Solution
E-commerce growth system
Store, brand, advertising, lifecycle communication and order automation as one system — with local payment methods and the margin arithmetic checked before launch.
E-commerce fails on arithmetic more often than on execution. A store can have good creative, competent advertising and a reasonable conversion rate and still lose money on every order, because nobody modelled contribution margin after shipping, returns, payment fees and acquisition cost.
This engagement builds the store, the acquisition and the operations together, and starts with the unit economics rather than the design. If the numbers do not work, we would rather establish that in week one than after three months of spend.
Why this is sold as one engagement
The components are genuinely interdependent. Acquisition cost determines what margin the product needs. Margin determines what shipping and returns policy is affordable. Payment methods determine conversion rate, which determines acquisition cost. Optimising any one in isolation moves the others.
Local payment methods are the most consistently underestimated factor for cross-border sellers. iDEAL in the Netherlands, Bancontact in Belgium, BLIK in Poland, MobilePay in Denmark, Swish in Sweden — a card-only checkout underperforms in each of these markets in a way that gets misdiagnosed as a creative or pricing problem.
Order operations are where margin quietly leaks. Manual order routing, stock reconciliation done by hand and customer service answering questions a system could answer all cost money per order, and they scale linearly with volume unless they are automated.
What is included
- Unit economics model
- Contribution margin after shipping, returns, payment fees and acquisition cost, before anything is built.
- Storefront
- Built for speed and conversion, with structured product data and correct tax handling.
- Local payment methods
- The methods each target market actually uses rather than a card-only international default.
- Brand and product presentation
- Photography, copy and a visual system that works at thumbnail scale as well as full size.
- Paid acquisition
- Campaigns with creative volume and a feed built properly for shopping placements.
- Lifecycle communication
- Abandoned cart, post-purchase, replenishment and win-back sequences with suppression rules.
- CRM and customer data
- A single customer record across storefront, support and marketing.
- Order automation
- Routing, stock reconciliation, supplier notification and fulfilment updates without manual handling.
- Returns and support automation
- Self-service where it saves cost without damaging the experience.
- Reporting
- Contribution margin by product and channel, not just revenue.
How it runs
Model the economics
Contribution margin per order after every cost, and the acquisition cost the product can sustain. This is week one, and occasionally it produces the conclusion that the business as configured cannot work — which is worth knowing then rather than later.
Build the store
Speed, structured product data, correct VAT and tax handling, and the local payment methods each target market expects. Performance and payment are conversion decisions rather than technical preferences.
Product presentation
Photography and copy that work at thumbnail size, where most purchase decisions are actually made, as well as on the product page.
Instrument and launch acquisition
Server-side conversion tracking and a properly built product feed before spend, then campaigns with enough creative variants for the platforms to optimise against.
Lifecycle and retention
Abandoned cart, post-purchase and replenishment sequences, which usually produce the highest return per hour of any e-commerce work.
Automate operations
Order routing, stock reconciliation and fulfilment updates, removing the per-order manual cost that otherwise scales with volume.
What changes
- Known unit economics
- Contribution margin per order and the acquisition cost the product can sustain, modelled rather than assumed.
- Checkout that fits the market
- Local payment methods per country, which is frequently the single largest conversion gain available.
- Acquisition with enough creative
- Variant volume and a correct product feed, so campaigns are not starved.
- Retention that compounds
- Lifecycle sequences producing revenue from customers already acquired.
- Operations that do not scale linearly
- Order handling automated, so volume growth does not require proportional headcount.
- Margin-level reporting
- Contribution by product and channel rather than revenue, which is what actually informs decisions.
Who this is for — and who it is not
A good fit if
- You are selling online and cannot say which products are profitable.
- Cross-border conversion is weak and you do not know why.
- Order processing is manual and scales with volume.
- Your ads run the same three creatives.
- You have no post-purchase communication beyond a receipt.
Not a good fit if
- The unit economics cannot work at any realistic acquisition cost.
- You want a storefront built and nothing else — buy the web service instead.
- You are unwilling to change pricing or shipping policy if the model says you should.
- Volume is low enough that manual operations are genuinely cheaper than automating them.
On price. Quoted per phase against a defined scope, with ongoing acquisition and lifecycle work as a monthly arrangement separate from media spend. Platform and payment fees are paid by you directly.
What we need from you
E-commerce engagements need commercial data more than creative input, and the data is frequently the hard part to obtain.
- Real cost data
- Product cost, shipping, packaging, payment fees, expected return rate. Without these the margin model is a guess and every decision downstream inherits the error.
- Product information
- Structured attributes, dimensions, variants. Feed quality drives shopping performance and is almost always worse than clients expect.
- Product photography access
- Or a decision that we produce it. Poor imagery caps conversion regardless of everything else.
- Authority over pricing and shipping
- If the model says the shipping policy is the problem, someone needs to be able to change it.
- Fulfilment process detail
- How orders actually get picked, packed and shipped, including the exceptions, so automation encodes reality.
- Realistic return rate
- Understated return assumptions are the most common single error in e-commerce planning and they invalidate the whole model.
Where this gets difficult
The uncomfortable finding is sometimes that the business cannot work. A product with thin margin, high return rate and a competitive acquisition auction may have no viable configuration, and we would rather establish that in week one than help spend three months proving it.
The second is that return rate is routinely understated. Clients estimate optimistically, the model is built on the estimate, and the actual rate invalidates the contribution margin entirely. Where historical data exists we use it and where it does not we model a range rather than a point.
The third is local payment methods. Cross-border sellers consistently attribute weak conversion in a market to creative, pricing or brand, when the cause is that the checkout does not offer the method most people there actually use.
A fourth is feed quality, which determines shopping campaign performance more than bidding does and is almost always worse than expected. Missing attributes and inconsistent variants are boring problems with large commercial consequences.
A fifth is the retention gap. Most e-commerce operations under-invest in post-purchase communication relative to acquisition, despite it being cheaper per unit of revenue. It is less visible than advertising, which is largely why.
Sixth, operational cost per order. Manual routing and reconciliation scale linearly with volume, which means growth erodes margin rather than improving it. This is invisible in a revenue report and obvious in a contribution one.
Finally, promotion arithmetic. Discounts are frequently run without modelling their margin impact, and a promotion that increases revenue while reducing contribution is a common and expensive way to look successful.
A further difficulty is that clients resist changing shipping and returns policy even when the margin model says it is the constraint. Those decisions sit with operations or finance rather than with whoever commissioned the growth work, and a project without the authority to touch them is optimising around the actual problem.
The second is seasonality in the model. Annual averages hide the fact that acquisition cost and conversion rate both move substantially across the year, and a contribution model built on a flat assumption will be wrong in both directions at different points.
Finally, returns processing is almost always under-automated relative to order processing. It costs more per unit, it happens at lower volume so it never reaches the top of a priority list, and it quietly erodes the margin the acquisition work was meant to protect.
The services this combines
Website Design & Development
Sites built to convert and to survive — fast, accessible, integrated with your CRM, and maintainable by someone other than us.
Read more →Paid Advertising
Buying attention at a price that works — with the tracking, creative volume and landing pages that decide whether it does.
Read more →Email, SMS & WhatsApp Marketing
The channels you own outright — where the list is yours, delivery is not rented from an algorithm, and automation does the follow-up nobody has time for.
Read more →Business Process Automation
Removing the manual steps between systems — the copying, re-typing, chasing and exporting that consumes hours nobody counts.
Read more →Content Creation & Creative Production
The production line behind everything else — the graphics, video, photography and copy that campaigns, channels and sales teams all consume.
Read more →Data Engineering & BI
Getting numbers out of the systems that hold them, into one place, in a state somebody can actually make a decision from.
Read more →Questions
Why start with the economics rather than the store?
Because the numbers determine what the store, the shipping policy and the acquisition strategy can be. Building first and modelling later means discovering in month three that the configuration cannot be profitable at any realistic acquisition cost.
Which platform do you build on?
Whatever fits — Shopify for speed to market and ecosystem, a custom build where the product or pricing model does not fit a standard platform. We will not migrate you without a reason beyond preference.
Do we really need local payment methods?
For cross-border selling in Europe, yes. iDEAL, Bancontact, BLIK, MobilePay and Swish each dominate their markets, and a card-only checkout underperforms there in a way that is routinely misattributed.
What does it cost?
Quoted per phase against a defined scope, with ongoing acquisition and lifecycle work as a monthly arrangement separate from media spend. Platform and payment fees are paid directly by you.
What if the model says our margins do not work?
We tell you, with the arithmetic and its assumptions shown. It is a genuinely useful outcome even though it is not the one anyone wants, and it costs far less than finding out through spend.
How much does the product feed matter?
More than bidding does for shopping campaigns. Feed quality is a boring problem with large commercial consequences, and it is almost always worse than clients expect.
Should we run discounts?
Only with the margin arithmetic done first. A promotion that raises revenue while reducing contribution is a common and expensive way to appear successful.
What is the highest-return work in e-commerce?
Usually post-purchase and lifecycle communication, because it produces revenue from customers already paid for. It is less visible than advertising, which is largely why it is under-invested in.
Can you handle multi-country VAT and tax?
Yes, and it needs designing in rather than adding later. Cross-border VAT, local invoicing requirements and country-specific rules affect the checkout and the accounting integration both.
How do we know you are the right supplier for this?
You do not, from a page. What you can check is whether we describe the failure modes accurately, whether we tell you when something is not worth doing, and whether the scope we write has an explicit list of exclusions. A discovery call costs nothing and is the fastest way to find out, and a supplier unwilling to say what they will not do is telling you something either way.
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Tell us where you are now. We will tell you whether this is the right shape of engagement — including when a smaller piece of work would serve you better.
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