Digital Clubhouse: Why No One In eCom Talks About Profit
Tony Conte
Founder
There’s a moment every eCommerce professional knows. You’re staring at a dashboard at 11pm, watching your ROAS tick upward, feeling briefly like a genius, until you notice the margin column. That number – the one nobody put on the slide deck – tells a different story entirely.
It was this gap between vanity metrics and actual commercial reality that sat at the heart of Digital Clubhouse’s February event, where founders, brand leaders, and technologists gathered to do the thing the industry rarely has time for: tell the truth.
Anil Patel has been running Moda In Pelle – a women’s fashion brand with 45 stores and a half-century of trading history – for nearly a decade. He does not suffer fools or bad technology. So when data enrichment firm Salesfire came to him with a proposition, his answer was characteristically direct: speak to my eCommerce director, if it’s good he’ll know. Two weeks later, the flows were up 30 to 40 per cent. Half a million pounds of incremental annual revenue followed.
Anil Patel (left) and Ethan Burnett (right)
The mechanism behind it is one that Ethan Burnett, Salesfire’s Strategy Lead, laid out with the quietly devastating precision of someone who’s had this conversation six hundred times (I’m confident I’m not exaggerating): roughly 90 to 95 per cent of your site traffic is anonymous. Completely invisible. Cookie deprecation, Apple’s tracking restrictions, GDPR – the infrastructure that once gave brands a near-total picture of their customers has been systematically dismantled, and most marketing teams are still operating as though it hasn’t. “Trying to tell someone they’re missing all these sales is genuinely one of the hardest sells,” Burnett said, “because people just don’t want to believe it.”
The Salesfire story is, at its core, a story about ego and denial dressed up as a data problem. Larger, more established brands – the ones with the most to lose – are often the most resistant. Ecommerce managers insist their existing stack covers it. Klaviyo can do this. Attentive does that. Then someone pulls up the actual numbers, and the conversation shifts. “The egos come down,” as Burnett put it. The trial period – two weeks, no cost – is essentially a mechanism for bypassing defensiveness with evidence. Patel’s advice to the room was blunter still: quote me, get your two weeks free, watch what happens.
Rowan Turnbull came up through the industry at End Clothing before leading eCommerce at Lakeland Leather, a 70-year-old brand that trades heavily on its Lake District heritage and an affluent, older customer base. His perspective on what most brands get wrong is unfashionably unfussy: they optimise for the wrong thing.
ROAS, he pointed out, is a vanity metric with excellent PR. It looks clean on a report and it’s easy to sell to a board that hasn’t dug into unit economics. What it doesn’t tell you is whether you’re actually making money. Revenue per user, by contrast, gives you something more honest: a holistic read on what customers are actually buying into, and whether the relationship you’re building has any commercial depth. Slashing prices to lift conversion will move the ROAS number. It will also train your customers to wait for a deal, attract lower-quality buyers, and quietly hollow out your brand positioning.
Rowana Turnbull, eCommerce Manager, Lakeland Leather
Turnbull’s first instinct when auditing a new site is almost meditative in its simplicity: reduce friction, above the fold, clear path to purchase. He recalled a well-intentioned effort to capture more first-party data by adding a login step before checkout. Conversion tanked. “The checkout converted less,” he said flatly. “And as much as it is a really important thing to have first-party data, the conversion for us was more valuable.” It’s a small story that captures something large about how good intentions become commercial liabilities when you skip the testing phase.
For brands operating with tightening budgets, his advice was to start with the Pareto principle applied ruthlessly to your tech stack: find the 20 per cent of tools delivering 80 per cent of value, then cut the rest. Most businesses are paying for premium tiers of software they’re using at a fraction of capacity.
Fran Gresswell is 25, and has a criminology degree she does not use. Instead, she owns Riviera Iced Tea – a premium, UK-manufactured, non-alcoholic alternative that she started from market stalls with her travel savings during the pandemic. Iced tea in the UK is, by most accounts, still massively underserved: Lipton is growing at seven per cent year-on-year, the product is on 77 per cent of menus in the US, and yet you’d struggle to find a non-carbonated, premium option at your local pub. Fran spotted the gap and went for it.
She nearly didn’t survive year one. A rogue Manchester manufacturer produced £12,000 worth of unusable stock, wiped out her profits from a major London café chain, and sent her back to zero. She took him to court. She lost. He liquidated and relaunched. “That’s the state of the UK, isn’t it,” she said, without much visible surprise.
Fran Gresswell, Founder, Riviera Iced Tea
What kept her in business was a series of counterintuitive decisions: saying no to Tesco in year one when the margins didn’t work, then saying no again more recently to Booths for the same reason. Her investor pitch was built on the fact that there was cash in the bank – she didn’t need the money, she wanted it. That distinction, she noted, was exactly what impressed her investors. Several of her peers took the big retail deals, are stocked in impressive venues, and are now in a structurally precarious position. She’s growing slower, sleeping better, and building for the long game.
The branding tension she raised was honest and unresolved: buyers tell her the packaging doesn’t stand out on shelf, but her customers reference it positively in reviews. That gap between wholesale buyer taste and end consumer behaviour is one that many challenger brands quietly wrestle with and rarely discuss on stage.
Interested in Brave but not quite ready to speak to us? Stay in the loop.
Our closing panel tackled “the silent killers of eCommerce” – a deliberately broad prompt that quickly converged on profitability as the thing the industry talks around rather than about.
Patel opened by framing the current moment with characteristic directness: costs are rising on every front, minimum wage has increased by 60 per cent over recent years, ad costs are climbing while ROAS is declining, and brands are responding by spending more to compensate. “It’s a perpetual cycle,” he said. His standard opening line in any trade meeting is now a single question: what was the profit? Sales figures are secondary. GP is the number that tells the true story, and inventory management – the unglamorous, unsexy work of knowing your rate of sale, your carry-forward stock, your markdown strategy – is where the biggest margins are won or lost. His own GP was up 15 points year-on-year from exactly this kind of discipline.
Adam Pearce from Blend Commerce made the point that ROAS endures as a metric not because it’s accurate but because it’s easy to calculate and easy to put in a LinkedIn post. The harder conversation – the one that involves a clear profitability target and an honest agency-client relationship – rarely happens because British commercial culture tends to avoid confrontation. His observation that American brands are “a lot more direct” landed as mild cultural critique and practical advice simultaneously.
Left to right: Anil Patel, Ethan Burnett, Rowan Turnbull, Fran Gresswell, Adam Pearce
Rowan added the structural problem of internal silos, noting that the barrier to entry in eCommerce is now so low that it’s internal processes and unclear lines of agency that become the real bottlenecks. The Ritz Hotel’s 2,000-rule – where any employee can spend up to £2,000 to resolve a customer issue without escalation – was offered as a model. Most eCommerce brands don’t need that ceiling. A £100 version of the same principle would represent a significant operational upgrade for most teams.
On AI, the panel’s consensus was practical rather than breathless. Fran uses ChatGPT daily to analyse hooks, build email briefs, and stress-test her content strategy – because she can’t yet afford agency support and has no choice. Ethan described training a proprietary internal model on Salesfire’s own product data, effectively replacing a significant volume of basic support queries and freeing his team for actual product development. Patel reached for an analogy: AI is like a tiger. You don’t need to outrun it. You need to not be last.
The thread connecting every conversation at Digital Clubhouse was something close to discomfort with the industry’s own reflexes. The reflex to prioritise acquisition over retention. The reflex to reach for a promotion when growth stalls. The reflex to measure what’s easy rather than what’s useful. The reflex to defer to the platform, the algorithm, the tech stack – as though the structural incentives built into those systems are somehow aligned with your brand’s long-term interests.
Google’s deprecation of cookies, Apple’s tracking restrictions, Meta’s auction dynamics – every one of these is a commercial decision made by a company with enormous power over the information infrastructure that eCommerce runs on. The incentives were always visible, had anyone cared to look. Brands that built their customer relationships on third-party data were tenants the whole time, paying rent to platforms that reserved the right to redevelop at will.
The question nobody fully answered – and which perhaps can’t be answered yet – is what a genuinely sustainable eCommerce business looks like when the cheap growth era is definitively over, AI is absorbing the operational layer, and the customer has seen every playbook. Fran Gresswell, packing orders in her lounge at night, declining Tesco, building slowly, might be closer to the answer than the brands spending six figures on their attribution models.
