Shopify recently launched ‘Exchange’, a marketplace that allows owners of eCommerce businesses to buy and sell their stores. One of the key components of buying a business is evaluating if the opportunity exists to turn it around so that you could recover your investment and make a profit on your purchase. Perhaps you already own a string of businesses in the industry that the seller is operating in – this gives you the leverage to make use of your existing customer base to drive traffic and revenue.

In a majority of the other cases though, the true business opportunity lies with identifying ineffective marketing strategies deployed by the former owner that you could fix to trigger growth.…