It means planning channel, platform, advertising, operations, and measurement decisions with an experienced external expert for a business that sells online or is preparing to. The consultant sets priorities and sequence and monitors whether implementation follows the plan; implementation may be carried out by the business's team, an agency, or the consultant. The need arises because e-commerce decisions are interconnected: the chosen platform affects ad measurement, shipping and returns affect margins, and the advertising budget affects inventory planning.
Not every business needs an ongoing consultant. A store with established sales channels and product-level profitability tracking often needs external help in just one area. For businesses starting out, losing profit as they grow or entering a new channel, ecommerce consulting can limit the cost of trial and error from the outset. Its value ultimately depends on recommendations being implemented and results being tracked with reliable data.
Which decisions does an e-commerce consultant guide?
A consultant's decisions fall into five areas: sales channels and platform, product profitability, advertising budget, completing purchases on the site, and operations. Priorities vary with the business's stage. A new store first needs channel and platform decisions, while an established brand may focus more on profitability and operations.
Choosing sales channels and infrastructure
The first decision is where to sell: your own ecommerce website, marketplaces or both. A marketplace provides an existing customer base, but the platform sets commission rates, major campaign schedules and customer communication rules. On your own website, you retain the customer relationship and take responsibility for attracting visitors. Your platform choice depends on payment, shipping and marketplace integrations, design flexibility, budget and your team's technical skills. The strengths of platforms such as Shopify, Ticimax, IdeaSoft, T-Soft and ikas are explained in detail on our e-commerce website setup page. Steps such as opening marketplace stores, uploading products and choosing categories are also covered on our marketplace launch support page.
Profitability per product
To decide which products should drive growth, you need to know what remains from each sale. Subtract product cost, any marketplace commission, shipping, payment processing fees, a returns allowance and the advertising spend that generated the sale from the selling price. The remainder is the contribution per order. Without a separate calculation for each channel, you may miss a product that is profitable on your website but loss-making on a marketplace, or vice versa. This analysis also clarifies which products deserve advertising support and which should help increase basket value during campaigns.
Allocating the advertising budget
In advertising, a consultant’s main contribution is deciding how to allocate the budget across channels and products, and in what order. Search ads reach people already looking for the product, social media ads generate interest among those who are not yet searching, and marketplace ads improve visibility within platform listings. Whether a channel works for a particular product becomes clear when each channel’s contribution to sales is tracked separately. The reasoning behind managing advertising against measurable objectives is explained in our performance marketing article. During consulting, this approach is considered alongside pricing and inventory decisions.
Completing a purchase on the website
If visitors arrive but do not buy, part of the problem may lie on your website. Missing size, dimension or delivery information, shipping costs revealed only at checkout, difficult mobile forms and limited payment options can lead shoppers to abandon their purchase. A good analysis considers these issues alongside visitor data and drop-offs in the order journey, prioritises changes and recommends small tests before a major redesign.
Inventory, shipping, and returns processes
As orders increase, operations can become an obstacle to growth. Discrepancies between website and warehouse stock, delayed shipments and slow returns affect both customer satisfaction and marketplace store performance. At this stage, the consultant maps the entire order flow, identifying manual steps and where errors occur. If necessary, they recommend an ERP or integration solution that centralizes inventory and order data.
Consultant, agency, training, or in-house team: the differences
One company may fulfil several roles. Knowing which role you are paying for helps you set the right expectations and contract.
- A consultant helps you decide what to do, in what order and against which criteria. Deliverables include analysis, a roadmap and periodic reviews of that plan.
- An agency carries out the agreed work: managing ad accounts, building or improving the site, or producing content. Its deliverables are live campaigns and completed work.
- Training transfers knowledge to your team; your team handles the work afterward.
- An in-house team handles daily work and retains brand knowledge within the company, but has limited exposure to what succeeds or fails in other stores.
Ecommerce consulting helps when you can implement but need direction. If the work is clear but no one can carry it out, agency services are a better starting point. Training is best when you want to build expertise internally. Pam Ajans's e-commerce and advertising training is delivered live and one to one, covering e-commerce fundamentals, marketplaces, digital advertising and analytics. Guidance then continues through initial campaigns, including keyword selection, audience definition and budget management.
When do you need e-commerce consulting?
The Ministry of Trade's news dated May 12, 2026 reports that 634 thousand businesses traded online in 2025, compared with 559 thousand in 2023 and 600 thousand in 2024. As competition grows, standing out in ad auctions and marketplace listings becomes harder, and poor decisions become more costly. Even so, your own circumstances matter more than your competitors when deciding whether you need a consultant. An outside perspective is usually most useful in the following situations:
- Decisions on channels, platform, and budget must be made before selling; they are among the hardest to change later. Moving an established site to another platform requires transferring product, customer, and order data, redirecting old URLs, and helping the team learn the new system.
- If revenue and ad spend rise while profit stays flat, the problem may not be visible in the ad dashboard. The conversion value shown does not automatically deduct returns, commissions or shipping costs. Without the contribution margin calculation described above, you cannot know which campaign truly makes money.
- A brand moving from its own site to marketplaces, or the reverse, must rethink pricing and stock allocation. International selling also involves target-market selection, logistics and customs. These topics are covered in cross-border e-commerce consulting.
- If delayed shipments and stock errors rise as the business grows, a single person may be blamed when disconnected processes are the real problem.
- If separate people manage ads, the website and marketplaces without anyone examining the combined result, decisions become disconnected. A consultant brings this work into one plan.
Consulting does not always deliver the expected benefit. Without the budget or team to implement recommendations, a roadmap can go unused. If the problem is confined to one area, such as ad account structure or a technical website setting, help from a specialist in that area is more direct. For a business starting with a few products on a single channel, a one-off assessment or training session is often a more proportionate first step than a comprehensive engagement.
The steps of a consulting engagement
Details vary by company, but in a well-structured engagement you can expect the following steps and a concrete deliverable at the end of each.
- The introductory meeting covers objectives, budget, team and existing problems. The project’s scope, duration and deliverables are documented afterward.
- During the data and access stage, store dashboards, analytics, ad accounts and order, return and inventory records are made available for review.
- The current-state analysis considers channel, product, advertising, website and operational data together, then prioritises issues by impact and difficulty of resolution.
- The roadmap shows who will do each task, by when and in what order. Each item should also state how success will be measured.
- During implementation and monitoring, the consultant reviews results periodically, removes ineffective steps and updates the plan when necessary.
Data that demonstrates success
The metrics agreed at the start show whether the work delivers value, provided tracking is set up correctly. In Google Analytics, product views, add-to-cart, checkout, purchases and refunds are tracked with e-commerce events. Without a correctly functioning purchase event, interpreting store advertising and conversions is little more than guesswork.
Metrics are chosen according to the objective. Most e-commerce businesses should read the following data together:
- Net sales after returns and cancellations, and contribution margin per order
- Conversion rate and average order value
- New customer acquisition cost by channel
- Share of returning customers
- Return rate and the most common reasons for returns
- Time to dispatch and customer complaints
The calculations for conversion rate, average basket value and customer acquisition cost are explained in our digital marketing glossary through formulas. Decisions based on a single metric can mislead: if ad return rises while the number of new customers falls, growth may actually come from existing customers. Campaign weeks and seasonal transitions can also distort month-to-month comparisons; comparing the same weeks of the previous year provides a healthier picture during these periods.
Legal obligations vary by channel
The legal implications of channel and marketing decisions also belong in the plan. Subject to final review by a lawyer or accountant, consultants should not overlook the following areas.
The Ministry of Trade's e-commerce frequently asked questions state that businesses selling through their own websites must register with the Electronic Commerce Information System (ETBİS) before starting operations, while those selling through domestic marketplaces have no registration or notification obligation. When a business selling only on marketplaces decides to open its own site, registration joins its to-do list.
Distance Contracts Regulation gives consumers a fourteen-day right of withdrawal, except for the exclusions listed in the regulation. Profitability calculations and shipping agreements must therefore account for return costs from the outset, especially in categories with high return rates.
For commercial electronic messages sent to consumers by email, SMS or telephone, such as campaign announcements, Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce requires prior consent under Article 6. Collecting and storing customers' personal data also falls under Personal Data Protection Law No.6698. For required website notices and other setup obligations, read our article on steps to set up an e-commerce website.
Questions to ask when comparing proposals
Fees may be project-based or monthly. Compare scope and deliverables rather than price alone. The questions recommended in Google's guide for those considering SEO services, “What results do you expect, and when?” and “How do you measure success?”, should also come first in ecommerce consulting. Clear answers to the following questions will help:
- Can they show an example of a previous analysis or roadmap with client information anonymized?
- What work have they done with your platform, sales channels and industry?
- Who implements recommendations: your team, the consultant's team or a third-party agency?
- Which metrics will reports include, and how often will review meetings take place?
- Which reports, files and access rights will be handed over when the work ends?
Clarify account ownership before work starts. Ad accounts, Analytics properties, domains and store dashboards should be registered to the business. Consultants and agencies should access them through their own users rather than shared passwords. In Google Ads, each user is assigned an access level and administrator-level users can change others’ access. Keeping administrator rights with the business makes revoking access easier when work ends. On Shopify, agencies and consultants in the Partner program access the store through a collaborator account; store ownership cannot be transferred to this account.
Be cautious of proposals guaranteeing rankings or sales. Google’s same guide states, “No one can guarantee first place on Google.” Advertising and sales outcomes also depend on the market, the product and the quality of execution. A trustworthy consultant links expectations to a measurement plan and clear priorities. If you are considering working with Pam Ajans, you can ask us these questions in your first meeting too. For our advertising, e-commerce website, SEO and marketplace services, you can request a meeting through the contact page.