MarginLens

I find where Shopify and DTC brands leak profit.

A fixed-scope profit audit of your order data. You get a ranked list of the discounts, products and customers costing you margin, what each one costs, and what to fix first.

Book a free 30-minute profit call See a sample audit

For Shopify and DTC brands doing roughly $500K–$20M a year. Start with data exports; read-only access if needed. NDA signed before any data is shared.

Case studies

Four audits, each ending in a recommendation. All four use public or synthetic datasets, not client data, and every figure is marked as observed in the data or modeled from it.

Power BI dashboard from the Profit Leak Diagnostic showing profit by product, shipping reliability and margin risk

8 products carry 84.5% of profit in a $35.2M catalogue

The Profit Leak Diagnostic. Public dataset from Kaggle: 180,519 transactions, $35.2M in sales.

What the audit concludedRevenue is not the issue. Mistaking revenue for business health is. Profit here depends on 8 products, and the 28 weak ones should be sorted by cause before any are cut.

  • Share of profit earned by 8 of 118 productsObserved in the data 84.5%
  • Products with weak margins and high delivery failure, together only 2.2% of salesObserved in the data 28
  • Profit at risk if the top 8 products lost 20% of margin, nearly 17% of total profitModeled scenario, not an actual loss $643,000

Full case study Read the report (PDF) Slide deck (PDF) Dashboard walkthrough (video)

Want to know if your catalogue depends on a few products too?

Book a free 30-minute profit call
Dashboard from the Retail Discount Profitability Audit comparing discounted and full-price profit

Discounting costs $13.8M: a standing practice, not a targeted tool

Retail Discount Profitability Audit. Synthetic dataset (Microsoft Contoso), 223K+ transactions.

  • Transactions sold at a discountObserved in the data61%
  • Total discount cost6.3% of revenue, 11.3% of profit$13.8M

What the audit concludedDo not change pricing policy yet. Put a budget, an owner, and reason codes on discounts, then test a lower discount cap on the 10% to 20% tier.

Full case study Read the executive report (PDF)

Charts from the Olist churn investigation linking late delivery to low reviews and no repeat purchase

Late deliveries hurt reviews, and over 96% of customers never ordered again

Olist churn root-cause investigation. Public dataset from Kaggle: 113K+ Brazilian orders.

  • Customers who never placed a second orderObserved in the data96.9%
  • Average review score for on-time vs late ordersObserved in the data4.2 vs 2.5

What the audit concludedTreat late delivery and repeat purchase as two separate problems. Fix fulfilment to protect reviews, and test a second-purchase offer to win customers back.

Full case study Read the executive report (PDF) Dashboard layout (PDF)

Excel and Power Pivot dashboard segmenting UK retail customers by lifetime value

Top customers were worth 3.2x the average, and up to 40x an at-risk customer

UK retail customer lifetime value and segment analysis. Public dataset from UCI: 1M+ transactions, £17M+ revenue.

  • Champion customer value against the average customerObserved in the data3.2x
  • Extra revenue if customers moved up a segmentModeled opportunity, not realised revenue£390K+

What the audit concludedA Champion customer averaged £8,767 against £220 for an At-Risk one. A gap that size makes moving existing customers up a segment the first place to look.

Full case study Watch the 3-minute walkthrough (video)

Free tool: profitability calculator

Check whether an order can afford its customer acquisition cost, and how much discount it can absorb before it breaks even.

Open the calculator

The Profit Audit

One fixed-scope engagement. I work from an export of your orders and answer four questions.

  • Are your discounts buying growth or giving margin away?

    I compare discounted and full-price orders line by line, so the cost of each discount habit is visible.

  • Which few products carry your profit?

    And which ones combine weak margins with high delivery failure, so you can find out why before deciding what to do with them.

  • How much depends on a small group of customers?

    Where your best buyers are concentrated, and what you stand to lose if they leave.

  • Where would a stockout or slow shipping hurt most?

    Single products or shipping tiers carrying more of the business than anyone has planned for.

What you get

A plain-English report that ranks the findings by what each one costs you and says what to do about it, followed by a walkthrough call. Most audits take 2 to 8 business days from data access to final report. The fee is fixed and agreed on the first call, before any work starts.

How it works

  1. Free 30-minute call. We check whether an audit fits and agree what to look at.
  2. You share a read-only export under NDA. Customer names and emails can be removed first.
  3. I run the audit and check each finding before it goes in the report.
  4. You get the report and a walkthrough call to decide what to do.

Good fit

Shopify and DTC brands doing roughly $500K to $20M a year, with at least a year of order history.

Not a fit

Pre-revenue stores, and brands that sell almost entirely through retailers, where the order data is not yours.

Book a free 30-minute profit call

Need retention analysis or a dashboard instead? Mention it on the call.

How to read the numbers

Observed
Measured directly in the dataset.
Modeled
A what-if built from observed data, such as a 20% margin drop. It is not savings, recovered revenue or a forecast.
Synthetic
Microsoft’s Contoso retail data. It behaves like a real business but is not one.

The code, queries and reports behind each audit are public, so any figure on this page can be checked:

The work uses PostgreSQL, Python and Power BI or Excel. You never need to touch any of it.

Common questions

Is my business data safe with you?

I work from read-only exports or view-only access, never admin access to your store. An NDA is available and signed before any data is shared, and I delete the raw data when the engagement ends unless you ask me to keep it. The analysis does not need customer names or emails, so you can remove them from the export first.

What if the audit finds nothing meaningful?

I would say so plainly in the report and not pad it. The first call exists to check this: if your order history is too thin, or too much of your business runs through retailers, I will tell you before you pay for anything. In all four of my case-study datasets, profit was concentrated in a few products, discounts or customers, because standard dashboards report averages rather than concentration.

How is this different from hiring an agency?

You work directly with me from the first call to the final report, not with an account manager relaying findings from a team you never meet. That means no overhead markup and someone who understands your data rather than running a templated checklist.

How long does an audit take?

Most audits take 2 to 8 business days from data access to final report, depending on data volume and how clean it is. I confirm a specific timeline on the first call.

Do I need to be technical to understand the result?

No. You get a plain-English report and a walkthrough call. The report is a ranked list of findings, what each one costs you, and what to do about it. The technical work stays behind the scenes.

What size of business is a good fit?

Shopify and DTC brands doing roughly $500K to $20M a year. Pre-revenue stores do not have enough order history for the analysis to mean much, and brands that sell almost entirely through retailers do not own the order data an audit needs. Larger retailers usually have an in-house team for this work.

Which time zones do you work in?

I work remotely and hold calls in UK afternoon and US morning hours. Most of the work is asynchronous, so you do not need to be online while I run the audit.

Talk to me

The quickest way to find out whether there is a profit leak worth chasing is a 30-minute call. It is free, and I will tell you if I do not think an audit would pay for itself.

Book a free 30-minute profit call

Call slots fall in UK afternoon and US morning hours.

Meet me · under 1 minute One product. 36th in revenue, last in profit. Watch the intro
Zeeshan Akram, independent e-commerce profit analyst and founder of MarginLens. You work with me directly, from the first call to the final report. More about me