The ecommerce ops stack that scales to 8 figures
What separates $1M brands from $10M brands isn't always the product or the marketing. It's usually the ops. Here's the stack that makes scaling repeatable.
The $1M to $10M journey in ecommerce is mostly a marketing problem. You figure out a product-market fit, you find channels that convert, you scale what works. At $10M and beyond, it becomes an ops problem. The marketing is still critical, but the team and infrastructure needed to execute it becomes the constraint.
The ops challenges that appear at scale
- →Data fragmentation: Meta, Google, Shopify, Stripe, Klaviyo, and GA all report differently. Reconciling them becomes a full-time job.
- →Reporting overhead: as team size grows, the number of briefs, standups, and dashboards multiplies. So does the time to fill them.
- →Decision latency: the time between 'this campaign is underperforming' and 'this campaign is paused' gets longer as organizations get bigger and more cautious.
- →Attribution confusion: at scale, the questions about which channel is really driving revenue become harder and higher stakes.
The core stack
Analytics and measurement
- →Northbeam or Triple Whale for multi-touch attribution (solves the 'who gets credit?' problem)
- →Stripe as the revenue source of truth — everything else is attribution, not billing
- →Google Analytics 4 for behavioral and funnel data
Paid acquisition
- →Meta Ads: primary prospecting and retargeting channel for most DTC brands
- →Google Ads: brand search capture + high-intent non-brand
- →TikTok Ads: increasingly important for brands with visual/creative-led products
- →LinkedIn or Pinterest depending on product category
CRM and retention
- →Klaviyo for email and SMS — the highest ROI retention channel for most ecommerce brands
- →Postscript or Attentive for SMS-first brands
Operations intelligence
This is the layer most brands underinvest in. You have all the tools above producing data, but someone still has to pull it together, make sense of it, and act on it.
The ops cadence that makes scale predictable
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- →Daily: campaign performance check (10 minutes, mostly automated)
- →Weekly: full brief with revenue reconciliation and campaign decisions
- →Monthly: attribution model review, budget allocation, and LTV cohort analysis
- →Quarterly: platform mix evaluation and ops stack review
The brands that scale past $10M aren't necessarily buying more media. They're making better decisions faster with the media they're already buying. Operations infrastructure is what enables that.
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Brian MacDonald
Brian MacDonald is the founder of Merit, the AI coworker for marketing teams. Previously ran SetupClaw.tech, an AI deployment service for SMBs. Read more about Brian and the mission.
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