Capital priced for digital cash conversion.
eCommerce is its own category for lenders — the cash conversion is fast (Stripe deposits in 2 days, Amazon in 14), the marketing spend is variable, and inventory is the single biggest capital line. The right structure depends on whether you sell DTC, on Amazon, or both.
How do online sellers finance inventory before the sales come in?
Most use an inventory line of credit or revenue-based financing. You draw to pay the factory, the goods ship, and you repay as the units sell. Lenders in this space do not just read your bank account. They connect to Shopify, Amazon, or Stripe and read the sales data directly, which means a growing store gets credit for growth the bank statements have not caught up to yet. Decisions often come back the same day. Repayment is usually a fixed percentage of daily sales, so a slow week costs you less than a strong one.
What we see funded
- Inventory financing. The big one. Most eCommerce operators are inventory-constrained — they could sell more if they had more product to ship. Inventory lines or PO financing close that gap.
- Amazon-specific working capital. Bridging the 14-day Amazon payout cycle, especially around Prime Day and Q4 holiday spikes.
- Ad-spend financing. Scaling Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon ads when the unit economics support it but the cash needs to land before the revenue does.
- Revenue-based financing. Fast-moving operators often prefer RBF over a term loan because the daily revenue holdback matches their cash-flow rhythm.
- Acquisition. Buying complementary DTC brands or Amazon FBA businesses is a fast-growing use case.
What an eCommerce deal usually looks like
A DTC skincare brand does $3.4M a year on Shopify. The Q4 buy is $420K to the contract manufacturer, due 60 days before the goods land and 90 days before most of them sell. We place a $350K inventory line plus a $100K revenue-based advance for the ad ramp. The line is approved in 48 hours off the Shopify connection. The advance repays at about 9% of daily sales, so it clears out roughly seven months later.
Amazon files look different. A seller doing $180K a month across 14 ASINs typically bridges the 14-day payout cycle with a $75K to $150K advance sized off settlement reports. Around Prime Day and Q4 those numbers double, because the inventory has to be in the warehouse weeks before the traffic arrives.
What lenders look at
It depends on where you sell.
For DTC brands, the platform data comes first. Bank deposits lag actual sales by a few days, so lenders read Shopify or Stripe directly. Then they check your unit economics — what a customer costs to acquire against what that customer spends over time. They also look at your return rate and whether one ad channel drives most of your traffic. A brand that gets 80% of its sales from a single Meta account is one algorithm change away from a bad quarter.
For Amazon sellers, the questions change. Seller-account health comes first, because a suspended account has no revenue at all. Then ASIN diversification: how many products carry your sales. One hero product doing most of the volume is a risk. Finally they read Amazon’s own payout history, which is about as reliable a record as underwriting gets.
We work with specialty lenders on both sides. Sellers who also stock physical stores get read partly like wholesale distributors, and that usually widens the options.
What we recommend
Inventory-constrained? An inventory line or PO financing. Scaling ad spend where the math already works? Revenue-based financing, or a term loan if the horizon is longer than a year. Buying a brand or an FBA business? A term loan, often with part of the price carried by the seller. We will run the unit economics with you before we name a structure — borrowing to scale a channel that loses money on every order only makes the problem bigger.