Wire hit. Keys are yours. Now what?
The first 100 days after closing an ecommerce acquisition are the highest-leverage period of your ownership. Done right, they set the foundation for growth. Done wrong, they can destabilize a business that was running fine before you touched it.
Here's what we recommend across four phases.
Days 1–14: Stabilize, Don't Optimize
Your instinct will be to start making changes. Resist it.
Do not touch the ad account. Whatever was working before close is still working. Even well-intentioned changes to campaign structure, budgets, or creative can trigger algorithm resets that take weeks to recover from. Observe, document, and wait.
Meet every team member. Even if it's just two VAs and a 3PL contact, introduce yourself, confirm employment terms, and ask what problems they've been sitting on that the seller never addressed. You will learn more from these conversations than from any financial document.
Audit access and credentials. Confirm you have admin access to every platform: Amazon Seller Central, Shopify, ad accounts, email marketing, social, the bank account, and the 3PL portal. It is not uncommon to discover that the seller retained access to something.
Get on the phone with your top 3 suppliers. Introduce yourself. Confirm payment terms and open orders. Ask about upcoming price changes or lead time issues. Supplier relationships are transferable but not automatic — you have to re-earn them.
Days 15–45: Understand the Engine
Build a unit economics model. For every major SKU or SKU group: landed cost, Amazon or Shopify fees, return rate, ad cost per unit, and contribution margin. This will immediately surface which products are driving profitability and which are hiding losses.
Audit your inventory position. How many weeks of cover do you have on each SKU? What's aging? Are there inbound shipments that were ordered by the seller and haven't arrived yet? Understanding your working capital tied up in inventory is essential before you make any ordering decisions.
Run a tech stack audit. List every subscription, software tool, and integration the business is paying for. You'll typically find 20–30% of subscriptions are either redundant or unused. Cut what doesn't serve an active function.
Review your Amazon listing health. Check every listing for suppression risks, missing attributes, and content gaps. Fix anything that could trigger a listing issue before you scale traffic.
Days 46–75: Renegotiate and Systematize
Renegotiate supplier terms. As a new owner with a clean slate, you often have more leverage than the seller did — especially if you can offer faster payment, larger order commitments, or a longer-term relationship. Even a 2–3% reduction in COGS is significant at scale.
Document every process. If the seller was a key operator, institutional knowledge left with them. Work with your team to document every recurring task: how purchase orders are created, how customer service tickets are handled, how inventory reorder points are calculated. This documentation is also critical if you ever hire.
Build a 13-week cash flow model. Map out every known outflow (inventory orders, payroll, software, loan payment) against projected inflows. This is where most new operators discover working capital surprises.
Days 76–100: Optimize Selectively
Now you can start making changes — but with data behind them.
Start with one ad experiment. Don't overhaul the ad account. Pick one campaign, one variable, and run a controlled test. Learn how this account responds before making structural changes.
Evaluate one growth lever. Whether it's a new product launch, a new sales channel, or an email marketing sequence, pick one initiative to develop and test. Doing too much at once makes it impossible to attribute results.
Review your loan covenants. If you financed with SBA or other institutional debt, confirm you understand your financial reporting requirements and covenant thresholds. Set calendar reminders for quarterly reporting.
What Not to Do in the First 100 Days
- Launch a new product line
- Rebuild the website
- Fire the existing team and rehire
- Change the brand identity
- Move to a new 3PL
All of these can be the right move eventually. None of them are the right move before you understand what's already working.