eCommerce consulting — Seattle
Commerce architecture and reporting clarity for Seattle organizations.
Seattle-area commerce organizations are often further along than most: multiple sales channels, real systems behind them, and people who can read a dataset. The problems that remain are structural rather than tactical.
Our work here usually concerns how the pieces fit — which channel owns which decision, where inventory truth lives, and whether reporting can be trusted enough to act on.
The market
Multi-channel, multi-system, one unclear picture
When a brand sells direct and through marketplaces, the operational questions multiply: pricing consistency, inventory allocation, fulfillment promises, returns handling and the reconciliation work that follows all of it.
Each platform reports on itself confidently. The composite view — what the business actually earned, from which channel, at what cost to serve — is the one nobody owns.
What we're usually called about in Seattle
- Direct and marketplace channels competing for stock
- Fulfillment promises that differ by channel
- Reporting that disagrees with finance
- Architecture decisions made platform by platform
- Engineering time absorbed by store operations
- Returns handled differently in each channel
- Analytics rich in data, thin in decisions
- No single owner of commerce systems
Every channel reports confidently. The composite view is the one that's missing.
How we work
Remote by design, senior by default
Gapstow is a U.S.-based practice that works remotely with brands across the country, including Seattle. We don't keep a local office, and we won't pretend otherwise — what we bring is senior eCommerce experience, in your working hours, without an account layer between you and the person doing the work.
We keep Pacific-friendly hours available, with earlier Eastern availability for anything that needs a same-morning answer.
- 01
Direct access
You work with the practitioner, not a coordinator relaying decisions to someone you'll never meet.
- 02
A real operating cadence
Scheduled working sessions, a maintained priority list and written decisions — the things that make remote work better than proximity.
- 03
Engagements sized to the problem
Advisory, fractional leadership, ongoing management or project delivery, depending on what's actually missing.
- 04
Coordination with your other partners
Agencies, developers, 3PLs and internal teams — briefed consistently instead of one conversation at a time.
Credentials
Experience, not proximity
10+
Years running the agency practice
Hundreds
Of stores worked on
15+
Years in eCommerce
Deepest platform experience is Shopify — development, Plus, migrations, integrations and optimization. The strategy, leadership and operations work applies to eCommerce businesses regardless of platform. See the work.
Relevant work
Chosen for the kind of problem, not the client's address. These are Gapstow engagements described on the site.
Fit
Who this tends to suit
There's no revenue floor. What matters is whether the problem is one senior eCommerce judgment can move — and whether someone internally wants it solved. See what we do.
A good fit looks like
- More than one meaningful sales channel
- Existing systems worth integrating, not replacing
- Internal engineering or data capability
- Shopify or Shopify Plus at the storefront layer
- Decisions currently blocked by unclear numbers
- Preference for operating independence over vendor lock-in
Questions we get from this market
- Do you handle marketplace strategy?
- We work on how marketplace channels affect inventory, pricing, fulfillment and reporting. We're not a marketplace-advertising specialist, and we'll say so rather than stretch the claim.
- Can you work alongside our engineering team?
- Yes. Commonly we own the commerce judgment and the platform-side work so engineering can stay on the product, rather than absorbing store operations.
- How do you approach reporting we don't trust?
- Fix the collection layer before the dashboard. Tracking, definitions and reconciliation first — see reporting and analytics.
- Is headless the right answer for a complex stack?
- Sometimes, and less often than it's proposed. Our view is in what headless eCommerce is and when it earns its cost.
Running commerce across more systems than anyone owns?
Tell us where the numbers stop agreeing. That's usually where the architecture conversation starts.