North America E-commerce Consulting

North America E-commerce Consulting

Launch and scale an e-commerce business in Canada and the US with a team that has run its own for 10+ years: sourcing, Amazon, Shopify, compliance, finance.

An E-commerce Business Is an Asset. We Help You Build One That Pays.

Most services in this industry sell you one piece: an Amazon listing, a Shopify theme, a sourcing agent, an ads manager. We do the whole thing. Pine & Birch has run its own e-commerce businesses selling into North America for more than ten years, and the service we offer is the one we wished existed when we started: build the complete system, end to end, with someone who has already made the mistakes.

Our view is simple. A properly built e-commerce business is one of the few genuine routes to owning an asset that earns while you are not in the room. It is not effortless — anyone who tells you it is passive from day one is selling a course — but once the supply chain, the platform, the compliance and the marketing are set up correctly, the business runs on systems rather than on your hours. That is real wealth: something you own, that produces, that can be sold. Not a salary.

"Isn't E-commerce Saturated?" No — the Easy Entry Points Are.

Marketplace selling looks harder than it did in 2015, and the obvious vertical niches look crowded. Both true. Neither means the opportunity is gone. It means the opportunity has moved to where the work is: better sourcing than competitors can manage, products that solve a real problem for a specific buyer, an owned brand across Amazon and your own store, and operations that run at a lower cost than the incumbents. There are more ways to win today, not fewer. The difference is that you have to find the right entry point first — and that is where experience matters more than enthusiasm.

What "End to End" Actually Covers

• ✔ Product and entry-point strategy — where you can win, what to sell first, and what to leave alone
• ✔ Global sourcing and supplier selection — finding and negotiating with manufacturers worldwide, not just the first result on a sourcing site
• ✔ Factory audits and quality control — verifying the factory before you pay, and the goods before they ship
• ✔ Purchasing, logistics and import — orders, freight, customs and landed-cost math that is right the first time
• ✔ Platform setup — Amazon Seller Central and FBA, Shopify, Walmart, TikTok Shop, and the integrations between them
• ✔ Compliance — product safety, labelling, certifications, customs classification and marketplace policy for Canada and the US
• ✔ Legal — entity setup, trademarks and brand registry, supplier contracts, terms and privacy
• ✔ Finance — bookkeeping built for marketplaces, sales tax and GST/HST, cash-flow planning for inventory, and unit economics you can trust
• ✔ Website and brand — a store that converts, built by the same team that does our custom software
• ✔ Online marketing — marketplace advertising, SEO and AI search, paid social and email, via our growth marketing team

AI, Used Where It Works — Not Everywhere

AI has become the most over-promised tool in e-commerce, and using it badly costs more than not using it at all: generic listings, hallucinated compliance advice, ad campaigns nobody understands. Where it genuinely pays — product research at scale, listing and image production with human review, customer service triage, demand forecasting, repricing, back-office automation — we have spent years working out exactly how, and we build it in. Where it doesn't, we say so. If you want the operational side automated properly, that is our AI agent development practice.

How We Engage

Launch programs take a business from idea to first sales with the complete system in place. Scale programs take an existing seller — often one stuck on a single marketplace — to a multi-channel brand with better margins. Both are run by people who have done it with their own money, which is the only kind of e-commerce advice worth paying for.