E-commerce has made the retail space faster to launch, easier to scale, and more accessible than ever before, with the rise of Shopify, paid media, and digital logistics revolutionizing the industry.
But in the rush for growth, many businesses invest heavily in marketing without clear visibility into whether it’s actually profitable. Marketing and finance traditionally operate on separate systems, with one pushing for spending and the other held back, each with different metrics and definitions of success.
Today, more and more businesses are recognising the need for alignment; instead of chasing growth, they’re asking whether spending is driving sustainable outcomes.
Thomas Gleeson recognized this impending shift long before the pressure reached breaking point, and has turned years of first-hand experience into StoreHero, a platform that unifies data from ecommerce, marketing, and finance tools to give businesses invaluable insight into their operations.
Thomas Gleeson: An unlikely translator between two worlds
Thomas’ mother ran one of Ireland’s earliest e-commerce sites, growing it through organic traffic and operational grit. As a teenager, he took over digital marketing for the business, running ads which saw positive results. But when he asked to scale spend, he quickly encountered resistance from his father, who didn’t trust marketing metrics.
To prove the value of his campaigns, Thomas built a spreadsheet that linked ad spending directly to profit, earning his father’s approval while also revealing something bigger: the disconnect between how marketers measure success and how finance evaluates impact.
This early attempt to connect two competing perspectives resonated with him and he often found himself translating between teams that relied on different numbers to make decisions.
Seeing the disconnect at scale
Thomas eventually joined Shopify, where he quickly progressed from frontline support to senior consultant, advising brands like Victoria Beckham and Dryrobe to troubleshoot everything from tech integrations to marketing inefficiencies.
What surprised him wasn’t just the scale of the brands he worked with, it was the fact they all suffered from the same issues as his mother’s business. Data was everywhere, but insight was rare, while marketing teams chased metrics their CFOs didn’t understand.
The spreadsheet Thomas built as a teenager came in handy again. He shared versions of it with clients to show them how campaigns could be measured in financial terms, and watched how teams responded when the numbers finally connected.
That realization turned into obsession: what if there were a product that made this translation automatic? What if there were a system that not only visualized the right data but aligned people around it?
A leap from comfort into uncertainty
While still at Shopify, Thomas enrolled in a business degree. For his final project, he returned to the spreadsheet, but this time as a fully fleshed out business model. He submitted the project on a Sunday, graduated with first-class honours, and resigned from Shopify that same week.
“I didn’t want to just write about a business—I wanted to build one,” he recalls.
The leap was dramatic: no revenue, no certainty, just a belief that the solution he’d prototyped could solve a real and growing problem in the e-commerce world.
In 2021, StoreHero was born.
StoreHero is a Saas platform purpose-built for e-commerce to grow profitably by bringing marketing, finance, and operations into a unified system. It connects storefronts, paid media accounts, and accounting tools, giving teams a real-time view of metrics like contribution margin, breakeven ROAS, and net marketing efficiency. This unified space helps them track full-funnel performance so they can see exactly how spending translates into profit.
Performance goals can be set and monitored across channels, with automated alerts flagging issues like rising customer acquisition costs or a campaign failing to meet profit targets. Teams can also compare numbers to industry benchmarks and receive personalized suggestions to course-correct.
For deeper visibility, the platform includes granular channel-by-channel reports for daily, weekly, or monthly email digests that summarize performance with custom metrics, insights, and trends highlighted.
Today, StoreHero supports over 400 brands and tracks more than $700 million in gross merchandise value (GMV). Its edge isn’t just scale, it’s how it links decisions to outcomes by showing marketing teams contribution margins and finance teams campaign ROI.
“Revenue is exciting,” Thomas explains. “Profit is what gives you freedom.” StoreHero is designed around that principle, making every team accountable for the same results.
Growth without vanity: A founder building for the long game
Unlike many SaaS founders, who chase explosive short-term growth, Thomas is intentional. He mentors top customers personally and travels globally. On a recent trip to Australia one client shared that StoreHero helped grow their business fivefold, expand internationally, and buy a new home. It wasn’t just software, it changed how they ran their business.
These outcomes shape how Thomas builds. He believes that better tools lead to better decisions and that better decisions compound over time.
Alongside the product, Thomas is also focused on building community. StoreHero runs operator events in London, Dublin, and New York, often in partnership with Shopify. These are working sessions, not product pitches, where founders discuss what’s working, what isn’t, and how they’re solving for profit.
Smarter growth with shared metrics
Thomas Gleeson isn’t just a founder who made something clever, he’s building the kind of company that this next phase of e-commerce demands: one grounded in operational empathy, built from real use cases, and capable of scaling sustainably.
In a market now defined by efficiency over exuberance, StoreHero helps brands grow with purpose. It shifts conversations from spends to return and helps teams act faster because they can finally trust the data.
As the e-commerce industry moves beyond its hypergrowth era, Thomas’ work with StoreHero offers a way to grow smarter and more profitable, not just bigger.
