The Profit-First Playbook: How Thomas Gleeson is Helping E-Commerce Brands Scale Sustainably
Despite access to attribution tools like Google Analytics, marketers still struggle to connect campaign performance to actual profit. According to Gartner's 2025 Tech Marketing Benchmarks Survey, proving the ROI of digital marketing remains a top-three challenge for marketing leaders.
Thomas Gleeson is setting out to solve this strategic blind spot with StoreHero, a platform which helps e-commerce teams unify their marketing and financial data, making it easier to see which campaigns are actually driving profits.
Drawing from his experience at Shopify and his own family's e-commerce business, Gleeson built StoreHero to bridge the gap between marketing and finance by helping online merchants move beyond vanity metrics and toward strategic decisions driven by profit potential. The Profit Disconnect: A Founder's First Challenge
The philosophy behind StoreHero was born from an experiment in what drives e-commerce success.
In the early 2010s, Gleeson's mother ran Wowee, one of Ireland's oldest e-commerce stores. She built the business through organic search traffic while Gleeson, still a student at the time, began testing paid advertising to accelerate growth.
His campaigns drove a noticeable uptick in sales, but not everyone was convinced. His father, an accountant and the store's financial lead, questioned whether the revenue gains were enough to justify their investment and translated into real profit. To make his case, Thomas built a detailed spreadsheet that mapped ad performance to bottom-line impact.
"He didn't connect with the typical marketing metrics," Gleeson recalls. "I still remember sitting at the kitchen table, building out this massive spreadsheet just to convince my dad that our ad spend was driving profit."
The spreadsheet linked ad spend to actual profit margins by factoring in costs, conversion rates, and contribution per order, convincing his father to increase digital ad spend and sparking what Gleeson calls an "obsession with aligning marketing and finance" in e-commerce. From Shopify to Startup Leader: The Leap from Shopify to StoreHero
Gleeson spent nearly four years at commerce platform Shopify, where he rose rapidly from customer support advisor to senior merchant success manager, advising some of the most prominent e-commerce brands in the United Kingdom, from Victoria Beckham to Motel Rocks, along the way.
At Shopify, he ran into the same problems with proving the true value of marketing on a larger scale. Siloed data and misaligned goals prevented marketing teams from delivering true value and profit to the business. Even high-revenue brands struggled to measure what mattered.
While the companies he worked with relied on tools like Google Analytics or Meta Ads manager, those platforms rarely connected campaign performance to profits. Gleeson's spreadsheet filled that gap by integrating marketing metrics with cost data and contribution margins, providing a clearer picture of which efforts were truly profitable.
Refined to work across industries and business models, it became a trusted tool for his clients.
During this time, Gleeson was working towards his bachelor's degree in business commerce in the evening. For his final project, he returned to the spreadsheet he had refined for his Shopify clients, transforming it into a full business plan by building a financial model, outlining a product roadmap, and detailing how the tool could scale into a SaaS platform for e-commerce brands.
That project became the foundation for StoreHero. The same week he graduated with first-class honors, he handed in his notice at Shopify and launched the company. How StoreHero Helps E-Commerce Brands Make Profitable Decisions
StoreHero is an e-commerce analytics platform that helps brands connect their marketing and financial data to drive profit-first growth.
As co-founder and CFO, Gleeson leads both the strategic vision and financial architecture of the company. Drawing on his background in e-commerce operations and experience advising top Shopify clients, he built StoreHero to help brands understand which of their ad campaigns actually drive profit.
Most e-commerce marketers depend on Meta Ad reports, Google Analytics, and store backends like Shopify to track performance. StoreHero brings it all into a single dashboard then connects it to deeper financial metrics like contribution margins, customer lifetime value, and blended return on ad spend.
The result is a clear, real-time view of what's working, what's wasting spend, and where more investment could lead to increased profit.
"Marketing shouldn't be a mystery to your CFO," Gleeson explains. "And finance shouldn't be a blocker to growth. When leaders can tie ad campaigns directly to profit, they can align faster, spend smarter, and scale more sustainably."
StoreHero delivers what Gleeson calls the Profit-First Playbook : a measurement and data analysis framework that helps merchants track how each of their digital ad campaigns connects to their bottom line. Less than three years after launching, StoreHero supports more than 400 e-commerce brands, generating over $700 million in annual sales.
While StoreHero is a data platform, Gleeson has built it with a human-first mindset. He regularly meets with clients to understand their challenges and shape the product around their needs. One Australian founder told him that StoreHero helped him and his wife grow their business to the point where they were able to buy a new home and expand internationally.
"That's when it really hit me," Gleeson says. "We're not just building software, we're changing lives." The Road Ahead: Scaling Smart at a Global Scale
As e-commerce brands face rising acquisition costs, supply chain volatility, and shrinking margins, many are questioning whether rapid growth alone is enough. In response, Thomas Gleeson has positioned StoreHero as an e-commerce intelligence solution that helps brands align their marketing and finance data.
His goal is to help brands grow not just faster but smarter, with the financial clarity needed to make sound marketing and business decisions.
Continued product innovation will be key to that goal. Based on client feedback, the StoreHero team is working to introduce more automation, deeper integrations, and advanced reporting features, but the core promise remains unchanged: helping brands make sense of their data to drive profit-first decisions.
"You don't need more data," Gleeson concludes. "You need better decisions."
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