What is a commercial audit? The seven area health check for retail and eCommerce brands.

A commercial audit is a structured, whole of business review that finds where a retail or eCommerce brand is losing profit, from the customer experience through to the P&L, and ranks what to fix first. It is fixed in scope, it takes about two weeks, and it ends with a prioritised action plan rather than a diagnosis.

If you've had a website audit, an SEO audit or your year end accounts done, you've had part of the picture. Each one tells you whether a single function is working. None of them tells you why revenue is up and profit isn't. That question sits across the whole business. So does the answer.

Why does a founder-led brand need a commercial audit now?

Because the market has stopped hiding inefficiency. Australians spent a record $82.6 billion online in 2025, up 14% on the year before, according to the Australia Post eCommerce Report 2026. Sounds like good news. But the same report shows households now buy from an average of 16 brands a year, and the average online basket has shrunk to $96.

More brands competing. More orders. Smaller baskets. That's more pick, pack and freight cost per dollar of revenue, and more acquisition spend to win the same customer.

At the same time, KPMG's Retail Health Index fell to -1.07 in the June quarter 2026, with retail profits down, insolvencies above their historical average, and conditions expected to stay challenging until the end of 2027. Customers are comparing prices and waiting for promotions.

In that environment, a business can post healthy top line growth while its margin quietly drains out through five different holes. You feel it in the bank account before you can see it in any single report.

Profit rarely leaks inside one department. It leaks in the gaps between them, where nobody is looking and nobody owns the number. Rachel Tigel, GM For Hire

How is a commercial audit different from a website or financial audit?

Most audits are built to answer one question well. A commercial audit is built to connect the answers.

Here's a typical example. The marketing report says return on ad spend is strong. The website audit says conversion is fine. But the traffic being bought is landing on a range that is 40% markdown, the 3PL is charging for split shipments on half those orders, and a third of them come back. Every function reports green. The P&L is red. Only a cross functional view finds that.

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What does a commercial audit cover? The seven areas

A proper commercial audit works from the customer backwards. The customer experience sets the standard, and every other area is judged on whether it supports that experience profitably.

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What should you walk away with?

Not a 60 slide deck. If the output of an audit is a diagnosis with no ranking, you've paid for a very expensive list of worries. What you need is:

• The top 10 actions ranked by impact and effort. Clear on where to start, and clear on what to leave alone for now.
• A named owner for each action. If it belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one.
• A list of things to stop. The apps, agency retainers, promotions and SKUs that cost more than they return.
• A 90 day execution plan. What moves first, what gets measured, and what "done" looks like in the numbers.

The best audits also tell you what's working. Founders under pressure tend to change everything at once. Knowing which parts of the business are carrying it protects you from breaking them.

Signs your business needs a commercial audit

You don't need one because things are bad. You need one when the numbers stop making sense. Watch for these:

• Revenue is growing but gross margin or cash in the bank isn't keeping pace.
• You can't say, with confidence, which channel actually makes money after all costs.
• You have two or three agencies and none of them are measured on profit.
• Markdowns are getting deeper and more frequent just to hit the monthly target.
• The team is flat out, but nothing is moving the number.
• Every decision still comes back to you, and you're too close to see the gaps.

If three or more of those sound familiar, the problem is probably not effort. It's visibility.

The audit isn't the work. It's how you make sure the next 90 days of work is on the right thing. Rachel Tigel, GM For Hire

How do you prepare for a commercial audit?

You don't need clean data. You need access. Pull together:

1. 12 to 24 months of monthly P&L, ideally split by channel.
2. Sales and inventory reports by product, including markdown history.
3. Access to your eCommerce platform, analytics and email or CRM platform.
4. Your 3PL, freight and returns invoices.
5. Current agency and software contracts.
6. An org chart, even a rough one, showing who owns what.

Messy is fine. The mess is often where the answer is.

What happens after the audit?

This is where most audits fail. The report gets delivered, everyone agrees with it, and then the business goes back to running at full speed in the same direction. Six months later nothing has changed.

A commercial audit is only worth doing if someone with the authority and the operating experience stays in the business to execute it. That is the whole idea behind an embedded GM: the audit finds the leaks, then the same person works inside the business for 90 days to fix them, and stays until the numbers prove it.

If you're weighing up whether that should be a full-time hire or a fractional one, the fractional GM vs full-time GM guide walks through the trade-offs.

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Frequently asked questions

Related reading

• 6 Signs Your Retail Business Has Outgrown Founder-Led Management

  The signs it's time for senior commercial support, and what staying founder-dependent actually costs.

• Growth Has Stalled. Start With the Customer, Not Another New Offer.

  Why new products and campaigns stop working, and the customer first sequence that fixes it.

• Fractional GM vs Full-Time GM

  How to work out which kind of senior commercial leadership your business actually needs.