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SERVICES · RETAIL ECOMMERCE AUDIT

The Retail Ecommerce Audit

For established retailers with physical stores whose online channel is not carrying its weight. Ten business days, fixed price, read only.

Senior advisory · Christian Fillion
Marketing Media
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01 · THE SITUATION

You have stores that work. The website does not.

Most retailers we meet are not failing. They are profitable on the floor, known in their market, and have been selling the same categories well for years. The online channel is the part that never took hold.

—The online store is a rounding error. A few thousand dollars a month against a business doing well over a million, and it has been flat for two years.
—The ads run but the math never closes. Budget goes out every month. Nobody can say what it earns after discounts, shipping and returns.
—Your best online month happened before any of this existed. A smaller budget, less technology, more revenue. That number is still in the reports and nobody can explain it.

Every one of those is a symptom. None of them is the problem.

02 · THE DIAGNOSIS

The constraint is almost never the advertising.

When a retailer with real stores cannot make the online channel work, the cause sits upstream of the marketing. It sits in how the inventory is structured, in how the product data is built, and in what the margin actually is once discounts, shipping and fulfilment are removed from it.

That matters because it changes what a fix looks like. Adding budget to a channel with a structural constraint does not produce growth. It produces a larger version of the same result. The work is to find the constraint, prove it with the retailer's own numbers, and put the corrections in the right order.

WHAT THIS MEANS IN PRACTICE

We do not start with a media audit. We start with the catalogue, the margin and the operations behind them, because that is where the ceiling usually sits.

03 · WHAT WE EXAMINE

Seven areas. Yours, examined against your own numbers.

01

Inventory structure

How depth, width and store versus online allocation shape what the site can actually sell.

02

Unit economics

What each order earns once discounts, shipping and fulfilment are subtracted, by category.

03

Platform and operations

Where the POS, the ecommerce platform and the middleware between them are quietly limiting the catalogue.

04

Product data and feed

How much of your catalogue is actually eligible to be advertised, and what is blocking the rest.

05

Demand and visibility

What the market is already searching for, what you already rank on, and what that traffic meets when it arrives.

06

Advertising economics

Break even return by margin tier, and which products should be allowed into a paid channel at all.

07

Growth ceiling

The point where inventory, platform, staffing or fulfilment stops the channel, and which one arrives first.

Built for retailers with real world constraints

Authorised dealer agreements. Brands you are not permitted to transact online. MAP, iMAP and UPP pricing policies. A point of sale system that was never designed to feed an online catalogue. Size and width matrices that break the moment they reach a product feed. These are not edge cases in retail. They are the job, and they are priced into the work.

04 · HOW IT RUNS

Four phases. Ten business days.

Days 0 to 3

Intake

Mutual confidentiality agreement first, before a single file changes hands. Then a project workspace, an itemised input checklist, and access requests. The ten day clock starts when the complete input set is received, not at signature. You always know where the delivery date stands.

Days 1 to 6

Diagnostic

Your sales history, product catalogue, cost and inventory data, examined against your live accounts. Each day produces a dated finding that lands in the workspace as it is completed. No silence for two weeks followed by a document.

One session

Systems walkthrough

Sixty minutes with whoever actually runs your systems. They drive, we observe. This is where configuration issues surface that no export will ever show.

Days 7 to 10

Blueprint and review

The findings are assembled into a single document, sent twenty four hours ahead, then reviewed in a ninety minute working session with you and your operations lead. The session is for decisions, not for reading.

05 · THE DELIVERABLE

A document that holds up when we are not in the room.

Written so it can be handed to your operations lead, your buyer or your accountant and still make sense. Eight sections:

—Current position. Where the business actually stands, in five lines.
—The core finding. One sentence. The thing that explains the rest.
—Findings by area. Each one carrying the number that supports it.
—Margin and unit economics. What you earn per order, and on what.
—Inventory depth rules. Where to go deeper, where to stay shallow, where to stop buying.
—Growth ceiling and triggers. What stops the channel, and at what point.
—A ninety day sequence. Each action with expected impact, effort required and an owner.
—Limits of the analysis. What we could not see, and what it would take to see it.
NO PROJECTIONS WE CANNOT DEFEND

You will not find an invented revenue forecast in this document. Every figure traces back to a file you supplied or an account you granted access to. Where the data does not support a conclusion, the document says so.

06 · TERMS

Fixed price. Fully credited.

$1,950 USD
plus applicable taxes
—Credited in full against the implementation mandate, if you choose to run one.
—Read only throughout. Nothing in your accounts is modified. That is a written commitment, not a technical limitation.
—No plan upgrades required. If your systems do not offer a read only role, we work from exports instead.
—Mutual confidentiality agreement signed before any data is exchanged.
—Ten business days from receipt of the complete input set.
NEXT STEP

A forty five minute call, no charge.

We go through your structure, your brand constraints and your numbers as they stand. If the audit is not the right thing for you, we will say so on that call.