The Ecommerce Playbook

Introduction

The idea for this report started over dinner with friends. One of them mentioned they were launching an ecommerce brand – and as someone who’s been building in this space for years, I was all-in on the conversation. But sitting at that table, I realized what people really needed was a guide. A playbook. How to actually win in ecommerce.

So I started writing one. But I quickly realized the best version of this wouldn’t just come from me – it would come from the sharpest operators, founders, and specialists I know, people who’ve built and scaled brands at every stage of growth.

For this report, the Intuit Mailchimp team sat down with twenty-two of those experts and asked them to share exactly how they’d approach the biggest challenges facing growing DTC brands right now.

The result is The Ecommerce Playbook: a practical, expert-led field guide spanning more than a dozen core areas – from brand positioning and unit economics to paid acquisition, retention, customer support, and scaling.

Each chapter is grounded in real frameworks, tactics, and hard-won lessons these operators use with their own brands and clients, shared in their own words. Whether you’re rethinking your approach to CRO or navigating the growing pains that come with hitting your stride, there’s something in here for you.

This isn’t a pitch for Mailchimp. This is a real guide to help ecommerce brands grow. Because we believe that if we help others be successful, we’ll be successful with them.

Matt Cimino, Intuit Mailchimp

Chapter 1: How to nail your brand positioning

Introduction

Before you start or scale your ecommerce shop, you need a brand that people actually trust.

Mailchimp research shows that trust and loyalty are largely subconscious. People don’t weigh every option. They rely on familiar, emotionally reassuring signals to decide quickly.

Trust building should begin on day one. This is especially true in the ecommerce space where a solid foundation of trust can start doing this work long before your product details ever get read.

That’s why this playbook starts with branding.

We’ve asked Nik to break down brand and positioning the same way that successful operators think about them: as a practical system for earning trust, shaping perception, and driving conversions. 

Based on his work with thousands of marketers and brands, he tells us how he approaches branding in his own words.

Let’s dig in… 

1. The first thing to know: brand = trust

Branding is the biggest trust builder of a consumer company today.

Getting it right can mean the difference between building a huge amount of trust immediately, or having potential customers doubt your brand at first sight.

Often, branding gets a backseat – typically because branding agencies can be very expensive to work with. And so the thought is sometimes, let’s launch first and, if everything goes well, we’ll invest in branding later.

But a good brand is sometimes the only thing separating you from a competitor.

The reality is, you really need to invest in good branding up front.

2. Most brands undervalue their visual identity. Here’s why you shouldn’t.

If you go to an online store and it has a standard theme, and you’re looking to buy something for $60, you have no idea if that product is even going to arrive at your doorstep.

But if you go to that same website, and instead it’s got beautiful imagery, nice branding, and nice fonts and iconography that describe the product, it immediately instills trust. You’re not as skeptical. 

Trust is the biggest thing that a visual identity does straight away. 

I think most brands under-invest in their visual identity. Usually the brands that over-invest are heavily venture-backed or have some form of funding. A lot of branding agencies overcharge for services – the entry point for a good branding agency is probably $60,000 all the way up to $500,000.

But have no fear: a happy medium is to find a smaller agency, or a boutique one, and remember you can work with a freelance designer, too.

The whole point is you’re borrowing mindshare from somebody who’s got taste. Especially going forward, with the default now being: “This was created by AI.”

Taste, whether in creation or curation, is going to be a massive lever in 2026 for the brands that have it.

3. Brand building goes way beyond logos

A lot of people think building a brand means having a nice logo, a nice font, nice buttons, icons, illustrations, and animations. But building a good brand really means constantly pushing things into the world that reiterate why you’re the right company to sell the product.

Brand isn’t the PDF you get from a branding agency. It’s what you do to get your brand’s name out in the world. 

That might not have a direct ROI tied to sales. It might show up as new eyeballs, new pockets of audience, or new people learning about the brand. When you tie everything to sales, you limit a lot of things that help build brand equity.

4. Think about a value proposition that actually resonates

The older wave of brands could get away with saying “we’re the best supplement gummies” or “we’re the best supplement brand”.

Today, that doesn’t work.

You now need to go at least two layers deep. Think… 

• “The best gummies – for pre-workout”
• “The gummy supplements – that moms can get behind”

It’s a two-pronged approach. 

The angle needs to speak directly to a particular moment, audience, or lifestyle.

This also performs really well from a performance marketing standpoint, because it’s more direct and more aspirational. If you hear it’s “a mom’s favorite after-school snack,” you immediately picture something healthy, light, good for kids, and made with good ingredients.

5. Focus on brand-market fit and channel-market fit

Most people think that ’product-market fit’ is the be-all and end-all, but trust me, you only really have to think about product-market fit if you’re inventing something totally new. Bedsheets already exist, couches exist, supplements exist.

Instead, you need to think about two things:

• Brand-market fit. Does your brand identity, visual identity, and messaging appeal to your target audience?
• Channel-market fit. I might have an amazing supplement product that gives you the best sleep of your life, but if I can’t figure out how to market it the right way in the right channel, then product-market fit doesn’t matter.

Most of the brands I’ve worked with have amazing products, so it’s on us to figure out – from a messaging, creative, offer, and channel standpoint – how do we get people to be educated and understand ’Wow! This is a miracle product’?

6. The best brands are native to each platform

A key part of your brand is your messaging hierarchy.

What might this look like in practice? Let’s take the example of a high-tech mattress.

• You might commit to talking about…
• how the customer gets great sleep
• before you talk about the great technology
• before you talk about price

You can follow this hierarchy across every channel, but the delivery has to change.

A video that works on Facebook, which perhaps targets an older demographic, probably won’t work on TikTok. You might find an angle that works on Facebook and apply it to TikTok, but you can’t copy it one-to-one.

On TikTok, you might need a green-screen video showing your product page, with someone explaining why the product works so well.

7. Every channel needs social proof — especially the lonely mid-funnel

Different channels need different types of social proof.

At the top of the funnel, that might be content creators who make videos, unbox the product, set it up, use it, and show their reaction. Then you have customer reviews — ideally that talk about the benefits they experienced or how their life changed after using the product.

In ads, a lot of the time you’ll have customer UGC or raw-feeling creator videos. That brings an authentic feel — it’s not a corporation telling you it’s good, it’s a person telling you. There’s also the idea of “secondary presence,” which is third-party content with the first party — the brand — pushing it out.

But remember, people do research on their own. They’ll go on YouTube and search “unboxing,” “review,” “is it worth the hype?” The same thing happens on TikTok.

These channels provide middle-of-funnel social proof. Yet this middle — where people are doing their own research — is often completely empty. Most brands don’t play there at all!

And that’s a big reason why brands die. They can’t get CAC down because they don’t have anything in the middle. It’s just a blank bucket.

Wherever people search for your brand — Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, Pinterest — there needs to be social proof.

8. Packaging matters more (and less) than you think

Packaging has a huge opportunity to immediately build trust. If packaging looks premium, people are more likely to try the product.

Packaging can also be the medium for the product. The sunscreen brand Vacation, for instance, which has a whipped-cream style container, is a great example. Many supplement brands stand out with distinct packaging as well.

But while packaging is important, it can be easy to overspend in areas that don’t truly provide value, for example custom inserts, expensive colored printing, extra samples. But everybody throws that stuff out immediately.

A friend of mine ordered a honey brand that came with a jar, a custom insert, two samples, a postcard, and a booklet. He grabbed the honey and tossed the rest.

That’s 90% of customers. That’s a lot of wasted packaging.

The whole job of packaging is to get someone excited to get to step one of using the product. They’re already sold on the product, and maybe already a subscriber.

No one gets excited to read a booklet. You don’t need four booklets in the box.

TRACE: How Nik breaks down what’s working (and not)

Instead of frameworks like the “four Ps,” from an ecommerce perspective Nik has always followed an acronym he calls TRACE — technology, reporting, audience, creative, and experience. Let’s dig in…

• Technology is making sure you’ve got the right data collection and pass-back mechanisms across the whole ecommerce funnel.
• Reporting is understanding incrementality, delayed attribution, and keeping everything up to date.
• Audience is who you’re going after.
• Creative is what they’re seeing — the angle, the hook, the thing grabbing attention.
• Experience is where you’re sending them. What does that page look like? Is there an offer? A bundle? Is it merchandised in a way that matches the audience?

“What’s great about TRACE is that once you check each box, you can see exactly where things are breaking,” Nik says. “You might have the right audience, but the creative doesn’t fit. Or the audience and creative work, but the offer doesn’t. TRACE gives you a clear picture of what to fix in order to hit that five-vertical slot jackpot.”

Chapter 2: How to build your email marketing foundations

Introduction

Email is one channel you fully own — a direct line into someone’s most personal digital space. Unlike social, where algorithms decide your reach, email lets you speak to the exact people who’ve asked to hear from you.

For ecommerce brands, that privilege is powerful. A well-timed email can drive significant revenue, build loyalty, and give you a foundation long before your store even opens.

In this chapter, email expert Emily Ryan lays down some of the fundamentals every growing DTC brand needs to think about and get right.

1. Why ecommerce operators should think about email from the get-go…

I always tell people that sending an email is like being able to walk into the living room of someone’s house. It’s not like social, where who knows who’s going to show up? You know who you’re sending to with email. It’s the most personal communication channel of all the digital marketing channels. It’s your inbox. Your personal space. Your workspace. And for a brand to be there is a privilege.

Email can do a lot. It’s a communication channel, first and foremost, but it’s also a revenue driver. It’s crazy what email can do for a business. A single, simple email can generate a lot of money. Whereas with an Instagram post, who knows how many people are going to click over to the link in your bio? And who knows if your ads will reach the right people? A single email can be really powerful.

2. Priority #1: list growth

Growing your list is your first priority – way before you even start selling your products. Ecommerce companies often come to us with a list of 500 or less contacts, and it’s just going to be a lot harder to generate a lot of revenue from that many contacts. So the more you grow your list with consented subscribers, the more successful you’ll be.

So how will you grow? Meta ads? An Instagram campaign? Will you host a webinar? Imagine you’re opening a brick-and-mortar shop – you want to have people excited until the opening day. It’s the same thing with email. You want to have that foundation before you launch.

You can’t expect to make $20,000 from an email if you have 50 people on your list. So put in the effort every single day to grow that email list as much as possible. That will get you so much further ahead than anything else.

The second thing you need to do is determine your email strategy. What’s your goal in sending emails? Is it purely to sell a product? Or maybe to educate your audience? Or simply stay top of mind?

Next, you need to figure out your frequency. A monthly newsletter? Once a week? Consistency wins.

Then you need to implement your email program: design your templates, set up your basic ecommerce automations, get your welcome email and abandoned cart emails set up, and design your campaigns. (And of course, schedule your campaigns!)

3. Choose a frequency you can stick with

How often you send emails really depends on your business. Start with something that seems truly manageable. Though, to be fair, once a month won’t move the needle a lot.

It all comes down to testing. Maybe your audience is really interested in your brand and would love hearing from you twice a week. I work with brands that email 5-6 times a week, because they’re highly segmented emails to different people. If you’re making money from your emails, try upping the frequency a little more. If you’re having a lot of unsubscribes, pull back a bit.

For my ecommerce clients, I recommend a baseline of emailing once per week. That’s a nice place to start.

4. Don’t forget to segment

For ecommerce, segmentation works best with purchase data. You can segment an email to just those people who have bought from you within the last month or last 90 days, or customers who have bought more (or less) than $100, for instance. You can segment by location too – maybe you only want to target a certain zip code before you launch. Once you start getting all that rolling into your Mailchimp account, segmenting becomes much easier.

5. Simple emails sell

Design matters for email. And when I say design, it can be the simplest design ever. It’s more about designing for your customer. What do they prefer? Maybe it’s plain text, with a simple email that looks like the business founder emailed you directly. Or maybe it’s a more elaborate, beautifully designed email with lots of color.

With ecommerce, the goal is to design for conversion. So things like button design matter. You can A/B test different button colors to find out if your audience clicks more on a bright red button or a blue button. It’s fascinating to test these things.

You generally want to keep your emails as clean as possible so that people can open them quickly and scan on their phone. Simplicity over everything is the name of the game. Look at some of the biggest ecommerce brands out there – their emails are shockingly simple. They have huge buttons, an image at the top, a few sentences of text, and that’s the whole email.

My advice to clients is often delete and then delete some more. Have extra copy or unnecessary fluff that’s absolutely not necessary? Delete it. Sometimes brands overthink their email marketing. The concept of email marketing is simple. You’re crafting a simple message to send out to a lot of people. You can craft a great ecommerce email in 10 or 15 minutes.

6. A powerful option for DTC brands

People don’t realize just how sophisticated of a platform Mailchimp is. It just works – and it’s really easy to use as a business owner. I’ve worked with so many brands over the last 10 years who are seeing great success via their ecommerce store by utilizing Mailchimp’s automations and all its tools – from campaigns to the signup forms, popups, and landing pages. I think people just don’t realize what Mailchimp is capable of doing. It’s a very powerful platform.

Chapter 3: How to get your unit economics right

Introduction

Now that your brand and email foundations are in place, it’s time to put a solid financial foundation underneath it. Because in ecommerce, you can have a brand people trust and a product people love and still get crushed by the math.

Mailchimp research shows that much of what we call “loyalty” is actually habit. Customers repeat purchases because it’s familiar and easy, not because they’ve formed a deep emotional bond. So when prices rise, shipping slips or friction appears, those habits can often break fast. That’s why strong unit economics matters even for brands customers say they love.

In this chapter, we’ll zoom in on unit economics and the numbers that decide whether you can scale profitably or not.

Let’s get some definitions out of the way…

These terms play a critical role when you’re considering pricing, margins, and the actual economics of running a brand.

• Unit Economics How much money you really make from one customer or one order once you subtract the costs required to serve them.

• COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) All the costs required to get a product to the customer — including manufacturing, packaging, shipping, and tariffs.

• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) What you pay to acquire a new customer.

• AOV (Average Order Value) Your average purchase size. Higher AOV gives you room to afford higher CAC without relying on long-term LTV.

• LTV (Lifetime Value) The total value of a customer over time.

• Contribution Margin / Contribution Dollars What’s left after all “get it to the customer” costs. This is the real pool you scale your paid acquisition against.

• Working Capital The cash (or access to cash) you need to fund inventory and operations — even if you’re profitable on paper.

• Inventory Cycle / Inventory Turn How long cash is tied up in product. Excess inventory is cash on shelves; stockouts kill momentum.

Now that we understand why these financial metrics are so important, let’s dig into some of the core concepts that Mehtab shared with us...

1. Why are unit economics so important?

For a lot of businesses recently, tariffs have changed their unit economics pretty dramatically. When you get hit with something like that, you end up running with lower margins — and you need a cushion to absorb it.

Anytime you have higher margins, the business is simply easier to run. That’s why strong unit economics and pricing power matter so much: they give you that cushion.

2. What are the warning signs of weak unit economics?

It’s dangerous when your unit economics don’t let you scale past the floor of what it costs to acquire a customer. For example, the floor for CAC on Meta has gone from around $5 in 2016 to $40 or even $60 today, depending on the category. Right now, it’s very hard to run a brand profitably — and not on an LTV basis — unless you can comfortably afford a $40 to $60 CAC. And that floor always goes up.

A lot of brands are constantly outrunning that CAC monster. It creeps up on them because their AOV is too small. That’s why having a higher AOV is so powerful — you can comfortably afford a higher CAC, and you’ll never get near the floor. It makes the business much easier to run.

3. For an ecommerce brand, what should be included in your COGS?

All the costs involved in getting your product to the customer’s door. If you order from my brand, I’m factoring into COGS the shipping, any tariffs I paid on that specific inventory, packaging costs, product costs — everything. We like to look at it on a contribution-dollars basis, because that’s what you scale your ad spend and marketing against. Every dollar you cut out of COGS makes the business so much easier to run downstream. You’ll thank yourself later!

4. How granular should brands get when tracking COGS?

It’s pretty easy now because most major ecommerce platforms support it. Shopify, for example, lets you upload specific COGS details and break out profitability by order. Ideally, you’re being as granular as possible so you can see contribution dollars on a per-order basis and scale spend accordingly.

5. How should brands think about their margin structure?

The name of the game in DTC is to lower your costs as much as possible and then spend as much as you can comfortably afford on customer acquisition.

A big mistake we see is brands running too close to break-even and then acting surprised when a macro shock hits — whether that’s supply-chain disruptions, Covid-era freight costs, or tariffs.

Ecommerce is famously volatile, so you need enough margin cushion to handle the unexpected. Targeting at least 12–15% net profit lets you survive most shocks. Ideally, you want to be closer to 15%. Most of our brands run at 18–20% net because we find that gives us the right cushion.

6. How much of your profit margin should be reinvested into growth?

It depends on the business. Great businesses often reinvest aggressively, but some brands overspend. Just because there’s money in your wallet doesn’t mean you need to staff up or build a big team. You need to be conscious of every dollar.

7. How should an ecommerce brand set its prices? Competitor benchmarking? Cost plus markup?

I think “cost plus” is dangerous, and we see a lot of brands do it. Your customer has no idea what it costs you to make something — they’d probably be shocked by the COGS for most products — so I’d stay away from that as much as possible. I don’t think it works well in DTC.

We focus on the competitive landscape and where the brand fits. Generally, I’d rather price a little higher and spend more to acquire the customer, because that can give you an advantage in the marketplace.

8. So you’d rather price a product higher to signal quality out of the gate, rather than underprice it to get more market share?

It’s difficult to come in with a low price because you’ll probably get crushed by someone else. It’s very hard to win the pricing game, especially when you’re small. Even if you’re a relatively large brand doing $50 million or $100 million in revenue, it’s still hard to win that game sustainably. It’s better to win on features and benefits — and charge accordingly for those features and benefits.

9. How should a brand approach raising its prices?

In some categories, customers are really price sensitive, so how you raise prices can vary. We have brands where increasing the base price doesn’t work well, but increasing fees or ancillary charges — basically unbundling pieces of value and charging for them separately — works better.

Shrinkflation can also work in certain categories. Look at fast-moving CPG: chocolate bars get smaller every year because those categories are so price sensitive. In those cases, you need to find other ways to raise effective prices, or focus on cost reduction.

Across most categories, we try to raise prices 3–5% a year. Generally, it’s better to run with higher prices and a higher CAC, because you can adjust your marketing spend relatively quickly — but you can’t fix your inventory quickly.

If I’m running lower prices, I have to predict inventory perfectly. If I’m selling fewer units at higher margins, my carrying costs go down and I don’t have to be as precise with forecasting. I can just adjust CAC at the last minute.

10. Does discounting hurt unit economics?

Discounting can be dangerous if you’re eroding your unit economics, but I think people sometimes worry about it more than they need to. You should have some discounting and a clean discount ladder. For example, if someone hasn’t been on your site in three months, you can hit them with an aggressive offer that’s basically equivalent to your CAC.

The real issue with discounting is when ad algorithms start optimizing toward people who respond to discounts — i.e. bargain hunters. That’s when it gets hard to reverse course. There’s a lot of medium-term pain in retraining the algorithm, and that part can be rough.

11. Can discounting harm brand perception from a customer psychology standpoint?

It really depends on your category and the audience you’re targeting. Some categories, like the hobby space, are very discount-heavy. It’s about what’s appropriate for your category and where you want the brand positioned.

And there are different ways to discount. You can offer a free gift over a certain order amount, which might not change the perception of your brand the same way a straight percentage-off discount would.

12. Shipping is a huge operational expense. How should brands budget for that?

A category like apparel will be very different from something like a floral brand. We have a company that sells succulents, and those have to ship by two-day air or the plant won’t survive.

The big thing with shipping is recognizing that in some categories you’re better off doing fulfillment in-house to save money. Generally, the more SKUs you have, the more in-house fulfillment makes sense.

And if you’re a young, growing brand, you should be aggressively shopping rates every six months — talking to UPS, FedEx, Amazon, or whoever else — to bring your costs down over time.

13. Even profitable businesses run out of cash. How does that happen?

Businesses can lose their source of liquidity. Let’s say I’m running an apparel brand and scale to $50 million in revenue. In the US, once you’re reporting on an accrual basis, the government treats your inventory as if it’s cash on your balance sheet. That’s tough for apparel because those businesses usually have high working-capital and inventory requirements. You might have $5 million in inventory and only $1 million in cash, but the government treats it all as cash. You can get hit with a surprisingly large tax bill.

Another common thing we see is when a brand works with a lender and the lender changes its underwriting and yanks the line. The brand is still profitable, but it just lost its main working-capital line and suddenly it’s short on cash.

14. How much working capital should an ecommerce brand keep on hand?

Again, very category-dependent. We have a jewelry brand where everything is made to order, so we have almost no working capital in the business. But in general, I like to maintain a heavier inventory buffer than I used to, because the macro environment has become so unpredictable.

The most important thing is making sure that if you’re relying on external capital, like a credit line, that the source is reliable. You might be profitable and growing, but if you become less profitable as a percentage of revenue, some lenders won’t like that. They’ll yank the line, and suddenly you’re out in the cold. Underwriting changes all the time, so you need to plan for that.

15. Are there best practices around planning for excess inventory on your shelves?

That’s one reason we like running with higher pricing — it reduces how precise you need to be with inventory.

But yes, you absolutely need a plan for clearing excess inventory, usually through a discounting schedule. In apparel, for example, once you hit end-of-season, you want to move product quickly or you’re stuck with it until the next winter, and that cost is huge. Brands often underestimate the cost of being stuck with inventory. You need to free up that cash, reinvest it, and avoid getting into the same situation again.

A few questions to ask yourself:

• Can you push holding costs onto your suppliers?
• Can you negotiate better net terms?
• Can you get something like net-60 after the product arrives at your warehouse?

All of that makes the business easier — and a lot less risky — to run.

Chapter 4: How to build your shop

Introduction

Your ecommerce store is the moment of truth — the place where someone decides whether they understand what you sell, trust you enough to buy it, and feel confident clicking ’checkout’.

A great storefront makes that decision easy. A confusing or slow one quietly destroys demand you’ve already paid for.

We spoke with Chris Hall and Colin Dougherty, hosts of the Ecomm Cowboy podcast and newsletter, for their practical tips on how to structure your shop, keep your tech stack lean, and the principles that consistently lift conversion — regardless of industry or product.

1. How to choose a platform

There’s no shortage of ecommerce platforms today. And there are plenty of newer tools built for brands that want to launch quickly with minimal setup. So why has Shopify become where most modern consumer brands build, experiment, and scale?

COLIN: Shopify’s CEO and CTO are so ingrained in the community itself. It’s clear that they listen to what the best operators in the Shopify community actually want. So there’s a feedback loop where they’re building in conjunction with the people that are actually operating the product at the top-tier level. They’re also building at such a fast pace. It’s a super lightweight product – it’s not bogged down aggressively with bad UI or hard functionality. You can start a store within 24 hours, get it live, and you’re ready to rock-and-roll.

CHRIS: Part of it is brand and part of it is ease-of-use. It’s easy to get started. And as they’ve armed all these rebels [the new ecommerce brands], they’ve continued to enhance and build out their functionality for the large enterprise brands, too.

2. Right out of the gate

If you were launching a Shopify store today, what are some best practices and non-negotiables you would set up in week one?

CHRIS: I’d say this…

• Start with great photos, but don’t overthink it. You no longer need to do a photoshoot. Just take a shot with your phone and then work with Shopify’s AI sidekick to create great photos for all your products.
• Get some very basic email and SMS automations in place.
• Set up a popup and create a juicy offer in front of that: 15% or 20% off, or “We’ll pick a winner over the next month”. Start collecting people’s data as they come to the website.
• Finally, you need to get high-intent shoppers on the site. And that comes down to either ads or making compelling social content.

COLIN: I agree – collect customer data as quickly as physically possible! Look at the brand Grüns. They made a really aggressive popup early on and got world famous for it. The amount of customer data that they grabbed from that was unbelievable. They also have a large lifetime value, they’re a repeat purchase product, and it’s a high margin product.

3. Site speed & performance

How much does site speed impact conversion? And how can you best optimize site speed?

COLIN: Site speed is paramount. You’ve gotta understand how impatient customers are. The experience has to be absolutely perfect and beautiful almost instantly. There’s a crazy statistic that says if you have a load time of three seconds or more, you’ll lose 90% of your potential traffic.

One of the main things you should be doing is making sure your site images and banners are mobile-friendly. You don’t want massive images that aren’t loading quick enough on mobile. Everything should be light-speed, as fast as physically possible.

CHRIS: Think of your website as a cash register. You’re not here to provide a dictionary’s worth of content. People need to be able to buy quickly. Reduce the friction between ’I arrived’ and ’I buy’. Make that path to checkout as smooth as possible.

4. High-converting store tips

What does a high converting shop actually look like in 2026? What elements should they include?

COLIN: There’s a company called Norse Organics. Their product page is one of the best high-converting product pages in town. It’s an absolute machine, and that’s because of very aggressive social proof: in the product images, quotes, before-and-afters, doctors talking about the product. If you sprinkle all of that throughout the site, layering on every bit you can physically find, and the site becomes a converting beast.

CHRIS: Clear is always better than clever. If I open the website and show it to my five year old or to a caveman, within three seconds they should be able to grunt what the product is and how it benefits them. It’s about clarity – being really clear who you are and the value that you provide.

5. Checkout considerations

The shopping cart is where some brands lose the most money. What are high-impact optimization techniques you’ve seen in the checkout process?

CHRIS: Here are my two tips:

• Sometimes third party apps and secondary offers and all of other stuff can confuse the customer. They’ll say: “What am I doing? Did I actually buy the thing? Now you’re giving me another offer?” Early on, you should do as little as possible.
• These days, people really expect free and fast shipping. I’d advise to bake that into the price of the product – and then you can tell people it’s free shipping!

6. Big takeaways

Let’s say you have 5 minutes to check a shop’s structural conversion problems. What are the key things you’re looking for?

CHRIS: I would say, at a high level:

• Do I know instantly who you are, what you do, and who this is for? Does it pass the ’grunt’ test? (as mentioned above)
• Is there a specific product you’re focusing on? Some shop owners say they’ve got an awesome catalog and there are so many things they can do. And I’ll say, “Let’s first focus on a single persona and the product that makes you the most money.”
• And how can we shorten the journey of: potential customer arrives > money is out of their pocket into yours? Are there unnecessary steps in your mapping tree that we can get rid of? How can we make that as smooth and salient as possible?

COLIN: From a raw tactical standpoint, there’s a concept of ’the wall of love’ where you put all the customer testimonials you’ve ever had in one section. I love doing that. I love also incorporating UGC content within the website to show real customers actually using the product. Visitors can see this is a tangible thing. People are impacted by it. It really helps you sell.

Chapter 5: How to supercharge your CRO

Introduction

Once your store is live and people start showing up, the real game begins: understanding what those visitors actually do — what they notice, what they ignore, and what finally convinces them to buy.

Every click, scroll, and hesitation is a clue about how your site is performing as a sales engine.

In this chapter, we draw on the approach of Dylan Ander to break conversion rate optimization (CRO) down into tactics that are simple, practical, and proven. Dylan spends his days analyzing how shoppers behave at a pixel level, and his work shows how much revenue is hidden in plain sight.

The fundamental idea is to make your site easier to understand, faster to trust, and smoother to buy from — without adding complexity or reinventing your brand. These are the small changes that compound into ongoing revenue.

1. CRO starts with listening

Why CRO matters for ecommerce brands

CRO isn’t just ’handling the website’ – it’s the brain of your business. Business optimization is really the right way to look at it, because your conversion rate is affected by everything in your business.

Quantitative is good, qualitative is (maybe) better

Quantitative hard data is important, but you need to aggressively look at qualitative data: customer feedback surveys, screen recordings, popup surveys, observing what pieces of the website people care about. If you don’t know who you’re selling to, you’re taking a big swipe in the dark.

CRO is essentially about understanding your customers:

• asking them what they want
• giving them what they want
• getting what you want, i.e. money

How early is too early to start?

It should happen on your first sale. Do a post-purchase survey that asks:

’What made you buy today?’

You can even do it before you get to market. It’s all about gathering intel on customers. That’s it. Lots of brands think they’re ’not big enough’ to do CRO, but that’s a bunch of crap. CRO is free to start.

My favorite thing is customer feedback surveys. There are demographics and psychographics.

• Demographics are “We’re selling to middle-aged women, maybe they have joint pain, and they live in these types of cities.”
• Psychographics are: “How do they feel about their bodies? How do they view exercise now that they’re a bit older? How do they view family? How do they view routine?”

The only way to understand psychographics is by asking. Literally, pick up the phone and call customers, and/or send customer feedback surveys – never more than six to eight questions.

The big mistakes ecomm brands make with CRO

It’s not always just about revenue conversions. There are micro conversions – secondary metrics and engagement metrics – that are hugely important. If you have a better hero image on your homepage, people are more likely to click to another page. If someone doesn’t get to your product page, they’re not going to buy. You need to make sure you’re taking everything into account. A rising tide lifts all boats.

But the biggest mistake is your mindset. There is no ’winning’ and ’losing’ with CRO. You get just as much benefit by knowing what doesn’t work then by knowing what does work.

2. Copy & images: the biggest drivers

Why images and words are (almost) the whole ballgame

People do all these crazy UX tests and invest so much in development, when all they need to do is have more resonant copywriting and better images.

I’ve run over 4,000 split tests and 80% of the winners are literally just about changing copy or images. The 80/20 of your website is copywriting and images!

Here’s the cool thing: none of this requires advanced code. Go into your Shopify and just swap out an image and change your headlines. You don’t need a data analytics team.

Start from the top – then work your way down

Pay attention to anything that is at the top of your shop page, otherwise known as ’above the fold’. 100% of the people who load a page see above the fold, so start there. In CRO you move from the top down.

Then look at navigation, hero images, product images, headlines, the menu, buy boxes – anywhere that they’re clicking and committing to buy.

3. AOV & upsells: what most brands ignore

How to optimize for boosting AOV

AOV is one of the most underrated areas an ecomm business can optimize. There are many methods – pre-purchase upsells, post-purchase upsells, bundling – and all of them are free. It just takes a little bit of elbow grease.

The best post-purchase upsell I’ve ever seen…

Post-purchase upsells are a very under-leveraged area. You’ve already made the sale, so you have nothing to lose!

The best post-purchase upsell I’ve ever seen in terms of revenue performance was for a supplement company. If you bought one unit, the brand would literally upsell you for 11 more bottles. It might sound ludicrous, but the consumer thought: “I might as well just get 11 more bottles for the year.”

You can always tweak and update post-purchase upsells. It’s an overlooked area, but it’s almost like free money.

Upsells vs cross-sells: the difference

They’re effectively the same thing. A cross-sell just means it’s a similar-priced item, while an upsell is that it’s a higher-priced item.

The bigger difference is a pre-purchase upsell vs post-purchase upsell. The upsells you see on a product page (“You may also like…”) are pre-purchase upsells. So are the ones in your cart (“You can also buy this thing right here”). But the popups you often see after you buy something are post-purchase upsells.

Why ’offer ladders’ are so important

It’s like that phrase ’a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’, right? I would rather collect revenue now, even at a discount, than hopefully get it later.

You should get very aggressive with offer ladders, offer discounts, bundles, and creative offer testing. Offer testing is truly one of the biggest levers you have as an ecommerce business. Unlocking an effective offer can make your ads more effective, your emails more effective, your text messages more effective – absolutely everything more effective.

4. Removing friction

Speed

There are a lot of statistics around site speed which I’m skeptical about. But here’s the main thing you should care about:

“Is my site loading in more or less than three seconds?”

If it takes more than 3 seconds, you’re losing revenue and you need to go work on that. But moving from three seconds to one second is really not going to make much of a revenue difference.

Checkout

Here’s one big tip for optimizing carts: you want your checkout process to be unbelievably boring. I even recommend cutting out the footer in the cart, because it can take someone to another page of the site. Make the most boring page where all they can do is click ’buy’ and go forward.

Testing

You can run an ABCDE test, which is still considered a classic A/B test – or what I prefer to call it, split testing.

And then there are multivariate tests, in which you’re changing more than one element in a dynamic way. You can’t have less than four variants in a multivariate test. The downside of multivariate testing is that you need a LOT of traffic. Most brands don’t have the luxury of enough traffic to be able to actually run multivariate tests. If you have the traffic, heck yeah, run as many MVTs as you can!

Every test must be for at least two weeks, because you need to account for weekday traffic and weekend traffic.

There’s something called the ICE method that makes it stupidly easy to prioritize your testing roadmap. It stands for Impact, Confidence, Ease.

You grade everything you want to test, from one to five.

• Impact: “If we run this test, how much can this move the needle?”
• Confidence: “How confident am I that this will move the needle?’
• Ease: “Do we need to get a whole dev team on this?” The easier it is to implement something, such as a standard headline, the higher the score.

Chapter 6: How to capture leads

Introduction

Only five years ago, most brands slapped “10% off” onto a popup and called it a day. Today, lead capture is far more sophisticated — and far more important.

Your email and SMS list is one of the only growth channels you truly own. It compounds over time. It protects you from rising ad costs. And it becomes the engine that powers launches, retention, and predictable revenue.

Below, Jacob Sappington explains how modern brands approach list growth: why you need to take it seriously from day one, how to collect meaningful zero-party data, how to structure high-converting popups across mobile and desktop, and why your offer matters more than anything else.

1. Think about lead capture and list growth early on

If you’re a new brand or have a small list, you need to take lead capture seriously.

Why? Because your list takes time to grow, and growing your list has a compounding effect.

Think of that old saying: The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, but the second best time is now. So… start!

As a new brand, you might see a couple hundred sessions a day, with a 5% opt-in rate. You’re capturing tens of people daily, which might not feel like much. But twelve months down the line, after you’ve found product market fit and you’re starting to scale your ad budgets and you’re ready to launch another product, you’ll wish that you had a strong, healthy list to send to.

Imagine you’re averaging 100,000 sessions with a 4% opt-in rate. If you decide to optimize your lead capture strategy and boost your opt-in rate to 8%, you’ve doubled your list growth – that’s massive! Over the course of the year, you’d add 50,000 net new subscribers per year without any additional traffic gains. And the more traffic you have, the more that compounds.

If you didn’t do this, you could be turning away hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of subscribers a year.

2. How (and why) to collect zero party data

What’s zero party data?

Zero party data is any kind of data that the customer willingly, explicitly gives to you. They told you something about themselves, likely as part of a quiz or a survey.

This sort of data…

• Can be used at the point of capture – if someone just told you a piece of information, then it could be used in an immediate welcome series.
• Can help customize your downstream messaging and content.

Just one thing to note: You don’t want to default to trusting this data blindly, because sometimes people misstate how they truly think about something. They’ll say one thing and actually need another thing. Just keep that in mind.

How to collect it

The two best places to capture this data is on the actual popup itself, or during the checkout process. You can even compare what pre-purchase insights look like versus post-purchase insights.

In terms of setting up your popup, a multistep popup form on your site is almost a non-negotiable these days – particularly one with a pre-engagement quiz at the front. These can start with zero-party data questions such as: “Who are you shopping for?” They’re questions that are deeper than just ’yes’ or ’no’ answers.

We’ve tested this so many times – you can boost your opt-in rate just by adding such a pre-engagement form. Plus, the consumer now thinks that the brand is asking about them as a user, and they then have a higher expectation of the brand. It’s a valid mechanism to get people into the CRM.

3. Structure your popups: mobile, desktop, timing

Mobile pop-ups

1. A full-screen popup with simple creative. You only have so much room on a phone, so don’t clutter it with too much content. Stick to straightforward, direct copy. Don’t get too cute. Don’t communicate too much information. Be offer-focused.

2. Start with a pre-engagement quiz. On the first page of your form, ask a question such as, “Are you shopping for yourself or for a friend today?” The goal is to get people to engage. While collecting segmentable data that allows you to send messaging to the customer is great, it’s more important right now to get someone to engage with the popup, full-stop. Some platforms limit how many pages you can actually have in your popup, so you’ll want to keep your quiz to a single page / question. Also: the more questions you ask, the fewer the people who make it all the way through. You need to think about asking the minimum amount of questions to get the benefit you want, without giving up any gains.

3. Email and SMS capture. That’s because if you answer the first question, you’re so much more likely to give your email on the next screen. And if you give your email, you’re so much more likely to give your phone number on the second screen.

Your mobile popup flow might look like:

• Page 1: Zero party data question
• Page 2: Email
• Page 3: SMS
• Page 4: SMS opt-in
• Page 5: Thank you / success page

Desktop popups

Desktop should follow a similar format as mobile, except on desktop, you can get a little bit more branded, because you have so much more real estate to work with.

On desktop, you can also have what we call a teaser following you around – meaning, if you close out of the popup, you’ll be given another option to sign back up. Maybe when I first showed you the offer, it wasn’t relevant to you, because you didn’t know about the products. But after you scrolled, you’re now interested. This gives them an easy way to reengage. We don’t like putting that on mobile because the screen is so small.

Time them right!

Generally speaking, we do a lot of immediate popups. I know some brand owners don’t love that customer experience. But we’ve tested it over and over again: immediate versus 3, 5, or 10 second page views.

We’re always looking for the best blend of volume and efficiency, and we’ve found that we get really good volume by going immediate.

4. Is your offer strong enough?

Make sure it’s good…

How the popup is built and the creative will have an impact on the actual conversion rate, but the most impactful change you can make is your offer.

…and consistent

A lot of times we see brands that have multiple landing pages with conflicting popup offers and messaging.

One might feature a ’buy one, get one free’ offer, and the other one says 20% off. By doing so, you’re introducing a ton of friction into the customer experience. You’ll have customers who are confused (’Can I combine those?’) and those who try to take advantage of it.

If a brand isn’t thinking through this, they can be accidentally letting customers get way too much margin off their order. But even if they have discounts that are mutually exclusive, they’re still introducing friction to the mix.

Get aligned before you get optimized

Sarah Levinger explains why you need to ask a fundamental question before you start optimizing: “Do we actually know our customer — or do we just know their data?”

If you have a communications degree right now, you’re about to become one of the most sought-after people in your industry. That’s because being able to communicate ideas clearly — what you sell, why it matters, who it’s for — has become one of the most important skills in modern ecommerce.

How you communicate your brand message draws in a very specific type of customer, and the mechanism you use to communicate it changes the effect.

The part people forget is this: you can’t communicate well externally if you aren’t aligned internally. Your messaging comes down to your team psychology more than anything else.

When I work with a brand, I ask very simple questions:

• What does your team believe they do?
• What do they think their job is?
• What do they believe about the brand?
• Where do they think the brand does well — or struggles?
• Do they truly know what you sell?

Sometimes I’ll talk to a media buyer who says, “We sell skincare,” and then speak with their creative strategist who insists, “No, we sell empowerment.”

If one person is optimizing an ad account for skincare and another is building creative around empowerment, nothing lines up. So of course the customer gets mixed signals. Consistency of messaging across channels starts with consistency inside the team.

The same applies to data and metrics. I believe marketers track far too many things. You don’t need an ocean of numbers to do your job effectively. You need two or three north-star metrics — the ones that truly move your business.

That might be margins, COGS, supply-chain reliability, monthly expenses, or pricing. It depends on the brand. What matters is choosing the right ones deliberately, based on the economics you need to hit.

From there, sit down with your team and ask a harder question: Do we actually know our customer — or do we just know their data? That’s where the real work begins. Challenge your assumptions. Everything gets better from that point.

And finally, slow down. I know a lot of brands that panic about saturation — afraid that if they don’t rush, someone else will swoop in and take their place. But nobody is eating your lunch. They’re too busy trying not to lose their own.

The brands that slow down, focus, and act with intention will still be standing five years from now. The clearer your team is, the clearer your brand becomes.

Chapter 7: How to create a UGC and influencer strategy

Introduction

Influencer and creator content has changed more in the past two years than almost any other part of ecommerce. AI has blurred the lines of what feels “real,” traditional pay-for-post models are fading, and creator marketplaces now move faster than most marketing teams can keep up.

For modern brands, working with content creators has become a reliable source of fresh creative, social proof, and a full-on acquisition channel.

In this chapter, Cody Wittick breaks down what actually works in 2026: why influencer ’seeding’ (handing out free product) beats sponsorships, how to source creators who genuinely fit your brand, and how to turn raw, native content into profitable ad creative.

Cody has helped scale DTC brands from the ground up, and his approach is refreshingly simple: lean into people, lean into authenticity, and let the best content win.

1. The state of influencer content

Cody, how should brands be thinking about influencer content in 2026?

You want to be even more bullish on influencer seeding, meaning sending out free product to influencers and micro-influencers (sub 150k following). I’m very bullish on this, even more so than I was five years ago, primarily because of AI. People are increasingly suspicious of what’s real. So, influencers and specifically seeding lends itself to lots of raw, shaky, native to the feed – great content that you can run in your ad account that will stand out in a polished, cookie-cutter world.

2. Working with creators

What makes a creator a good fit for a brand? Their follower count? Engagement rate? Quantitatively, you want to look at those metrics – engagement rate, views, what they’re getting on their videos, etc. But then qualitatively, you should ask: Would I be proud if this person represented my brand? Do they represent my customer or who I want my customer to be? So, you really need to know your customer!

You mentioned micro-influencers. Why micro instead of larger influencers?

The majority of brands that are reading this should not be entertaining macro-influencers, nor should they ever be. Paying a macro-influencer to post – that whole age is dead and gone, as far as a pay-for-post model. Unless you’re doing nine figures in revenue.

And even at that stage, doing one post isn’t going to do anything anyway. It should be some sort of equity deal or bringing them on for a year contract. 90% of the brands reading this should work with micro-influencers instead – and there’s so many more of them, too!

3. Metrics to watch

How do you all approach maximizing conversion on these ads?

The good thing is you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel on creative. It’s posted organically, and people are seeing it organically. The best thing you can actually do is upload it as-is. You’ll do some basic reformatting, of course, but honestly, I’d recommend uploading them as-is, and then setting a CPA goal for that piece of creative.

If it spends, that means it’s acquiring customers at that CPA, and if it doesn’t, no harm, no foul.

That’s the beauty of being able to launch as much creative as possible, because creative is 70% of the reason people buy. The headline and copy will make very little difference. In terms of getting conversions, it’s always going to be the creative.

Should brands be A/B testing their own branded content? What should they be looking for? Conversion rate? Awareness?

Yeah, 100%. Always sales. Anything else and you’re lighting money on fire.

Is creator content more effective for acquisition than your own organic TikTok or Instagram content?

It’s about being able to measure it against your pixel, right? Organically, you have fewer touchpoints and fewer ways to track conversion. Honestly, brands need to have both. You want to be doing well organically and on a paid perspective.

4. Onboarding creators

What’s your onboarding process look like when working with an influencer or customer for customer generated content?

With customers, we keep things simple. They’ll get a short intro video from the founder and an example of the kind of content we’re hoping for, just so they know what a strong piece of content looks like. We guide them a bit so the process feels easy and clear.

With influencers, we approach it in a very open way. We reach out to people who feel like a natural fit and offer to send them the product — no script, no requirements, no request to post. It really is just, “We think you’d like this — can we send it to you?”

If they decide to share something after trying it, great. That might be an unboxing, a reaction video, a selfie — whatever feels natural to them. We’ll pick it up through social listening, see that they’ve posted, and then reach out to ask for usage rights so we can potentially use that content in our ad account.

It ends up giving us a variety of authentic content to work with, but always based on what the creator chose to share and with their permission.

For new DTC brands that are looking to get into using influencers or creators, what do the fees look like? Per post? A flat fee?

I wouldn’t pay any upfront fees at first, as a young DTC brand. I would just invest in product seeding, so it’ll cost you your COGS plus shipping to send it out to these creators. Then I would actually build relationships with these people. And the ones that are doing well within that ad account, you build a deeper relationship with them. Maybe establish a monthly retainer where they can start producing content, posting organically. There are many layers and levels to this before I’d ever throw up-front money.

5. Always be testing!

How should brands think about their ad content strategy more broadly?

There’s a lot of nuance here. It depends on the lifespan of the brand. For a newer brand, you don’t know what you don’t know. Try to get as much as possible, as diverse as possible, and as cheap as possible.

For the average $7-8 million brand, audit your current ad library and see what gaps you’re missing, between video and static, and between human-forward and brand product-forward. And then try to fill up those missing gaps in terms of your creative diversity.

From there, whatever is getting spend within the ad account you can iterate off of, because spend is the leading indicator of future performance within Meta. Then create iterations off your high-spending ads, and then net-new concepts that you can create. Just constantly be testing!

Chapter 8: How to be great at organic social

Introduction

Organic social plays a bigger role in ecommerce growth today than most ecommerce operators realize.

Platforms reward content that feels native, is fast-moving, and entertaining, and the brands that thrive are the ones treating organic as a testing ground for stories, formats, and ideas that can flow into paid.

In this chapter, Aaron Orendorff breaks down how to think about organic in 2026 — from creating content people actually want to consume, to using hook-and-hold signals. His guidance is simple: make content that fits the platform, listen to your customers, and focus your energy where it actually moves the needle.

And Alex Garcia expands the picture by showing how every organic post acts as a data point, which metrics actually predict reach, and why repeatable formats and familiar creative help brands cut through faster than ever.

1. Why organic is still worth it

What advice, tips or tricks work for organic in 2026?

I believe that organic is going to become even more valuable this year. So you need to build your muscle for content production and entertainment.

You don’t need to build a full-on media company or make a magazine and have people leave the platform. The platforms want people to stay in-platform.

What all the algorithms reward right now is what is going to keep a person spending more time in the feed. We’re talking native social.

The good news is follower count no longer matters in the way it used to. Today when a post goes out, the algorithm looks at who it’s going to resonate with, and then serves it up. It’s no longer dependent on how many followers you have. If a piece of content holds them, it gets shared out to everybody else.

You need to consider two things: hook rate and hold rate.

• Hook rate: Does someone keep watching past the first 2-3 seconds?
• Hold rate: Is someone watching at least 50% or more of my video?

The algorithm only cares about what gets people’s attention. That’s the game. For a brand, think about: How do I produce more content at a faster velocity so that I can learn what holds people – and then replicate that.

Should brands post on multiple platforms, or focus on just one?

As long as what you’re building is vertical video, 9 x 16, and you’re ripping a bunch of different types, formats, hooks and ideas, then you’re good to go for Reels, TikTok, and YouTube shorts. Those are the three – that’s where people are. Master this first and the algorithm will do its thing and reward what it rewards.

What’s the relationship between organic and paid?

What we’re going to see in 2026 and onward is almost a tearing down of this organic vs paid divide. It will instead become very collaborative.

There’s one ecomm founder I know who has pivoted their paid ads to organic-first. Meaning, if your organic video is performing well, then your job is to ask yourself:

“How do I get this winning video content in its rawest form immediately into my ad account, so that I can then start iterating off of it for performance?”

You’re not making your organic content convert or trying to sell. You’re taking your organic content, optimizing it for what the algorithm wants, then taking what works and fueling your ad account with that type of content.

You’re basically turning your already proven content into a paid ad to drive even more sales. That’s a very powerful combination.

Your checklist:

• Optimize your organic for in-platform metrics (hook and hold rate)
• Build your content machine for that outcome, and
• Fuel your ad account with this type of content

2. Content that works

Founder-led content is when a brand owner shares their business story, vision and who they are. Does this type of content resonate?

The only time founder-led content actually works is if the founder would create the content even if nobody was listening or buying.

It often looks like it works in retrospect. A company gets big, then the founder gets big, then the founder has an audience, and then people then think that founder-led content got them there. But it’s a cause and effect thing for the most part, in that situation.

The flip side of this are creator-led brands, which are very different altogether. That’s where you have a critical mass of an audience, because you’re a content creator on the internet, and you’re thinking of how to serve your audience better. But that’s very different from founder-led content. Conflating the two is a fundamental mistake.

The only time I’ve ever seen founder-led content work, i.e. where the founder creates content and the business at the same time, is when the founder is creating content naturally themselves – short-form videos, blog posts, newsletters – because they couldn’t help it, no matter what. That’s the secret ingredient.

Would you make this content regardless of whether you were building a brand? If so, bet you can stick it out and make it work.

And yet, is this content driving real impact in the business? Even for someone who has a good story and can create great content, I’d be shocked to find the content is an actual, real growth lever for them – a source of true growth.

How about educational content on social – is it effective?

The higher your AOV is, the more important educational content becomes, because people are more discerning. Particularly the closer you are to health and wellness, where people have a lot of questions and where they care about what they’re putting in their bodies and on their bodies. Educational content is a powerful sales mechanism as a proof point.

Particularly the tried-and-true ’X reasons why’ format; i.e. ’5 reasons why this supplement helps me sleep better.” It’s education, it’s landing page sales, and it’s conversion rate optimization.

One place where educational content doesn’t work is when you lead with the value proposition of “Buy this product because it’s good for the earth.” Everyone says they’re eco-conscious, but very few people actually pay money for it.

Organic: The connective tissue

3. Why organic is worth it

More brands are pouring money into organic social because it increasingly feels like a necessity. Everyone is taking it seriously.

If you’re pumping out 30, 40, 50 pieces of content every month, there’s no other channel that has this many consumer touchpoints.

Organic controls the perception your brand forms in somebody’s head. That’s very important.

Optimize your funnel with organic

Organic content should be the connective tissue of your brand. Everything you publish on organic is a data point that says people are interested in this, or they’re not interested in that.

If you look at organic content the same way you look at paid – top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel – then you can publish all of your content on organic, then put together a report that says: here’s what worked and what didn’t work. Then, for everything that worked, you can repackage it for different channels.

If your brand has an educational, resource-driven archetype and you’re consistently putting out high-quality, top of funnel, how-to content, you can repurpose that into emails, SMS, listicles, landing page content. You can optimize your entire funnel off the back of organic content.

Organic metrics that matter

Good metrics are platform-dependent. But if you’re on Instagram, and you’re a new brand, you don’t need to have a following to win. It’s a lottery. You can publish an amazing piece of content and get 100,000 views or 10 million views.

If you do have an audience, though, then your following and the quality of your following does matter, because your content will always be shown to your followers first. How well that content performs determines whether or not it gets shown to more people.

Here are three video metrics to pay attention to:

• Skip rate. Do you have something that’s interesting enough for people to stop their scroll? If your skip rate is below 50%, then you have a very good hook. If it’s above 50%, then you need to work on your hook drastically. There are all sorts of hooks: visual hooks (what you show), verbal hooks (what you say), and title hooks (the text on the in screen the first three seconds of the video). The first three seconds of your video can suck and the next 30 seconds can be rock solid, but that doesn’t matter, if they never see it.
• Average watch time. If someone stays past the first three seconds, now it’s all about how good your storytelling skills are. It goes from attain to retain, very fast. Your average watch time pokes holes at your ability to tell stories.

Imagine my video is 40 seconds long. I’ll look at my average watch time every hour the video is live. Is the number climbing or declining? If I’ve got a 12 second average watch time, and an hour later it’s a 13 second average watch time, and it continues to climb every hour, my video will expand past my follower base, hands down, every single time. If, as it starts to be shown to new people, it goes from 13 seconds back down to 12 seconds, my video is done. It’s reached its limit. Remember, that’s not a bad thing, because it’s a data point.

• Retention graph. Finally, you want to measure behavior. Where do people drop off heavy? If everybody always drops off at the five second mark, but your hook – the first three seconds – is good, then you have to analyze what you’re doing wrong at the five second mark. In most videos you’ll see common denominators with behavior.

4. Create a bingeable concept

In the past, attention was typically about “How do we shock the viewer and get their attention?” Now, it’s “How do we build familiarity?” Familiarity is the new hook. You want to be recognized within that first frame of the video. The way you do that is with repetitive elements. This can be a combination of characters, themes, location, set, all the way down to having the same hook every time.

Look at the Instagram series SubwayTakes (@subwaytakes). It always starts the same way: a split screen, with the host saying, “So, what’s your take?” That’s the opening frame for every single episode, to the point where I can be scrolling a million miles a minute and the second I see that frame I know 1) what the show is, 2) what I’m going to get, and 3) the value expectation.

If a brand wants to grow on social, the fastest route to success is to build familiarity, and that comes from repetitive elements.

There are three potential ways to do this:

• Signature series. This tends to be more budget-friendly for brands. Such a series is character-driven, unique to you, and scalable.
• Limited series. This typically requires more budget. It’s a story you build that has multiple episodes and with the same layers: there’s a common theme, repetitive developments, but it only lasts a bit of time, such as six episodes.
• Social shows. This is about taking formats that work on TV and bringing them over to social, but they live on a completely separate account. This is IP that you own, in a category that’s associated with who you are, what you do, and what you offer. It’s all about building top of funnel awareness.

Chapter 9: How to think about paid acquisition

Introduction

Paid acquisition is one of the biggest levers in ecommerce — and also one of the easiest to misunderstand. Meta, TikTok, and Google each behave differently, reward different creative styles, and require brands to be clear about what they’re trying to achieve.

The real question isn’t: “Are ads expensive?” It’s: “Do they work — and how?”

Some brands pour money into platforms with no structure, no creative strategy, and no understanding of their unit economics.

Others treat paid as a disciplined, financially grounded part of the business — and those are the ones that see reliable lift and predictable growth.

This chapter focuses on that second group. Cherene Aubert walks through the foundations every brand needs before running ads, how to choose platforms intentionally, and the math behind sustainable acquisition.

Then, Zain Ali gives a masterclass on getting started – and gaining traction – on TikTok Shop.

And Chase Mohseni and Dara Denney bring it home with unique perspectives on storytelling and your creative ops strategy.

Your paid strategy: do the math, then scale

1. The realities of paid acquisition today

Where should early stage brands start with their paid acquisition strategy?

Investing money in paid media is a necessary evil for brands trying to grow their acquisition today. But the barrier to participate is becoming higher, as it not only requires an investment in advertising, but also in content creation.

The brands that create the most bulletproof, profitable businesses right now are often the ones that invest in organic marketing first, such as community-building or organic social content production.

Why is this so important? Because it’s what fuels the advertising machine pipeline. Meta and TikTok ads, for instance, require such a high velocity of content and the content that performs best is platform-native.

To have the best chance at success and break through the noise, you need to get very clear about who you are, what you’re offering, and then get very good at entertaining with content.

A paid role for awareness?

For early stage ecommerce brands, your ads are doing a lot of work for you. The ads that you’re creating in your conversion campaign need to sit at all stages of your funnel. Maybe there’s one ad that gets someone to click through and learn about your brand, and maybe there’s another ad that’s 15% off your first order.

Think of the traditional buyer’s journey – awareness, consideration and decision. You want your ads to speak to those different stages. Then, as you get bigger, you can do true top of funnel ads or awareness ads, which don’t actually drive immediate sales, but are designed to create brand recall.

2. Choosing the right platform for your brand

Meta

From my perspective, Meta continues to be the best advertising platform from an immediate conversion lift standpoint. Of course, it depends on the brand, the category, and who they’re targeting.

For brands just getting started on Meta, you need to balance the amount you’re spending with your creative velocity – i.e. the amount of content.

It’s about having differentiated pieces of platform-native content, in order to be able to get an understanding of what works.

TikTok

In general, TikTok is a great channel and a more upper-funnel media investment. For newer brands, being on TikTok is recommended if they’re in a trend-driven category, or if they have a younger audience.

There are two ways you can look at TikTok: TikTok Shop and TikTok ads.

TikTok Shop is a very promotion-driven channel and driven by their affiliate program. Think of it as an investment in a high-volume of affiliate content, and then being able to boost that affiliate content with paid.

With TikTok ads, it’s hard to see direct attribution between TikTok ad spend and DTC conversions. That’s why I recommend earlier stage brands to start on Meta and then test into TikTok. For brands that are omnichannel – that have a retail presence – and are just getting started in DTC, there might be more opportunity to grow brand awareness on TikTok.

Creator content is the predominant source of content for ads on TikTok. It’s about finding creators that are native to the platform, and getting agreements set up with them to have them create content for your product. You can start by seeding your product to creators who produce good content in your industry, and even paying them as an affiliate or contracting them. This becomes a pipeline for your ad creative on the platform.

Google

In categories that are very visual, such as apparel, Google Search and Google Shopping can be a great discovery channel. It requires you to delve into consumer psychology a bit and understand your customer.

For example, say I want a pair of black leather shoes. I’ll Google the words black leather shoes and scroll Google’s shopping feed until I find a photo that inspires me. Imagine I see one with a gold buckle I like, so I’ll do another search for black leather shoes with a gold buckle’.

A lot of brands tend to waste a lot of money bidding on their own branded keywords. Imagine I’m a Brand A and I want to bid on anyone who’s searching for Brand A. The return on ad spend is going to look great because that person is already aware of me and they may already have a high purchase intent. I’m potentially wasting money on bringing in a sale that would not have been an incremental net new sale.

Then again, if you have a lot of competition, maybe you’ll think differently. For example, if you do a Google search for Brand A and Brand B is showing up in your ads, then you probably want to spend a bit to defend your turf.

3. How to spend, test, and scale

For early ecommerce brands, one challenge is that they often don’t know how much to spend. Doing that math is the most important foundational step.

Before you start testing, you need to understand the financial implications of spending and advertising. That’s the first test! Can you handle the investment?

For early stage brands, you need to ask yourself:

• If I put $100 into Meta and got one customer, what is my AOV on that customer?
• What are my COGS and my gross margin?
• And less any ad investment I make, am I breaking even on acquiring that customer?

If you just want to see some growth, it’s less about understanding your total P&L and more about your unit economics and doing the math to find out how much you can actually afford for new customer acquisition. If your AOV is $200, your CAC is $50, and you have great margins, you can buy customers all day long.

Later stage brands need to think about:

• What does your P&L look like?
• What would happen if you introduced an advertising line item to your P&L?
• Assuming revenue doesn’t change in the first month, what is your tolerance to invest?
• What happens to your EBITDA?
• Can you afford to invest without any incremental gains in the first month?

So what happens next?

Once you understand your math, you can start the creative testing pipeline.

That means going into Meta, for instance, and…

• putting in a very small budget into one campaign
• ensuring your pixel is set up properly on your site
• running a conversion-optimized sales campaign, and
• putting new ad creative into the campaign weekly.

You’ll soon get into the practice and rhythm of launching new ads, trying different concepts and continuously iterating and learning what works

Time to diversify

You have to keep doing what’s working until it doesn’t work, and do that for as long as you can! But you also can’t be beholden to just one strategy. That’s why establishing KPIs in the beginning is so important.

Let’s say Meta servers go down. Is your business going to collapse because of one ad platform? So you should also be building your email automation and retention, and making sure that as you’re acquiring new customers, you have a way to predictably and consistently reconvert them.

Focus on how to build an anti-fragile business. How do you not rely on advertising? Because there’s always a point of diminishing returns in your ad spend. So keep building your organic social. And you can use a smaller percentage of your advertising budget for tests on TikTok and building brand partnerships

4. Let’s get creative

Meta has been saying that they want creative diversity, which is common sense. If you’re a user and you’re scrolling your feed and you keep seeing the same thing over and over again from every brand, or slight variations of the same thing from one brand, you’d be bored. What if your whole feed was homogeneous? You wouldn’t open Instagram anymore.

So you need to think:

• How can I entertain?
• How can I have different and surprising formats?
• How can I try things that haven’t been done before?

This is where many people get stuck. They’ll say: “My competitor did this, so I’m going to do it too.” Maybe that works for a week, but when everyone starts copying each other, Meta won’t reward that. They’ll reward things that break through the noise and gain attention and engagement – things that people want to share and click through.

Think of the ’AIDA framework’, the core principles of advertising that have existed since the dawn of time: your ads should drive attention, interest, desire, and action.

How to win at TikTok Shop

TikTok Shop has become one of the fastest new revenue channels for ecommerce brands — but only for those who understand how the platform really works. Below, Zain Ali breaks down what brands actually need to get started.

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What’s TikTok shop?

TikTok Shop is basically an ecommerce platform built within TikTok. It allows you to put a link to buy your product directly in a video, making it easy for customers to check out. Having creators talk about your product and getting sales on TikTok Shop has a strong halo effect in increasing brand awareness, which can boost sales in other channels, too.

What do brands need before they launch on TikTok Shop?

All you need is a physical product, ideally at a price point that’s reasonable. Something under $60 usually does well, because it’s more of an impulse buy, and it needs to be a physical product, not digital.

You open up a seller account, list your products or sync your listings from Shopify, then you send the product to affiliate creators, who will post videos and tag your product, which helps drive traffic, awareness and sales. You can also post it on your own, if you have a TikTok profile.

Given these are usually impulse buys, do brands often see repeat buyers?

TikTok also has a ’Subscribe and Save’ feature, where potential customers get a discount if they subscribe to your account. But most transactions on TikTok Shop are one-time purchases. But there’s a good chance that, if your product is quality and if it’s something consumable they’ll need again, you’ll have repeat buyers. It just might not be on TikTok Shop. It might be on Amazon or your website, etc. It’s important to keep an eye on this spillover effect.

What metrics should a seller focus on? Traffic, volume, repeat sales?

Your focus should be on getting the product into the hands of creators and posting as much content as possible. The more videos you post, the higher the chance one of them goes viral, and the more sales. It’s very much a volume game.

Should a seller post on their own account or focus more on creator content?

It’s always great when the brand puts out videos itself, but it’s difficult for brands to put out the volume they need to be successful without working with creators. 90% of sales on TikTok Shop are coming from affiliates.

Let’s say you posted one video a day on TikTok – 30 videos per month. The brands that are really succeeding on TikTok Shop are getting between 300-1000 videos being posted every month. Many of the brands doing $1+ million a month on TikTok Shop have 1000+ videos being posted. It’s really tough to get that volume without working with creators.

We recommend sending your product to at least 200-300 affiliate creators per month. A handful of those videos might go viral. That gives you a solid shot to see sales traction.

What role does social proof play in driving sales and conversions?

If you’re new on TikTok Shop with zero orders and zero reviews, it’s tough to get customers to try it. You should consider syncing some of your reviews from Shopify. There are a few tools and platforms that can do this for you.

And if you have existing customers, you can go into your Mailchimp account and send an email campaign to existing customers, asking them to try the product on TikTok Shop and to leave a review. All of this generates trust, which makes your conversion rate higher and makes it easier to gain initial traction.

What are the fulfillment options on TikTok Shop?

A while ago, you could sync your orders into Shopify to fulfill them. Now, TikTok is pushing people to use Fulfilled by TikTok (FBT), which is like FBA on Amazon. You send your inventory to TikTok, which fulfills your orders to the end-customer.

What are some TikTok Shop mistakes to avoid?

The number one mistake is not having enough patience. It’s very much a momentum-based platform. The first few months might be slow. Stick with it!

A story-first way to make paid creative

Chase Mohseni believes the most valuable levers in paid media today aren’t hacks or tools — they’re storytelling, narrative, taste, and knowing your customer. Below, he explains why.

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Most people go tools-first. That’s backwards. Before you find your tools, you need to know your terrain. Three things matter: understanding what the major platforms are doing, understanding the market you’re operating in, and understanding your customer. Once you have those laid out, you can tell any story you want and find any tool you need. Tools are irrelevant if you don’t have this foundation. But with this foundation, tools become accelerants. They can make something small feel big.

Every platform has a different narrative psychology, and understanding this changes how you build creative. Google is utility-driven — someone searches because they’re trying to get to the next leg of a journey. Your creative needs to answer. Instagram and TikTok are discovery-driven — people are scrolling, open to being surprised. Your creative needs to intrigue. Understanding your customer’s expectation of their experience on each platform will dictate how you communicate with them creatively and narratively.

This is also why tools-first thinking fails over time. Platforms evolve their algorithms constantly — TikTok might work well for six months, then stop if you haven’t evolved your creative. But customer psychology stays relatively consistent. You need to chase velocity in narrative, not tactics. Keep finding the next angle of your story, not the next tool.

Framework-wise, think vibe, variety, and velocity. What is the vibe of your customer and the channel you’re interacting with them on? What is the variety and diversity of your creative? And what is the velocity at which you can move to keep up with these channels? This triad matters because platforms reward freshness — if you nail vibe but lack velocity, your creative goes stale. If you have velocity but no variety, the algorithm sees repetition and stops serving you. All three need to work together.

One caveat: don’t confuse velocity with volume. Volume is a function of the size of your business. If you’re a million-dollar brand trying to match the volume of a $100 million brand, you’ll spread yourself too thin. If you have 100 ads live but only $10,000 a month to spend, none of those will get meaningful budget and you’ll have wasted time, money, and resources. As you scale, volume becomes more important — but it scales with the dollars you can deploy.

Most people get discouraged early in this process. They’ve built their Shopify, set up Mailchimp, and they’re ready to go. Then they run some ads and don’t get the conversions they want right away. They expect the money printer to start immediately. But getting water flowing through the pipes takes reps — not because you’re doing it wrong, but because that’s how systems stabilize. The name of the game is discipline and consistency. The unsexy truth is that this compounds over time, not overnight.

Performance Creative > Brand Guidelines

Dara Denney believes performance creative is dictated by the platform, not by your brand guidelines. Here, she explains how to think about personas, creative formats, testing velocity, and AI when building paid social systems that actually scale.

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How can a brand stay creatively consistent when running hundreds of ads?

From a performance perspective, I actually take a pretty unorthodox perspective – I encourage brands to relax or even let go of their branding guidelines and consistency in order to develop content that’s going to result in creative diversity and more potential for performance.

You need to think about the platform, what type of content works best on that platform, and which creators are going to be the best for representing that. So it’s really about what performs best from a conversion perspective and testing aggressively against that?

From the perspective of a brand just starting off, you need to be radically open to testing many different formats, strategies and tactics on paid social.

Often, brands say, “We’re not going to do this format because it doesn’t fit our brand guidelines”. Or “We need to use this type of font because we need brand consistency.” In my creative strategy work, I have very little tolerance for that, because for creative strategy, especially on Meta, what performs best is dictated by the platform and not by your branding guidelines.

It’s much more important to understand…

• What type of content do your consumers love?
• What type of personas are you actually targeted?
• What are the bread and butter content types they can’t get enough of?

• This helps determine what type of content you can start developing on the creative strategy side, in order to start scaling.

Let’s dig a bit more into this…

First, take stock of your core personas. It starts with understanding exactly who you’re marketing to. I always like to do a persona exercise, taking your existing customers and breaking them down into 3-5 core individuals that you should be marketing to.

A big reason we do this is because the 2026 algorithm is incredibly persona-based. Meta essentially categorizes an ad as engaging to this type of individual or an individual who likes this. So getting laser-focused on who you’re marketing to is the first step.

Next, take stock of your creative operations. What type of content are you able to actually create from an ops standpoint? Do you have a graphic designer on staff? Do you have a video editor? Are you just a founder doing it yourself and you’re therefore also the content creator?

Finally, understand the formats you can use to create performance creative to scale. This means the different types of image statics, your before-and-after statics, your bullet point statics, etc. What type of video content are you going to be making? Will you make founder ads? Problem/solution-oriented ads? Will you take a personal history angle? There are hundreds of amazing creative formats to test.

What are your thoughts on AI’s role in helping brands scale their creative?

My newly formed message to brand owners is to be AI-first, but don’t lose your humanity in the most important places. Where it’s most beneficial to use AI is static generation, helping to manage your Meta Ads account, and making sense of your data – it’s quickly becoming so much easier to have AI as your thought partner on these tasks.

The places where I don’t think brands should use AI is when it comes to using AI avatars or fake UGC. Many newer brand founders say, “I’m going to use AI people so I don’t have to be in the ads.” But there’s a cultural shift right now and people are becoming repulsed by that type of AI. When AI tries to masquerade as human, people get a funny feeling about it. It almost triggers a biological response, because we’re taught to fear things that look human but aren’t quite. It’s the ’uncanny valley’ effect.

But using an exaggerated animation or cartoon in your hook to illustrate your problem – people actually tend to react well to that. They’re generally not bothered when they know something is AI, as long as it’s not pretending to be a real person.

What’s the one thing ecommerce brands should know about creative performance?

If you can open up your phone and make a video explaining who you are and why you made your product, you’re going to be ahead of 50% of the people trying to make Meta ads creative work.

It’s not easy. I’m going through the process right now of starting a new brand myself – my second business. And I’ll admit, even as a creator, to feeling a bit uncomfortable saying, “Hey, my name is Dara, here’s what I’m creating and putting into the world.” Putting yourself out there is a psychological act. It’s not natural. But brand owners need to have those chops, because it’s the content that really resonates as you scale.

Chapter 10: How to retain customers with email and SMS

Introduction

Retention has quietly become the engine of ecommerce profitability.

Traffic is more expensive, conversion is harder, and many brands no longer make money on the first purchase. Profit is now about what happens after the order.

In this chapter, Feras Khouri and Eric Rausch break down how modern ecommerce operators build retention that actually moves the needle, from the flows that matter, to segmentation that influences the customer journey, to the metrics that reveal whether your brand is truly healthy.

They show why a strong returning-customer base is the thing that makes growth sustainable.

1. The power of returning customers

A snapshot of the ecommerce landscape

FERAS: Eric and I come from the brand side, so we’ve seen the DTC space evolve over the last ten years. It’s become very expensive to acquire customers. There’s increased competition, and more restraints around targeting. More companies, new and established, are spending on platforms such as Meta.

But once it gets too expensive to acquire customers this way, the golden ecommerce equation starts to break down:

Traffic x Conversion Rate x Average Order Value (which has a CLV component) = Sales

Back in the day, you could over-index on the conversion rate and the quality of the traffic being good and inexpensive. Now, brands no longer see the same economics vis-a-vis acquiring customers, so their profit comes from retaining customers.

Think of it this way: If brands aren’t making as much money on an initial purchase – or even losing money on the first purchase – they need to supplement it by having a strong retention program.

Growth comes from paid media, but profit comes from retention. Here’s the good news: retention channels – email, SMS, loyalty programs, physical mailers, mobile apps, etc – are cheaper than paying to acquire a customer.

ERIC: Retention marketing is therefore about retaining your customers by reminding them how good your product is, how much they benefit from it, and why they need to purchase more of it.

Post-purchase is where retention marketing lives and dies. It involves reminding your customer what they purchased and what its best case use is, along with cross-selling and upselling within your brand’s product suite.

If a customer buys a shirt, retention marketing helps that customer find the best ways to optimize their experience with the shirt they just bought, including finding the rest of the outfit, whether that’s pants, a jacket, or a hat.

High AOV + high repeat customer rate = success

FERAS: In general, you want as many returning customers as possible, because the more returning customer revenue you have, the easier it is for you to scale.

That’s why subscription brands are often able to scale so quickly, because if they can acquire customers profitably and get them to stick around for a certain period of time, they have a baseline of monthly recurring revenue that can absorb fluctuations in paid media spend and efficiency – even if the brand has a bad day, week or month in terms of acquiring new customers.

In general, at least 30% of your day-to-day revenue should be from returning customers. But it can be different for every brand.

In most cases, a high AOV means a lower returning customer rate, and a low AOV means a higher returning customer rate. Where you start to see challenges is when you have a low AOV and a low returning customer rate – think of a product such as phone cases. Or on the other side of the spectrum, you could have high AOV and a low returning customer rate, such as with mattresses.

So, your mission as a brand is to ask yourself…

How can you have a high enough AOV to be first-purchase profitable, but also have a strong enough repeat customer rate – or customer lifetime value through repeat purchase or upsell – so that you’re still making money after you pay to acquire the customer for the first time?

2. Get your flows right

A flow is an automated sequence of coordinated email and SMS messages triggered by a customer action or behavior. Here are some that work.

ERIC: Shockingly, many brands don’t have all the key flows, email triggers and SMS triggers in place that you would expect. For something like 90% of brands, there are 10 or so evergreen flows that will produce 95% of the revenue. The rest are things like birthday flow, which sound nice, but honestly generates almost zero money.

The flows that often work include…

• Welcome
• Post Purchase
• Abandoned Checkout
• Abandoned Cart
• Abandoned Browse
• Winback
• Rewards Reminder

Flows are so important to get right. It’s about understanding what the juice and the squeeze are for each individual action that you take.

A 50% incremental win in a win-back flow could net a couple thousand dollars, but a 5% incremental win in a welcome series could net you $100,000. It all depends on the traffic going to your website and into those individual flows.

To get this right just requires some time-ROI on flow-work for an email, SMS or retention agency, to see if your flows are configured properly and figure out the easiest tests to strategically move the needle.

Ultimately, the incremental revenue per email or per delivery over the course of the year can compound into millions of dollars.

3. Segmentation is key

What a good segmentation strategy looks like

ERIC: For the sake of a base point, let’s imagine there are 10 levels of segmentation.

The first level is to send to everyone on your list, all the time.

The second level is to do an engaged 60 – meaning, if you’ve opened, clicked or been active on the website in the last 60 days, we’ll send you every email.

As you slowly, incrementally go ’up the ladder’ from 1 to 10, you get more granular on segmenting out buyers, non-buyers, win-backs, prospects, active paying subscribers, or whatever it might be, and getting deep insights on each individual segment.

Let’s say that your email sends over the course of a week are a promotional email, a reviews-based email, a product email, and a blog post. If you set up proper segmentation that uses baseline buyers-engaged, non-buyers-engaged in win-backs, you can figure out that these types of emails resonate the most with these types of customers.

You can then start to really index within that. For instance, you might discover that a win-back segment that hasn’t purchased in six months, but which has been active in three months, has the most ROI when you send a bestselling product email or a new arrivals drop.

If you do these baseline adjustments, you can actually use your campaign emails to funnel into your flows, and then constantly iterate on what messaging is resonating with your customers the most.

Influencing the customer journey

ERIC: Think of your cohorts in terms of: What do you want the customer to do?

• If they’re an active paying subscriber to a subscription membership, you basically want them to not cancel their subscription, and even add another product to their subscription.
• If they’re a win-back customer, whether subscription or not, you want them to buy again – ideally something they haven’t tried before or that they tried in the past and enjoyed.

All of these are relevant when you’re looking at your messaging:

• If it’s a prospect, your message is: “Here are all the paths to buy.”
• If it’s a win-back, it’s: “You haven’t purchased in a while. Here’s why you should come back.”
• If they’re a one-time purchaser, it’s: “Here’s all the reasons you would benefit if you just subscribed.”
• And if they’re a subscriber, it’s: “Here’s what you subscribe to and here are some things that could make your subscription better.”

4. Track these metrics

Non-subcription metrics

FERAS: There are subscription and non-subscription metrics. A few things are consistent across both, but let’s start with non-subscription.

One of the first things we can dig into is your email and SMS program. While email and SMS are amazing for retention, they impact acquisition too. You might have quite a lot of prospects on your list who haven’t purchased, so email and SMS can play a big role in converting people.

There are a few major ’buckets’ of metrics to track here...

• One major one is your popup. How effectively are you capturing all of those expensive customers that you’re sending to the website?
• Then there’s your prospects. Within your retention program, how effectively are you converting prospects into buyers? This involves anything that touches prospects, from your welcome flow to abandonment flows, which are laser-focused on converting people.
• Next are campaigns: How effectively are you getting prospects to convert, or existing customers to come back and purchase as many times as humanly possible?
• Finally, there’s the overall deliverability of your account. What is your spam rate, bounce rate, and deliverability score?

Subscription metrics

FERAS: Subscription brands are laser-focused on reducing churn, which all boils down to revenue. If you reduce churn, people stay longer, and revenue goes up.

So the approach is a bit different. Subscription brands have prospects, just like a normal brand, and many offer one-time purchases, just like a normal brand.

But then they also have this unique thing called active subscribers. You have to be very careful with active subscribers, because you don’t want to message them too much, because then they might cancel.

Every email you send them is a reminder for them to cancel your subscription.

5. The biggest retention opportunity

FERAS: The biggest opportunity to move the needle is for you to understand your numbers better, understand your levers, and hammer the fundamentals.

It’s always shocking how many brands don’t understand their numbers. This isn’t just about opens, clicks and revenue. It’s about your cohort data: What are your customers doing? What are their behaviors?

Use software to help you get insights on your cohorts and better understand data-points such as…

• Of all the people who purchased in February, how many are purchasing again in March, April, May or June?
• If they purchase product A, what’s the next purchase they’re making? Product B? Product C?
• What’s the average number of days between orders?
• What are your repurchase rates by month?
• What’s your customer lifetime value by product?
• Does your hero product have a very low CLV, but your number two product has a very high CLV?

Your next job is to figure out how to impact the above with your retention touchpoints – the big ones being email and SMS, but your customer support, website, product and packaging all impact retention, too.

ERIC: This ties into the importance of integrated marketing. Individual channels often operate in their own silo.

Your acquisition team needs to talk with your website team which needs to talk with your customer service team – and all of that information needs to go back through the system so that the retention team can correct expectation-setting and post-purchase care instructions.

This is where many brands fail, and you can win.

Chapter 11: How to think about profitability

Introduction

Accounting is what keeps your business alive.

Revenue can flatter you. Profit tells the truth.

According to Drew Fallon, most ecommerce operators don’t truly understand the numbers that decide whether they’re building something durable or digging themselves into a hole.

So, this chapter breaks down the financial foundations every brand needs — the margins that matter, the cash flow realities operators underestimate, the CAC curves that surprise them, and the accounting infrastructure that keeps you out of trouble as you scale.

1. Know your gross margin!

What should an ecommerce operator know about accounting and profitability?

I’ve seen a lot of brands scale quickly to $10 million, but at that point you can’t outrun bad or lopsided unit economics. It’s a ticking time bomb.

That’s why you need to understand how your unit economics and operational expenses reconcile with each other. And it’s the reason it’s critical to focus on profitability from the get-go.

If that $10m brand had been focused on having a better gross margin – which is everything in product businesses – then it might have arrived at $10 million slightly more slowly – three years instead of two – but it would have been far less likely to go out of business in the process.

You need to have visibility into your economics at an accrual level, so that you can manage your cash accordingly.

What’s the best way of thinking about gross margin?

Your revenue minus the cost of your product and costs of goods sold. As soon as someone places an order on your Shopify, you get charged for the payment processing, you’ve gotta ship it, there’s probably freight to pay to get it to the 3PL, there’s the cost to deliver it, there’s postage. Anything that goes into when the customer places the order and you incur an expense is a cost of goods sold.

Your gross margin is the foundation of everything. You really need to understand it. It’s often hard to calculate it, so very few people actually know the true number.

What are some other important unit economics ideas that ecommerce operators need to understand?

Contribution margin per order. You could slice it a few different ways, but the most basic way to think about it is: if you sell a product for $100 and your gross margin is 50%, that means you make $50 of gross margin.

If you have $10 in overheads – salaries, rent, etc. – then your CAC and marketing expense should be $40 at the very most, because then you’re breaking even on a fully-burdened net income basis. And then you’re good.

It’s when you start dipping into the red that those economics start destroying value, the more orders that you make. If you sell one order and lose $10, fine. If you sell 1000 orders and each loses $10, that starts to hurt. That’s where growth actually begins to destroy enterprise value, as opposed to creating it.

How else can contribution margin be useful when making growth decisions?

Contribution margin wasn’t actually meant to be used for growth, but it’s recently fallen into the hands of digital marketers and adopted weirdly by the ecommerce industry. It was originally meant for manufacturing businesses to figure out how many widgets they needed to make to cover the depreciation of the machine!

Contribution margin is basically a managerial accounting metric. The purpose is to determine a break-even point at which you cover your fixed costs.

Let’s say you have an overhead of $100 and you make $10 for every unit you sell. How much contribution margin do you need to break even? $100. How many units do you need to sell? Well, if you’re making 10 per unit, you need to sell 10 units. So your contribution margin at 10 units is zero.

If you’re at break-even and you have some element of repurchase, then you can reasonably assume that if you continue on that path, the same thing happens – they start to stack on each other and the gross profit starts to pile up.

As long as those costs aren’t changing, then you can keep growing, because you’ve covered your costs, and every incremental dollar is going to produce more economic value.

But… the costs will change, because your CAC is going to go up! [see CAC section below]

2. The realities of cash flow

How should scaling ecommerce brands think about cash flow?

As you get started with a business, it’s very rare that you don’t lose some money in the beginning. And you shouldn’t pretend like you’re not going to. You should be prepared to. You should have the reserves.

The “cash conversion cycle” is a bit of a myth, because, as I said, you can’t outscale bad unit economics. Growth does not last forever.

There’s a fable going around the ecommerce industry the last five years that a brand can scale to $500 million in revenue with a negative cash conversion cycle.

But your cash conversion cycle can’t create economic value. You need to make a profit!

What are some big cash drains you’ve spotted?

Think about your cash flow statement. If net income is quite positive on the cash flow statement, inventory is very often a use of cash. It takes cash down. Inventory can be brutal. It really hurts.

But the higher your net income is, it increasingly doesn’t matter if your inventory is subtracting from your cash balance, because you have that nice cushion.

Now, when people really get themselves into trouble is when they don’t have a lot of net income – and they also have to pay for the inventory. All of a sudden, cash is super negative.

The answer is always to be aware of your unit economics and how much accounting profit you’re making. You can’t have a negative cash conversion cycle and a five year payback. That’s not a good business.

3. Why CAC will (and should) go up

What’s the best way of thinking about CAC as your brand scales?

How many customers did you acquire last month (or some other time-bound period)? And how much did you spend on marketing? That’s your CAC. You can twist yourself into knots trying to come up with other ways of figuring it out, but there’s no need. Because that’s what’s going to show up on your P&L.

Your CAC will probably never decrease. Decreasing your CAC is not the game you should be playing – at least in my opinion. The game is to acquire customers who will continue to buy your product. In which case, it doesn’t necessarily matter if your CAC goes up, because you have so many more repeat customers, and it compounds.

If you acquire 10 customers, that’s a cohort of 10 people that can come back. Great. If 5 of them come back, you can use that money to acquire the next incremental set of customers. Generally speaking in ecommerce it’s really hard to build a super valuable, profitable business in a category where people aren’t repeat purchasing, because you need your customers to basically pay for your incremental customer acquisition. Therefore, when you have more customers, you can finance a higher CAC.

The way you win in ecommerce is when you acquire so many customers that it actually outpaces the growth in CAC. That’s how successful brands like AG1 and Grüns can afford to keep paying for new customers. Because they have such a giant base of customers that are coming back – and they’re coming back with high gross margin orders. If they were coming back with a 25% gross margin order, that’s not much cash to play with. But 70%? That’s awesome.

4. Remember your fundamentals

When should ecommerce operators start building a financial model and forecasting?

My first business was a supplements company. I built out the financial model and did my books in QuickBooks. You can just feel the business better, see the transactions, see the forecasts and then internalize everything so intensely.

If you’re a startup and making less than a million dollars in revenue, you don’t necessarily need to be spending 50 hours a week on a financial model. You should be putting out more creative, testing more ads, and figuring out how to scale up. But every so often you definitely need to get in there and refamiliarize yourself with the way that your business works.

What’s a big financial mistake ecommerce operators make as they grow?

They lie to themselves about their unit economics. They forecast some rosy payback or fake CAC. That’s the ultimate crime.

Another one is they don’t give themselves the opportunity to set up good infrastructure.

I talk to businesses making $10 million in revenue that ask, “What accounting ledger do you use? We usually just use Excel.” And I’m astonished.

You don’t necessarily need a fancy setup, but don’t be afraid to build your business! You need good people and good infrastructure – even if you’re really profitable and lucky. A lot of times people don’t think these things matter until it’s too late.

Chapter 12: How to nail your customer support

Introduction

Customer support plays a bigger role in ecommerce success than most ecommerce operators realize.

Support teams shape expectations, influence retention, and uncover the product issues that determine whether a customer ever comes back. And in an era where AI is taking over repetitive work, the human side of support, such as empathy, accountability and clarity, becomes even more valuable.

In this chapter, Eli Weiss breaks down what great support actually looks like today: how to set expectations, when to use different support channels, and how to turn customer conversations into reliable retention insights.

1. The changing nature of customer support

Eli, what are some universal themes that apply to good customer support?

Number one, the bar is super low. Most brands don’t realize that just setting proper expectations puts you ahead of 95% of brands. Think about the expectations around shipping. If you say it’s going to take two to three days and it takes five, you look really bad. If you say it’ll take five to seven days and it takes three, you look great. It’s mostly about expectations across the board.

Customer experience more broadly is also never in a vacuum. Everything is related. And so the biggest lever is your product. If you have a crappy product, no one will repurchase it. You can hire the best customer experience, support or retention person in the world, and it won’t solve for a crappy product.

In what ways is customer support work changing?

Customer support is funny, because on one hand, your ideal outcome is somebody to not have to reach out for support. But there’s also a paradox: if somebody reaches out with a negative situation and you can make it right, they’re 10 times more likely to be excited with your brand. Should brands screw up in the hopes that they can fix it and make it better? Absolutely not!

Customer support agents aren’t often incentivized to care, so their responses often sound like a prerecorded message. But when people take personal accountability, even if it’s not their fault, it immediately relieves the tension. This human diffusion of tension is going to be massively important in the age of AI. AI is going to make human moments so much more important than they’ve ever been.

Most customer support people right now are, like, “Oh my god, will I lose my job?” But I think they’ll actually be doing higher leverage, more meaningful, hospitality-esque work. In the age of AI, great support will mean empathy and high EQ. That’s the future of customer support. It’s the rainmaker, the magician, the brand moment.

2. From a company’s perspective

For a growing DTC brand, how can they justify the cost of customer support?

In the past, we had to justify crazy high costs. We’d say, “You need a team of 50 and it needs to be in-house, because if you send it to the Philippines, it won’t be as good.” But in the future, I don’t think it will be this way. Instead, the framing is, “Do you want to justify a fraction of the cost you’re spending on billboards to create meaningful moments?” It becomes a more human question.

It’s becoming far less of an uphill battle. If I’m hiring a 10-person team in the US just to answer emails all day, it’s harder to see the perceived value of that. But if they’re only doing the most high-leverage tasks, you should be able to see meaningful results faster.

And when people see that your brand is doing such magical moments, and customers are getting excited about it, and they’re not spending a crazy amount of money, hopefully the baseline goes higher. The reason why the bar is so low is because it’s expensive and manual and rigorous and annoying. But in the age of AI, hopefully it’ll be less.

When you’re getting into customer support, what channels should brands prioritize?

I think the biggest mistake is that small brands think they have to do everything. And there’s nothing worse than a chat that’s not responsive. There’s nothing worse than a discord that’s not moderated. Customers would rather you do one thing and do it well. I would rather know that you just have chat support and it’s fantastic, versus now I can send you a DM, but you respond 10 days later.

Most brands should just choose the easiest channel. Chat is hard. Yes, you can leverage AI, but when it gets escalated you need a human, and the human has to be readily available. Even on email, brands say they have a 30 minute response time, but their responses might be garbage.

3. Taking on feedback

How should a brand document this feedback?

There are a bunch of tools in the current AI age that can pull all of it together. But I honestly think that, from a zoomed out perspective, the most important thing you can do is tag the trends and issues customers have with your product. How do you track these trends over time? If you’re not taking a tally of that week over week and sharing it with the team, you’re unable to identify and prioritize the issues that matter most to your customers.

The value of good support is you can really gauge things like, “Should we do this product again next year?” I think that’s the future of customer listening. In my 10+ years doing this, I think the biggest mistake brands make is they think they need to be spending nine figures on enterprise tools to build out the infrastructure for this, and you can do it at $100 a month. It’s not expensive to track stuff like this.

There will come a time when the initial first line of support – whether it’s an agent, live chat, AI – can’t handle it themselves. What are some best practices on approaches for escalation that don’t make the customer feel like they’re getting passed around?

I think the most important learning I’ve had, even in the early days making $33,000 a year and answering 500 emails a week, is that escalation is generally one of two reasons: number one is that you can’t provide the support they want, which is less common than the second, which is they don’t feel heard.

So when you’re just reciting the same scripted response from the piece of paper you’re reading on your laptop (“We’re so sorry you had XYZ”), they ask for a supervisor not because they want a different outcome, but because they want to be heard. And they’re like, “If you’re not going to hear me, I’m going to make your boss know that you’re not going to hear me.” And then the boss gets on the phone and apologizes, and suddenly everything is okay.

So the biggest key around escalation is people want to be heard. They want to be understood. You can take responsibility and accountability without it being your fault. The best reps that I’ve ever worked with were people that can be human, can jump in, and can get creative, even if you know that you can’t refund someone.

The biggest mistake around escalation is you think the customer needs a manager in their title, but no, 90% of calls shouldn’t be escalated if you give them empathy and promise that you’ll do the best you can. People just want to know that you’re doing the best you can.

Customer support can’t fix a bad product. What other things can the company focus on for retention and boosting LTV?

The weird phase we’re going into with AI is that, eventually, maybe not today, but in a year or two, AI agents might be doing the purchasing for you. And in that case, a brand won’t have to build loyalty with a person. They’ll have to build loyalty with an AI agent! We’re in an interesting place.

For some brands, loyalty is fantastic. Other brands don’t need a loyalty program – if you’re buying a mattress every 10 years, for instance. But loyalty is only part of the equation.

The big three things to think about are: product, expectations and post-purchase messaging. Even if it’s a subscription, you have to resell the value of your product constantly. This is what email and SMS are great for. So many DTC brands are focused on sell, sell, sell, but they’re not doing enough product value messaging. And that’s a big mistake.

Chapter 13: How to measure success

Introduction

Most businesses hit that moment when their marketing starts to feel… fuzzy.

Sales are up, or down, or sideways — but why? Which channel is actually pulling its weight? And which ones only look good because they’re catching people at the finish line?

That’s where analytics steps in. It’s not a crystal ball, but it gives you a way of understanding the real story behind your growth. Good measurement gives you confidence. It cuts the emotional decision-making. It shows you what’s working, what’s not, and what deserves more fuel.

For this chapter, we called in someone who’s spent years helping brands scale with clarity: Rabah Rahil, former CMO of Triple Whale and FERMÀT. His advice boils down to this: get really good at the basics — attribution, MER, LTV, and a sane dashboard — and your marketing becomes dramatically easier to run.

1. How to think about attribution

Attribution is backward-looking. Attribution is a historical record. Think of it like looking at the rear-view mirror in your car.

It can really help you forecast and understand past performance. Attribution can be done many ways at the channel level, whether it’s on Meta, Google, TikTok.

As you get more channels online, you start to get into a more sophisticated marketing ecosystem. That’s when you want to consider looking at things such as MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio) or Ecosystem ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).

You’re essentially taking the total sales divided by your total marketing ad spend. Then you’ll know for every ad dollar you spend, how much revenue it’s generating. That’s not going to give you channel-level performance, but it’ll give you marketing ecosystem performance.

And then, if you really want to start looking at profitability, you can look at your gross profit over your ad spend. That’s a really nice metric for gauging profit. But MER is really going to be the closest metric to the business impact.

The two big decisions you really want to make are…

• What attribution model are you using?
• What attribution window are you using?

2. Attribution models

There are a variety of models you can use, depending on how sophisticated you want to get. But for a beginner, you don’t need a cannon to kill a mosquito (i.e. an overly complex model.) You just need to decide which attribution approach makes the most sense for what you want to track and focus on those metrics.

For example: Do I care about my ads that get people to the party? Do I care about ads that tell people about the party? Do I care about ads that get money from people at the party?

What I mean by that is, there is one model of attribution called first click attribution, and that means no matter what happens, the first time somebody enters the ecosystem through this ad, that’s their first touchpoint. And so if I look at first click attribution, that can be really great to understand what’s driving that – what we would call top of the funnel performance.

And then last click attribution is the last touchpoint that they had before they made a purchase. That can be really useful to understand if you have a product that has a longer consideration cycle, what ads are actually converting these people to give us a purchase?

And then you can get really complex, where you have linear models. You can get into different types of weighting. But for DTC it’s mostly a very linear purchase where you have an awareness, consideration, and conversion phase, and you’ll use first-click or last-click attribution.

3. Attribution windows

The last thing you want to look at is your attribution windows. And that means from when that person touches an ad, how long do you want to look back?

The reason an attribution window matters is because if you start to look back 28 days and you have a sophisticated marketing ecosystem, it starts to pervert the data, because who’s to say that’s actually the thing that impacted it?

For example, if you have a first click attribution model, or even a last click attribution model and you’re looking back 28 days from that ad, you’ve probably also had email campaigns, organic campaigns, and UGC campaigns running.

The real gold standard is a 1-day click, 1-day view. And what that means is, did somebody click on this ad or view this ad within one day and convert? That’s a really short, tight window, which is a bug and a feature. It’s a bug when you’re a really small business, because you probably don’t have a lot of people buying first-purchase on the ads.

Secondarily, if you have a high AOV product or high price points, you’re not going to buy a $5,000 couch when you see one ad. Whereas maybe you would buy a $50 supplement on one ad, one touchpoint. So this is something that you need to take into consideration.

Most people default to a 7-day click, 1-day view. What that means is, did somebody click this ad within 7 days or see this ad within 1 day of the conversion event?

4. The challenges of attribution

Since attribution is about past performance, it’s like that old maxim about stocks: past performance is not indicative of future performance. Especially for a growing brand. It’s really challenging to have an apples to apples comparison.

You might start out posting on Instagram, then run some Facebook ads, which start making you money, then you get into email marketing and SMS, which are incredible. Then you bolt on Google, and then TikTok, and then UGC. And suddenly all these touch points start to become really intertwined.

There’s a joke in marketing about somebody who doesn’t know a business or is looking in from the outside: “Oh my God, look at the ROAS on these retargeting campaigns!” A retargeting campaign being someone who already knows you and your products. But the challenge with attribution is disambiguating that from, “Are you just handing somebody an ad when they’re already walking to the checkout?” Because that’s not driving incremental value, yet it will show up in the attribution.

There’s an art and science of attribution. There’s the science of measurement, and there’s the art of allocation. And this is where CMOs, VPs of marketing, and high-level paid media managers make their money: understanding what is actually driving the incremental purchase.

There are many ways to do this, but the fastest, easiest way is, if you’re thinking about a channel and the metrics seem questionable, you either turn the channel off completely, or turn it up to 11. If you turn off Google for a week and save all this money and revenue still hasn’t moved, then Google probably wasn’t adding any incremental revenue.

And vice versa, if you turn the channel up to 11 and you’ve tripled sales, amazing. That’s a way to hack the system. If you add such an ’extreme’ into the system, you can see how that reverberates through the system from your baselines within 7 to 10 days. And then adjust accordingly.

Then, as you get much bigger, you can add something called mixed media modeling, which basically means doing a huge regression on your entire marketing ecosystem.

5. The role of lifecycle marketing

First purchase metrics matter, because you need enough oxygen in the tank from every customer. If you can get a lot of oxygen in the tank from the first purchase, you’re in a great place. But if you have a subscription business, you might not mind taking a break-even or a loss on your first order, because your data says they won’t churn for 6 to 12 months.

Of course, if you’re only six months old, you won’t know if customers are going to stay with you for 12 months. You don’t really have the data to support that.

All of this gets into LTV. Real businesses are run off of LTV, not CAC. You can’t just be on this CAC hamster wheel of pain to get people to go out with you everyday. You want people to go on the date with you – that’s the first purchase. If somebody makes a third or fourth purchase, you kind of get married to the brand.

That’s where lifecycle marketing comes in…

Do I have a great email flow set up? Do I have SMS set up? Because the costs of those are negligible compared to paid ads, which are very expensive. You want to ideally use ads to get customers for first orders and then you use retention and lifecycle marketing so you don’t have to pay to reacquire these customers. This is why subscription models are so sought after.

6. The lifecycle metrics that matter

The lifecycle metrics you should really care about are:

• Repeat purchase rate: How often are people buying my products? Are there cross-sells or upsells around that? Now you can get higher AOV which will boost your LTV.
• LTV: Your lifetime value
• Time between first and second purchases: The shorter the better.

Those three metrics can give you a pretty good idea of how healthy a customer base is. You’ll then be able to segment your customer base into your evangelists, people that made more than three purchases, people that have made two purchases, people that have only made one purchase, and people who have a purchase but haven’t purchased in six months. And those are essentially new customers that you need to figure out how to reactivate.

7. Dashboard best practices

Broadly speaking, you need to understand the rhythm of your business. How this looks in practice depends on your role in the company.

If you’re the paid media manager, you’re probably checking your ad accounts daily. Also it depends on how much money you’re spending. I know people that are spending $1,000 a day. I know people that are spending $60,000 a day. You’re spending a lot of money a day, you want to have a tighter understanding vis-a-vis if your budget is being spent in the right way, at the right times.

If you’re an email marketer, you’re probably checking the dashboard every time you send an email because you want to see click through. You want to see how much money you’re driving.

If you’re the CMO, I would check the dashboard every few days or have a ’power five’ metrics on display: revenue, ad spend, MER, profit, and maybe return rate or subscription rate.

It’s also very nuanced to the size of your particular business.

For smaller ecommerce store owners, if checking your dashboard makes you emotional, you’re checking it too often. But if you’re constantly surprised by what you see on the dashboard, you might be checking it too infrequently.

Emotional decisions are bad decisions, and being shocked by what’s going on in your business is, of course, bad.

Chapter 14: How to navigate growing pains

Introduction

Every brand dreams of scale, but the path from an early idea to a real business rarely follows pure intuition. Growth comes in phases — each with its own problems, signals, and traps — and the brand operators that ’win’ are the ones that know which stage they’re in and what to focus on.

The truth is, the moves that matter at $20K in revenue look nothing like the decisions you face at $20M. Product market fit, paid acquisition, hiring, forecasting, creative velocity, cash flow — all of these change shape as your brand climbs. And trying to apply “big brand” tactics too early (or too late) is one of the fastest ways to stall momentum.

In this chapter, Ari Murray walks through the real growth journey she’s seen again and again — and what derails brands that grow before they’re ready.

PHASE 1: $0 → $100K

This is your proving-ground phase — where you’re testing your idea with real strangers, learning fast, and building the first signs of traction. The goal is simple: get cold traffic to validate that your product is worth paying for.

It’s time to build your foundations

The sooner you can start testing paid acquisition against a concept, the sooner strangers can prove to you that what you have is worth buying.

This is how you establish product-market-fit outside of your supportive circle of friends and family. The sooner cold traffic can meet your brand, the better.

This is also when you can start building the foundations of collecting customer data, such as email and phone numbers, via a simple landing page.

People wait too long to bring an idea into the world and spend too much money, and they might have a big problem. It’s better to find that out sooner than later.

So in that sense, zero to $100K is the same path as zero to $1M. You’re still finding your legs, and the more new customers that can pay for the product, the better luck you’ll have.

What to focus on and what to ignore

Ecommerce operators should learn to do as much as possible themselves, because zero to $100K is still a very small business.

Every person hopefully has one sweet spot that makes them really good at being an integral part of their new and quickly growing business. Personally, I spend my time in marketing. Others spend their time in ops. It’s crucial you hone the specific part of the business that you’re going to own, and then be well acquainted with and responsible for revenue.

Spend your time balancing your skills – bringing in a team, buying media to get your first customers, or bringing in a finance person if you’re bad with the books.

From zero to $100K, there’s not a lot of free cash. The more you can learn to do it yourself, the better.

The metrics that matter most

Repeat is probably the best sign of product market fit. So in this first stage, repeat rate is a metric you should watch really closely to make sure you’re selling something people come back for. This helps to inform what the lifetime value could be. The stickiness of your customer is a really great tell.

Then, new customer CAC is important to watch as well, because you have to be able to afford to bring in those customers for them to eventually repeat.

PHASE 2: $100K → $500K

You’ve found early product–market fit and momentum is forming. Now the job is building repeatable systems — around product, channels, and early team support — without getting distracted or overreacting to one-off wins.

The product-focused systems to get in place

In this phase, a system around new product expansion and refinement matters most. Hopefully by now you’ve got your first batch of big customers. So what’s the plan? Will you have a drop model as your way of building momentum? Will you keep to 1 or 2 SKUs or launch a new version or a new flavor? If you’ve launched something very niche, maybe there’s a complimentary product to raise AOV.

Think about product expansion systems and a go-to-market plan for those new products, or drill-down into your existing products and collect proof, reviews and press – and get louder.

There’s no right answer, but this is the time when the product has already been in-market – there’s proof of life – and so emphasizing your go-to-market against the product and telling stories against those SKUs will be the next chapter.

Then you can start to unlock efficiencies of scale. You’ll get a better deal with your 3PL or you’ll be able to afford a better marketing agency. But in the midst of all this, you still need to be laser-focused on your product. Once you’ve proven it’s good, people will start to watch you.

How to think about channels

Meta will be your best friend for a long time. Meta and Google are a great one-two punch. Demand generation plus demand capture.

Any tertiary channels are also great. TikTok makes sense next, even as a place to join the conversation. But wherever you’re going to spend, make sure you also devote energy to posting organically, maintaining your highlights on Instagram, sparking relationships with creators on TikTok, etc. All of these things really matter.

In sum: do Meta really well in this phase, don’t overspend on Google, and the rest is the icing on the cake. You’ll probably do poorly on the next ten channels if those first two aren’t ready.

Pay attention to who you hire

Hiring depends on who the founder is and what they’re good at. Remember there’s also power in freelancers and outside agencies. Sometimes people wait too long to bring in people that allow the existing team to move quickly. So, hiring a project manager, even as a freelancer, can make sense earlier.

Mistakes to avoid

Make sure that you’re scaling on repeatable systems you can predict. You want to make sure that first big jump wasn’t because of lightning striking the brand. Did Oprah feature it? Did something major happen that isn’t actually a sign of future progress or a future pattern?

Once you’re struck by lightning, you can overreact and buy too much product, hire too fast, and grow quicker than the market will allow you to.

That’s all the more reason to make sure CAC is under control and there’s a pattern in your growth, versus something that might never happen again.

Phase 3: $500K → $1M

Resources start to open up in this phase, allowing you to expand creative output, strengthen retention, and move faster — as long as you stay focused on your core category and avoid drifting into unproven territory.

The resources that come with growth

The best way to drive growth is to do more at the same level. As you scale, there are usually more resources, and you’re able to get more out the door on a daily basis, which means you’re able to bring better things to market quickly.

Anyone can make 100 ads, but 100 ads that tell different stories and are persona-based, well-researched and beautiful, isn’t easy.

How brands plateau at this stage – and how to avoid it

Brands that hit a plateau are often distracted or diverted from their main category. They might be a meal kit brand that suddenly launches a totally different product. Or a brand that sells mascara and then launches a loofah. Sometimes you can be overconfident in switching categories without proper research. Of course, it can also work really well and not backfire. But trust me, I’ve seen it backfire.

I also think that brands that have a celebrity or a known founder are really fragile, because they could change their status, popularity, or interest. If this is a side hustle and they’re known for something else, this might not be their passion. They might change their mind.

A couple bad product launches can also mess up who the market thinks you are, and then before you know it you’ve created a bad situation. A lot can go wrong!

Phase 4: $1M → ???

Growth becomes more complex as you layer channels, retail, forecasting, and team expansion. The brands that thrive here keep cohesion, read signals carefully, and scale without losing the scrappiness that got them started.

The growth challenges in the march to eight figures

Sometimes it’s hard to understand the signals you’re getting. And so, if you’re diversified in more than one place of selling – you might be spending against your DTC store, but you might have retail traffic too – it can be hard to know what’s happening.

As you grow, the brand can take on a life of its own, and sometimes it’s hard to understand exactly how point A gets you to point B.

It’s also really hard to forecast a high-growth brand. You can be overexposed in some categories, have not enough stock in others, and that can really stall you.

That dance is hard to predict, because it’s not easy to forecast a brand that’s growing really quickly. It’s exciting, but it can also eat up cash flow or lose revenue potential if you sell out of something that’s a surprise winner. I’ve seen this a lot.

Keep cohesion as your team expands

You can’t always have the same team as the company grows. You can invest in roles that are more experiential. You can spend more on brand, or more on marketers that have the budget to do big events, or plan a partnership that might take place in a year. You can in-house so many functions.

Make sure the team that got you to where you are is supported and growing with you. Your team still needs to operate from a scrappy place and enjoys what they’re doing. Teams that have fun do better work!

Channel diversification beyond DTC

I spend my time on digital and DTC, and there’s so much power in controlling your own site – in investing in and owning that relationship. But it depends on your category and what you sell. There’s so much opportunity in selling in other places. There’s a lot of open ocean, which is exciting.

If you sell cold-pressed juice, which is what I used to sell, and it’s cold chain [a supply chain that uses refrigeration], then you’d want to spend more time in retail. If you sell electrolytes that are lightweight to ship and have a high refund rate, you want to sell in Walmart but also own your store. If your biggest problem is the cost of product shipped and landed, then an expansion into retail will matter more. If you’re a beauty brand that likes control, then maybe selling a few more places will allow for your brand to stand out and drive purchases when people shop.

How raising investment changes your strategy

The question of whether or not to raise money totally depends on how the brand started, who the founder is, who owns the brand, what the growth expectations are, and what the vision is. I’ve seen a lot of businesses that grow slowly and I’ve seen a lot of businesses that grow quickly, and they don’t all have the same path. You can grow both ways.

The big milestones to watch

You always have to be in a growth phase, because you always have to be replenishing your customer base and prioritizing new customer acquisition. Some are financial and some are a sign of the brand’s longevity and power. There’s your first million dollar year, your first million dollar month, your first million dollar day, your first 10 figure month, your first sellout at Walmart, your first Vogue mention.

There are so many meaningful milestones along the way in this journey. There’s nothing cooler than watching a brand hit these milestones. They’re all fully telling of the future.

Chapter 15: How to scale from day one

Introduction

Launching a brand is one of the most misunderstood phases in ecommerce. The internet makes it look easy — build a Shopify store, run a few ads, and watch orders roll in. The reality is far more scrappy, slower, and more uncertain.

The first 90 days shape everything that comes next. They determine whether your product has legs, whether your pricing holds up, whether your ads actually convert, and whether your cash lasts long enough to find out.

In this chapter, Nate Lagos shares what he learned building his own hat brand, Shootin’ Doubles, from zero. From pre-launch seeding to early Meta spend to ruthless cash management, Nate walks through what actually matters in those first critical months — and what can wait.

PRE-LAUNCH

What to do before you launch your brand.

Remember, starting your own thing is hard! I started my career working for ecommerce brands that were already doing $25 to $50 million a year in revenue. So, starting my own business has been shocking – it’s way harder.

Send your product to people. For me, it was so helpful to get early feedback and hear what they think about the product even before I launched, as it informs what sales angles might work.

Grow your social media following. I started on our social media three months before launch, and posted organic meme-type content in my customer niche. I was able to get a few thousand followers, so on launch day we already had a following.

If I could go back, I’d go way harder on both of those things. I would have seeded 100 products instead of 15, and gone harder on content, to have the launch make as big a splash as possible.

Dial in your website optimizations and make sure everything works. Make sure your site is promoting and upselling the products you want. I was in content creation mode before launch, with product photography and videography, and making sure the site would do its job once people started visiting.

Good enough is always good enough in my book. Especially early on – and especially if you’re bootstrapping with no investors. For me and for a lot of brands starting out, your brand is your side hustle. “Good enough” got a lot done!

Optimize for simplicity. As you head towards launch day, constantly ask yourself what’s the simplest way something could work. Whenever you’re adding layers of complexity or extra work, ask ’Is this necessary?’ If it’s not, just skip it. In a month or a year, go ahead and pull the trigger on it. For me, I just wanted to have a relentless focus on what’s absolutely necessary for me to sell hats as simply as possible. And that’s what I did.

PHASE 1: DAYS 0 TO 45

What to do from launch (congrats!) to day 45.

I launched with six products. To do that, I built out six PDPs (product detail page) on our Shopify page. I kept the website homepage super simple – it’s essentially our main collection page. On launch we also had our email set-up along with a pop-up, plus Rebuy to do some upsells in-cart, and Intelligems to do some on-site split testing. We tested prices and some content early on.

I launched paid ads on Meta from day one. That immediately started bringing in customers. Some customers have come from organic content. And I’ve also done a few small influencer deals that have gone well.

Get early customer feedback quickly. Early on, the first 100 people that bought from me all got a DM. I said, ’Hey, thanks so much. Please let me know what you think and if there’s anything we can do to improve.’ That was super valuable early on.

A bootstrapped brand should be obsessed with cash flow early-on. The one thing that can stop you from being in business is running out of money. So, you need to aggressively monitor every dollar that’s going out of the business, and asking if it’s needed. The only dollars going out for me were inventory and ad spend. You need to correctly manage your cash and your inventory.

Welcome to the waiting game. Early on, I was spending $250 a day on ads. There’s not much you can learn yet. The performance of even the first $5K in ad spend isn’t indicative of anything. It takes a long time to trust the results. And that’s a trap many brands fall into early on. They overreact to every little signal in the business. They’ll have a good week and say, “We had a good week because of this one thing. Let’s triple down on that one thing.” Lots of brands assume early signals are gospel and end up chasing their tail.

That being said, keep your ad dollars on a short leash. I launched ads and was profitable by hour four – that’s rare. But I’ve known brands that spend $30K in the first month and then do only $5K in revenue. Something’s broken there. You need to pull back and figure out what’s going on.

PHASE 2: DAYS 45 TO 90

Now you’re cooking! Here’s what to consider from day 45 until 3 months in…

Time to optimize your PDPs. Don’t take descriptions lightly. I’ve done copy tests on PDPs that produce big changes in conversion rate. Consider taking inspiration from what’s working in your ad account – specifically static image ads – and using them as PDP graphics. I don’t think brands do enough selling on their PDPs, but that’s the place where you should be the most salesy. For a hat, instead of having product photography that’s front, side and back, the first photo is the hat on a white background. But for the subsequent ones, I’ve found a ton of success making them graphics that look like ads. You still need to convince people to buy. People are closer to a purchase decision, but you still need to convince them to buy. PDPs are such a big lever to be persuasive.

People don’t talk enough about price-market fit. I actually think it’s the most important thing after product-market fit. Customers are often less price-sensitive than we think, and more value-sensitive. If they think they’re getting something useful out of the product, then a couple dollars here and there won’t necessarily kill conversions. I had an idea of what I’d charge for prices, and I price-tested from day one. Through that, I saw that increasing prices by $10, a 30% increase, didn’t hurt my conversion rate.

Not all products are winners. The biggest change from phase one to phase two was that I launched with six products, but realized only two of them worked. In the first 45 days or so, I was spending Meta ad dollars on all the products, so essentially burning money on four of the six. In phase two, I decided these four products are losers and these two are winners. So let’s go all-in on those. I started to get more UGC content from influencers and do partnership ads with influencers on Meta. Overall performance has been much better since then.

All your metrics should be getting better by this point. Revenue, click through rate, conversion rate, revenue per session, profit – everything should be getting better. If they’re not, you’re probably missing the mark on some marketing work. Phase two is good for building. Early on, I made $10K – $15K pretty quickly, which was cool. But now that I’m starting to see a more clear relationship between pulling levers and revenue and profit going up, it’s given me the confidence to put more money and time into it. You realize you’ve got a brand with legs. It’s working. And it’s time to get to work on it.

PHASE 3: DAYS 90+

Time to get to work.

I recently entered this phase with my own brand. I’ve had some returning customers, but not nearly enough to run a super profitable business. That’s motivated me to launch more products. Since I’ve only ever had six hats, and price hasn’t been a big objection, I’m not giving anyone a reason to come back to my shop. My product development pipeline is currently dry – but I’m working on filling it up. It’s about giving people a real reason to come back to buy again.

For brands doing under $10 million a year, you need one avatar. Go find your one customer type and sell to them all day. If you chose a decent category, the TAM exists to get to $5 to $10 million a year, selling to just one persona. That’s what I’m trying to stay laser focused on until I hit a ceiling. We’ll eventually expand our product line and build products for different personas within our niche – we’re super focused on whiskey, but we’ll eventually become more of a lifestyle apparel brand.

3 big things to remember on your journey

1. You’re a better steward of your dollars than anyone else

You need to stay super close to everything that’s going on in the business. Even if you’re hiring for someone to help you with ads or your site, you need to keep an eye on the work and understand the relationship between the work that’s being done and the performance that’s being driven from it.

I’ve seen so many brands start from zero and pay an agency $7K a month to run their ads. What is the agency doing? Often you get into the ad account, and the agency launched ads twice that month and did nothing else. That’s 35 minutes of work for $7K. You could have learned to do yourself.

2. Don’t get emotional

It’s easier said than done! But try to zoom out. Volatile inputs will create volatile outcomes. For me, I had a set amount of money to spend the first month on ads – and I decided that if it doesn’t drive a single dollar of revenue, that’s fine. I’ll at least know I gave it a chance. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. But the important thing is, I didn’t ramp up ad spend like crazy either when it was going well. A steady hand on the wheel is much more often the right answer.

3. Build cool things

This should be in bold for every founder out there. You can get lost in the world of marketing optimizations and new ad content and new software. But just build cool products! There’s enough knowledge out there these days to be decent at marketing, even if you’ve never done it. So just build products that are really cool.

Your next move…

If you’ve made it this far, you’re serious about building an ecommerce brand that lasts. That’s exactly who this Playbook was written for.

We want to thank all the experts who contributed their time, frameworks, and hard-won lessons to this report. These are people who are in the arena every day – building brands, testing ideas, and figuring out what actually works. Their generosity is what made this Playbook possible.

Now it’s your turn. You’ve got the frameworks. You’ve heard from the people who’ve done it. The rest is execution.

And if you want to keep learning as you grow, we’ve got you covered. Talk to a Mailchimp expert on how you can implement the strategies from this Playbook today.

Go build something great.