300 Stores Opened Their Books - What Surprised Me

Hey Reader,

You’re reading The Long Game - insights on financial mastery, entrepreneurship & building a rich life from Andrew at eComFuel.

After waaaay too much number crunching, chart building and coffee the 2026 eComFuel Trends Report is finally live!

This is our sixth annual deep dive, built from 300 store owners who collectively represent $3.5 billion in revenue.

The TL;DR findings are below.

To go deeper down the rabbit hole, check out the blog summary or the full 60-page PDF report.

Here are the top 4 findings:

Amazon Sales Drop to 2017 Levels

Amazon's share of community revenue has fallen all the way back to 2017 levels. What makes that remarkable: more operators sell on Amazon today (63%) than at any point in survey history.

It's gone from growth engine to supplemental channel.

DTC is winning vs. Amazon. Owners selling on their own stores have faster revenue growth, higher gross margins, and dramatically higher owner satisfaction.

Only 17% of operators who sell on Amazon actually like it vs. 90%+ for people selling on their own websites.

Nobody's fleeing in a panic, but they're increasingly building their real businesses elsewhere. (More on Amazon)

AI Isn't Making Owners Money (Yet)

AI is one of the fastest-adopted technologies in eCom history. And yet we found no meaningful difference in financial outcomes between adopters and non-adopters.

The time required to learn, adopt, and integrate these tools into real workflows seems to be eating up whatever gains they create.

I expect this to change as workflows mature, especially given how fast the technology improved in early 2026. But right now, net ROI remains elusive. (More on AI)

Gross Margins at Records. So Why Isn't Profit?

Here's a weird one. Gross margins have climbed to the highest point we've ever recorded (49.5%), driven by the massive shift toward manufacturing.

And yet net margins have fallen to a record low (10.6%).

It's not Zuck's fault. When we controlled for ad spend, profitability stayed surprisingly consistent.

The real culprits are product economics and high overhead.

The most profitable stores in the data spent 38% less on COGS and 30% less on overhead. If profitability is a problem, the fix is probably structural, not advertising-driven. (More on margins)

Paid Traffic Isn't Killing Your Margins.

97% of stores now use paid traffic. This blows me away.

It's not optional anymore. But here's what surprised me: stores leaning hardest into paid are growing 3-4x faster and their net margins are comparable to stores spending conservatively.

Turns out the brands winning at paid don't have the best ROAS. What they have are fat gross margins (~64%) and ultra-lean overhead (~15%).

The edge isn't in the ad account. It's in building a lean enough business and high enough margin product that you can spend heavily on ads (More on paid).