NetNet vs Northbeam

Northbeam and NetNet get compared because both appear in searches about ecommerce profitability. They are built for different questions and, more importantly, for different sizes of advertiser.

The question each answers

Northbeam is a marketing intelligence platform organised around attribution. Multi-touch credit allocation, channel performance, and the machinery required to decide where the next increment of ad budget should go. Its documentation is largely about how credit is assigned across touchpoints, which tells you where the product’s depth sits.

NetNet is a Shopify profit analytics app. It attaches costs to orders — landed goods, the carrier invoice, gateway fees including tax on the fee, refunds attributed back to the originating sale — and reports four layers from gross profit down to net.

Neither is a lighter version of the other. They consume different data and answer questions that do not overlap much.

Why the pricing structure is informative

Northbeam does not publish per-tier prices. Its site describes bands by ad spend: brands spending under roughly $1.5 million a year, growth teams up to $500,000 a month, and larger teams above that.

That is a more useful signal than a number would be. Attribution earns its cost through media efficiency — if better allocation improves results by a few percent, the platform pays for itself many times over at large spend and cannot at small spend. Pricing against ad spend is the honest expression of that.

The practical read: if your monthly ad spend is measured in tens of thousands rather than hundreds, attribution tooling of this class is ahead of where the business is, regardless of how good it is.

The number that connects them

There is one genuine point of contact, and it is the strongest argument for caring about margin even if attribution is your priority.

Attribution tells you a channel returned 3.4x. Whether that is good depends entirely on contribution margin, because break-even ROAS is one divided by your contribution margin rate. At 45% margin you break even at 2.2x. At 28% you need 3.6x, and 3.4x is losing money.

An attribution platform cannot know your contribution margin — that requires carrier invoices, payout statements and landed costs. So a brand with sophisticated attribution and no margin figure has a precise answer to a question it cannot score.

That is the case for running both at scale, and the case for starting with margin at smaller scale: a break-even is useful with rough attribution, while perfect attribution is not very useful without a break-even.

What we are not claiming

NetNet does not do attribution. No pixel, no multi-touch model, no incrementality testing, no credit allocation. A brand whose binding problem is where to move budget will not be served by us, and we would rather say that here than after a trial.

What NetNet does is the cost side: what each order left behind, which products and regions are quietly unprofitable, and what the ceiling on customer acquisition cost actually is. If the margin question is unanswered, that is usually the cheaper problem to fix first.

The scale question, put plainly

If you are weighing these two against each other, the deciding factor is almost always monthly ad spend rather than any feature.

Attribution improves the allocation of a budget. Its return is therefore a percentage of that budget, which means the same platform can be obviously worth it and obviously not, depending only on how much you are spending. At $300,000 a month, a two percent allocation improvement is $6,000 — several times any subscription. At $15,000 a month it is $300, and no attribution product recovers its cost from that.

Margin work behaves differently. Finding that a weight band ships at a loss, or that a gateway fee tax has never been counted, returns the same money regardless of how much you advertise. It is a fixed-size win rather than a percentage of spend, which is why it tends to be the better first investment for a smaller store and a supporting one for a larger one.

The practical sequence for most brands: establish the margin and the break-even first, because it is cheaper and it makes every attribution decision interpretable. Add attribution when the budget being allocated is large enough that a few percent of it matters.