The symptoms
Three signs that nobody owns the number.
None of them arrive as a single dramatic event. That's exactly why they survive quarter after quarter.
Spend goes up, revenue doesn't follow
You're buying more sessions and converting a smaller share of them. Acquisition gets blamed for what is actually a storefront, merchandising or margin problem.
Four vendors, no single plan
An ads agency, a dev shop, an email freelancer and a designer — all busy, none accountable for the same number. Nobody can say what this month is for.
The backlog grows faster than it ships
Everyone agrees on what should be done. Nothing gets sequenced, so the highest-value items sit behind the loudest ones.
Where this fits
Agency, consultant, or someone who owns it.
Most brands eventually try all three. The difference isn't seniority on a CV — it's who is accountable when the number doesn't move.
Ecommerce audit packages
Start small. Escalate only if it's worth it.
Fixed prices, fixed scope, fixed dates. No hourly billing and no discovery call required before you know what something costs.
Level 01
Store Teardown
You suspect something's wrong but can't point at it. Fully async — no meetings required.
- →20-minute recorded walkthrough of your store on mobile and desktop
- →Top five revenue leaks, each with a euro estimate and the maths shown
- →Core Web Vitals and checkout speed benchmark you can re-run yourself
- →One-page priority list your team can start on immediately
- →Fee credited in full against an audit booked within 30 days
Level 02
Audit & Growth Plan
You want the whole commercial picture and a sequenced plan your team can execute without me.
- →Everything in the Teardown, taken several levels deeper
- →Full funnel: ad click → PDP → cart → checkout → post-purchase
- →Unit economics review — margin by product and channel, contribution after fulfilment and ad spend
- →Catalogue, merchandising and pricing structure
- →Channel mix — paid, organic, email and lifecycle, marketplaces, B2B
- →Markets, tax, currency and localisation check
- →Tech and app stack — what's slowing you down, what's redundant, what it costs
- →90-day growth plan ranked by €/effort, written for your team to ticket directly
- →90-minute walkthrough call with you and whoever will do the work
Level 03
Optimisation Sprint
You don't want a document. You want the top items shipped, measured and off the backlog.
- →Audit & Growth Plan included
- →I lead execution of the highest-value fixes with your developers or agency
- →CRO test design and A/B setup where traffic supports it
- →Access to my partner network for anything outside my scope
- →Before/after measurement on every change shipped
- →Weekly written progress against the plan, not activity reports
- →Handover doc so your team keeps going without me
Add-on
Marketplace Audit — Amazon & beyond
Listings and content quality, pricing and Buy Box position, fee structure, advertising efficiency, review health. From someone who ran marketplace P&L across Amazon, Walmart, eBay and Reverb — and knows where the margin actually goes.
€1,400 standalone
Ongoing
Fractional Ecommerce Director
For brands that have outgrown ad-hoc help but aren't ready for a €90k+ director hire. One to two days a month of senior ownership: I hold the roadmap, set the priorities, make the commercial calls, direct your agencies and developers, and answer for the result.
- →Quarterly plan, monthly priorities
- →Pricing, margin and channel economics
- →Agency and vendor management
- →Commercial scorecard and reporting
- →New market and channel decisions
- →Hiring input as you build the team
Fit
This pays for itself in some stores and wastes money in others.
I'd rather you know before you pay than after.
Worth doing
- ✓€250k+ in annual online revenue
- ✓A genuine desire to scale — not just to keep the lights on
- ✓Technical or large catalogue — variants, specs, compatibility
- ✓Mixed B2B and D2C, or heading that way
- ✓Someone internally or at an agency can act on the findings
- Any of these platforms: ShopifyShopify PlusWooCommerce MagentoOpenCartCustom build
Not worth doing
- ✕Pre-launch, or still validating whether people want the product
- ✕You want someone to run ads or produce content day to day
- ✕You're looking for a quick tactical hack rather than a plan you'll follow
- ✕Replatforming or a full site rebuild — that's an agency job, and I'll say so
- ✕Nobody available to implement anything for the next quarter
- ✕The decision-maker isn't in the room and won't be
The bench
One person can't do everything. I know who can do the rest.
A plan is only worth what gets built from it. When something falls outside what I do, I introduce you to people I've worked with and would use myself — and I stay involved to make sure the brief is right.
01
Performance Marketing
Paid social and media buying built around contribution margin, not last-click ROAS.
02
PPC & Shopping
Google Ads, Shopping and feed management for catalogues that are too large to manage by hand.
03
Brand & Creative
Positioning, identity and creative direction for brands competing on more than price.
04
Shopify Developers
Theme work, custom apps and integrations — vetted people who ship on time and document what they build.
05
Ecommerce Project Management
Someone to hold the schedule and the vendors when your team has no capacity to run the plan day to day.
06
Email Marketing
Campaigns, flows and deliverability — the channel with the best margin in ecommerce, run by people who treat it that way.
07
Influencer & Affiliate
Programme design, partner recruitment and tracking — built to scale rather than one-off collaborations.
08
Retention & Loyalty
Subscriptions, loyalty programmes and SMS that earn revenue between campaigns instead of during them.
09
Logistics, Tax & Compliance
Fulfilment partners and cross-border VAT support for brands opening new markets.
On referral fees: some partners pay a referral commission and some don't. Either way you'll be told which is which before an introduction is made, and I'll never recommend a partner I wouldn't hire with my own budget. If a commission would compromise the advice, there's no introduction.
Who's doing the work
I'm not an agency. I run a store for a living.
I'm Vess Dobrev, Head of eCommerce at Shelly Group — a listed European smart home and IoT manufacturer, traded on the Bulgarian and German exchanges. I own global revenue and profitability across the Shopify Plus estate: storefront, conversion, campaigns, operations and analytics.
Before the promotion I ran the same store as Ecommerce Manager and delivered 3× growth in net revenue through structured optimisation rather than more ad spend. I launched the B2B portal and the affiliate programme from zero, and built out a dedicated US market storefront. Thousands of SKUs, multiple currencies, corporate and consumer buyers on the same platform.
Before that I owned the omnichannel P&L at Antelope Audio — professional audio hardware sold through Amazon, Walmart, eBay and Reverb alongside D2C. Ten years across D2C, B2B and marketplaces in total, including years on WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart and WordPress.
That range is the point. I'm not only looking at your checkout — I'm looking at pricing, margin, channel economics and what your organisation can realistically execute. My first qualification was in microprocessor technology and electronics, so technical catalogues don't intimidate me, and I'm a Shopify Partner building apps on the platform, so I know where Shopify bends and where it doesn't.
I take a small number of engagements each month alongside the day job. If I'm not the right person for your situation, you'll hear that in the first reply rather than after an invoice.
In their words
What clients say.
Six people who have worked with me directly — on audits, sprints, and as a fractional lead.
Vess helped us further build and scale our e-commerce business through a structured approach covering Audit, Strategy, Sprints, Execution, and Fractional Ecommerce Management. His strategic and hands-on approach played a key role in achieving 3x e-commerce growth in just one year.
What I liked most was the level of detail. The audit went beyond the obvious issues and identified several areas where we were losing potential customers without realizing it. The recommendations were clearly prioritized, which made it much easier to turn the findings into an action plan.
Vess quickly became an extension of our ecommerce team. Through a series of focused sprints, he helped us identify the biggest opportunities, prioritize what actually mattered and move from strategy to execution much faster. Having a fractional Ecommerce Manager involved made a real difference because we weren't just getting recommendations — we were actually implementing them.
What made the collaboration different was that Vess didn't just tell us what was wrong with our ecommerce operation — he worked with us to fix it. We ran focused ecommerce sprints together, prioritizing the most important opportunities and turning them into concrete actions. Having a fractional Ecommerce Manager working alongside the team gave us the expertise and momentum we needed without having to build that capability internally.
It was refreshing to get an outside perspective that was focused on the actual customer experience and business impact. The findings were specific, easy to understand and backed by clear reasoning. We came away with a much better idea of what to fix first rather than trying to change everything at once.
Working with Vess went far beyond a typical ecommerce audit. We worked together through focused ecommerce sprints, where he helped us identify priorities, turn them into actionable tasks and drive them through execution. Having him operate as an Ecommerce Manager gave our team both strategic direction and hands-on support when we needed it.
Process
Four steps. You spend about ninety minutes in total.
You send access
A staff account, analytics read access, and a short form about what's already bothering you. No kickoff call needed.
I go through the store as a buyer, then as an operator
Real devices, throttled connections, real checkout attempts in every market you sell to. Then the commercial layer: catalogue, merchandising, pricing, margin, channel mix and tech stack.
Findings priced and ranked
Each issue gets an estimated monthly cost and an implementation effort, with the assumption shown beside it. Anything I can't size honestly gets marked as such rather than padded.
Walkthrough, then it's yours
Ninety minutes with you and whoever will do the work. Everything is handed over — no lock-in and no dependency on me to execute it.
Objections
The questions people ask before booking.
What is an ecommerce audit?
A structured review of your store — funnel, catalogue, pricing, tech stack and channel mix — that finds exactly where revenue is leaking and ranks the fixes by euro impact and effort. Every finding comes with a number and the assumption behind it, so you know what's worth fixing before you spend anything implementing it.
How much does an ecommerce audit cost?
A Store Teardown is €400 and takes three working days. A full Ecommerce Audit and Growth Plan is €1,900 over two weeks. The Teardown fee is credited in full against an audit booked within 30 days.
Why start with the Teardown instead of the full audit?
Because €400 is a cheap way for both of us to find out whether this is worth doing. If the leaks turn out to be small, you've saved €1,500. If they're large, the fee comes off the audit price. There's no version of this where starting there costs you money.
How are the euro figures calculated?
From your own analytics — session counts, conversion rate split by device and country, average order value and margin — applied to the drop-off I can actually measure. Every assumption sits next to the number so you can adjust it. I'd rather give you a defensible range than an impressive figure.
Which ecommerce platforms do you audit?
Shopify and Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart and custom-built storefronts. The commercial work — pricing, margin, channel mix, funnel — is platform-independent. Platform knowledge mainly determines how precisely I can specify a fix and how well I can estimate what it costs to build.
Do I need to give you full admin access?
No. A staff account with theme and settings read access plus analytics covers the Teardown and the Audit. Write access only comes up on a sprint, and only within the scope we've agreed.
What exactly is a fractional ecommerce director?
A senior ecommerce leader engaged part-time who owns the plan rather than a single channel. Practically: I set the quarterly priorities, hold the commercial scorecard, make the pricing and channel calls, direct your agencies and developers, and answer for whether the number moved. It's the role you'd hire at €90k+ full time, taken at one to two days a month — available to past audit clients.
We already have an agency. Does this step on their toes?
Usually the opposite. Agencies execute well and rarely get paid to audit their own work or to sequence someone else's. Most findings become their next sprint, handed over in a format their developers can ticket directly. I'm not pitching to replace anyone — I'm the person who decides what they work on next.
Do you take commission from the partners you recommend?
Sometimes. Some partners pay a referral fee and some don't, and you'll be told which applies before any introduction. The advice doesn't change either way — if I ever thought a commission was influencing a recommendation, I wouldn't make the introduction at all. You're also free to take the brief and hire someone else entirely.
Do you do replatforming or full site rebuilds?
Not as a build. Those need a team with production access and a project manager, and a fixed-price consultant is the wrong shape for them. What I will do is tell you honestly whether you need one, write the brief, and introduce you to people who deliver it properly — so you don't get sold more than you need.
Do you audit Amazon and other marketplaces?
Yes — as an add-on to any audit or standalone. I ran omnichannel P&L across Amazon, Walmart, eBay and Reverb, so the review covers what actually moves marketplace profit: listing quality, pricing and Buy Box dynamics, fee structure, advertising efficiency and review health. If your marketplace channel is bigger than your D2C store, say so in the first email and we'll weight the work accordingly.
What if we don't act on any of it?
Then you've bought an accurate picture of your store and nothing changes. It happens. It's exactly why the Teardown exists at €400 — so nobody spends €1,900 discovering they had no capacity to act on it.
Next step
Find out what the leaks are worth before you decide anything else.
Send your store URL and roughly what you're doing in monthly revenue. You'll get a reply within two working days telling you whether this is worth your money — including when the answer is no.
Two audits per month · Currently booking from next week
Or pick a time directly
Book a 30-minute intro call
No obligation. Bring your store URL and roughly what you are doing in monthly revenue, and you will get a straight answer on whether an audit is worth your money.