How The Commerce Group Turned a $60K Software Expense Into $700K in Profit

About The Commerce Group

The Commerce Group operates a portfolio of CBD and THC brands, each built for a different customer and category. TRE House, CBD FX, Ferris Wheel, Get Bars, and Happy Pause together process roughly 400,000 orders a year on Shopify.

Running five brands changes the math on operational software. A per-order fee that looks negligible for a single brand multiplies across the portfolio. Twelve cents an order sounds like nothing until you are processing 400,000 orders, at which point it becomes a $48,000 line item for just one function. Compound that across the full suite of post-purchase features needed for a mature DTC brand and the numbers get scary fast. Portfolio operators feel post-purchase economics before most single-brand merchants ever notice them.

The Challenge

Like most brands at scale, The Commerce Group treated post-purchase software as a cost of doing business. Their legacy provider charged roughly $50,000 a year for order tracking, plus another $12,000 for returns. Around $60,000 annually, all pure expense, and all of it scaling with order volume. Growth made the bill bigger.

Their goal when they first talked to Onward was narrow. They wanted a cheaper replacement for tracking and returns. Nothing more.

The Solution

Onward laid out two ways forward. The first was to buy the services standalone: order tracking, returns, and order editing, cheaper than their legacy provider and with better functionality, but still a line item. The second was to run Checkout+ order upgrades, in which case that same suite of services came bundled in at no cost. The revenue generated from the upgraded orders covered the platform costs.

The Commerce Group's goal walking in was to reduce costs, and the standalone option answered it directly. Checkout+ was new to them. They had come looking for a tracking replacement, not a new revenue program. Adding a customer-facing upgrade to five brands was more than they had planned to take on.

What changed their mind was Onward's customer experience platform. Onward provides brands with the same type of self-service experience that customers love from Amazon. Shoppers get proactive communication after every purchase and a self-serve control panel to change an order, resolve a delivery issue, or start a return on their own. Customers place an order and manage it themselves, no ticket required, exactly the way they already expect it to work from years of shopping on Amazon.

The Commerce Group's brands pride themselves on their customer service teams, and that was part of the appeal rather than a contradiction. Onward’s self-service portal lets customers handle their own needs and leaves customer support to focus on real issues, not trivialities. The most elevated experience a brand can offer is the one where the customer never needs to ask for help, and Onward gives independent brands the same self-service tooling that trained shoppers to expect it in the first place.

They chose the bundled path. Order tracking, returns, and order editing came in at no cost across all five brands, and Checkout+ order upgrades turned the post-purchase flow into a profit stream rather than an expense.

The Results

The full scope of their post-purchase economics comes to roughly $760,000 a year. About $60,000 in software fees eliminated, and $700,000 in profit generated through Checkout+ order upgrades, from the same order volume that used to only cost them money.

The consolidation matters as much as the number. One platform now serves all five brands with order tracking, fully integrated returns, and order upgrades, with no per-brand SaaS fees and no per-order charges. What was a vendor bill split across a portfolio became a single system that contributes margin and an improved customer experience..

Customers across every brand now resolve their own issues: order changes, delivery problems, returns, all self-serve. Support teams handle the conversations that actually need a human.

What This Means for Multi-Brand Operators

The Commerce Group came to Onward with the most common request in post-purchase: make this cheaper. They left with an entirely new mindset. Order tracking and returns stopped costing them anything, and the checkout flow they already owned started generating profit.

If post-purchase software is a cost line on your P&L, that is a choice, not a given. The same order volume that generates fees under the legacy model generates profit under this one. At 400,000 orders a year, The Commerce Group's version of that choice was worth about $760,000.