eCommerce Podcast

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Aug 2026

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If you’re looking for great tips and insights into how to run your online store, look no further than the Ecommerce Podcast: a show dedicated to helping you deliver eCommerce WOW. New episodes are released every Thursday, and each episode features interviews with some of the biggest names in the eCommerce world. Whether you’re just starting out in eCommerce or you’re a seasoned veteran, you’re sure to learn something new from each episode. So what are you waiting for? Subscribe to the Ecommerce Podcast today!

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August 21, 202646 min

Why Pay an Agency 15k When Your Customers Will Tell You for Free

A brand Cem Atik helped scale from $15m to $50m paid an outside firm $15,000 to be told what it was doing wrong. It already had 100,000 customers who would have said the same thing for nothing. Cem co-founded Harucon Ventures in Düsseldorf, in western Germany, and spends his days pulling apart the numbers behind ecommerce brands in the UK and the DACH region (Germany, Switzerland and Austria). He has been in the space for 13 years. He scaled his own first business to $7m, then burned more than $250,000 on a second one he started alongside it and went bankrupt in five or six months. That failure shapes most of what he says here. The two things holding brands back, he argues, are a loose grip on unit economics and the ego that arrives somewhere between $2m and $5m in revenue. He makes the case that ecommerce only really starts past $10m, that retention rather than paid marketing is where the profit is made, and that a rising customer acquisition cost is only a problem if the repurchase rate is low. He also walks through what happens inside a growth audit, including a packaging change that took 25% out of one client's costs before any extra ad spend. In this episode 02:57 - Who Cem is and what Harucon Ventures does 08:33 - The two mistakes he sees in almost every brand 11:11 - Why pay 15k when you already have 100,000 customers 13:45 - The $250,000 second business that went bankrupt in five months 16:54 - Why a rising CAC is not automatically bad 20:45 - What actually happens inside a growth audit 24:18 - Cut the feelings and call your customers 34:32 - How Cem uses AI to read data he has no time to read 43:02 - The five numbers every ecommerce founder should know The Two Mistakes He Sees in Almost Every Brand (08:33) Asked for the single biggest mistake ecommerce businesses make, Cem named two. The first is having no control over unit economics. His opening question on a first call is what the brand's customer acquisition cost to lifetime value ratio is, and he asks it less for the number than to find out whether the founder knows it at all. The second is ego, and it tends to show up between $2m and $5m in annual revenue. "The first call that I have with people is usually like roasting them for 30 minutes." - Cem Atik He is not dismissive of that milestone. Getting a business to $2m or $5m is difficult and most people never do it. His argument is that the game changes afterwards. "Ecommerce is actually, if you're just asking me, starting after you're passing the $10 million, because then you just really start to feel pressure, competition, and you also just need to play the game differently, or otherwise you die within like a 3-month period." - Cem Atik He has paid for the lesson himself. His first business reached $7m in revenue, at which point he assumed everything he touched would turn to gold. He started a second business alongside it, spent over $250,000 and went bankrupt inside five or six months. Matt offered the same story back from his own history, copying the code behind Jersey Beauty Company to launch Jersey Gift Company, which died in about three weeks. "People only learn with pain. You just need to feel this pain at least once or twice until you understand." - Cem Atik Your Customers Already Know What Is Wrong (11:11) A brand Harucon had helped take from $15m to $50m told Cem it had hired an outside firm for $15,000 to identify what it was doing wrong. Harucon has invested in that business, so Cem asked the founder why. "Marcel, you have 100,000 customers to ask for what you are doing wrong. Why are you just hiring a company?" - Cem Atik The founder's answer was that it felt like the next step. "Who say you that this is the next step? You're just only increasing your OpEx cost for no reason." - Cem Atik The objection Cem expected was credentials, so he dealt with it directly. "These guys have like huge reference. And your customers has no reference. They buy, they bought your product. So what kind of reference you need more, right?" - Cem Atik The catch is that free feedback still has to be accepted. Cem's view is that a sparring partner is only useful to a founder who can take criticism, provided the criticism comes with a reason and a fix rather than just a verdict. Matt tied that back to Jim Collins in Good to Great , and the idea that a great leader confronts the brutal facts while holding on to a belief that the future can be different. Retention Is Where the Profit Sits (16:54) A client complains that their customer acquisition cost is rising. Cem's first question is the repurchase rate. At 40%, a rising CAC is not a problem. At 10% or 15%, it is. "A raising cost number doesn't mean that something is going bad or good. It more shows you where your business is moving on." - Cem Atik Category matters here. Beauty products tend to bring in new customers, supplements should bring the same customers back, and a supplements brand without a repurchase rate of 30% to 40% is leaving money on the table. His wider point is that paid marketing has a ceiling. "You cannot stay always profitable with your marketing if you just reached 100, 150, 200 million. That is not working. Marketing is not made for that." - Cem Atik Retention, conversion rate on the shop and signup forms are the levers that turn unprofitable traffic into profit. "Retention is the only channel that is generating your pure profitability." - Cem Atik Scaling Usually Starts Before the Ad Spend (20:45) Harucon runs two due diligence workstreams before it touches anything, marketing with Cem's team and finance with his partner Tobias Münnich and his team. The scan covers rates, supply chain and process, and the fixes it surfaces are rarely about buying more traffic. One food and beverage client was producing in Poland and Bulgaria, shipping the product to Germany, unpacking it, repacking it, then selling it. Finishing the packaging at the point of production took roughly 25% off the packaging cost. A separate change to fulfilment on the same brand saved another 12%. The findings get delivered in what Cem calls the second roast meeting, where the brand hears exactly what is wrong, why it is wrong and how it gets fixed. He is firm that the last part is what makes the first two worth anything. Naming the problem is cheap. Handing over the method is the bit brands can act on, and it leaves them free to run the fix themselves or bring Harucon in to do it. Cut the Feelings and Follow the Data (24:18) "Your ecommerce brand is your baby. You just grow it up from the beginning and there is a lot of emotion into it. Cut it. It's hard to say, but cut it." - Cem Atik A 15% to 20% return rate does not need a dashboard or a consultant. It needs phone calls to the customers who sent the product back. The same instinct applies inside the data. One of Harucon's partner brands asked why repurchase rate fell away after the third order. The numbers showed no gifts, no welcome series and no contact of any kind after the first purchase. "It takes us 5 minutes to fix something that you just thinking about like 2, 3 weeks." - Cem Atik For founders with nobody to ask, his suggestion is LinkedIn. Message ten people who work in the area. If eight of them say the same thing, fix that. He answers his own messages, prompted by his team when one has been sitting there a day or two. The last piece is pace. One of the larger private equity operators Cem knows describes himself as not especially smart, but says he understands how pace and execution work together. He runs five things at once, cuts whatever is not working inside a month and rotates. He burns money doing it, roughly 5% or 6% of it, and that buys him the other 90%. "If you are not able to sacrifice 5, 6 or even 10% to generate another 90% which are insanely profitable, you are leaving money on the table and you are just wasting your time." - Cem Atik The Five Numbers He Names (43:02) Asked to close with the metrics every ecommerce founder should be able to state, Cem gave five. Customer acquisition cost Average order value New customer share, meaning the percentage of customers coming in who are new Lifetime value Repurchase rate His closing advice was borrowed, heard on another podcast and repeated because he thinks it is true. Work so hard and so much that it makes it unreasonable not to succeed, and do not let pace and execution be the last thing you care about. Cem's Question for Matt Every guest leaves Matt with a question, and he answers it on social rather than on the show. "If you compare your biggest success with your biggest failure, which one teaches you more? Failure, for sure, right? But are you sure about that?" - Cem Atik Matt's answer goes up on LinkedIn and Instagram. Today's Guest Cem Atik (pronounced "Jem") is Co-Founder of Harucon Ventures GmbH, based in Düsseldorf, Germany. Harucon is a growth partner for ecommerce brands in the UK and the DACH region, which covers Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Cem runs it with his partner Tobias Münnich, who leads the finance side. The firm works on a performance-based model, caps itself at 15 brands at a time and takes equity positions...

August 12, 202652 min

What I've learned in 300 episodes of the eCommerce Podcast

Three hundred episodes in, and the most useful thing Matt has learned isn't a tactic. It's that the question we all use to filter ideas doesn't filter anything at all. In May, on episode 289, Matt committed on air to a 90-day Instagram experiment, personal brand against a paid-ads benchmark, numbers published either way. This is the honest report. The benchmark never got run, the reels never hit cadence, and the two-to-three hours a week he'd allowed for it were never once spent. So it wasn't time, and he argues it wasn't discipline either. What it was is a cost he never budgeted for, and a coaching question he's asked of a thousand other founders and failed to ask himself. This is also the last episode ever recorded in the home studio, the Edmundsons move house in a week, after 22 years. In this episode 01:58 - The 90-day Instagram experiment, and what actually happened 06:17 - Origination cost, the expensive part was never the filming 09:27 - Entrepreneurial optimism, and the two coaching questions 12:33 - Why a notebook full of good ideas creates overwhelm 17:21 - Why 8 out of 10, and why "consistent" is the word that matters 22:51 - Does it fail because of you, or because of the task? 25:51 - The conversation that lifted mobile conversion over 400% 31:58 - When the guest is right and you don't want them to be 36:01 - What AI actually changed 39:16 - How this podcast started, and what 300 episodes have been worth 46:12 - Should you start a podcast? The Promise That Didn't Get Kept (01:58) The setup on episode 289 was a proper argument. Davie Fogarty, the Oodie founder doing around $200m a year, reckons founders under $10m shouldn't bother with personal brand, the opportunity cost is enormous and that time is better spent on ads creative. Alex Hormozi and Daniel Priestley say the opposite. Show up on camera or AI eats your business. Matt said he'd settle it. Ninety days, head to head, numbers published. "The ads benchmark never actually got run. Not that it underperformed, it never actually happened. So I can't give you the comparison that I promised you, which I can only apologise for." Origination Cost (06:17) The filming was never the problem. Matt has three studios and, in his words, more iPhones than he knows what to do with. The expensive part was deciding what to say and then getting in front of a camera cold, from a blank page, every single time. The one reel that did work, building an AI assistant like KITT from Knight Rider rather than Jarvis, hit eight or nine thousand views, the best on his channel. And he didn't script it. Hook written word for word, landing written word for word, prompts in the middle, everything else ad-libbed. The Two Questions (09:27) "Will this move the needle between where I am and where I want to be? And can I be a consistent 8 out of 10 at doing this?" Two questions Matt has put to a hundred, maybe a thousand founders over the years. He broke the second one in public, on his own podcast, and the thing that got him there he calls entrepreneurial optimism . The blind confidence that we can just do the thing. Your Notebook Isn't Full of Bad Ideas (12:33) Matt takes pages of notes on every episode, conference, book and coaching call. It's a genuine gold mine. It's also, he suspects, a library of good intentions. "The problem isn't that the ideas themselves are bad. The problem is that every single idea written in my notebook is good." Which is exactly why question one filters nothing. Everything in the notebook passed it, that's the only reason it got written down. Why 8, and Why Consistent (17:21) Ten out of ten is a fantasy, and chasing it means never starting. Eight is where things produce real results and where Matt and the team can still sustain them on a Thursday afternoon when everyone's tired. "Ten out of ten is perfectionism wearing a business suit." The word doing the real work is consistent . Hitting an 8 once is a good afternoon. Week nine is the test. And a brilliant idea managed at 4 out of 10 sporadically is worth close to nothing, arguably less, because of what it eats. "It could slowly improve your guilt score. But that's a KPI not worth measuring." There have been three or four points across seven years where Matt seriously considered stopping the show. He didn't, and that consistency is the entire argument. Drop, Delegate, or Systematise (22:51) When something fails question two, there's one more question. Does it fail because of you, or because of the task? If it's the task, drop it and feel good about it. If it's you, work out which steps genuinely need you and which you've only assumed do. With the reels, the honest answer was thirty seconds of face on camera, the ideas, the beat sheets, the edit and the scheduling never had to be Matt's. Three exits. Only one of them is a no. What It Looks Like When It Works (25:51) Episode 280, March this year. Adam Pearce of Blend Commerce on the first three thumb scrolls of a mobile product page, you get about three before somebody buys or leaves, and most of us waste them. Across his client base he was seeing 30-50% conversion lifts from fixing them. Question one, obviously yes. Question two, no. Matt isn't a CRO specialist and won't become one. Had the plan been "Matt learns mobile UX," it would have died in week three. So they changed who does the doing. The conversation became research, then a Claude Code tool that audits the mobile experience and tells the developers how to fix what it finds, then a three-phase implementation plan. "We have worked through two phases of that three-phase plan. As things currently stand, our mobile conversion is up by over 400%." Capacity, Not Appetite (31:58) A warning, because the filter can be abused. Back on episode 35 in October 2020, Chloe Thomas told Matt to get moving on Black Friday. He agreed out loud and dismissed it internally, they'd done this before, they knew what they were doing, there was time. There was not time. They've been early every year since. Question two is about whether you can sustain something, not whether you fancy it. "I could do this at 8 out of 10 every week, I just don't want to" isn't a fail. That's a Tuesday afternoon. What AI Actually Changed (36:01) The gap between an interesting idea and a decision you can act on is enormous, because answering question two honestly means holding the whole business in your head at once. SAM closes that gap, those conversations run from fifteen minutes to two or three hours of genuine pushback. "It doesn't do the thing for you. It doesn't get me in front of a camera. But it does close the gap between me doing it and not doing it." Where It All Started (39:16) Matt's best friend Tony told him he had a great face for radio. That was, more or less, the strategy. They already had the kit from a 2012 podcast run for a beauty business, which made hundreds of thousands of pounds in ways nobody predicted. Season one of EP was mostly Matt talking, until he got bored of his own voice and switched to interviews. He has never scripted an episode or his questions since. And the most listened-to episode of all 300 is still episode one, the one he made before he'd learned anything. There was never any sponsorship. Measured that way, the show is a failure. Measured on seven years of weekly hours with people who know things he doesn't, it's worth millions, plus the part nobody plans for. Jared Mitchell (episode 74) and his family have stayed at Matt's house, and Matt and his daughter have stayed at theirs. Chris George (episode 130) led to recording live at SubSummit and doors that wouldn't have opened otherwise. Should You Start One? (46:12) Yes, with one condition, which by then you can guess. Only if you can be consistent at it. Ignore the download numbers and have great conversations with interesting people. "This podcast is definitely not the best idea that I had in 2019. Not even close. It's just that this particular one I have been able to do at a consistent 8 out of 10 for seven years, week after week. And that, I think, is the entire reason it has worked." Your Turn Go and find your list, the notebook, the doc, the Slack channel, wherever the graveyard is. Run it through both questions. Where something fails the second, ask whether it's you or the task before you delete it. Most people end up with two or three things. And that tends to feel like an enormous relief. Download The 8/10 Filter , one page, free, at ecommercepodcast.net under the resources link.

August 5, 202649 min

The 90-Minute Massage That Cost Him Half a Million

Jayden Clark sold his first ecommerce business for £500,000 — and the decision came to him during a 90-minute massage. Two and a half years earlier he'd started it in the evenings around a job at Sky. It hit seven figures in year one and got both him and his wife out of corporate work. It also had nothing holding it up underneath. Jayden had built the demand engine and skipped the operations, and the gap between what the business sold and what it could actually support kept widening until he broke. In this episode he's unusually straight about what that cost him — he reckons another 18 months of operations work would have made it a seven-figure exit — and about what the fund that bought him taught him during a six-month earn-out he didn't want. He then walks through how he's building Camper Nation differently, including why a 0.3% conversion rate is deliberate, why he stopped selling his second best-selling brand, and the lead magnet sequence he'd run if he were starting tomorrow. In this episode 04:20 — From ten years at Sky to seven figures in year one 15:19 — Building the demand engine and skipping the operations 17:36 — The massage that ended the business 21:10 — The two non-negotiables in business number two 25:37 — Why a 0.3% conversion rate is the plan 33:33 — Why nobody turns up to the lead magnet workshop 39:10 — Most conversion problems are traffic problems 44:40 — How to build your first lead magnet The Gap That Breaks Founders (15:19) Jayden's strength is demand — ads, SEO, everything up to conversion. So he pushed demand, and kept pushing, while the operational side went unbuilt. "What I am not very good at and what I don't enjoy is what happens after the sale. And so you keep doing this, this, this with the demand, and the gap between what the business is doing and what the business can realistically sustain just gets bigger and bigger and bigger." — Jayden Clark Financial pressure made it worse. With two corporate salaries gone and roughly £10,000 a month needed out of the business, every profit increase became a choice between hiring help and banking the security. He kept banking it and working the extra hours. The 90-Minute Massage (17:36) Two years in, a spa day after his UK wedding ceremony. Ninety minutes, no distractions, and a head full of liabilities and bad hires. "For me at this time that was like hell, because it was 90 minutes in silence with my own thoughts, thinking about all the liabilities that exist." — Jayden Clark He came out and said he needed to sell — not because the offer was right, but because he couldn't face the work required to make the business sustainable. The fund that bought it made him stay six months, because he'd built a business only he could run. That earn-out became the operations education he'd never had. Why 0.3% Conversion Is Deliberate (25:37) Camper Nation converts at 0.3–0.4% against a 1–2% benchmark, with an average order value around £2,000. At that price the scoreboard changes — Jayden runs the business on traffic-to-lead conversion, not traffic-to-purchase. The mechanic is concrete. A customer wants an awning but fears ordering the wrong one. So Camper Nation asks for the registration and vehicle type, returns a guaranteed-compatible list, and covers return shipping if it's still wrong. "If they don't feel confident that awning is right for their vehicle, no matter how many times you bombard them with the product and more traditional remarketing, they are never going to get to the point where they're ready to purchase." — Jayden Clark Most Conversion Problems Are Traffic Problems (39:10) When people bring Jayden a conversion problem, he says at least two times out of three the real issue is the intent of the traffic arriving. Someone searching for a sleep supplement with two specific active ingredients is a different buyer from someone searching for help sleeping better. "You can optimise on-page and conversion rate and lead magnets as much as you want, you are always going to be running uphill if your traffic source is not intended correctly." — Jayden Clark Jayden's Lead Magnet Sequence (44:40) Pick one product — the one you'd sell if you could only sell one thing tomorrow Describe the dream lead in five specifics Reverse-engineer which searches and channels put that person on the page Write down what they don't know and what's blocking them Build the lead magnet around the single biggest blocker, and give away enough that it feels uncomfortable Serve the first leads manually, then automate what works Also mentioned George Bryant on the APPLE framework — the nurture-sequence approach Jayden recommends Today's Guest Today's guest: Jayden Clark Company: Camper Nation Website: campernation.co.uk LinkedIn: Connect with Jayden on LinkedIn Email: jayden@foundersclubhouse.co.uk YouTube: Jayden Clark Ecom Community: 1% Ecom Club (on Skool) Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/the-90-minute-massage-that-cost-him-half-a-million-with-jayden-clark

July 29, 202656 min

He's Done 70 Acquisitions — Day One, He Calls PayPal

Bawar Ahmad has bought around 70 ecommerce businesses in six years, and the first thing he does after the money clears isn't marketing. It's ringing the vendors. Summary Bawar Ahmad co-founded Ecomma, a Dubai-based micro private equity firm that buys, scales and sells Shopify businesses. Around 70 acquisitions and 60 exits later, with a team of 40 and a target of 30 to 36 more acquisitions this year, he has turned what most people treat as a once-in-a-lifetime event into a repeatable system. He walks Matt through the 12 to 15 "value drivers" his team runs on every store they acquire, why valuation comes down to just two things, and the mistake that quietly costs sellers a chunk of their exit. He also explains how Ecomma gets from first questionnaire to cash in the seller's bank in 14 to 20 days when the industry standard is three to four months. Matt, who has bought and sold ecommerce businesses on very different terms, pushes him on the other side of the coin, which is growth by acquisition. If you're turning over a million and want to get to five, should you double from scratch or go and buy someone? 00:00 — Welcome, and two ecommerce dinosaurs meet 03:22 — Seventy acquisitions in six years 06:11 — The first deal, a declining shoe brand bought before Black Friday 10:04 — What happens in a seller's head once they decide to sell 12:28 — Choosing an advisor, and the clean-financials red flag 16:02 — Normalisation, SDE and the tax conundrum 17:51 — Fourteen days from questionnaire to cash in the bank 20:09 — Asset purchase or share transfer on sub-$2m deals 24:06 — Profit, risk, and the value drivers that run on day one 29:11 — Voice marketing as the third retention channel 32:48 — Where to start if you want to buy a business 35:25 — Due diligence is for understanding, not just verifying 38:32 — When the brand is built entirely around the founder 41:09 — Buy for the audience, not the niche 46:52 — Structuring a deal when you buy a competitor 50:31 — What Ecomma buys, and the free exit-prep checklist 53:22 — Saving the best till last, get your data room ready (Chapter markers aligned to the episode video.) The Day-One Phone Calls That Move the Numbers (24:06) Valuation comes down to two things in Bawar's model, profit and risk. Ecomma either grows one or removes the other, and about 20% of the time they add value without touching profit at all — building a team, adding backup suppliers, getting better contracts in place, removing the dependencies a buyer would discount for. The rest is a standardised playbook of 12 to 15 value drivers, and the first one he gives away is negotiating costs down. On day one, the team rings every vendor on the account. The Klaviyo bill, the PayPal transaction fee, the supplier, the 3PL. Then they ask for better pricing. "You'll be surprised how much of the vendors were like, we're waiting for this call for some time." — Bawar Ahmad He reckons that alone moves profit by roughly 20% almost overnight. On the payments line specifically, his framing is blunt. "So on PayPal, we've added 20% of valuation on the first day." — Bawar Ahmad The next two drivers are marketing ones. Creative volume. If a brand is shipping 8 new videos a month on Facebook, Ecomma pushes it to 20 or 30 and expects ROAS to follow. Untapped retention channels. SMS flows and campaigns get switched on, then voice. Stack enough of those small percentages and, in his words, before you know it you've doubled the business in 90 days. His stated average across the portfolio is a 150% uplift in 90 days. Don't Assume the Sale (10:04) Bawar says he sees the same sequence in about 90% of sellers. Life changes, they Google whether they can sell, they land on a valuation form promising a big number, they list, and the interest floods in. Then, 30 or 50 conversations later, the buyers go cold and the seller starts drifting away from the business. That's where the damage happens. New creative doesn't get made. The influencer deal gets shelved. Inventory doesn't get reordered. Performance dips, and buyers can read a declining chart as well as anyone. "You don't want to run the business as you're gonna sell it." — Bawar Ahmad The example he gives is illustrative rather than measured, but the shape of it holds. A business doing $100,000 profit a year at a 3x multiple is a $300,000 exit. Let performance slide during the sale process and that same business might fetch $150,000. Two or three more months of running it properly is, on his maths, worth the difference. Clean Financials Beat a Good Pitch (12:28) Bawar's third seller mistake is the one he came back to at the end of the episode when Matt asked for the best advice he hadn't yet given. Plenty of brands doing millions a year are still run on Google Sheets, with the car lease and the Uber Eats going through the same entity as the stock. "It's just a red flag." — Bawar Ahmad Buyers at this level often aren't ecommerce natives, so messy books make a business hard to underwrite and easy to walk away from. His fix starts at least a full financial year before you go to market. Separate every personal cost out of the business Get a proper P&L, balance sheet and cash flow reporting in place Keep the bookkeeping current and the invoices tidy Have the SOPs, systems and team documented alongside the numbers Matt raised the obvious British objection, which is that a limited company owner legitimately puts as much through the business as possible to reduce their tax bill, and in doing so reduces the profit their valuation is built on. Bawar's answer is normalisation. Costs that are genuinely personal get added back as seller discretionary earnings, or SDE, and the valuation reflects the real economics — but that only works if the books are clean enough to prove it. "You have to start thinking as an asset. This is a business, this is a system, it's not a lifestyle business." — Bawar Ahmad The preparation argument runs into deal speed too. Both of them have a phrase for it. "Time kills deals." — Bawar Ahmad "Deals are like concrete — the longer you leave them, the harder they get." — Matt Edmundson That's what the data room is for. If a buyer asks a question and the answer takes three or four days to dig out, the deal cools. If the answer takes five minutes, it doesn't. Fourteen Days, Not Four Months (17:51) From the moment a seller returns Ecomma's questionnaire to cash hitting their bank is 14 to 20 days on average. An offer goes out within 24 hours of getting access, due diligence takes seven days, contracts add a couple more, then handover. Bawar is clear that this isn't standard. A normal go-to-market process runs three to four months, and Matt's own exits have taken six. The gap exists because most buyers don't understand ecommerce well enough to move quickly, so they compensate with time and paperwork. Knowing the model means knowing which checks actually matter. One structural note for anyone selling. Around 99% of deals below $2m are asset purchases rather than share transfers, so the buyer takes the assets and leaves the entity, its contracts and its history behind. Matt's caveat is that the tax treatment differs between the two, so talk to your accountant before you decide. The Third Retention Channel (29:11) Almost every Shopify store has an abandoned-cart email flow. A smaller number have SMS. Bawar's argument is that voice AI is arriving as the third one, and that 95% of brands haven't turned it on. The mechanic is straightforward. Someone adds to cart and leaves, and roughly ten minutes later an AI agent phones them. It might be one in the afternoon, it might be one in the morning. "These agents, the softwares never sleep." — Bawar Ahmad The agent asks what they were looking for, hears the answer, and offers the discount code. Ecomma sees it add around 5% to revenue. The side benefit is the recordings, because you get to hear a mother buying a toy for a ten-year-old explain in her own words why she was on the site, which is intelligence that paid ads and email don't give you. He expects it to be as ordinary as email within three years. Matt's gentler on-ramp for anyone nervous about letting AI talk to their customers is the voice memo, sent over SMS or WhatsApp, recorded by an actual human on the team. Buying a Business to Grow Your Own (41:09) For an operator doing a million a year who wants to get to five, acquisition is the other route. Bawar's filter for what to buy is not the product category. "I would just go with audience first." — Bawar Ahmad A skincare brand serving 35-year-old women with acne shouldn't buy a phone case company for the extra revenue, and shouldn't buy a mascara brand either, because that's a different customer wearing the same label. It should buy the supplement brand those same women are already asking about, and build around the audience rather than the niche. Matt's live example is a vegan supplement business whose customers keep asking for two things, electrolytes and protein. The electrolytes are developed. Protein quotes from manufacturers came back in the hundreds of thousands of pounds to get started, which makes buying or merging with an existing vegan protein brand the live question. Three things Bawar would tell a first-time...

July 22, 202649 min

Is Amazon Cutting Your Product Titles to Just 75 Characters?

Amazon is shrinking product titles to 75 characters from 200, enforced 27 July 2026, and Carolyn Lowe explains exactly what to fix first. Summary Carolyn Lowe spent years at Dell — including running the consumer side of Dell.com — before leaving corporate life to build ROI Swift, an Austin agency that helps consumer brands grow profitably on Amazon. In this episode she and Matt dig into the single mistake she sees most often, which is founders throwing more money at ads when the real problem sits somewhere else entirely — a weak product page, a poor main image, or a listing the algorithm can't read. She shares the numbers behind her thinking, from the 18–20% of ad spend most brands are quietly wasting to the 25% packaging saving she found for one client, and the clean rule she keeps coming back to, which is that the main image drives traffic while the content drives conversion. There's also a hard deadline every Amazon seller needs to act on, plus why she prefers affiliates over influencers and why Amazon Business is worth a look. 00:00 — Welcome and two ecommerce "dinosaurs" meet 06:13 — Why more ad spend usually burns money 13:12 — Agencies that think like owners 23:48 — Grading a listing A to F and the 75-character title cut 26:20 — Main image drives traffic, content drives conversion 32:00 — Why Amazon is shrinking product titles 34:55 — Launching her own brand with Vine and TikTok affiliates 40:05 — Where AI actually helps on Amazon 45:20 — Saving the best till last, SKU analysis to Amazon Business (Chapter markers aligned to the episode video.) Why Throwing More Money at Ads Usually Backfires (06:13) Carolyn's view is that most brands reach for the ad budget when sales dip, when the fundamentals are what actually need fixing. If a website isn't converting at 2–3% with an average order value under $100, or an Amazon listing isn't converting at 15–20% or higher, more spend simply pours good money after a bad page. "If your website isn't converting at 2 to 3% and your AOV is less than $100, go back and fix your product pages." — Carolyn Lowe She points to the 18–20% of ad spend she routinely sees wasted. On a £30,000-a-month budget, that's roughly $6,000 a month set on fire. One example she gives is a women's fertility product whose automated software kept spending on "dog, cat, horse, pet" keywords, which is why ROI Swift uses AI to analyse the data but keeps a human in the loop to make the call. The Amazon Title Change Every Seller Needs to Action Before 27 July (23:48) The most time-sensitive point in the episode is Amazon's move to shorten product titles. Titles are dropping to 75 characters (including spaces), down from 200 , with enforcement from 27 July 2026 . The change applies to all categories except media, and it's largely driven by mobile, which now accounts for the majority of Amazon traffic. What sellers need to know: Over-length titles get auto-rewritten by Amazon's AI if they aren't fixed Only brand-registered sellers get a 14-day review window to adjust Amazon has added a new Item Highlights field (around 125 searchable characters), so total indexable space stays close to 200 Carolyn's advice is to go back in now, rewrite titles to be compliant and intentional, and get the most important product details in first — before Amazon does it for you. Why Your Main Image Drives Traffic and Your Content Drives Conversion (26:20) This is the cleanest framing in the episode. The main image is what earns the click in a crowded search result, so it's a traffic lever. The content further down the page is what turns that click into a sale, so it's a conversion lever. "Your main image is going to get you more traffic. Your content is going to get you more conversion." — Carolyn Lowe Carolyn shares a worked example. Changing a main image from a pair of shorts on their own to the same shorts worn on a person — so buyers could see whether they were 5, 7 or 9-inch — lifted conversion by around 30%. A follow-up change to the content added roughly 12% more, with no extra ad spend. Her category-by-category tips include putting the product next to its box to signal a legitimate brand over cheap knock-offs, and showing the fruit a flavour is based on so shoppers can imagine the taste. What It Means to Hire an Agency That Thinks Like an Owner (13:12) Carolyn's differentiator is that ROI Swift thinks like owners rather than vendors, looking at the whole business instead of just the ad account. That's how they spotted a packaging change that saved one brand 25%, switching floss picks from a bag to a box and taking $1 off every unit across 200,000 units a month. It shows up in how they charge, too — a retainer to keep five specialists working on each account, plus a share of the brand's growth, so incentives are aligned. Their four core values run through the whole approach. Care about what you do Make it better Always be learning Glass-half-full mindset "We sort of are in the business of making other people millionaires and billionaires." — Carolyn Lowe Before they wrap up, Carolyn's parting tips are to start with a SKU-level benchmark of where a brand is today, and not to sleep on two growth channels — TikTok Shop and affiliates (she backs paying on sale over paying influencers for visibility), and Amazon Business, where 96 of the top 100 Fortune brands hold accounts and over $30 billion is transacted. Today's Guest Carolyn Lowe is the CEO and Co-Founder of ROI Swift, an Austin-based agency that helps consumer brands scale profitably on Amazon. ROI Swift has worked with 150+ brands and generated more than $100M on Amazon. Before founding the agency, Carolyn spent years at Dell, running a large division and the consumer side of Dell.com. She is also the author of Business Growth Do's and Absolute Don'ts and a licensed pilot. Website — roiswift.com LinkedIn — Carolyn Lowe Book — Business Growth Do's and Absolute Don'ts Carolyn has also offered a free one-page listing audit for any listener doing $5,000 or more on a single Amazon product page. About the eCommerce Podcast The eCommerce Podcast helps you deliver ecommerce WOW with real talk about building online stores. Matt Edmundson talks to experts and founders who've built the stores and learned the hard way, so you don't have to. Subscribe at ecommerce-podcast.com for a new episode every Thursday. Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/is-amazon-cutting-your-product-titles-to-just-75-characters-with-carolyn-lowe

July 16, 202642 min

Can Old-School Direct Mail Beat Email Marketing in Ecommerce?

Direct mail to your warm customers pulls four to five times the response of email, and most ecommerce brands aren't using it at all. This week Matt sits down with Daniel Dunn, CEO and co-founder of Paper Planes, to make the case that the letterbox is the reactivation channel hiding in plain sight. Summary Daniel Dunn spent years working on Tesco Clubcard data strategy before co-founding Paper Planes, a direct mail platform built for DTC ecommerce. (For anyone outside the UK, Tesco is the country's biggest supermarket and Clubcard is its loyalty scheme, one of the richest customer datasets in British retail.) His argument is simple. Most brands lean entirely on email and SMS to work their first-party data, yet a big chunk of that database never opens, clicks, or responds. Those people are prime for something tangible in the post. Matt, who cut his teeth in direct marketing in the late '90s, digs into how the channel has changed. Dan explains why mail to warm customers outperforms email, how a single abandoned-cart postcard nudges buyers back, why hyper-personalisation lifts basket spend, and the second-purchase problem that has become the biggest challenge in DTC since COVID. There's also the Clubcard truth that one loyal customer is worth thirteen who just trial your brand once. If you're planning your channel mix around email alone, this conversation will change how you think about where mail fits. Why Mail to Warm Customers Beats Email Dan's core point is about saturation. In the hour it takes to record the show, your inbox collects twenty or thirty emails. The postman, meanwhile, delivers three letters and won't be back for a couple of days. That scarcity is exactly why mail cuts through. "In the hour it takes us to do this podcast, we'll have received 20 or 30 emails, whereas the postman came and delivered three letters, and I won't see that man again for another couple of days." — Daniel Dunn The results follow. When you send physical mail to warm customers, such as postcard follow-ups for abandoned baskets or A4 mailers to win back lapsed buyers, Dan says the response is at least four to five times higher than email. Email should still sit at the front of your strategy because it's a high-ROAS channel, but complementing it with something physical is where the value compounds. Email first, because it's cheap and personalisable and works for certain segments Mail for the people who've gone quiet and stopped engaging with email A multichannel follow-up creates more value from the same customer than any single channel The Abandoned-Cart Postcard That Lands on Day Seven Dan walks through the mechanic. A customer fills a basket, then life gets in the way. The usual email flow fires at two hours, twenty-four hours, and seventy-two hours. If they still haven't come back, that's the moment to trigger a postcard, roughly on day three, so it lands around day seven. The clever part is the tracking. Because Paper Planes tracks off the Shopify or Magento checkout, there's no need for a QR code, a discount code, or a microsite. You know who you triggered and roughly when they'll return, so the moment they hit the checkout you can see it. And if they come back via email first, they're stripped out of the postcard targeting, so you never waste the send. "The beauty of tracking today off Shopify and Magento is you don't have to rely on a QR code, a discount code, or a microsite." — Daniel Dunn This answers the two big objections to mail in one go. Cost, because you're mailing the handful of people who didn't complete checkout rather than your whole list. And relevance, because digital printing lets you hyper-personalise the card around the exact products the customer looked at. On average, Dan says getting the right product combinations in front of people lifts basket spend by 25 to 30 percent. His favourite example is a pet-supplier surprise-and-delight card featuring the customer's actual pet, "Stanley, it's your birthday," using an image already on file. The Real Prize Is the Second Purchase Abandoned-cart recovery is where most brands start, but Dan thinks the bigger opportunity is elsewhere. Since COVID, the hardest problem in DTC has been moving one-time buyers out of what he calls the "nursery programme" and onto a second purchase as quickly as possible. "You'd be amazed how valuable direct mail is at bringing people back for that all-important second purchase." — Daniel Dunn Mail recovers these second-purchase customers at rates you can't match through Meta, TikTok, or email. From there, Dan loves a loyalty play, trading people up into tiers and telling VIP cohorts about a launch first to build buzz. And it doesn't have to cost margin. Reminders and status messages, such as "here's how many points you have" or "thank you for being a valuable customer," can work as well as ten percent off. The rule throughout is test and learn. That connects to the Clubcard truth Dan keeps coming back to. One loyal, committed customer is worth thirteen who trial your brand once and move on. So don't turn your back on your first-party data, and if you follow up on it, use personalisation, because that's where the extra sales come from. You Don't Need Scale to Start The old barriers, a list of 100,000 people and a couple of million in turnover, are gone. Dan's advice now is to plan mail into your channel mix from day one, the same way you'd plan SMS, so you understand how it works alongside email before you need it at scale. Paper Planes is releasing a Shopify app this summer that lets brands set up campaigns on templates with a small amount of free credit each month to dip a toe in the water. Today's Guest Daniel Dunn is the CEO and co-founder of Paper Planes, a direct mail and postal marketing platform built for DTC ecommerce brands. He's Vice Chairman of the DMA Print Council, previously worked on Tesco Clubcard data strategy, and runs a monthly newsletter on direct mail trends. He's based in East London, originally from Birmingham. Website — paperplanes.co.uk LinkedIn — Daniel Dunn (search "Daniel Dunn Paper Planes") Email — daniel.dunn@paperplanes.co.uk About the eCommerce Podcast The eCommerce Podcast with Matt Edmundson is a weekly show for anyone building an online business, whether you're just starting out or running a multi-million-pound brand. Every week Matt sits down with founders and experts to dig into what actually works, from marketing and tech to story, growth, and the day-to-day of running a store. Full show notes and back catalogue — ecommerce-podcast.com Join the free eCommerce Cohort — a free, application-only community with monthly virtual sessions and regional groups. Apply at ecommerce-podcast.com Subscribe to the newsletter — at ecommerce-podcast.com Follow Matt on social — @mattedmundson If you're part of the AI community, ask Sam to put you in touch with Dan and to help you think through direct mail ideas for your business. Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/can-old-school-direct-mail-beat-email-marketing-in-ecommerce-with-daniel-dunn

July 8, 202649 min

How AI Is Quietly Killing Your eCommerce App Stack

There are thousands of software companies chasing the same small pool of brands on Shopify, and AI is quietly dismantling the bloated app stacks those brands built. Neal Goyal has spent eight or nine years inside ecommerce software, leading sales teams at names like Tapcart, and he now advises five or six earlier-stage software companies on how to grow. From that vantage point he's watching the "uninstall rate" surge as founders ask a new question of every app they pay for. Do I even need a tool for this at all? In this conversation Neal walks through how the ecosystem commoditised in three waves, why agentic commerce is about to change the rules again, and why the answer for anxious founders is bracingly old-school. Stop chasing the shiny object, do the Business 101, and invest in the human relationships AI can't fake. Matt shares how his own software subscriptions have roughly halved while the amount his team builds with Claude Code has doubled, including a mobile conversion rate now 400 to 500% higher after a few hours of work. In this episode [13:38] How so many apps ended up chasing so few brands [23:04] The great uninstall and why brands are tearing apps out [26:26] Shiny object syndrome and the case for Business 101 [29:30] What the app stack can't replace [45:02] Neal's single best tip for anyone in the ecosystem How So Many Apps Ended Up Chasing So Few Brands [13:38] To understand why app stacks are collapsing, you have to understand how they got so big. Neal breaks the commoditisation of ecommerce software into three waves. The first was COVID. Brands on Shopify went from two million to four million "in a hot second", and an equally fast race kicked off to build the software companies that served them. The count roughly doubled from 5,000 to 10,000 almost overnight. The second wave was AI as an engineering tool, around early 2023. Suddenly four people in a basement could ship a compelling, high-quality product in 90 days and offer it cheaply. Every category, from loyalty to reviews to mobile apps, got disrupted by a player built almost overnight. The count climbed again, from 10,000 to 15,000 in roughly a year. The third wave is the one we're in now, and Neal thinks we're only at the start of it. Part of it is agentic commerce, the idea that forcing a customer to visit a website, add to cart and fill in checkout details is already starting to feel archaic. "We don't really know what it's gonna be today. All we know is it's gonna be different than it is today." — Neal Goyal The other part is what's already on your desk. The ability for the average person, with no engineering background, to build their own software. The effect of all three waves is the same. There is an alternative for everything, loyalty is thin, and a brand can sign off a tool as fast as it signed on. The Great Uninstall and Why Brands Are Tearing Apps Out [23:04] Most Shopify brands didn't start with a business background. They started at the kitchen table with a dream and a Shopify account, and they figured it out as they went. Neal describes it as building the plane while they flew it, "like putting duct tape on the wings as it's taking off." Every new challenge, from COVID to tariffs to iOS 14, was met by looking left and right and asking the person next to you what they were doing. AI hasn't changed that instinct. It's supercharged it. "We've all become superhuman in our own light." — Neal Goyal The reflex that used to be "which tool solves this?" is now "do I even need a tool for this at all?" And the result is showing up in the numbers. "The uninstall rate of software tools in the last 90 days is huge." — Neal Goyal Brands are quietly asking of each subscription, do I really need this, was my business really suffering without it, what value is it actually giving me. Neal is clear this isn't a bleak picture. It's a shift in mentality happening across the ecosystem, and he expects that mentality to look different again 90 days from now. Shiny Object Syndrome and the Case for Business 101 [26:26] The ecosystem suffers from a chronic condition Neal calls shiny object syndrome, and AI is its newest and brightest object. "You bat your eyes and all of a sudden, next thing you know, you have this incredibly bloated tech stack." — Neal Goyal The temptation right now is to believe that if you're not adopting every new AI tool the moment it lands, you're falling irreversibly behind. Neal doesn't buy it. There will be early adopters who benefit and pull ahead, but the learning curve is going to be gradual, because this is not a fad passing through. "At the end of the day, we are still selling a physical good here. We're still selling a t-shirt. We're still selling a supplement." — Neal Goyal His advice for the anxious founder is the opposite of urgency. You're almost certainly not behind. You only feel that way because of the few loud voices on LinkedIn and Instagram talking about it. The danger isn't that you're too slow to adopt AI. It's that you chase the shiny object instead of doing the unglamorous Business 101 that actually moves the needle. What the App Stack Can't Replace [29:30] If software is commoditising and stacks are shrinking, what's left to compete on? Neal's answer is the part most people assume AI makes obsolete. The human stuff. As tools get more similar, the decision about which one to buy comes down to something basic. "There's a lot of similar software like this being built, but I like those people more. They're really responsive, they're really kind." — Neal Goyal As budgets tighten, a lot of software companies are cutting exactly the customer-facing people who build those relationships. Neal argues that's precisely the moment to do the reverse. He puts his own money where his mouth is. Of the ten largest deals he's closed in recent memory, he went and met all ten in person. Ten out of ten. Email, meanwhile, "is eroding, or completely eroded already, as a trust channel." When thousands of companies flood the same small pool of inboxes, the inbox stops being a place anyone trusts. So the bet he's advising his clients to make is the counterintuitive one. Give before you take. Win attention rather than compete on features. "We're not in the business of competing against other providers in the space for that brand's business. We're in the business of competing against every other software company for attention." — Neal Goyal His single best tip, saved for the end, doubles as the whole philosophy. Forget the textbook and go strike up 20 interviews with operators who live and breathe this work. Walk in their shoes and you'll learn more than any course could teach you. He should know. He has an MBA in marketing and says the 20 conversations taught him more than the degree ever did. Today's Guest Today's guest: Neal Goyal Company: SaaS Class Website: http://saasclass.io LinkedIn: Connect with Neal on LinkedIn Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/how-ai-is-quietly-killing-your-ecommerce-app-stack-with-neal-goyal

July 1, 202649 min

How to Win on Walmart, Not Just Amazon

Most Amazon sellers who try Walmart copy their listings straight across — same title, same bullet points, same ad campaigns — and wonder why it doesn't work. Andrew Deramo has spent seven years on Amazon and now puts 40% of his working time into Walmart. His argument is simple: Walmart is its own search engine, its own customer base, and its own opportunity. Sellers who treat it like a second Amazon are leaving money on the table. In this episode, Andrew walks through the strategy he uses with his own products and his clients at SellTru — from building platform-specific listings to using Walmart's account managers to place products on virtual shelves, running flash deals and tentpole events to build organic rankings, and eventually cutting paid advertising altogether once those rankings hold. Key Topics 06:11 — Why copy-pasting Amazon listings onto Walmart quietly undermines brands moving across 09:59 — Why Walmart is far less competitive than Amazon (and could win long-term) 18:16 — The Walmart account manager (something Amazon simply doesn't offer) and what virtual shelf placement actually means 26:24 — Flash deals, tentpole events, the commission rebate system, and why you can switch off PPC once you rank 33:12 — Importing Shopify reviews onto Walmart listings, and why conversion matters more than the algorithm question 35:54 — The wholesale opportunity — finding Amazon brands absent from Walmart and becoming their Walmart seller Treat Walmart as Its Own Search Engine Andrew's central point is that Walmart and Amazon are distinct search engines — different keyword volumes, different customer intent, different listing requirements. The titles are structured differently. The bullet points are structured differently. The keywords that perform well on one platform do not automatically perform well on the other. The practical implication is that a brand moving onto Walmart needs to build a Walmart-specific listing from scratch, using Amazon data as a starting point to be checked and adjusted against Walmart search data. Andrew is direct about why this matters beyond just keyword matching. "Set it up properly the first time. It's really difficult to change once you're already on there." The Walmart platform is less mature than Amazon's, and making changes to live listings — even something as routine as updating a main image — can take weeks to process. Getting the listing right before launch matters more on Walmart than it does on Amazon. The Walmart Account Manager Advantage A significant difference is the Walmart account manager — a Walmart employee assigned to a seller's account, with no equivalent on the Amazon side. What an account manager can do is called virtual shelf placement. A seller shares the keywords their product ranks for on Amazon, and the account manager manually places that product on the relevant virtual shelves within Walmart's platform. This effectively bypasses the organic ranking process for those shelf positions, giving a new or growing product visibility it would otherwise take months to earn. In 2026 the route to getting an account manager has changed. Previously sellers could request one; now Walmart reaches out based on GMV thresholds. Andrew notes that if a brand is doing well on Amazon, a Walmart account manager has probably already sent them an email trying to bring them across. "Take that gift and run with it because they can be very beneficial." Account managers also facilitate flash deals — a minimum 10% discount in exchange for placement on a high-traffic promotional shelf — and give access to tentpole events around back-to-school, Black Friday, and Christmas. During those events, Walmart offers commission rebates to sellers running Walmart-exclusive discounts: if a seller discounts a product 15% on Walmart, Walmart may cut its commission rate from around 15% down to 6 or 7%. Andrew is attending the Walmart convention in San Diego this year specifically to push for a clearer path to account manager access for sellers who qualify but haven't been contacted. Running Ads on Walmart — and Stopping Walmart's advertising platform is less developed than Amazon's. Andrew recommends no more than three to five keywords per campaign, running those tightly focused campaigns for a couple of months after launch to build organic rankings. The key difference from Amazon is what happens next. On Amazon, organic ranking positions tend to decay quickly without ongoing ad spend to support them. On Walmart, Andrew finds those positions hold for one to two months after cutting PPC. "Once I see that my organic ranking is page 1 in a good spot for specific key terms, I'll cut that off — because it'll maintain its spot for a while." The strategy that follows is to sustain sales velocity through flash deals and tentpole events rather than continuous advertising. CPC is lower on Walmart than on Amazon, but conversion rates are also lower — the platform has less established consumer trust. Andrew sees returns of 4x to 5x ROAS on well-reviewed products once they have some history on the platform. Reviews and the Shopify Import Reviews affect conversion on Walmart just as they do on Amazon. What Walmart allows that Amazon doesn't is a direct import of existing Shopify reviews onto a Walmart listing — sellers upload an Excel file, Walmart runs a review check, and the reviews appear on the product page. Andrew is honest about the limits of his knowledge here: he's confident the imported reviews lift conversion, but less sure how much weight the Walmart algorithm gives them as a ranking signal. The conversion benefit is the clearer win. "I'll get a review later and they'll be like, 'Oh, I read the reviews and this product was great.' But how much does it actually help the algorithm when you upload those? I'm not sure." The ability to port verified reviews from an existing Shopify store removes one of the biggest barriers for new products on any marketplace. The Wholesale Opportunity Andrew's closing advice is aimed at sellers who don't yet have their own product but want to build on Walmart. His suggestion is wholesale. Find small brands doing well on Amazon that have no Walmart presence — either because they lack the team, haven't prioritised it, or simply haven't got around to it. Call them. Ask for a wholesale price. Then take their product through the same Walmart launch process described above. "Go to Amazon, there's tons of small businesses out there that have great products, that do great sales on the Amazon platform, but just don't exist on Walmart. There's an opportunity right there." The logic holds because a product with a proven Amazon track record is exactly the kind of listing that Walmart keyword data and an account manager relationship can accelerate. It is a lower-risk entry point than launching an unknown brand, and there are a large number of Amazon-only brands who have simply never had the bandwidth to expand. About the Guest Andrew Deramo is the founder of SellTru, where he helps ecommerce brands grow on Amazon and Walmart Marketplace. He has spent seven years on both platforms, started as ecommerce director for a large beach-supply business, and now runs his own product accounts alongside his agency work. Website: selltru.com LinkedIn: Andrew Deramo About the eCommerce Podcast The eCommerce Podcast is hosted by Matt Edmundson. Each week Matt talks with ecommerce founders and experts about what's actually working — practical strategies, honest lessons, and the kind of insight that comes from running real businesses. New episodes every week. Find show notes, transcripts, and links at ecommerce-podcast.com . Sign up to the newsletter to get each episode delivered to your inbox, and if you want to go deeper, check out the Cohort Groups — monthly calls with ecommerce people from around the world. Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/how-to-win-on-walmart-not-just-amazon-with-andrew-deramo

June 24, 202649 min

Why Your 2-Pound Parcel Ships Like It Weighs 18

Leo Rodriguez has spent years watching ecommerce brands quietly overpay on shipping, sometimes billed for 18 pounds on a parcel that actually weighs two. In this episode of the eCommerce Podcast, Matt Edmundson sits down with the VP of a Los Angeles 3PL to pull apart the unglamorous moves that protect your margin, one parcel at a time. Summary Leo Rodriguez, VP of River Plate, Inc., joins Matt to talk through the hidden costs sitting inside every order you ship. It starts with dimensional weight, where a small product in an oversized box gets rated as a far heavier shipment, so you end up paying for air. Leo explains how "cartonization" and carrier rate-shopping can claw that money back, saving $2 to $3 per parcel for brands doing hundreds of orders a day. From there the conversation widens out to the messier stuff. Leo breaks down why smaller brands got hit hardest by the new tariffs while bigger brands used their buying power to get manufacturers to absorb the freight. He and Matt compare notes on international shipping gray zones, customs nitpicking, fuel surcharges becoming the new normal, and Amazon's ever-growing pile of fees. 00:00 Welcome and meet Leo 03:58 The inventory and replenishment problem 09:51 Tariffs, Brexit and customs gray zones 21:29 Why small brands got hit hardest 25:29 Fuel surcharges and the new normal 29:02 Cartonization, save $2 to $3 a parcel 33:07 Amazon's fees and dim weight 41:17 How to reach Leo Dim Weight and Cartonization, Where Your Margin Quietly Leaks [33:07] Dimensional weight is the formula carriers use to rate a parcel by the space it takes up, not just what it weighs. Put a light product in a box that is too big and you get penalised for the empty space. "If you're putting it in a, you know, 12 by 12 by 12 box and weighs only 2 pounds... it's not a 2-pound shipment. It's getting rated at an 18-pound shipment." — Leo Rodriguez The fix is cartonization, where transport management software reads the net dimensions and weight of your products and picks the smallest sensible shipper. Pair that with rate-shopping across a multi-channel carrier network and the savings add up fast. Brands doing 100 to 300 orders a day can save $2 to $3 per parcel Shipping cost can be more than your fulfilment fee on a per-order basis Regional carriers and zone skipping can halve transit time and cost on the right lanes "They're saving $2 per shipment. That adds up. That's a margin protector." — Leo Rodriguez Why Smaller Brands Got Hit Hardest by Tariffs [21:29] When the large tariff percentages landed, the brands with leverage came out ahead. Big brands could go back to their overseas manufacturers and renegotiate, and in some cases get the factory to cover the full freight bill, between $4,000 and $9,000 a container. Smaller brands had no such leverage. Many were left holding inventory they had already produced overseas but could not afford to import, while retail partners cancelled or halved the very purchase orders they had been banking on. Lead times stretched from 3 to 4 weeks out to 8 to 12 weeks Brands shifted to smaller consolidated shipments, nearshoring, and alternate-country manufacturing in places like Malaysia and Taiwan Standing up a new supply chain takes time, so the relief is rarely quick International Shipping and the Customs Gray Zone [09:51] Matt and Leo swap war stories on cross-border shipping, with Matt's running Brexit gag as the UK parallel to US tariff chaos. On both sides of the Atlantic, free global trade turns out not to be that free. Country-by-country rules are strict, especially on cosmetics and skincare, with Italy, Spain and Mexico all flagged. You can send 50 or 100 shipments through fine, then one customs agent nitpicks and the product gets stuck, disposed of, and the brand cops the bad review. "Free global trade is not actually that free... it does require quite a lot of joined-up thinking." — Matt Edmundson Leo's advice is to build item-level profiles, get the harmonised codes and packaging language right at the point of manufacture, and register properly for tax before you fire away. Fuel Surcharges, Amazon's Fees, and the New Normal [25:29] Fuel surcharges jumped roughly 18 to 20% in two months, and the historical pattern is that surcharges ratchet up and never quite come back down. Plastics and packaging climbed 20 to 30%, hitting shrink wrap, poly mailers and bubble bags. Amazon comes in for a closer look too. Powerful, yes, but fee-laden, with per-unit charges, ageing and seasonality storage tiers, FBA percentages, marketing fees, and a quietly added fuel surcharge in early May. Leo's case is for channel diversification, so you keep some control and predictability rather than living entirely inside one ecosystem. "I am optimistic overall still. I think brands, you get smart and then you have to be resilient." — Leo Rodriguez Today's Guest Leo Rodriguez is Vice President of River Plate, Inc., a Los Angeles-based 3PL and fulfilment company serving DTC, wholesale and Amazon brands. River Plate handles fulfilment, logistics and international shipping, and Leo is happy to take a quick call to see whether there is a fit. Website: riverplateinc.com LinkedIn: Leo Rodriguez River Plate Inc on Instagram and LinkedIn Email: sales@riverplateinc.com About the eCommerce Podcast The eCommerce Podcast helps you deliver eCommerce WOW. Every Thursday, Matt Edmundson talks with experts and founders who've built the stores and learned the hard way, so you don't have to. Subscribe and find every episode, with full show notes and links, at ecommerce-podcast.com . While you're there, take a look at the free monthly eCommerce Cohort and Slingshot AI Mentor. Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/why-your-2-pound-parcel-ships-like-it-weighs-18

June 18, 202649 min

The Elastic Band That Became a Global Brand

Emma Burke didn't set out to start a business. She was standing on the sidelines of her son's football training in the wind and the rain when a parent looped an elastic band around a boy's boots so his laces would stop coming undone. Everyone else's kids retied their laces three, four, five times a game. His didn't. That was the moment Laceeze was born. Summary This is a founder story about turning a problem nobody was searching for into a brand sold around the world. Emma had trained as a vet nurse on £80 a week, then built a 60-person contract cleaning company she quietly dreaded, before spotting that elastic-band trick on the touchline. She didn't invent it. She saw it work, asked the parents and the kids whether they'd buy and wear a proper version, and took the answer to market. Laceeze launched in 2017 at £6 and is still going today. She and Matt get into the marketing problem most product founders never see coming, which is customers who don't yet know they need you. Emma explains how she built the UK with no marketing budget through an ambassador programme, why selling to an audience of children means treating safeguarding seriously, and how being honest on social media (the wins and the bits that go tits up) builds the kind of trust that ads can't buy. There's a brave call she made pulling her best seller right before Christmas, the supplier relationship she rates above everything else, and a complaint she turned into a five-star review. Key sections by timestamp: 00:00 Welcome, Liverpool to Bournemouth 02:09 The elastic band on the touchline, how Laceeze started 03:47 From an £80-a-week vet nurse to a 60-person cleaning company 05:41 Throw away the business plan (she's never written one) 10:38 Going full-time, and trying to crack the USA 14:42 When customers don't know they need you, the ambassador programme 17:39 Safeguarding kids, and a TikTok violation 19:14 Grassroots community and giving back 21:38 Founder-led and honest on social media 27:35 Winning customers for life when things go wrong 34:45 Free market research, competitor sites and an inspiration folder 37:16 The one she wishes she'd known, pulling the best seller at Christmas 40:17 The most important relationship in the business 41:18 Rapid fire, Shopify, Klaviyo and getting into Claude 44:54 The dream, the US and a big brand collaboration The Accidental Founder Who's Never Written a Business Plan (02:09) Emma is clear that she's no inventor ("save that for Mr Dyson"). What she has is a little black book of crazy ideas and a habit of acting on the good ones. Before Laceeze there was a vet-nursing career she loved and a contract cleaning company she grew to 60 staff on the back of a Dorset property boom, knowing, by her own account, almost nothing about running a business when she started. "I'm not your textbook kind of business builder. I've never written a business plan in my life." — Emma Burke Matt's seen the same thing from the other side. He once had a would-be founder spread every form she thought she needed across his boardroom table, business plan and all. He swept the lot into the bin so they could actually start. The point both of them make is the same. Begin with a real problem and the simplest possible solution, and let the rest snowball. "It was never done like, oh, we're going to create this product and it's going to go global. It was literally, there's a problem, here's a solution, and let's just take that to market." — Emma Burke When Your Customers Don't Know They Need You (14:42) The hard part of selling Laceeze isn't the product. It's that nobody wakes up looking for it. A parent watches their kid retie a lace five times a match and never thinks twice about it. Building what Matt calls solution awareness is the whole game, and in the UK Emma did it with no marketing budget at all, through an ambassador programme that started with a few mums on the sidelines and a £9.99 pair of bands gifted in exchange for a tag. "You've hit the nail on the head, because we've got a solution to a problem, but parents don't go looking for the solution." — Emma Burke That programme is now a points-based platform with monthly challenges, and she's rebuilding it by hand in the United States, where the brand-recognition gap is the real reason PPC on Amazon wasn't growing. Because the audience is children, the work comes with a duty of care. Laceeze only sends to parent-run or clearly flagged accounts, and Emma is candid about a TikTok post of the product on a pitch being flagged for "exploiting children", with the appeal auto-rejected by a bot in about fifteen seconds. Honesty as a Marketing Tool (27:35) Emma's case for founder-led social media is simple. Tell the truth, including when a container's stuck or a shipment's delayed, because that's the reality of building a brand and people connect with it. Matt backs it up with a story of his own. One of his sites had its best month ever after a totally honest email about a stock shortage, telling customers they'd get one of six now and the rest later at the company's expense. Sales went mental. The same instinct shows up when things go wrong. Emma describes a customer who vented on Facebook without ever contacting the brand directly. She moved them into the DMs, apologised, sent product, and two weeks later they were asking where to leave a review. "Take the more negative, unhappy ones and see what you can do to resolve that. Because let's be honest, they're the ones that shout the loudest." — Emma Burke As Matt puts it, the angry ones are at least telling you what the problem is. Going out of your way to fix it is the secret marketing tool no one talks about. The Brave Call That Saved the Reputation (37:16) Asked what she wishes she'd known sooner, Emma goes right back to the first Christmas. The bands started snapping, a cutting and manufacturing issue, and rather than risk kids finding duds in their stocking fillers, Laceeze pulled everything at peak selling season. It was gut-wrenching, every instinct told her to keep selling and just replace the faulty ones, but the unseen risk was the customers who'd never complain and would simply decide the product was rubbish. "It's not just a rubber band. There's a lot more to it." — Emma Burke They switched manufacturers afterwards and have stayed put since. Emma rates that relationship above every other in the business, a supplier with a UK office and a China factory, on her time zone, close enough to pick up the phone. The brave call cost a Christmas. It bought the reputation that carried the brand worldwide. Today's Guest Emma Burke is the Founder and Managing Director of Laceeze , the elastic-band brand that keeps kids' football laces tied and gives back to grassroots sport with every UK sale. She spotted the idea on the touchline of her son's training, launched in 2017, and is now building the brand in the United States. Website: laceeze.co.uk LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/emma-burke-5bb73826 Social: Laceeze on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok About the eCommerce Podcast New episodes of the eCommerce Podcast land every Thursday. Join the free eCommerce Cohort, our monthly group for ecommerce founders, at ecommerce-podcast.com/cohort , and find everything else at ecommerce-podcast.com . Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/the-elastic-band-that-became-a-global-brand-with-emma-burke