// Insights · commercial thinking · built from operating, not advising
No theory. No filler. No recycled platform advice. Just commercial thinking from 20 years of building and running e-commerce businesses — the things that actually affect your numbers.
Most e-commerce businesses running Google Ads have never calculated their break-even ROAS. They've set a target based on gut feel, industry benchmarks, or whatever their last agency told them. The number is almost always wrong — and in most cases it's below break-even, meaning every ad-driven sale is generating a loss that looks like a win on the platform dashboard. Here's how to calculate the real number, what it changes, and what to do if yours is below where it needs to be.
In the early 2000s, Amazon didn't have a sports and outdoors category. We built one — negotiating directly with Amazon, in the first of several meetings at their HQ over the years, to create the structure for a market segment that didn't exist on the platform yet. What that taught us about first-mover advantage, platform relationships, and why most Amazon strategies are already 10 years behind.
Every Google Ads agency focuses on campaign structure, bidding strategy, and budget allocation. Almost none of them look hard enough at the product feed. The feed is what determines which products serve, in what context, with what data. A campaign built on a bad feed is optimising noise. Here's what a proper feed audit actually finds — and how much it's worth.
Amazon Vendor Central looks attractive — Amazon handles retail, logistics, and customer service. What it doesn't advertise is the co-op deductions, the chargeback exposure, the pricing control you lose, and the negotiation leverage that evaporates the moment Amazon can see your volume. A hard-headed look at what Vendor really costs versus what most brands assume it costs.
You are spending money acquiring customers through Google and Amazon every single day. A significant percentage of those customers will never buy from you again — not because they didn't like your product, but because you gave them no reason to return. The economics of email retention versus paid acquisition are so stark they change how you should think about every marketing pound you spend.
Safari blocks third-party cookies. iOS restricts cross-app tracking. Ad blockers intercept your tag. Firefox has restricted cookies by default for years. If you're running standard Google Ads conversion tracking without enhanced conversions and Consent Mode v2, you are training your bidding algorithm on significantly incomplete data. This is what that costs — and how to fix it.
Each of our free tools was built to solve a specific commercial problem. These articles explain the problem, why it matters more than most people realise, and how the tool approaches it.
The number Amazon pays you on a Vendor invoice is not your margin. By the time co-op deductions, freight allowances, damage claims, and chargebacks have been applied, the effective margin on many Vendor lines is 8–12 percentage points lower than the gross figure. This article maps every deduction, shows how they compound, and explains how to calculate what you're actually making — which is what the Vendor Margin Calculator was built to show you instantly.
Platform fees, payment processing, VAT, pick-and-pack, packaging, shipping, returns — these costs are predictable and calculable, but most DTC pricing decisions don't account for all of them. The result is products priced below viability without the business knowing it. This article walks through every cost that hits a DTC sale and shows why contribution margin — not gross margin — is the number that determines whether a product is actually worth selling online.
Amazon's Late Shipment Rate is one of the metrics that can get your listings deactivated. It is directly controlled by your handling time settings. Most Seller Central accounts selling a mix of in-stock and ordered-in products have a single default handling time applied to everything — which means either your in-stock items look slow (you lose Buy Box) or your ordered-in items promise dispatch you can't deliver (you get late dispatch defects). This article explains how to fix it, and the tool generates the exact upload file Seller Central requires.
Google Shopping matches your products to search queries using a combination of your product title, description, and product type. If your product_type is wrong or missing, Google has less signal to work with — and your product serves on less relevant queries, or fewer queries altogether. For large catalogues, miscategorisation at scale represents a significant invisible impression loss. This is what the AI categorisation tool was built to fix, and why getting product_type right matters more than most feed managers realise.