Do you need access to our ad accounts and platforms, or just the data?

Typically both, though the depth varies. We usually need read access to GA4 or equivalent analytics, the main paid media platforms, CRM/ESM data, and finance-grade revenue and margin figures. Where full platform access isn't possible, exported data covering the same period is usually workable.

We're already running a lot of marketing activity — will this duplicate our agencies' reporting?

No. The diagnostic sits above channel-level reporting and looks at the commercial picture across all of it, including where different agencies' own metrics may conflict with each other. It's designed to be a single, independent read that agencies themselves are rarely positioned to provide.

Is this only relevant if our growth has actually stalled?

It's most commonly commissioned when growth has plateaued or profitability has come under pressure, but it's equally useful for businesses growing well who want a clear-eyed check on whether that growth is on a sustainable footing before committing further investment.

How does this differ from a standard ecommerce audit?

A standard audit typically reviews one channel or function in isolation — SEO, paid media, or CRO. The Growth Diagnostic looks across all of them together, against contribution margin and customer economics, because the real constraint is usually at the intersection of several functions rather than inside any one of them.

Ecommerce & Retail Growth Consultancy

Most ecommerce and retail businesses can grow revenue. Fewer can grow it profitably, on top of a stable base of returning customers, without leaning harder every quarter on paid media and discounting. This is the point at which leadership needs a clear, independent read on where the business actually makes money, where growth is being bought rather than earned, and which levers still have room in them.

The Growth Diagnostic Talk to us

Who this is for

Established ecommerce retailers with £5m–£50m+ revenue
DTC brands moving from founder-led growth to a structured operating model
Specialist and multi-category retailers managing broad product ranges
Marketplace-reliant retailers exposed to Amazon or third-party platform economics
PE-backed businesses under pressure to show profitable, repeatable growth
Founder-led businesses handing commercial ownership to a wider team

01 — The model

What growth looks like in this model

01
Revenue growth is matched by contribution growth
Top-line revenue and contribution margin move in the same direction, at broadly similar rates. When they diverge — revenue up, contribution flat or down — the business is often buying growth through discounting, paid media, or an increasingly costly product mix, rather than earning it.
02
New and returning customer economics are both understood, separately
New-customer acquisition can be loss-making in month one if the business genuinely understands the payback period and repeat-purchase curve behind it. Growth looks healthy when leadership can state, with evidence, how many orders and how much margin a new customer generates over 12 months — not just what they cost to acquire.
03
AOV, CVR and traffic quality move together, not against each other
Sustainable growth rarely comes from one lever moving in isolation. If traffic is up but conversion rate is falling, or AOV is rising because higher-margin lines are being pushed out by discounted bestsellers, the headline number can mask a weakening base.
04
Non-paid, non-promotional demand is growing
A business that can only grow while spend and discount depth increase has not built durable demand. Healthy growth includes rising direct, organic, and repeat-driven revenue that doesn't require an escalating media or promotional budget to sustain.
05
Stock, fulfilment and returns are treated as commercial levers
Availability of the right stock in the right sizes and categories, delivery reliability, and returns rates are not just operational metrics — they are directly commercial, and growth that ignores them tends to be fragile at the point of scale.

02 — Constraints

Where growth usually gets stuck

Blended CAC creeping up while platform-reported CAC looks stable

Platform dashboards report CAC within their own attribution window and channel silo. Blended CAC — total marketing spend divided by total new customers — often tells a very different story, particularly once branded search, affiliate, and retargeting spend are consolidated. Businesses that only track the platform number can miss a genuine acquisition cost problem for several quarters.

Category and product mix quietly eroding margin

As a range grows, revenue can keep climbing while the mix shifts towards lower-margin, higher-discount, or higher-return categories. Total revenue up, gross margin percentage down, is a common and under-examined pattern — especially where reporting is organised by channel rather than by category and margin cohort.

Promotional dependency baked into the customer base

When a meaningful share of revenue only converts at a discount, the business has effectively trained its customer base to wait for sales. Removing or reducing promotional depth then looks like it damages growth, when it is actually revealing the true underlying demand.

Paid media doing double duty — demand creation and demand harvesting conflated

Brand and non-brand paid search, Meta prospecting and retargeting are frequently measured and budgeted as a single channel, which hides where marginal spend is genuinely acquiring new demand versus capturing purchases that would have happened anyway.

Non-brand SEO and organic discovery under-invested and under-measured

Category and product pages that should be doing structural, compounding work in non-brand search are often left to inherit whatever internal linking and content the platform template provides, with no clear owner and no visibility of commercial contribution beyond last-click.

CRM and retention treated as a bolt-on channel, not a customer-economics function

Email and SMS flows frequently get credited with revenue that would have converted anyway, while the underlying repeat-purchase rate and time-to-second-order — the real drivers of retention economics — go unexamined.

Fulfilment, delivery and returns friction quietly capping growth

Stock-outs on bestsellers, slow or unreliable delivery, and a returns experience that erodes trust all suppress conversion and repeat rate in ways that rarely show up clearly in a standard marketing dashboard, but are frequently large enough to explain a stalled growth line.

Team and agency ownership split in ways that obscure accountability

Paid media, SEO, CRM and merchandising are often owned by different people or agencies, each optimising their own metric, with no one holding the single commercial view of contribution margin across the whole customer journey.

03 — Economics

The numbers leadership should be able to see

Not a reporting wish list. These are the figures that decide whether more investment is a good idea, and the cuts that make them meaningful.

Key metrics for this business model
Metric	What it tells you	How we read it
Revenue growth vs contribution margin growth	The single clearest signal of whether growth is being earned or bought.Compare rates of change over the same period, not absolute revenue vs absolute margin.	Compare rates of change over the same period, not absolute revenue vs absolute margin.
Blended CAC (new customers)	The true cost of acquisition across all channels, unlike any single platform's reported figure.Total marketing spend ÷ total new customers, reconciled against finance, not platform dashboards.	Total marketing spend ÷ total new customers, reconciled against finance, not platform dashboards.
Average order value (AOV) by channel and category	Reveals whether AOV growth reflects genuine basket-building or a shift in product mix.Segment by new vs returning and by category; a rising blended AOV can hide falling AOV within cohorts.	Segment by new vs returning and by category; a rising blended AOV can hide falling AOV within cohorts.
Conversion rate (CVR) by source, device and category	Aggregate CVR can mask serious weaknesses in specific traffic sources or product areas.Mobile vs desktop, paid vs organic, and by category — not one blended number.	Mobile vs desktop, paid vs organic, and by category — not one blended number.
New vs returning customer contribution split	Shows whether the business is dependent on continual new-customer acquisition or has a repeat base carrying margin.Contribution margin, not just revenue, by customer type.	Contribution margin, not just revenue, by customer type.
Gross and contribution margin by category	Identifies which parts of the range are actually funding growth versus diluting it.True contribution after fulfilment, returns and payment costs, not headline gross margin.	True contribution after fulfilment, returns and payment costs, not headline gross margin.
Stock availability / in-stock rate on bestsellers	Availability directly caps both conversion and repeat purchase in ways acquisition metrics won't show.Availability at SKU level for the top revenue-driving lines, not aggregate stock cover.	Availability at SKU level for the top revenue-driving lines, not aggregate stock cover.
Returns rate and net revenue after returns	Gross revenue overstates the commercial picture where returns are high or rising.By category and by acquisition channel — returns rates vary widely across both.	By category and by acquisition channel — returns rates vary widely across both.

04 — False positives

What can look healthy but isn't

Looks fineRevenue is up year-on-year, so growth is on track: Revenue growth funded by increasing discount depth, rising media spend, or a shift towards lower-margin categories can mask a business that is making less money per pound of revenue than it did last year. The question that matters is whether contribution margin grew at a comparable rate.
Looks finePlatform-reported ROAS looks strong across paid channels: Platform attribution windows overlap and over-credit last-click paid channels, particularly retargeting and branded search, for revenue that would likely have converted through another route. Blended CAC and marginal spend testing tell a more reliable story than any single platform's own reporting.
Looks fineAOV has risen, so customers are spending more: A rising blended AOV can simply reflect fewer, larger orders concentrated in a promotional period, or a mix shift towards higher-priced but lower-margin categories. It is worth checking whether AOV has risen within stable customer cohorts, not just in the blended top-line figure.
Looks fineCRM/email is driving a large share of revenue: Attribution models frequently credit CRM with revenue from customers who were already going to purchase, particularly through post-purchase and abandoned-basket flows. The more useful question is what incremental revenue CRM drives versus what it would have happened anyway.
Looks fineThe site redesign or replatform improved conversion: Conversion rate changes after a replatform are frequently confounded by seasonality, traffic mix changes, and short-term promotional activity run around the launch. A clean pre/post comparison needs matched periods and stable traffic composition, not a simple before-and-after look.

05 — Flagship

The Growth Diagnostic in this model

The Growth Diagnostic applies the same seven-lens commercial review to ecommerce and retail businesses, adapted to the specific economics of product margin, stock, fulfilment and repeat purchase that don't apply in the same way to service or B2B businesses.

Full diagnostic scope and deliverables

01Demand/MarketWhere is category demand actually growing, and is the business capturing a fair share of it, or losing share while revenue still rises on the back of the wider market.
02DiscoveryHow customers find the business across paid, organic, marketplace and direct channels, and which of those routes are genuinely incremental rather than overlapping.
03AcquisitionThe true blended cost of acquiring a new customer, the marginal return on the next pound of media spend, and how much of current growth depends on an escalating acquisition budget.
04ConversionCVR by source, device and category, and the merchandising, PDP, trust, delivery and stock factors that most plausibly explain the gaps.
05RetentionRepeat-purchase rate, time-to-second-order, and whether CRM activity is creating incremental revenue or simply claiming credit for it.
06MeasurementWhether the business's attribution and reporting can be trusted for decisions — reconciling platform-reported numbers against blended, finance-grade figures.
07CapabilityWhether the team and agency structure in place can act on what the diagnostic finds, and where ownership of the commercial view currently sits.

06 — Growth problems

Start from the problem you recognise

Each of these is written for this business model specifically: the symptoms, the likely causes, the numbers we would look at, and what tends to mislead.

Ecommerce growth has stalled

Revenue has flattened, or is growing without a corresponding rise in profit. A look at where the real constraint sits.

Rising customer acquisition costs

The cost of winning a new customer keeps climbing, even where individual platforms report healthy performance.

Traffic isn't converting

Visitors are arriving but not buying. A structured look at where conversion is breaking down, and why.

Low repeat purchase and retention

New customers convert once but don't return often enough. A review of repeat purchase, cohorts and CRM's real contribution.

SEO traffic isn't driving revenue

Organic visibility looks strong but it isn't translating into sales. A look at intent, landing pages and product availability.

Paid media dependency

Growth only happens while spend keeps rising. A look at how much of that spend is creating demand versus capturing it.

Marketing attribution is unclear

Every platform claims the credit and the numbers don't add up. A pragmatic approach to measurement that decisions can actually be based on.

Growth stalled after a replatform

Traffic or conversion dropped after moving platforms. A structured way to separate migration issues from unrelated factors.

Agency underperformance

Results aren't matching the effort or spend, but it isn't clear whether that's an agency problem or a structural one.

Growth team capability gaps

The constraint isn't strategy or budget, but who owns decisions, how fast they get made, and where execution bottlenecks sit.

Questions we get asked in this model

Do you need access to our ad accounts and platforms, or just the data?: Typically both, though the depth varies. We usually need read access to GA4 or equivalent analytics, the main paid media platforms, CRM/ESM data, and finance-grade revenue and margin figures. Where full platform access isn't possible, exported data covering the same period is usually workable.
We're already running a lot of marketing activity — will this duplicate our agencies' reporting?: No. The diagnostic sits above channel-level reporting and looks at the commercial picture across all of it, including where different agencies' own metrics may conflict with each other. It's designed to be a single, independent read that agencies themselves are rarely positioned to provide.
Is this only relevant if our growth has actually stalled?: It's most commonly commissioned when growth has plateaued or profitability has come under pressure, but it's equally useful for businesses growing well who want a clear-eyed check on whether that growth is on a sustainable footing before committing further investment.
How does this differ from a standard ecommerce audit?: A standard audit typically reviews one channel or function in isolation — SEO, paid media, or CRO. The Growth Diagnostic looks across all of them together, against contribution margin and customer economics, because the real constraint is usually at the intersection of several functions rather than inside any one of them.

Also relevant

Working through an agency?

We provide the senior strategy and commercial layer behind agency delivery, white-label or co-branded.
Non-solicitation by default: your client relationship stays yours.
Useful when a client needs a diagnostic view that sits above channel delivery.

Agency partner proposition

Get a clear read on where your growth is actually coming from

A Growth Diagnostic gives ecommerce and retail leadership an independent, evidence-based view of acquisition cost, retention economics, conversion and margin — before the next quarter's budget decisions are made.

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