Read your store like a buyer

Almost every Shopify store under $2M a year is priced the same way: owner earnings (SDE) multiplied by a multiple. Owner earnings is the profit the business makes before you pay yourself. The multiple is how many years of those earnings a buyer is willing to pay up front.

The first number is arithmetic. The second is judgement, and it is where most of the money is. Two stores with the same $150,000 of owner earnings can sell for $300,000 or $600,000, depending on how safe, transferable and durable a buyer believes those earnings are.

What a buyer is really asking

A buyer is not buying your past. They are buying the next three to five years. Every question in due diligence is a version of one of these:

• Will the earnings continue? Revenue trend, repeat customers, how long the store has existed.
• Can I run it without you? How many hours you work, whether processes are written down, who the suppliers know.
• What could break it? One hero product, one ad channel, one supplier, one season.
• Are the numbers real? Clean books, consistent margins, refunds and chargebacks explained.

Every chapter in this course answers one of these questions. When you improve the answer, the multiple goes up. When you improve profit as well, both numbers rise together, which is why small operational changes can have a large effect on the sale price.

Your starting point

Your StoreWorth estimate or report already scores your store on each factor. Use it as the baseline for this course. The factors marked as negative are where a buyer will push your price down, and the improvements list shows which fixes are worth the most in dollars.

You do not need to fix everything. Most owners get the biggest result by picking two or three levers, working on them for six to twelve months, and documenting the change so a buyer can see it in the data.