce consultant does not run campaigns or build the store: they decide what the bottleneck is and write down in what order to fix it. During the consultation they go through the margin calculation, the range, logistics, the platform and all sales channels, from SEO and paid search to marketplaces, and compare it with what the market in your industry looks like. They are sometimes called an outside e-commerce manager, but the difference matters: a manager is responsible for execution, a consultant for the decision.

Both, because margin and the ad budget are one equation. We check whether Google Ads and Facebook Ads deliver orders at a cost that fits within the product margin, whether performance marketing scales the right products and where marketing automation can replace manual work. We do not run these channels as part of consulting: we assess them and say what to change in the marketing strategy, also when someone else runs them.

On yours. The margin calculation comes from your store admin panel, product costs, returns, shipping costs and ad spend. Industry data comes in where we compare your store with the market: for competitors' prices and the cost of entering a new channel. For the calculation itself, read-only access is enough, with no right to change anything in the store.

Usually from three to six weeks, depending on the state of the data. The first stage is the one that tends to stretch, because product cost and returns rarely sit in one place and have to be gathered from several systems. The workshop itself is one afternoon.

A document with the margin calculation per product and per channel and with a list of decisions ranked by their effect on profit, with an estimated cost and a named contractor for each item. Plus an hour of discussion with your team. The document is yours and you can implement it with anyone.

No, and we set the price that way on purpose. Consulting costs the same regardless of what you order afterwards, and we write the recommendations so they can be implemented without us, marking which ones your team will do. Some clients come back after a quarter, and that is fine, but it is not a condition.