I've had some version of the same conversation hundreds of times.

A founder schedules a call. They've built something real. 7 figure revenues. They've built an internal team, they're running paid media, and they've invested in their tech stack. On the surface, everything looks like forward motion.

But the money isn't where it should be.

The bank balance doesn't reflect the effort. The margins feel thin. Paid acquisition costs keep climbing. Certain months are brilliant. Others are inexplicably flat. The business is moving, but no one can quite explain where it's going, or whether the destination is somewhere worth getting to.

This isn't a niche problem. It's the dominant experience of founders running seven-figure ecommerce brands right now. And it almost never appears on podcasts, in agency case studies, or in the books.

What appears instead is a parade of tactics: new channels, new tools, new frameworks for scaling paid social, new takes on retention. All activity. All noise. None of it addresses the actual problem.

Revenue is not the same as progress. Activity is not the same as momentum. Growth that doesn't compound into profit is not growth. It's just expensive motion.

The conventional assumption is that if a business isn't performing as it should, something is broken in its marketing. The ads are inefficient. The conversion rate is low. The email flows are weak. The attribution is off.

So the founder hires an agency, or brings in a specialist, or buys a new tool. Sounding familiar? Sometimes that helps. Often it doesn't. And when it doesn't, the instinct is to try something else.

What's rarely considered is that the marketing might be working perfectly and the economics of the business still make it impossible to win.

I've worked with brands where the ads were well-structured, the conversion rate was solid, the email programme was generating meaningful revenue. And the business was still losing ground, quietly, quarter by quarter.

The product margin didn't support the acquisition cost because the mix of customers being acquired weren't the ones who came back. Because the discounting strategy was destroying lifetime value at the point it was supposed to create it. Because the channel driving the most revenue was also the one with the worst contribution per order. The list goes on.

None of this shows up in a dashboard. None of it gets flagged in a monthly agency report. It sits in the economics of the business, invisible until the numbers stop adding up.

Quick question for you before we move on; Do you know which of your customers are profitable, not just at first purchase, but across their full lifetime with your brand?

So, 27 years in. A quarter of century trying figure all this stuff out. Not to create a blueprint, if I could I’d be a billionnaire by now (fact check: I’m not). I'm writing about my findings across hundreds of conversations with founders, and what I've lived through in my own ecommerce businesses.

Ecommerce has become extraordinarily good at generating activity. Platforms make it easier than ever to spend money reaching people, to convert them into first-time buyers, to send them automated messages, to look busy across every metric that's easy to measure.

What it has not become is good at generating profit. That is for the brands… the tech and agencies are doing just fine. Because profit requires something different from activity. It requires understanding how money actually moves through your business. Where it comes in, what it costs to acquire, what gets eaten by returns and discounts and fulfilment, how much is left, and whether the customers you're working so hard to win ever buy again.

Most founders I speak to cannot answer these questions with confidence. Not because they're not smart, and not because they don't care. Because the way ecommerce businesses are typically run doesn't force the question until something goes wrong.

You grow to seven figures on instinct, hustle, and a product that resonates. You add headcount. You add channels. You add complexity. And at some point the machine you've built starts working against you, extracting cost at every turn without making it visible.

Meanwhile the metrics you're watching, ROAS, revenue growth, traffic, open rates, look fine. Or at least fine enough.

The metrics that tell you the business is working and the metrics that tell you the business is profitable are often not the same metrics.

The gap between those two sets of numbers is where most ecommerce founders are living. And it's a gap that grows quietly, then suddenly.

Ecomonomics exists because I think founders deserve a better frame for this.

Not a complicated one. Not an academic one. An honest one.

The questions that matter in ecommerce are economic before they are anything else;

When founders treat these as marketing questions, they get marketing answers. Better ads. Better emails. Better creative. Sometimes those answers are right. More often, they're solving for the symptom, not the cause.

When founders treat them as economic questions, the right interventions become much clearer. You stop trying to scale a product that can't contribute enough margin to support acquisition. You stop discounting your way to a repeat purchase that costs more than it returns. You stop chasing revenue in channels that destroy profitability while ignoring the ones that build it.

You start making decisions based on how your business actually makes money, rather than how you hope it does.

That's the shift Ecomonomics is built around. Not tactics. Not software. Not a new framework for growth hacking. A way of seeing your business clearly enough to make decisions that genuinely move it forward.

Something for you to consider: When you last made a significant commercial decision, how many financial variables did you model before committing? Or did it feel more like an educated guess?

There is a question I come back to in almost every engagement I take on. It isn't complicated, but it cuts through faster than almost anything else.

Does this make the business more profitable and more resilient, or does it simply increase activity?

Most of what gets recommended to ecommerce founders increases activity. New channels, new platforms, new campaign structures, new tools that generate reports about the activity you're already doing. The consultants, agencies, and software vendors who serve ecommerce are, by and large, in the business of selling activity.

Activity isn't worthless. But it isn't the point. The point is a business that works. One where the economics are understood, where growth compounds into something sustainable, where the founder isn't permanently exhausted trying to outrun the cost structure they've built.

That kind of business doesn't come from doing more. It comes from understanding more clearly what's already happening, identifying where profit is being created and where it's being lost, and making deliberate decisions to change the ratio.

That's what the writing in Ecomonomics is designed to help you do. Each piece is a reflection from inside real businesses, on the patterns I see repeatedly, the assumptions that most commonly mislead founders, and the questions that tend to unlock better decisions when you're willing to sit with them.

There's no quick fix here. There's no single metric that resolves everything. There is, though, a way of running an ecommerce business that produces genuine, compounding results rather than the exhausting hamster wheel that too many founders are on.

That's what we're building toward. One piece at a time.

You don't need more activity. You need a clearer picture of how your business makes money, and the discipline to protect it.

Coming up in Ecomonomics

The series will cover the economics questions that actually determine whether your business scales or stalls. Among the topics coming: