Ask five brokers what your store is worth and you will get five numbers. Ask a buyer, and you will get the only number that matters: what someone will actually wire for it. This guide walks the method buyers and marketplaces actually use, with the real bands, so the number you write down is one a stranger's accountant can agree with.
The method: SDE times a multiple
Almost every ecom store under a few million in value trades on the same formula:
Value = annual SDE x multiple
SDE is seller discretionary earnings: net profit, plus your own salary, plus any personal costs you run through the business, minus one-off items a new owner would not inherit. It answers the only question a buyer cares about: how much cash does this thing put in its owner's pocket in a normal year?
Revenue is not the number. A store doing 1 million in revenue at a 5 percent margin earns 50,000. A store doing 400,000 at 25 percent earns 100,000 and is worth roughly twice as much, despite being "smaller". When a listing leads with revenue and hides profit, that ordering is usually the pitch.
The real bands in 2026
For verified stores, the market clusters in a fairly tight band: roughly 2.2x to 3.2x annual SDE across mainstream ecom niches, with strong brands pushing toward 4.5x. Those numbers line up with what curated marketplaces report for vetted listings, and they are the same band the Kairos valuation calculator is built on.
Niche sets the starting point inside the band. Fashion and beauty stores tend to start near the top: repeat purchase behavior and brand equity travel well to a new owner. Electronics and food sit lower: thinner margins, more supplier risk, more things that can break in handover. No niche escapes the band entirely; a niche just decides where you start before your own numbers move you.
What moves the multiple
Four factors do most of the work.
Growth trend. The biggest lever in both directions. A store trending up earns a premium because the buyer is buying next year, not last year. A declining store takes the biggest haircut of any single factor, because the buyer is pricing the risk that the slide continues.
Traffic mix. Mostly organic traffic adds to the multiple. Mostly paid traffic subtracts. The logic is brutal and fair: organic traffic is an asset that transfers, while paid traffic is a bill that transfers. A store that lives on ads is a store whose profit belongs partly to the ad platform.
Age. Past three years, a store has proven it survives seasons, algorithm changes, and supplier hiccups; that record adds to the multiple. Under a year, the track record cannot carry the claim, and the multiple drops.
Provability. The quiet factor nobody prices until the deal is on the table. Two identical stores, one with revenue verified from order data and one with screenshots, do not sell for the same number. Buyers discount what they cannot check, and screenshots are where discounts start. This is the one factor you control completely in the months before a sale.
The math, worked
Say your store did 480,000 in revenue last year. Net profit was 96,000. You paid yourself 24,000 through the business and expensed a 6,000 one-off rebrand.
SDE = 96,000 + 24,000 + 6,000 = 126,000.
It is a home and decor store, so call the base 2.7x. Sales are growing (up), traffic is roughly half organic and half paid (neutral), and the store is four years old (up a notch). Adjusted multiple: about 3.1x.
Value = 126,000 x 3.1 = 390,600, with a realistic negotiating range of roughly 330,000 to 450,000 around it. That range is not noise; it is where provability, inventory terms, and deal structure get argued.
If typing your own numbers beats reading someone else's, the valuation calculator runs this exact method on six inputs and gives you the range in about a minute.
The mistakes that cost sellers real money
Valuing on revenue. Covered above, but it is the most common and the most expensive. Multiples of revenue only apply to a tiny class of high-growth brands, and yours is statistically not one of them.
Counting the owner twice. If you add your salary back into SDE, the buyer will subtract the cost of replacing you. If you work sixty hours a week in the store, say so; a buyer discovering it in diligence prices it as a lie, not a detail.
Anchoring on asking prices. Marketplace asking prices run well above closed prices. Comparables mean sold stores at your size in your niche, and closed-deal data is exactly what a serious venue publishes.
Ignoring inventory. Stock is usually priced on top of the multiple at cost, not inside it. Sellers who forget this give away five figures; buyers who forget it find five figures they did not budget.
Waiting to make numbers provable. Every claim in your listing either reconciles against order data or it does not. Doing that reconciliation months before the sale, rather than during it, is the difference between defending your multiple and negotiating your apology. There is a full walkthrough in how to prepare your store for sale.
When the formula bends
Two cases sit outside the standard band and deserve honesty about it. A store under a year old barely has a track record to price, so buyers weight the asset value of the brand, the product, and the audience more than the earnings, and the multiple can fall below 2x no matter how good the months look. And a genuine brand, one with repeat customers who search for it by name, can justify the top of the band and beyond, because the buyer is acquiring demand that does not need to be re-rented from an ad platform every month. Most stores are neither of these. If yours is, price it like what it is, not like the average.
What a valuation is not
A valuation is an estimate built from published multiples and six facts about your store. It is not an appraisal, and it is not a promise. A real sale price also reflects deal structure, inventory, transition support, and how much of your revenue survives contact with a buyer's due diligence.
The estimate gets you to a defensible asking price. The proof gets you to a close. When you are ready for the second part, selling on Kairos starts with verifying your numbers against real orders, free, before any buyer sees them.