Diagnosis before solutions.
Independent ecommerce and commercial advisory for UK retail and consumer boards.
In two to four weeks you know the one constraint holding the business back, the evidence behind it, what to do first, and what not to spend money on.
Retail and consumer businesses from £20m to £1bn, founder-led, PE-backed and listed.
Why you are here
Something is not working, and the room cannot agree what.
The numbers are not moving the way the investment says they should. The agency wants a replatform, the technology team wants better data, and the board wants an AI answer by the end of the quarter.
Everyone in the room has a solution, no two of them are solving the same problem, and every voice offering to help also happens to sell the fix it is recommending.
You do not need the problem defined before we talk. Working out what it is happens to be the job.
Talk to Steve about the problemWhy you are here
Where Barking Cat can help
Should we replatform?
Replatform assessmentAre we ready to sell internationally?
International ReadinessWill AI pay back here, or should we wait?
The AI DiagnosticCan the business deliver the growth plan?
The Cat’s WhiskersDoes the ecommerce number in this deal stand up?
For investorsIs our website costing us sales?
The ReviewWhy is traffic up and profit flat?
The ReviewThe board cannot agree. Where do we start?
The Board BriefingSelf-assessment
Check it yourself, or have it checked
Three tools, built from running these businesses. Nothing you enter leaves your browser.
Cat’s Whiskers self-assessment
Thirty-six readiness checks across seven foundations.
StartAI self-assessment
Twenty-one checks across the five foundations, and the three AI Inventory questions that come before any of them.
StartPre-Peak Checklist
Find your constraint before the traffic arrives.
StartTwo ways in
One recognition point, two diagnostic questions.
Each diagnostic stands on its own method. What follows either of them is optional.
Something about commercial performance or customer experience is not working.
The Review
Eleven commercial lenses walked outside-in, resolving to one binding constraint.
Stands on The Cat’s Whiskers 07 foundations How the Review is undertakenWhether AI will pay back here, or a specific AI decision needs making.
The Barking Cat AI Diagnostic
The operating model scored inside-out, naming where AI pays back and where it is theatre.
Stands on the five foundations 05 scored Where AI spend pays backProof
international growth, heritage apparel
22%9% to 22% of revenue, a £1bn consumer electronics business
82%growth three years running, furniture retail
120%year-on-year growth, online fashion
Results delivered by Steve Webster as an operator, 1999 to 2026.
The £20m to £100m range is one Steve has traded through himself: an ecommerce channel built from negligible to £30m in three years, another run from £60m to £240m.
Track recordIndependence
How we are paid
Barking Cat Advisory is paid a fixed fee by its clients, and nothing else.
How Barking Cat Advisory is paid- No referral fees from platforms, agencies or vendors.
- No commissions and no success fees.
- No implementation work.
- We do not sell, resell or implement any ecommerce platform: not Shopify, Adobe Commerce (Magento), Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce, commercetools or any other.
Thinking
Published judgement, dated and specific
The practice writes down what it believes, and when, and lets the record keep score.
October 2026 · Trading kit
How to Trade the Golden Quarter
The companion to the Q4 readiness playbook, for the event days themselves: a launch checklist, the morning read, the daily action grid, the same-day retrospective and the lost-sales review. Templates, rules and owners. Free PDF, no form.
October 2026 · Second edition
The Retail AI Vendor Map, October 2026
The three layers re-verified to 1 October. Salesforce closed on Fin, the model frontier began shipping to restricted groups first, and in September US checkout moved back inside the assistant by platform default. What changed since July is listed at the foot of the page.
October 2026 · Position
The chatbot paradox
Conversational AI earns its keep where the customer cannot choose alone, and very little where they can. IMRG’s 0.39%, a peer-reviewed study of 973 websites, and a first-hand test of an AI stylist with nothing to style.
Contact
You do not need to know what is wrong. That is what the conversation is for.
Thirty minutes. No pitch, no prescribed solution. If there is a problem worth solving, Steve will help you find it. If Barking Cat is not the right answer, you will hear that first.
