Usage-based and hybrid pricing models are changing how B2B companies generate revenue — and creating new headaches for the finance teams behind them.

Tabs co-founder Rebecca Schwartz and PwC Partner Amit Dhir sat down to unpack exactly what that means in practice: how pricing model decisions ripple into revenue recognition, forecasting, and financial ops — and what it takes to scale without piling on manual work.

Watch the on-demand recording to get practical frameworks, real-world examples, and a clear path to operationalizing usage-based revenue — including a forward-looking take on how AI will reshape financial workflows. If your team is navigating pricing complexity heading into the back half of the year, this is worth an hour.

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You've seen the number before: 90% of e-commerce businesses fail. It gets thrown around so often it's become background noise — the kind of stat you nod at and scroll past.

But here's the part that should actually stop you: most of them don't fail slowly. A UK study that surveyed 1,253 owners of failed online stores found that 90% collapsed within the first 120 days of launch. Not years. Months.

So what actually kills a store that fast? It's rarely the product. It's rarely even the money — at least not directly. When you break down the survey data, the top two reasons founders gave for their failure were both marketing problems:

That's not a tie. That's two out of every three failed founders pointing at the same root cause: nobody could find them, and once found, nobody was convinced to buy.

Let's break down exactly how that happens.

This is the most common — and most fixable — failure mode. A founder builds a beautiful storefront, lists great products, and then just... waits. No SEO. No ads. No content. No email list.

The math is brutal: a store with zero visibility gets zero traffic, and zero traffic guarantees zero sales, regardless of how good the product is. Building the store is maybe 20% of the job. The other 80% is making sure people can find it — and that 80% is exactly where most first-time founders under-invest.

A huge share of new stores spend nearly their entire launch budget on the product, the photography, and the platform — and leave little or nothing for actually driving traffic to the site. It feels responsible ("I'm investing in quality!") but it's often just delaying the real problem. A perfect product page with no visitors converts at exactly the same rate as no product page at all.

Several of the top-cited failure reasons trace back to the same gap: founders never nailed down who they were selling to. Without a defined audience, ad targeting is a shot in the dark, messaging tries to speak to everyone (and ends up speaking to no one), and customer acquisition cost climbs until it eats the margin entirely.

Search is still where most shopping journeys start, and stores that ignore SEO are invisible at the exact moment someone is actively looking to buy. This isn't a "nice to have" long-term play — the businesses in the failure study were dead within four months, well before most SEO strategies even start to compound.

Founders who leaned on exactly one acquisition channel — one ad platform, one influencer partnership, one marketplace — had nothing to fall back on the moment that channel got more expensive, changed its algorithm, or dried up. Resilient stores split acquisition across a few channels from day one, even at small scale.

Roughly a quarter of failed founders said they were simply outcompeted, and nearly a fifth pointed to giants like Amazon dominating their category. This one isn't purely a marketing failure, but it's a marketing strategy failure: trying to fight a retail giant head-on in a broad category, instead of carving out a defensible niche where a smaller, sharper brand can actually win attention.

Every one of these reasons collapses into one sentence: stores don't fail because the product was bad — they fail because nobody built a real plan to get in front of buyers.

The good news buried in this data: almost every top cause is a marketing and go-to-market problem, not a product problem. That means it's fixable before you launch, not something you discover the hard way at day 90.

If you're planning a launch — or trying to figure out why an existing store isn't gaining traction — the fix starts with the same three questions the failed founders skipped:

Answer those honestly before launch day, and you've already sidestepped the reason 9 out of 10 stores don't make it to month five.

Sources: US survey of 1,253 failed e-commerce founders (Marketing Signals / reported via Forbes, Huffington Post, InternetRetailing); additional industry data from Failory, Wix, and Kombee.