What is an e-commerce store worth?

The multiple is one division: sold price ÷ trailing-twelve-month profit. Only the stores whose source page states a profit figure can be in it, which is why we publish that count next to the median rather than behind it. The gap between the two figures above is not a gap in the market — it is the ordinary condition of this data. Most sold e-commerce deals are published with a price and nothing else.

Where the profit figures come from matters more than how many there are. In our database today they arrive almost entirely from small marketplace auctions, because that is the only kind of source in our source register that publishes a per-deal profit figure beside a confirmed sale price. Larger e-commerce sales reach us from acquisition journalism and first-party seller posts, and those state a price with no profit line to divide by — so they raise the deal count without touching the median.

The practical consequence: the median above describes the small-auction end of the market. It is a real, cited, arithmetically correct number about stores that mostly changed hands for three and four figures. Read it as that, and it is useful. Read it as "what e-commerce businesses trade at", and it will mislead you badly.

A median under 1× looks like an error until you look at what is being sold. At auction, the profit figure is the seller's own claim about a business the buyer has never seen, and the closing price is what an anonymous bidder would risk against that claim. Two numbers, two very different degrees of evidence.

The recurring reasons, all of them visible in listings rather than inferred:

• The profit is asserted, not attested. Screenshots and a spreadsheet, not a read-only data pull or a filing.
• The history is short. A store a few months old has a profit figure that is one good month multiplied out — see annualized months.
• The margin depends on ad spend that may not transfer. Ad accounts, pixels and their learned audiences are frequently the actual asset, and frequently the part that cannot be handed over.
• Supply is somebody else's. Dropshipping and print-on-demand stores rent their fulfilment; the buyer inherits a relationship, not an inventory.
• The buyer pool is thin. Sub-$1,000 auctions attract bidders pricing an option, not operators pricing a business.

These are the questions that separate a store that clears several times its profit from one that clears a fraction of it. None of them is answered by the multiple.

1. Is the revenue provable without the seller? Read-only access to the payment processor and the store platform beats any screenshot or exported PDF.
2. What survives ad spend, refunds and chargebacks? Contribution margin after those three is the number a buyer underwrites; gross revenue is decoration.
3. Where does the traffic come from, and would it still arrive next quarter? Paid, search, social and marketplace traffic carry very different risks of stopping the day the seller leaves.
4. How concentrated is it? One product, one supplier, one ad account or one channel carrying most of the revenue is a risk the buyer prices in, and it is the discount sellers argue with most often.
5. What actually transfers? Domain, storefront, apps and subscriptions, supplier terms, ad accounts, and the customer list with the consent that makes it legal to email.
6. Twelve months, month by month. A trailing-twelve-month total hides seasonality, a decline, and the month everything broke.
7. Who else is bidding? Price is set by the second-most-motivated buyer, so a private sale to one interested party and a live auction are different pricing mechanisms.