Mark Leach · eCommerce consultant

Everything has an ROI. That’s the problem.

I’m an eCommerce consultant, and I work at board level with consumer brands between £20M and £150M. A hundred initiatives will cross your desk this year, each with a business case attached. Your business has the capacity to do five of them well, and the whole job is knowing which five.

Shop services

Services · 5 items Fixed prices · Board level · UK

The Clarity DiagnosticCC 004 · £15,000 · Fixed · Four to six weeks

Board SessionCC 003 · £3,500 · Fixed · One day

AdvisoryCC 005 · From £8,000 a month · 1 seat · Q1 2027

SessionsCC 006 · By invitation

The Clarity IndexCC 001 · Complimentary · Two minutes

The Method

Most good teams are solving the wrong problem well. Three questions, asked in order, check the diagnosis before you spend on the cure.

01 · What do we know

The honest read of data, tech, team and trading. This is where the cost usually sits: contradictory briefs, duplicated work, a platform blamed for a process problem.

02 · What’s the pattern

The shape under the symptoms. This is where the brief gets corrected, and where a £300,000 replatform or a pointless AI pilot gets stopped before the money moves.

03 · What’s the play

Five moves for the next twelve months, ranked and costed. Getting it wrong is faster and more expensive than it used to be, so the decision is argued in a room with your board.

Start with the Diagnostic

A consultant, or an agency

An agency sells you hands. I sell you the decision about where to put them.

Most brands at this size already have an agency, sometimes three, and the agencies are usually fine. What’s missing is someone in the room who doesn’t earn more when the scope grows. I don’t sell software, I don’t run a delivery team that needs feeding, and the advisory is designed to be stopped rather than renewed. That is what independent means in practice.

Twenty years on both sides of that table, running eCommerce P&Ls at brands like Missguided and building an agency that sold to Brainlabs, is how I know where each side hides its problems.

How I work, and what it costs

Proof

The brief was not the problem.

01Board nervous about a £300,000-plus replatform decision, three agencies pitching three different answers. Led discovery and governance.+8% conversion · +12% AOV

02A fashion brand asking about site speed and an app contract. The real problem was simpler: they’d outgrown their vendors and were renting capability they should own.$600k a year eliminated

03Major transformation for an eight-figure consumer brand, where the product data underneath couldn’t carry the ambition. The harder play was the right one.Zero trading days lost

In the rooms at Abbott Lyon · ARNE · Travel Counsellors · Lakeland · Card Factory

“Mark is a true expert in eCommerce. I’ve experienced how he accelerates growth and builds strong teams. He remains a trusted advisor of mine.”
Gareth Jones · Chairman, Abbott Lyon

“I can honestly say Mark is the most knowledgeable person I have met when it comes to conversion, customer journey improvements and all things digital.”
Paul Masters · CFO

Thoughts · Latest

All sixteen

How much does an eCommerce consultant cost in the UK?16 · eCommerce

Turn it off for a fortnight15 · eCommerce

The phone number that wasn’t14 · eCommerce

The expensive silence between strategy and execution13 · Leadership

CC 100 · Look Again · Hardback, 2027

Why clear brands pull ahead with AI, and the rest just spend.

Written in public. Sixteen pieces so far, filed as they’re finished.

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Thirty minutes is enough to know.

No pitch. A conversation about where you are and what needs to happen next, and a straight answer on whether I’m the right person for it.

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