Pricing consulting in e-commerce — when it’s worth it, what you get, and what the collaboration looks like

4. Five channels, five different bottom lines

Red flag: You sell in five channels but you can’t quickly determine the real profit on a sold unit.

Problem. Example calculation of a single transaction:

Every additional unit sold on this channel deepens a loss that nobody sees on the sales report.

What we did. We calculated the full Total Cost of Sale in the channel × market × category view. The full P&L separated volume channels from the ones that actually make money.

Result. No more subsidizing sales. Some channels were delivering revenue at a negative net profit. Repricing on unprofitable products and shutting down entire product × channel pairs stopped the losses.

5. Your worst competitor is your own Allegro

Red flag: The customer finds the product on Google and buys it on your Allegro — i.e. in the channel with the highest commission.

Problem. Full Allegro costs not included in the minimum price:

The same price in both channels works like a silent tax on your own sales.

What we did. Full Allegro commissions built into the minimum price there. Allegro got the role of a channel for acquiring new customers, and the own store — the channel for building profitability. Each channel received its own role, cost structure and price.

Result. The channels stopped cannibalizing each other. The own store started recovering traffic that previously landed on Allegro with the full commission.

6. Customs, VAT, and the profit that vanishes in Excel

Red flag: Your “purchase price” from China is often just the factory price plus freight — without customs duties and clearance costs. A margin calculated from such a base is fiction.

Problem. Factory PLN 100 + freight PLN 15 = PLN 115. Excel calculates margin from PLN 115. In reality, customs duties and clearance costs are added — the real cost base is higher by a dozen or so percent, and every price calculated from it is too low.

What we did. We built the recommended import cost sequence, plugged into the cost card of every SKU:

1. Purchase price from the supplier
2. International transport and insurance
3. Customs value (1 + 2)
4. Customs duty (on the customs value)
5. Clearance and terminal costs
6. Real purchase cost = sum of 1–5 (margin base)

Result. A real cost base in every SKU’s cost card. A wrong start ruins the entire strategy — the system only accelerates the loss. A corrected base immediately flows into every price calculated downstream.

Methodological note: the import VAT base includes the customs value, customs duty and — depending on the case — additional charges. For an active VAT payer, the tax is generally deductible, so it mainly affects cash flow, not margin. The detailed calculation depends on delivery terms and how the import is settled.

7. Pricing knows. Marketing — doesn’t.

Red flag: The Google Ads budget is burning on products where you earn nothing.

Problem. The agency promotes “broadly” because nobody sends them a list of margin-generating SKUs. At a budget of PLN 50,000/month, even 20% spent on products with zero or negative margin is PLN 10,000/month burned on traffic that doesn’t earn.

What we did. Automatic tags in the pricing system (margin, competitiveness, potential) plugged straight into Google Merchant Center. The budget is steered by dynamic custom labels — not emails to the agency.

Result. A budget steered by profitability. Media funds what earns — without weekly manual emails. The problem wasn’t on the agency’s side, but in the missing bridge between price and advertising.

8. Scaling without expensive traffic

Red flag: Every additional percent of sales costs you more — CPC grows faster than revenue.

Problem. Scaling only through paid traffic: rising CPC eats margin on every additional order. You pay more and more for less and less.

What we did. Instead of bidding in Ads — entering platforms with ready-made traffic (Allegro, Empik, Kaufland). For every product × channel pair we calculated commissions, the threshold price, and profitability. Only products and channels that stayed profitable after all costs were rolled out.

Result. Growth without pushing CPC up. New channels made it possible to grow sales without further increasing Google Ads budgets.

9. Expansion by gut feel

Red flag: You picked a foreign market “because we know the language” — not because someone actually calculated the margin there.

Problem. A wrongly chosen market is not only a missed opportunity but also a wasted budget and many months of the team’s work. Three markets (DE / FR / AT) — different levels of competition, entry costs and potential.

What we did. A comparative analysis of three markets: platforms, competitive saturation, price levels, commissions, entry costs, volumes. A recommendation on the right sequence of expansion.

Result. Expansion in the right sequence. The decision stopped being based on language and contacts — the analysis compared profit potential and entry cost across three markets.

10. 15,000 SKUs, one rule, melting margin

Red flag: You manage 15,000 SKUs with one rule — “let’s be PLN 0.10 cheaper” — that’s not a strategy, that’s the absence of one.

Problem. The rule cuts price even where the customer would have bought anyway, and ignores returns and commissions per segment. Revenue grows, profit stays flat — margin leaks 10 groszy times 15,000 SKUs.

What we did:

1. Prices dependent on market availability (where competition is out of stock, price goes up);
2. VIN verification before shipment (automotive category) — reduced returns due to incorrect fitment;
3. A whole-cart brake strategy — low-margin products got the role of support, not a standalone revenue generator.

Result (project outcomes):

• +12% category net margin
• –15% number of returns
• PLN 500k of capital released from dead stock in 30 days

Managing thousands of SKUs with a single rule is not a strategy. Every segment has a different dynamic of costs, demand and returns.

Common takeaway from the 10 stories

Traps rarely occur in isolation — they overlap and amplify each other:

1. Lack of automation wastes people’s potential.
2. Lack of bandwidth turns strategy into a backlog.
3. Automation without strategy generates chaos.
4. Sales without the full cost gives revenue, not profit.
5. Multichannel without channel roles leads to cannibalization.
6. Wrong cost assumptions at the start break the whole model.
7. Lack of connection between pricing and marketing burns budgets.
8. Dependence on a single traffic source limits scaling.
9. Expansion based on gut feel generates unnecessary costs.
10. High revenue is not profit — what counts is the profitability of every line item.

That’s exactly why consulting works across the whole chain at once — from pricing roles, through the full cost of sale, to Google Ads budgets — not on a single symptom.

What consulting at Dealavo actually does

Consulting at Dealavo is run by the product team, in a workshop format. We don’t sell decks with recommendations — we work with your team, implement changes in Dealavo tools and automate the process so that you don’t have to recreate it manually every month. The collaboration stands on four pillars.

1. A pricing strategy tailored to your company

We adjust the scope to each client. Areas we suggest analyzing and providing recommendations for:

• Competitor selection — general competitor and competitor within a specific category; who really takes your customers away and who you only see in price comparison engines.
• New assortment selection — which SKUs actually complete the cart and raise margin, and which only inflate the catalog.
• Defining product pricing roles and classification rules — which products drive traffic (KVI), which are responsible for margin, which build the cart, which act as a price brake; including activation of non-rotating products.
• Setting optimal prices — not “let’s be 10 groszy cheaper”, but a price appropriate to the product’s role, market availability and full cost.
• Growing cart and receipt value — cross-sell, up-sell, bundles, private label, cart mechanics.
• Improving Google Ads ROAS — automatic tags in the pricing system (margin, competitiveness, potential) plugged straight into Google Merchant Center, so that the budget goes to products that earn.

2. Data and tools you don’t have in-house

As part of the collaboration we provide:

• additional data — e.g. the price index of your category, a list of new assortment observed at competitors, market availability data;
• additional tools — e.g. a ROAS module, ad-hoc reports for a specific board-level question.

This is the part you usually can’t do “with a script in Excel” — not because it’s technically complex, but because it requires a pricing database at a scale a single store won’t maintain in-house.

3. Implementation, not just recommendations

The biggest difference between consulting and classic “slides-only” consulting is that recommendations don’t end in a PDF. In practice this means:

• recurring implementation meetings with your team;
• the consultant as a sparring partner for new ideas — before you test them on the whole catalog;
• automation in Dealavo tools — pricing roles, tags, repricing rules, Google Merchant Center integrations land in the system, not on a Miro board.

Strategy without implementation stays in the backlog — and every month of delay is unrealized potential of cart and margin growth.

4. Results that land in the P&L

The results our clients report after our projects — always selected against business goals:

• higher sales and higher margin — not “either/or”;
• automation of price, assortment and advertising management processes;
• savings from not needing to add headcount on the client’s side (remember: 45% of a specialist’s FTE stuck in Excel);
• growth of the team’s pricing competence — after the project, the procedures and knowledge stay, not just a dashboard.

Selected results from our practice: 4× growth in weekly revenue in one of the categories, +12% net margin in a category with a simultaneous –15% returns, PLN 500k of capital released from dead stock in 30 days.

Software alone vs. software + consulting

Consulting doesn’t compete with software — it competes with the situation in which you have software but nobody has time to translate it into decisions.

What the collaboration looks like — a workshop format

We don’t do a 200-slide audit. Instead:

• diagnostic workshops — we start from your transactional data from ERP and/or Google Analytics 4, not from market benchmarks;
• recommendations as decisions, not options — the consultant tells you what to do and why, not “you could consider one of three approaches”;
• 1 dedicated person on your side — without them the collaboration won’t happen; this person owns the project internally;
• recurring implementation meetings — we check what went into production, what got stuck and why;
• the consultant as a sparring partner — before your team runs a new idea on the catalog, they have someone to test it against.

Who pricing consulting is for — and who it’s not for

Consulting is an expensive service. We say honestly when it makes sense and when we refer the client elsewhere.

Consulting is for you if:

• Your online store has annual revenue of at least PLN 100 million (EUR 25 million) and it is not shrinking compared to the previous year;
• if we don’t have revenue data — a minimum of 50 employees;
• you have more than 500 products in your offer;
• the decision-maker on your side is a board member, owner or director — without that, decisions get stuck;
• you can share transactional data from ERP and/or GA4 — without that we work “by eye”;
• you can assign 1 person on your side to work with Dealavo.

Nice-to-have: you run international sales; you sell through at least 2 e-commerce channels besides your own store.

Consulting is not for you if:

• you’re a top retailer or corporation with an in-house pricing team — you already have an in-house team doing this daily; we can offer body leasing, where you can outsource to us the analyses your team doesn’t have time for.
• you’re a manufacturer running a store with only products that are not comparable on the market — in this model pricing strategy looks different and requires a different approach;
• you have a catalog below 500 SKUs — pricing problems there are real, but they’re usually solved by the tool itself, not by workshops.

Borderline cases we discuss individually — if you’re not sure, the Pricing Doctor session (described below) is there to give you that certainty.

First step: Pricing Doctor — a free 30-minute 1:1 session

This article, even with a full description of the 10 traps, won’t replace a conversation about your specific store. Your case almost certainly differs in the details — and in pricing, details are exactly what you earn or lose on.

That’s why we start with a free 30-minute 1:1 session with a pricing expert (worth around PLN 500), which we call Pricing Doctor.

The session is:

• a diagnosis of your specific case (not a general training);
• a 1:1 conversation with an expert who has worked through dozens of similar stores;
• 3–5 concrete recommendations delivered during the meeting.

The session is not:

• a demo of Dealavo tools;
• a general pricing training;
• sales pressure — the decision about further collaboration stays on your side;
• a webinar with Q&A for a crowd.

It’s run by two consultants who speak plainly, without a pitch deck: Amadeusz Bathelt (Head of Product & Pricing Consulting, 8 years of work with dozens of stores — from 100-SKU catalogs to large multichannel networks) and Krystian Pomorski (E-commerce Growth Consultant, dozens of stores on UK and international markets, including large operations on Amazon and eBay). Sessions in PL or EN.

If after the session we agree — both sides — that full consulting makes sense, we walk you through the scope, timeline and pricing. If it doesn’t make sense — we say so directly.