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An eCommerce store can grow 50% and become a worse business.
Sounds weird, but:
Year 1:
$500k sales
$100k profit
Year 2:
$750k sales
$90k profit
Sales went up $250k.
The owner worked more.
More inventory was purchased.
More money went into ads.
More orders had to be shipped.
And the business made $10k LESS.
This is why I wouldn't ask an eCommerce owner:
“How much did you sell?”
I'd ask:
“How much did you keep?”
Growth that doesn't improve the bottom line is just more work.
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founders love asking one question first:
“how much?”
fair question.
but after years of doing this, i’ve learned that price usually isn’t the first thing we need to figure out.
the first question is:
“what are we actually trying to fix?”
two founders recently came to me for almost the same thing:
a brand refresh.
one came with a solution already picked:
make the logo system match a favicon direction she liked.
the other came with the actual problem:
the platform’s branding was overpowering the independent businesses using it.
same general ask.
very different starting points.
once the problem was clear, the direction, scope, process, and price were much easier to define.
“make X look like Y” gives me a direction.
“X isn’t working because of Y” gives me a problem to solve.
and that’s what you’re actually hiring a designer for.
We turned off a client's free shipping threshold and just made shipping free on everything.
AOV dropped which was expected but revenue dropped too, which wasn't.
So I tried it on another store to be sure, surprise surprise, same thing lol.
But the funny part is what happened to order frequency.
Without a threshold, people bought less per order, but they didn't buy more often to make up for it so they just spent less overall.
My read is that the threshold was doing something beyond nudging cart size.
It gave people a reason to browse a second time before checking out, and that extra pass through the store is where a lot of the discovery was happening.
Take it away and people grab the one thing they came for and leave.
What worked better was keeping the threshold but making the progress toward it obvious in the cart, with an actual suggestion of what to add rather than just a number to hit.
So free shipping on everything sounds like the generous move, and customers probably say they'd prefer it.
Most €2k–€10k websites are going to disappear.
I think the middle class of web design is going to disappear.
Not because web design is dead.
Because AI is going to make cheap websites incredibly easy to build.
And big agencies will still take €20k, €50k, €100k+ projects.
But what happens to the €2k–€10k website?
That's where I think things get interesting.
If all you're selling is:
“Here's a website. We built it.”
You're going to have a problem.
Because AI can already build that.
The value will move away from simply building websites.
It will move toward strategy, positioning, creative thinking and actually understanding the business.
I might be wrong about this.
But I don't think web design is dying.
I think the average web designer is going to have to become a lot more valuable.
I'd push back a little here, I don't think the middle disappears so much as it gets squeezed into bundling strategy or brand work on top of the build instead of selling the site alone. Are you seeing that shift with your own clients already, or is this more of a prediction?