OPTION 1
Hire in-house
Six months to recruit a Director of Ecommerce. $180K+ fully loaded. And they still arrive alone. You now need a platform lead, a growth lead and an analyst under them.
FRACTIONAL ECOMMERCE DIRECTION.
One monthly fee. The whole ecommerce team.
Strategy, leadership and execution in one retained team, across Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Lightspeed. We do not hand you a report and leave. We set the direction, then we run the work.
For merchants doing $2M to $15M, B2C or B2B. And when you only need the decision, not the team, that is where we start.
SHOPIFY & SHOPIFY PLUSBIGCOMMERCEMAGENTOWOOCOMMERCEPRESTASHOPLIGHTSPEED RETAIL (R-SERIES) + ECOM (C-SERIES)
THE TRAP
Between $2M and $15M, every ecommerce leadership option is bad.
You have outgrown the founder running it on instinct. You are not big enough to carry a full internal leadership bench. So you pick the least bad option, and pay for it for two years.
OPTION 2
Hire an agency
Channel-deep, business-shallow. They are staffed to defend a scope of work, not your P&L. Strategy stops precisely where their statement of work ends.
OPTION 3
Hire a consultant
A diagnostic, a slide deck, a roadmap, an invoice. Then they leave and you execute it alone, with the same team that was already at capacity.
THE FOURTH OPTION
One senior team. Retained monthly. Sets the direction and does the work.
Merchants & Co. is a fractional subscription to a complete, senior-level ecommerce team. Not one consultant. Not a junior pod with a slide deck. A leadership layer that owns the roadmap and the numbers, with the execution capacity sitting inside the same team.
The judgment does not change with the level of engagement. Only the number of hands does.
We own outcomes, not deliverables
The roadmap, the priorities and the numbers are ours to defend every month. You are not left holding a plan nobody is accountable for.
Advise and execute, in the same loop
The people who decide are the people who ship. No handoff gap, no translation loss, no "that is outside our scope."
Platform-fluent, not platform-loyal
We work across the six major platforms. We are paid to grow your business, not to keep you on a stack that suits us.
Senior only
No account coordinator between you and the person doing the thinking. You get the operators directly.
ENGAGEMENT
One team. Two depths.
Every engagement starts with the same senior judgment. The only difference is whether we hand it to you or run it ourselves.
LEVEL ONE
Advisory
The senior call. Platform selection, migration decisions, agency and vendor review, budget arbitration, roadmap sequencing. You get the decision and the path to it. Your team executes.
Advisory ends when the decision is made.
LEVEL TWO
Advisory and execution
The senior call, plus the people who carry it out. Same judgment, same team, now accountable for the numbers instead of the recommendation.
ECOMMERCE DIRECTION
PLATFORM AND TECHNOLOGY
GROWTH AND ACQUISITION
MERCHANDISING AND CONVERSION
DATA AND REPORTING
EXECUTION CAPACITY
The fractional team ends when the number moves.
You are not choosing between two services. You are choosing how much of the work stays on your side.
WHAT YOU ACTUALLY GET
The team, without the headcount.
One monthly subscription gives you access to the full stack of roles a serious ecommerce operation needs, dialed up or down as the quarter demands.
01
Ecommerce Director
Owns the roadmap, the priorities and the P&L conversation. Runs the cadence. The person your team escalates to.
02
Platform & Technology Lead
Architecture, replatforming, migrations, integrations, performance, technical debt. Decides build vs. buy.
03
Growth & Acquisition
Paid media, SEO, lifecycle, marketplaces, retention. Channel mix tied to contribution margin, not vanity ROAS.
04
Merchandising & Conversion
Catalog, pricing, promotions, PDP and checkout experience, CRO. What actually moves revenue per session.
05
Data & Reporting
One version of the numbers. Cohorts, contribution margin, forecast. Reporting your CFO will accept.
06
Execution capacity
Development, design, content and deployment, routed through the team so work ships instead of queueing.
HOW THE WORK MOVES
Advise. Execute. Adjust. Every month.
01
Diagnose
Platform, data, acquisition, margin and operations. We find where the money is actually leaking.
02
Decide
A ranked 90-day plan with owners, effort and expected impact. Short enough to act on, specific enough to argue with.
03
Ship
The work gets built and released by our team, your team, or both, coordinated by us.
04
Measure
Against the numbers agreed at the start. Monthly business review, no reporting theatre.
05
Adjust
The plan is re-cut every quarter based on what the data did, not what the deck promised.
STRAIGHT COMPARISON
Where we sit.
| CONSULTANT | AGENCY | IN-HOUSE HIRE | MERCHANTS & CO. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sets strategy | YES | PARTLY | YES | YES |
| Executes the work | NO | YES | PARTLY | YES |
| Owns the numbers | NO | NO | YES | YES |
| Multi-platform expertise | PARTLY | NO | NO | YES |
| Senior from day one | YES | NO | PARTLY | YES |
| Live in weeks, not months | PARTLY | PARTLY | NO | YES |
| Scales down without a layoff | YES | PARTLY | NO | YES |
PLATFORMS
Six platforms. One team that knows the difference.
Most partners sell you the platform they are certified in. We start from your catalog, your margin and your operations, then tell you whether the platform you are on is the problem or not.
Shopify & Shopify Plus
The fastest path to revenue for most DTC brands, and the fastest path to app sprawl if nobody is governing it.
SEE OUR WORK ON THIS PLATFORMBigCommerce
Strong on catalog complexity, B2B and API-first builds, with a lower total cost of ownership than most merchants expect.
SEE OUR WORK ON THIS PLATFORMMagento
The most powerful platform in the list, and the most expensive to own badly.
SEE OUR WORK ON THIS PLATFORMWooCommerce
Unbeatable when content drives the sale. Fragile when it is asked to behave like an enterprise platform.
SEE OUR WORK ON THIS PLATFORMPrestaShop
Deeply capable and widely underserved. Most PrestaShop merchants are running on module debt and an overdue upgrade.
SEE OUR WORK ON THIS PLATFORMLightspeed Retail (R-Series) + eCom (C-Series)
Retail POS first, ecommerce second. Strongest when store and online catalogue share one inventory; most fragile when the catalogue outgrows what the POS was built to hold. We optimize what you’re running today, and when local reach stops being enough, we take it further
SEE OUR WORK ON THIS PLATFORMFIT
Built for merchants doing $2M to $15M online.
B2C, B2B or both. Founder-led or owner-operated. One storefront or a portfolio.
A good fit if
You do $2M to $15M in online revenue and growth has flattened or become unpredictable.
There is no full-time ecommerce leader, or there is one and they are drowning.
You are on Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, PrestaShop or Lightspeed, or weighing a move.
You have agencies or freelancers running channels with nobody above them connecting the dots.
You want decisions made and shipped, not another audit.
Not a fit if
You are pre-launch or under $2M online. You need a builder, not a leadership layer.
You are shopping for the lowest hourly rate.
You want one channel executed with no ownership of the wider business.
You want to hand down the plan and have us execute it. If every decision is already made, you are hiring hands, and that is not what this is.
WHO RUNS THIS
You are hiring a person before you hire a structure.
Christian Fillion. More than twenty five years in ecommerce, B2B and B2C, on both sides of the Canada and United States border. Cofounder of Marketing Media, execution: SEO, PPC, CRO, implementations and migrations. Infrastructure runs through our own hosting division: hosting, maintenance, SLA, security.
Strategy, execution and infrastructure under one roof is rare in fractional work, and it is the reason platform advice here is not theory.
MORE ABOUT HOW WE ARE BUILTPROOF
Eleven years, three very different problems.
PREMIUM TOOL RETAILER · ONTARIO
Eleven years on the same platform, two redesigns, six figure monthly volume, more than half of revenue online since 2024. The recommendation that held is the one we never had to reverse.
MOTORCYCLE APPAREL RETAILER · QUEBEC
A storefront carrying the revenue and an online channel returning 11.7 times on ad spend, at forty eight cents a click. The store is not the enemy of the site.
INDEPENDENT HARDWARE RETAILER · OHIO
Four days from question to signed engagement. Four mechanisms tested, three reversals put in writing, eleven to fourteen hours of custom development removed from our own scope.
An advisor who never corrects himself in writing is selling you his first guess.
READ THE FULL CASE STUDIESHOW IT STARTS
Same door, either way.
01
Fit call, twenty minutes
We find out whether the channel actually needs senior direction, and at what depth. If it does not, we say so on the call.
02
Diagnostic sprint, two weeks, paid
The store, the stack, the numbers, the team. You leave with the operating picture and the decisions that follow from it. This step is identical at both levels.
03
You run it, or we do
Take the decisions and execute them with your own team, or keep the team that made them. Monthly, no long lock in.
Most clients decide at the end of week two, not at the end of the first call.
A RETAILER WITH STORES? START HERE · FIXED PRICE · 10 BUSINESS DAYS
SEE THE AUDIT
The Retail Ecommerce Audit
For established retailers whose online channel is not carrying its weight. Read only, $1,950 USD, credited in full against any mandate that follows.
Twenty minutes tells us both whether this works, and at which level.
No deck, no discovery invoice. A short call to see where you are, what is stuck, and which level of engagement fits. If neither does, we will say so.