How to value a small ecommerce store

Most people price a small store by staring at its revenue and guessing. That's how buyers overpay and sellers sell themselves short. Revenue tells you how big the store is. It says nothing about what you'd take home owning it, and that second number is the one worth paying for.

Price the profit, not the revenue

Start with what an owner keeps each month once the real costs are out: product, ad spend, apps, transaction fees, all of it. The industry calls it seller's discretionary earnings, but you can just think of it as take-home profit before you pay yourself a wage. A store turning over €20k a month sounds great until you find out €17k of that goes straight back out in product and ads.

Be strict about what counts. You can add back a genuine one-off, like a logo redesign or a bad month of ad testing that won't repeat. You cannot quietly delete the ad spend the store needs to survive. A store that only makes money while a Meta account runs hot is worth less than a boring one making the same profit from repeat customers and search.

Then pick a multiple, and know what moves it

Small stores sell for some multiple of that yearly profit. Hunting for one magic number is a waste of time, because the same profit is worth very different amounts depending on how likely it is to survive you taking over. What you're really pricing is risk.

A few things push the number up: a couple of years of steady trading, traffic coming from more than one place, a supplier who'll keep the same terms for a new owner, customers who come back, a brand someone would actually miss. Other things drag it down: one ad account carrying the whole business, a single hero product, margins so thin one supplier price rise wipes them out, or a store that lives entirely inside the current owner's head.

Where people overpay

The classic mistake is pricing the best month and ignoring the ways the whole thing could fall over. Before you agree a figure, name the single point of failure out loud. One banned ad account? One supplier who stops replying? A seasonal spike that isn't coming back? Each of those is a reason the number should be lower. You're not being harsh. You're paying for certainty, and a fragile store has less of it to sell.

Check it against real sales

A number you invented in a spreadsheet is worth less than one you can point at. Look at what comparable stores actually sold for, not what sellers are asking. Every completed sale on EcomFlips is published as a real comparable, and if you're the one selling, the team gives you a free valuation range with a person looking at your numbers instead of a formula spitting out a figure.

Getting the price right is only half the job. The other half is making sure the money and the store change hands safely, which is a different problem entirely: escrow, an inspection window, and a transfer you can actually prove. A fair price protects your return. It does nothing to protect you from getting scammed.