Building a CHF 500K+ e-commerce from scratch

My father had the idea for a coffee business and a shop to sell it from. What he didn’t have was customers. The site was on WooCommerce, and keeping WooCommerce running was eating the time we needed for marketing. So I moved the whole shop to Shopify, which freed our energy for selling. Then I took over the commercial side: Google Ads, the campaigns, the brand.

I did the first stretch while I was still at P&G. When I left, I went into the shop full-time, redid the branding, and pushed on growth. The plan was plain: digital marketing, measured and adjusted, aimed at a curve we could compound. It worked.

One person, the whole store

There was no team, so I owned all of it. On the data side I built demand-forecasting and price-elasticity models to keep stock and pricing sane, and A/B-tested the campaigns as they ran.

One person across the whole store, with the data models carrying stock and pricing.

the loop that kept stock and pricing sane

The two months I priced us into a loss

Everything here was new, so we improvised and fixed as we went. One of my fixes cost us. A mistake in how I calculated net margin meant the shop lost money for two months before I caught it. I recalculated the whole thing, measured the loss properly, and changed how we set prices: aim each price at a target net margin from the start, instead of checking the margin at month-end when it’s already too late to do anything about it.

Result

The first year cleared CHF 500K in sales. Days out of stock dropped to zero once the forecasting drove the reordering, and A/B testing lifted campaign engagement by around 70%. A later rebuild of the degraded support and email flows added roughly 30% more orders.

After

I built the shop from scratch under Firmy SA. We sold it in 2024, and I stepped away. In 2026 the new owners called me back, this time to automate the parts that still ran by hand: pricing, restocking, the marketing. That work has its own page: The e-commerce that runs itself.