“You’re not going to believe this: our ecommerce sales have tanked in no time. Just over two months. Traffic is down, but so is conversion. The biggest shock isn’t even the numbers — it’s the speed at which a previously positive trend has flipped… although the real problem is the anxiety spreading through the top floor where the CEO and the rest of the board sit.”
The sentence is never said out loud, but it hangs in the air: you are worth what you bill.
And nowhere is this truer than in ecommerce (we won’t talk about fairness — it has nothing to do with it).
We may have delivered years of growth, professionalised the team, optimised the funnel, scaled channels. It doesn’t matter. When sales turn and fail to bounce back in a reasonable timeframe, past performance becomes a nostalgic reference point that fades the longer the slump lasts.
Those achievements haven’t vanished. They’ve simply become temporary fuel: a couple of months of goodwill, some borrowed trust, a shrinking organisational patience buffer. Sooner or later, the spotlight shifts from “look how well you did” to “why haven’t you fixed this yet?”
Two bad months = an existential eternity
In ecommerce, eight weeks is basically a summary trial:
- The P&L tightens its grip
- Analyses accelerate
- The window of patience closes
- And the internal narrative gets rewritten at data speed
Ecommerce brought us an “unexpected gift”: extreme datification of the business. Every click leaves a clue, every conversion tells a story, every funnel becomes a hypothesis waiting to be validated or axed.
This gives us an almost infinite analytical arsenal, but also a real danger: mistaking speed for accuracy and spiralling into panic. In a downturn, the quality of the diagnosis depends as much on who reads the data as on the data itself. That’s why having a strong analyst — and steady nerves — becomes critical.
Analysis must be structured, methodical, built on clear hypotheses that get validated or discarded, one by one. Otherwise we fall into the classic trap: trying to explain everything at once and struggling to deliver certainty in pieces instead of chaos in bulk:
- Has traffic dropped? Conversion too?
- All channels? All devices? All markets?
- Is this technical — or demand?
- Pricing? Competition? Product?
- Are we even still in the consideration set?
What depends on us, first
“Almost instinctively, we search for answers in what we can control, because if the problem is in our hands, the cure is expected to be there too.”
We look inward before outward — at what we can tweak, fix, adjust, relaunch, or reconfigure. And it makes sense. The organisation needs to believe a path forward exists, and that action is possible.
The truth is that a downturn is rarely caused by a single variable, but by a stack of factors, some controllable, others not so much. Only when actionable hypotheses have been ruled out — with data, not intuition — can we voice the uncomfortable but necessary conclusion: “there’s limited room for direct intervention here.” Not as an excuse, but as a diagnosis.
The most dangerous bias
When things go well, success is distributed generously — even to those who were just passing by the meeting room. When things go badly, accountability becomes personal: “What’s going wrong with marketing? Ecommerce? Performance?”
At that point, self-doubt creeps in, quiet but persistent, tightening its grip around professional identity:
- Growth was never 100% your merit
- The downturn is suddenly 100% your fault
And then, inevitably, the question returns:
Are we as good as the revenue we generate?
No. And even less so when we were clearly capable of generating it not so long ago. We should be measured by our ability to:
- Hold the narrative when data stops cooperating
- Separate signal from noise under pressure
- Move fast without mistaking velocity for reckless reaction
- Remind the organisation that growth is built on sustained trends
Ecommerce, more than measuring talent, measures resilience, business understanding, and narrative ownership. In sporting terms: revenue is the scoreboard, not the game.
[By the way: without a brand, its underlying concept, and a structured narrative built around them, there is no profitable performance that will endure for long. But that’s a conversation for another day…]
