Scaling an e-commerce brand: unit economics first

Top-line revenue is a vanity metric. Contribution margin is the truth metric. If you can't tell us your contribution margin per channel today, you can't reliably scale spend tomorrow.

Contribution margin = revenue − COGS − variable fulfilment − payment processing − returns. It's what's left over to fund marketing, overheads and profit.

Once you know contribution margin, you can compute payback by cohort: how many days until a paying customer cohort returns its acquisition cost?

Brands with a payback of under 60 days can scale aggressively. Brands at 6+ months should slow down and fix the funnel before adding fuel.

This is the lens we use with every e-commerce client we advise. It changes everything about how you allocate budget.