D Barlow Advisory works with eCommerce operators on the parts of the business the platform never shows — unit economics, operating structure, and the commercial discipline that decides whether growth compounds or leaks.
Most online retailers don't have a growth problem. They have a structure problem wearing a growth problem's clothes.
Revenue hides a great deal. A store can be scaling top-line while its contribution margin quietly inverts — freight, returns, discounting, and acquisition cost compounding faster than the order value that funds them. By the time the bank balance says it, the decision that caused it is six months old.
We work upstream of that. The mandate is to make the economics legible: what each order actually earns after everything, where the operating model bends under volume, and which levers move the number that matters rather than the number that's easy to watch.
The output is not a deck. It's a clearer set of decisions — and an operator who can see the machine they're running.
Contribution margin built from the order up — freight, payment, returns, blended acquisition cost. The true floor beneath the headline.
How the business is put together — fulfilment, supply, cash cycle, the seams that hold at one scale and tear at the next.
The day-to-day calls — pricing, promotion cadence, channel mix — priced against margin instead of momentum.
Deciding what to scale, what to hold, and what to stop — so the capital goes where the return is, not where the noise is.
Before any advice, the numbers. We rebuild the P&L from the order level and find the places where the story the dashboard tells and the story the cash tells stop agreeing.
Every operating model has a handful of choices that carry the rest. We isolate them — and put a number on what each one is costing or earning right now.
The work resolves into decisions an operator can actually make on Monday — sequenced, sized, and honest about the trade. Not a strategy document. A shorter list of better calls.
Advice that ends at the recommendation is half-finished. We stay close through execution, because the number only moves when the decision survives contact with the operation.
The practice is built on a quantitative and capital-markets background — a decade spent pricing risk and managing institutional fixed-income portfolios before turning that same discipline toward the commercial reality of online merchants.
It's an uncommon lens for the category. Most eCommerce advice is written in the language of channels and creative. We write it in the language of margin, cash, and capital allocation — the language the business is actually settled in.
Engagements are selective and taken directly. Reach us by email and we'll respond ourselves.
daniel@dbarlowadvisory.com ↗