Selling your e-commerce brand?
Owned customers are worth more than rented traffic.

The honest version

What e-commerce businesses actually sell for

Most smaller e-commerce businesses sell for roughly 2.5–4x seller’s discretionary earnings (SDE), with larger, diversified brands reaching 3.5–6x adjusted EBITDA. The convention shifts from SDE to EBITDA as brands scale past the point where a single owner runs everything. Channel mix and repeat-purchase behaviour decide where in the range you land.

The range is wide because the same business is worth different amounts to different buyers. In this sector you are usually looking at three:

• Brand aggregators and PE-backed platforms — still buying, but selectively: profitable, differentiated brands with clean data rooms, not growth stories.
• Strategic acquirers in your category — consumer products companies buying a brand, a customer base or a channel they lack. Often the best payers when the fit is real.
• Individual and search-fund buyers — the most common buyer for smaller brands, usually financing-dependent.

Which of those is at your table changes your number far more than last quarter’s ROAS.

What moves the number

The four things buyers actually underwrite

• Channel mix. Revenue from your own site and email list is priced above marketplace revenue, and a brand doing most of its volume through one marketplace account carries platform risk the buyer has to underwrite.
• Repeat purchase rate and customer economics. A brand with genuine repeat behaviour and acquisition costs that pay back in months has forecastable revenue; one that must buy every order is a media plan, not an asset.
• Supplier and SKU concentration. One supplier, one country of origin, or one hero product doing most of the volume are all discounts; documented alternatives and a workable tariff posture are worth real money right now.
• Margin durability. Buyers rebuild your P&L with true landed costs, current ad prices and market-rate labour for everything you do yourself. Profit that survives that rebuild is what the multiple gets paid on.

A note on add-backs that costs owners real money: e-commerce P&Ls are full of judgment calls — inventory accounting, ad spend classified as growth investment, owner labour that would take two hires to replace. Aggressive adjustments do not survive diligence, and a price built on them gets re-traded. Conservative, documented add-backs are the difference between a number that closes and one that shrinks.

The process

Why a quiet, competitive process beats the first offer

Most brand owners field cold emails from aggregators and brokers every week, and the temptation is to answer the most persistent one. That is exactly backwards: a buyer negotiating against nobody has no reason to move on price or on terms, and the serious acquirers respond to a run process, not a reply-all.

We run the opposite process. Buyers are qualified and under confidentiality agreement before they learn whose business it is. Nothing is listed, advertised, or published. Your staff, your customers, and your competitors learn nothing until you decide they should — and several credible buyers are considering the same opportunity at the same time.

The result is not only a better number. It is better terms: what happens to your team, how long you stay, how the earn-out is structured, and what happens to any real estate.

Common questions

E-commerce founders ask us these first

What is my e-commerce business worth?

Most smaller e-commerce businesses sell for roughly 2.5 to 4 times seller’s discretionary earnings, with larger, diversified brands reaching 3.5 to 6 times adjusted EBITDA. Channel mix, repeat purchase rate, supplier concentration and margin durability decide where in the range you land. A confidential valuation will give you a confidential range in writing, based on what buyers are paying now — not an appraisal.

Who buys e-commerce businesses?

Brand aggregators and private-equity-backed platforms, strategic acquirers in your product category, and individual or search-fund buyers for smaller brands. Each underwrites the same brand differently, which is exactly why competition among them matters.

Does inventory get included in the price?

Usually good, saleable inventory is purchased on top of the multiple, at cost or an agreed value, and stale inventory is excluded or discounted. Offers differ in how they treat it, so two headline numbers are rarely comparable until the inventory treatment is settled — it is one of the first things we normalize when comparing offers for a client.