- Why Ardmore grew and earned less
- Your brief
- The dataset
Find the returns leak in an online retailer’s margin
Ardmore & Co grew 22% last year and made less money. Eighteen months of orders, returns and courier events are waiting for you in SQL. Work out where the margin went, decide what the business should stop doing, and put it on one page a commercial director will act on.
PCREATED BYPrepmeetsProject studio, Prepmeets
THE CHALLENGE → YOUR OUTCOME
Real context. Work that matters.
Ardmore grew revenue 22% and profit fell. You are given the order, return, product and courier data and asked to find out why before the next buying round. The work is mostly judgement rather than technique: deciding what a return costs, which dirty rows to exclude and which to keep, and then saying plainly which categories should change — with the number next to each.
What’s at stake
Your responsibility: Work as the commercial analyst—investigate the requirements, implement your approach and verify the result.Ardmore sells rugs, lighting, cushions and small furniture through its own site and two marketplaces. Last year revenue grew 22% on the back of a paid-social push and a widened range, and everyone expected a good year. The management accounts came in with profit down 9%, and nobody in the building can say why with any precision.
Success means: A defensible net-margin figure per category, the real cost of a return by reason and weight band, the cohort finding stated plainly, and three recommendations the director can take into the buying meeting with the money attached to each. Explain the decisions and checks behind your implementation.
WHAT YOU’LL BUILD
01SQL
02DuckDB
03Power BI
Ardmore & Co returns and margin dataset
INCLUDED WITH YOUR PROJECT
A workspace, not just a document.
Your brief, a Jira-style task board and an interview studio—all in one place.
A look inside your workspace
Start with the full project brief
Build step by step Track your progress Own your interview story
Know where you’re heading.
- 01Why Ardmore grew and earned less
- 02Your brief
- 03The dataset
- 04How the analysis is layered
- 05Five steps
- 06Reconciliation and sensitivity
- 07What you hand over
- 08Submission
Practise explaining your decisions
Which decision mattered most in your solution, and how did you verify it?
Use your own implementation to connect Situation, Task, Action and Result into one interview story.
Before you begin · tools & running costs
Prerequisites: Your own accounts and access to DuckDB with SQL, Power BI, Tableau Public or Excel, A reason-code mapping table.
Additional costs: Cloud and tool usage in your own accounts may incur charges. Set a budget and clean up after testing.
Work in your own accounts and repositories. Never share credentials or confidential data.
What’s included
Project brief, target-design guidance, assigned tasks, resource guidance and interview prompts. Detailed requirements become part of your purchased workspace.
P
MEET YOUR PROJECT EXPERT
Prepmeets
Project studio, PrepmeetsWe are the team that builds Prepmeets. Between us we have run cloud platforms, delivery pipelines, analytics teams and AI governance programmes in banks, hospitals, retailers and government departments, and these projects are the work we used to hand to new joiners in their first fortnight. Every one of them is a real scenario with the client’s name changed, scoped to a week of evenings, and reviewed by the person who originally did the job.
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