Ecommerce channel assessment for consumer brands
Most of our consulting clients did not come to us excited about ecommerce. Their products were already online whether they wanted them there or not, usually because a distributor or a customer got there first.
Our consulting work answers the question underneath that: is Amazon, Wayfair or another marketplace worth it for your brand, and if it is, what exactly would you have to do to win there.
Who this is for
You run or lead a consumer brand doing between $5MM and $100MM a year, mostly through traditional retail or wholesale. Online is under 20% of sales and nobody on the team owns it. You have been told you “should be on Amazon” but nobody has shown you the arithmetic. You want a decision you can defend, not a sales pitch.
We work with furniture, lighting, plumbing, kitchen, pet, food and DIY brands in Canada and the USA. If you can tap phones to swap contact details, you are probably not our client. If you ask for a card, you probably are.
You will recognise yourself if
- Sales of $5MM to $100MM, mostly through retail or wholesale
- Online is under 20% of revenue and nobody owns it
- A distributor or a customer already put your products on Amazon
- You want the arithmetic before you commit a budget
How the engagement works
The work runs in three stages. Most clients start with the first and decide about the rest once they have seen the numbers.
1. Assessment
We size the prize before anyone spends money: category sales data for your products on the platforms in question, the competitive set and what they sell, and a net-sale model for your top items covering retail price, platform commission, advertising, fulfillment and logistics. Then your side of it: portfolio fit, pricing across channels, channel conflict, operational readiness and the partners already in place. The output is a written assessment with a clear recommendation: go, do not go, or go this way and not that way.
2. Roadmap
If the answer is go, we write the plan. Which platform first and why, which SKUs launch and which wait, the pricing architecture, the advertising budget and the target economics, what has to change in your warehouse and your systems, and who does what for the first 90 days and the first year. Every line in the roadmap ties back to a number in the assessment.
3. Execution, if you want it
Some clients take the roadmap to their own team. Others ask us to run it. When we run it, we become the general managers of your ecommerce business: we set up the accounts, build the listings, manage pricing, promotions and advertising and report against the KPIs we agreed in the roadmap. That work is described on our Amazon services and Beyond Amazon pages.
What you get
Every engagement ends with the same six things in your hands. The person who did the analysis is the person you deal with throughout.
A size-of-the-prize assessment
Category data you can check, for your products on each platform in question.
A net-sale model for your top SKUs
Retail price to what is left, per platform, in a spreadsheet you keep.
A written go or no-go recommendation
Go, do not go, or go this way and not that way, with the reasons.
A channel and portfolio roadmap
Owners, sequence and a 90-day plan, every line tied to a number in the assessment.
A working session with your leadership team
We walk through all of it with the people who have to decide.
One point of contact for the whole engagement
The person who did the analysis, not a handoff to an account team.
How we charge
Assessment and roadmap work is a project fee scoped to your portfolio and the number of platforms. If you go on to run the roadmap with us, we generally credit a portion of that consulting fee toward the monthly minimum fees of the project.
Ongoing management is performance based: a monthly minimum fee against a commission on net sales, so we earn more only when you sell more. Longer agreements carry lower monthly minimums. We will show you the model before you commit to anything.
Project fee
Assessment and roadmap, scoped to your portfolio and platforms.
Monthly minimum plus commission
Ongoing management is paid on net sales, whichever is greater.
Consulting fee credited
A portion of the project fee generally offsets the monthly minimums.
Results from this kind of work
margin improvement identified for a CPG brand that had handed Amazon to a distributor, with a 130% growth opportunity over three years
of sales now online for a Canadian furniture designer that started under 5%, with Wayfair.com alone a $10MM+ account and 100 SKUs grown to 900+
year over year growth on every managed account for three straight years for an importer of sinks and vanities
The people behind these numbers spent their careers at Colgate, Clorox, MARS, Ferrero and PwC Strategy& before Looking Glass Group. That is the kind of experience mid-sized brands cannot usually hire full time.
Frequently asked questions
How long does an ecommerce channel assessment take?
About six weeks for most brands, depending on the size of the portfolio and how quickly we can get sales data from you. The first two weeks are data gathering. The recommendation comes with a working session, not just a document.
What do you need from us to start?
A SKU list with costs and current pricing by channel, your last 12 months of sales by customer, and an hour with whoever owns the P&L. If you already sell on a marketplace, read access to the account. That is usually enough to build the first model.
Will selling on Amazon or Wayfair upset our existing retailers?
Sometimes, and the assessment says so plainly. We model channel conflict, IMAP exposure and price parity before recommending anything. In many cases a marketplace listing protects your brand from unauthorized sellers who are already there.
Do we have to hire you to run it afterwards?
No. The roadmap is written so your own team or another partner can execute it. Some clients ask us to run the channel and some take it in house. Both work.
Do you work with US brands or only Canadian ones?
Both. We run accounts on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca, Wayfair US and Canada, Lowe’s, Home Depot and more. Cross-border is a normal part of the work.
Start with the sample report
The fastest way to see how we think is our ecommerce advisory sample report. It walks through a real assessment, anonymized: where the opportunity sat, what was already working and what we fixed first.