I spent six years building a E-commerce storefront from nothing into a €1,600,000 per year European e-commerce business.
I'm now looking for the next one.
No storefront. No catalogue. No suppliers. A company that wanted to sell solar online and didn't yet know how.
I joined Planet Soar as their e-commerce lead. Within months I had a temporary contract turn into an apprenticeship, and an apprenticeship turn into the build of planetsoarshop.com. What started as a side channel became the company's commercial engine.
Six years later, the online channel accounts for 60% of revenue and sources 100% of inbound demand. It is a story about scale, but also about protecting what works while everything around it changes.
A Shopify storefront with 544 active SKUs at peak, served by nine European suppliers, supported by a custom shipping engine, and run by a team of seven.
Panels, batteries, inverters, EV chargers, accessories. Five categories, each with their own logistics constraints.
ENECSOL, VOLTANEO, KRANNICH, BAYWARE, ESTG, POWR CONNECT, ALLIANTZ, plus two irregular partners in Switzerland and Italy.
The problem nobody wanted to solve: per-item shipping across nine suppliers with no carrier API. I built an internal cost model with ~90% accuracy.
~500 daily clicks, 2.5% CTR. All organic SEO. Paid was reserved for product launches and peak seasons only.
Five sales representatives, one e-commerce assistant, plus oversight of the accounting function. KPIs, reporting cadence, process design.
Quotation funnel above €7,000. Direct conversion below. A deliberate split for a high-AOV catalogue, not a workaround.
120 SunPower panels, shipped internationally from France to Miami, Florida. End-to-end ownership of the deal: quotation, negotiation, logistics, shipping organisation.
Domestic enterprise account. A different funnel: longer cycle, technical discussion, supplier coordination. Same outcome.
Planet Soar was bidding on a European Union FASEP public-sector contract in Southern Africa. The bid needed local partners on the ground.
I flew to Gaborone and Johannesburg. Two weeks of meetings, site visits, partnership conversations. By the end, we had secured Solar Power Kgalagadi Resources Development Co. as the local partner underpinning the bid.
It is the part of the job that is rarely on the e-commerce manager's brief. I think that's why it matters.
What people say
Melvyn joined us as an apprentice and over four years became the person running our entire e-commerce operation. He built the storefront, managed our supplier relationships, led our campaigns, and took revenue to €1.6 million. I rarely say this, but he would be an immediate asset to any team in Europe.
We approached Planet Soar about a commercial partnership and Melvyn handled the entire process. Methodical, sharp on margins, and clearly understood both sides of the deal. He closed it in three meetings — no unnecessary back and forth.
I've reviewed a lot of e-commerce operations at his level. The breadth is rare — SEO, paid media, CRO, logistics, supplier negotiation. Most people his age specialise in one of these. Melvyn runs the full stack and understands how each part connects to the others.
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