I'm James Nichols.

For eight years I built US Park Pass into an $8M/yr Shopify business — half a million orders, a 450,000-person email program driving 25% of revenue, subscriptions, and a fulfillment operation shipping 80,000+ orders a year at peak. It sold the America the Beautiful pass, the annual pass to the U.S. national parks.

I didn't run it from a deck. I built the systems that ran it: a margin-based bidding pipeline that fed real per-order margin into Google Smart Bidding daily, AI-run support operations, and treasury tooling wired to live bank data. I built the pipeline because revenue reporting kept saying one thing and the margin math kept saying another. That gap is documented, every base and caveat, in the evidence section.

In 2026 a federal rule change broke the reseller model the business ran on, and we wound it down. The business ended. The capability didn't.

Here is what actually sets me apart: I'm not an engineer, and I ship production systems anyway — fast, with AI doing the work of a whole team while I keep the judgment and check every number myself. This site went from nothing to live in about a day. I keep a few of the things I've built somewhere you can open them up and poke around.

Get nerdy with me →

Now I work with $1–10M e-commerce brands, two fractional engagements at a time, never more. I don't hand you a deck and leave — I build the systems and run them.

Email james@jamesdnichols.com — it lands in my inbox, not a shared queue, and I read every message.

Prefer to talk? Book a 30-minute call.

The fastest path is the three-minute self-assessment — I read every submission the day it arrives.

Or leave your email on the contact form — I'll follow up personally, usually same day.