Most ecommerce founders we speak to assume the only way to fix a cash squeeze is to sell more or borrow more. Usually there's a third option sitting in plain sight: cash that's already trapped in the business.
None of the ideas below are overly complicated. Most can take a single phone call or a spreadsheet exercise to test. But they're the kind of thing that's easy to overlook when you're heads-down running the business day to day.
Where this comes from
At RT Finance we specialise in providing strategic virtual finance support to UK ecom brands. We have some version of this conversation with almost every founder we work with, usually in the first few weeks: there's often more cash available in the business than the bank balance suggests, it's just sitting somewhere unexpected.
Here are the top seven places we'd start looking.
1. Renegotiate payment terms with your manufacturers
If you're still on the payment terms you agreed when you placed your first order, it's worth revisiting them. Once you've built a track record with a manufacturer, order volumes have grown, and you're a reliable, repeat customer, you're in a stronger negotiating position than you were at the start.
This is probably the single biggest improvement you can make to your available cash levels. Be specific about what terms you'd like to move to, and don't be afraid to over-ask: this is a negotiation. You might want to reduce the % of deposit you pay upfront, delay balance payments until 30 or 60 days from when the inventory is shipped by the manufacturer, or even delay it until after it lands in the UK (if ordering from abroad). This reduces the crucial timing gap between paying for your stock and turning it into sales.
Your manufacturer is unlikely to offer you better terms unprompted - you have to ask for them. If cash flow planning like this is something you'd want a second pair of eyes on, this is exactly what we help with in our Cash Flow Forecasting service page. The worst outcome is the manufacturer says no and you're exactly where you started.
2. Are you overdoing your packaging?
Packaging is one of those costs that creeps up gradually and rarely gets revisited once it's set. It's worth asking honestly whether the packaging spend is actually converting into sales/repeat purchases, or is just a cost you've become used to.
We worked with a brand selling gift sets that assumed premium packaging was required for the category, until they looked at what their closest competitors were actually shipping their gift sets in: plain, basic bags, nothing elaborate. The premium packaging was costing several pounds per order more than it needed to, with no evidence customers valued it or noticed the difference. That's a meaningful margin improvement on every single order, for a change that took an afternoon to identify.
3. Consider shipping from China by rail
If you're used to choosing between sea and air freight, rail is worth putting into the mix. It typically takes 14 to 25 days from China to Europe, well under half the time of sea freight (30 to 45+ days), at a fraction of the cost of air freight, which usually runs 4 to 7 days.
It won't suit every product, and routing changes from time to time (some China-Europe rail corridors now run via Central Asia rather than Russia, so it's worth checking current options with your freight forwarder), but for stock where sea is too slow and air is too expensive, it's a genuinely underused middle option. Subject to dynamic pricing, it's particularly useful around Black Friday and other peak periods, when a few extra weeks of lead time makes a real difference to how much cash is sitting in transit rather than in your bank account.
4. When did you last review your pricing?
It's easy to set a price once at launch and never touch it again, even as input costs, shipping, and ad spend all move. If your bestseller has strong repeat demand and low price sensitivity, a small increase (even 5 to 10%) often has minimal impact on conversion but drops straight through to margin and cash.
This is worth testing on your bestseller specifically, since it's the product where you have the most sales data to judge the impact, and the one where a small percentage change moves the most cash.
5. Audit your subscriptions and utilities
Two of the easiest wins sit in plain sight on your monthly outgoings: software subscriptions nobody's using, and utility or insurance contracts nobody's checked in years.
On subscriptions, it's worth going through your card statement or your Xero/QBO chart of accounts once a quarter and asking, for each one, whether anybody on the team is actually opening it. Tools get added when a project starts and rarely get cancelled when it ends.
On utilities and insurance, there are specialist brokers who'll benchmark your current rate against the market, usually for a cut of whatever saving they find rather than an upfront fee, so there's little downside to asking one to check.
6. Do you have R&D you can claim?
A lot of founders assume R&D tax relief is for software companies or science labs, not ecom brands. If you've developed your own product from scratch, whether that's a proprietary formulation, a patent-pending design, or solving a genuine technical problem in how the product works, some of that spend may qualify. HMRC sets out the qualifying criteria qualifying criteria.
It's worth a conversation with your accountant or an R&D specialist to check, even if you think it's unlikely to apply. Where it does apply, it's effectively cash you're owed by HMRC rather than cash you need to find.
7. VAT payment plan
If a VAT bill lands at an awkward point in your cash cycle (for example right after a big stock order), HMRC will in many cases agree to a Time to Pay arrangement arrangement, spreading the payment over a few months with interest costs, rather than requiring it in one lump sum.
This isn't something to rely on every quarter as a matter of course, but as a one-off tool to smooth a genuine timing mismatch, it can be the difference between a manageable month and a genuinely stressful one. It's a call to HMRC, not a loan application, and it's often quicker to arrange than founders expect.
Where to start
None of these seven are mutually exclusive, and none of them require you to take on new debt or sell a single extra unit. The common thread is that they all come from having the mental headspace to take a step away from the daily demands of the business, to allow you to take a zoomed out look: at your supplier terms, your packaging spend, your shipping routes, your pricing, your subscriptions and utilities, your qualifying costs, and your tax timing. It's rare that everything is already optimised.
If you want a second pair of eyes on where cash is trapped in your business specifically, that's exactly the kind of conversation we have with clients. Get in touch and let's find 30 minutes to go through your numbers.
