eCommerce Podcast

Drew Morgans spent 15 years and around $50,000 building an AI trained on his own work, and it now helps run his Amazon agency.

Summary

Drew Morgans, founder of the Amazon and marketplace agency Marknology, returns to the eCommerce Podcast for a conversation that is all about AI in the real world rather than the hype. Drew explains how he fed 15 years of his own work into an AI system, roughly 500,000 emails, around 300 podcast episodes, blogs, SOPs, playbooks and won and lost proposals, to build something that thinks the way he does. The pair get into the practical build behind it, why context is the hard part, how he keeps his running costs sane by using cheap local models for ingest and expensive frontier models only for client-facing work, and why he chose a single "super agent" over a crowd of specialist bots. Matt and Drew also compare notes on being founders who came up through code, stepped away, and have now picked it back up. It is a generous, concrete look at where AI actually pays off for an ecommerce operator, and where it does not.

Turning 15 Years of Work Into an AI That Thinks Like Him

Drew describes the shift from using AI for one-off tasks to building a system trained on his own history. He ingested roughly 500,000 of his own emails, around 300 podcast episodes, blogs, SOPs, playbooks and old proposals, turning past work into present value.

"I really needed a copy of me." - Drew Morgans"The real meat's in the emails." - Drew Morgans

• The starting point was helping himself first, then rolling the tools out to his bookkeeper, design team and wider team.
• Old work he had already paid for in time and energy became a source of ongoing value, including 500 real examples of how he handled objections over the years.
• A QuickBooks-approved app now auto-drafts invoices from incoming email, always human-gated, never sent automatically.

Why Context Is the Real Problem

Drew argues the genuine bottleneck is not the model, it is context. AI works sequentially, checking one source then the next, and never holds everything at once the way a close colleague would. His answer was to build the context in before the model ever runs.

• Drew IQ is a set of around 350 operator rules, a series of "if this, then this" checks that mirror what he already knows as an operator, plus tags that give each product context such as whether a SKU is a launch.
• WCS is a context engine that surfaces everything relevant to a brand in about half a second, locally, so the model arrives with the full picture already in front of it.
• Winston is his always-on system, built to be model-agnostic with fallbacks, so if one provider went down he could switch and keep running. He built it on OpenClaw, an open-source always-on agent framework, rather than tying himself to a single vendor.

Cheap Model In, Expensive Model Out

One of Drew's most useful principles is matching the model to the job. He runs cheap local models via Ollama for the overnight grind of ingesting emails, transcripts and Amazon data, and reserves the expensive frontier models for anything client-facing or "trying to be me".

"Cheap model in, expensive model out." - Drew Morgans

• All the pre-work, the rules, the routing and the context surfacing, happens on his own machine, so it is effectively a free call.
• By the time the reasoning model is called, it is doing only the final, high-value layer, which keeps costs in check without dumbing down the output.
• Both Drew and Matt land on the same conclusion about tool-switching, that the opportunity cost of constantly jumping between systems is real, and there is more value in committing to one setup and getting genuinely good at it.

One Super Agent Beats Twenty Specialists

Drew tried the popular approach of building a crowd of named specialist agents, a CFO agent, a design agent and the rest, all chatting and arguing in Discord. It did not work as well as the alternative.

"I cut down the jungle, my team manicures the lawn." - Drew Morgans

• Instead of managing twenty different personalities, he invested his time in one super agent that knows where all his information lives and can genuinely help.
• Drew's view on where things are heading is that mediocre roles are in trouble, trades will grow in value, and strong operators will be fine, with a parallel movement back towards authenticity and in-person work.
• On Amazon specifically, he sees AI helping him do the deep, non-scalable work an agency normally cannot afford at scale, cross-referencing ranking, margin, inventory, reviews, Reddit and search query gaps to work out why a listing is not converting.

"It's helping scale the unscalable." - Drew MorgansToday's Guest

Drew Morgans (Andrew Morgans) is the founder and CEO of Marknology, a full-service Amazon and marketplace agency based in Kansas City, working across Amazon, TikTok Shop, Walmart and Shopify. He also runs a warehouse and 3PL operation and a portfolio of brands. This is his second appearance on the show.

• Website: marknology.com
• LinkedIn: in/amorgans
• Instagram: @andrewmorgans

About the eCommerce Podcast

The eCommerce Podcast helps you deliver eCommerce WOW, with real talk about building, growing and running online stores. Hosted by Matt Edmundson, each episode brings on experts and founders who have built the stores and learned the hard way, so you do not have to. New episodes every week.

• Website: ecommerce-podcast.com

Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/ai-for-ecommerce-personal-ai

How do the best brands actually win on TikTok Shop, and where does AI genuinely earn its keep in the process?

Summary

Matt Edmundson talks with Sohun Sanka, founder of Clankers and former head of growth at the TikTok Shop outreach tools Euka and Reacher. Having audited more than 2,000 affiliate programmes and seen the backend of over 150 agencies and 1,000 brands, Sohun has a clear read on what separates the brands that win on TikTok Shop from the ones quietly burning through samples.

The conversation moves from the biggest mistake most of us make with AI (never showing it what good looks like) to the practical mechanics of creator commerce. Sohun explains why top affiliates post 15 to 21 times a week, why lighting matters more than copy in the first two seconds of a video, and how the best brands treat their affiliates like a sales team rather than a mailing list. On the AI side, he walks through Claude Code plan mode, turning repeat tasks into skills, and the single connection almost nobody has switched on that would save agencies 15 or more hours a week.

• 03:14 Who Sohun is and what Clankers does
• 07:36 The biggest mistake we are all making with AI
• 08:33 Why you have to show AI what good looks like
• 15:06 First steps on TikTok Shop before you touch AI
• 17:42 Using AI to analyse video, lighting and hooks
• 25:03 Frontier models versus the agents that connect them
• 28:27 Claude Code plan mode and turning tasks into skills
• 32:38 The hundred dollar versus two thousand dollar task
• 44:12 Why consistency and volume win on TikTok Shop
• 48:25 Treating your affiliates like a sales team
• 50:43 The window fans affiliate making a million a year
• 55:38 Where to begin with TikTok Shop and AI

Show AI What Good Looks Like

08:33

The first mistake Sohun sees is that almost nobody has their processes written down clearly, and their data is rarely clean enough for AI to learn the business. Feed a tool like Claude Code or Codex nothing, and it hands back what he calls AI slop.

"You don't even have a folder on what good looks like, your brand colours and stuff. You're not feeding it anything." - Sohun Sanka

His fix is to onboard AI the way you would onboard a person. A new employee gets 90 days, a meticulous onboarding guide, multiple calls a week and time to shadow. Most people give AI two sentences and then conclude it does not work.

"Think about how much context a human gets when they're signing on for a new job, and then they give nothing to AI." - Sohun Sanka

Working out what good looks like is uncomfortable precisely because it forces you to define processes most of us keep vague. As Matt put it, the reason we do not tell AI what good looks like is often that we are not sure ourselves.

Win on TikTok Shop Before You Touch AI

15:06

Plenty of the early wins have nothing to do with being AI-forward. Sohun's first moves are the unglamorous ones.

• Pull the copy from your highest performing Meta ad angles and landing pages, then feed it into a creative testing brief for affiliates.
• Mine your last 30 days of Amazon reviews for one-liners customers actually use, and hand those to creators.
• Use social listening to find creators already talking about your product, then reach out personally rather than starting a slow sampling process.
• Benchmark against comparable brands. Tools like Kruva scrape and index every video and its KPIs daily, so you can pace yourself against five similar brands and use that as a working definition of good.

The context most people miss is scale. There are roughly 4.5 million TikTok Shop sellers in the US, and only about 1.6% are making a couple of hundred dollars in the last 30 days. That gap is an education problem, and it is exactly where AI can help.

Use AI to Read Your Video, Not Just Your Copy

17:42

TikTok affiliates are not polished UGC creators. They often miss the softer craft, like lighting and camera setup, and on a fast-scrolling feed a slightly off frame can cost you the view before a word is spoken. Sohun uses Gemini to break a video into frames and analyse the first two seconds, pulling out the lighting style so creators can be coached with real examples rather than vague advice.

Cost is the catch, because generating a transcript and classifying every hook frame by frame gets expensive across a thousand videos. Tools like Kruva already pass through transcript, hook and lighting analysis, which lets him reduce the Gemini spend by three to five times by only analysing the final slice of each video with his own framework.

The payoff is reuse. Inside GMV Max you can pull the two-second and six-second video view rates, find every creative clearing a 33% hook rate, analyse what those openings share, and splice those hooks back into your Meta ads or even Amazon sponsored display.

Plan Mode, Skills and the Connection Nobody Switches On

28:27

Sohun's view is that prompt engineering is already on the way out.

"You don't need to learn how to prompt anymore." - Sohun Sanka

Claude Code plan mode interviews you instead. Ask for a report and it works through which brand, which KPIs, what output format, whether it should run as a cron job, and whether it lands in Slack for review or goes straight to a client. When you find yourself doing that 10 to 15 times a week, you turn it into a skill and run it on demand.

The bigger miss sits underneath all of it. Most brands and agencies have never connected their TikTok Shop tool to Claude as a connector, even though these tools expose around 110 MCP tools. One connection turns the model into an expert on the platform, yet agencies are still spending 15 to 17 hours a week on manual reporting that could be automated.

This ties back to how Sohun runs his own day. He puts a dollar value on his time and sorts tasks into hundred dollar, five hundred dollar and two thousand dollar an hour work, then pushes the cheap tasks to AI or to someone on Upwork.

Treat Your TikTok Shop Affiliates Like a Sales Team

44:12

On TikTok Shop the follow-through is human. Where a performance marketer lets the ad mechanism do the work, here someone has to sit with creators, coach them, share the data and keep them posting.

"The top affiliates are posting 15 to 21 times a week per brand." - Sohun Sanka

Volume matters because the algorithm is getting very good at matching niche interests to the right moment, and there simply is not enough content in the US to feed it (China's feed runs at roughly 60% shoppable content by comparison). The brands getting this right build real communities. Javy Coffee grew TikTok Shop revenue from $300K to $1M a month with 15 community managers, each owning a book of affiliates and rewarded on the GMV growth they drove, making sure new affiliates post 30 times in their first 30 days.

Then there is the story that anchors the whole episode. One of Sohun's friends is a top-100 affiliate who prints around $1M a year in commissions selling window fans. He runs a dedicated account posting the same fan under different lighting gradients, hundreds of videos, purely to A/B test lighting, then scrapes the top-100 videos each month into a Claude Code testing pipeline.

"We A/B test copy. And I was like, nah, we need to A/B test lighting, because on TikTok Shop, the lighting matters so much." - Sohun Sanka

Matt recognised the pattern from his own son, a nutritionist with a large Instagram following who tests everything down to the camera angle, and once found that a tea towel over his shoulder lifted engagement. It is the same instinct ecommerce operators already have for split-testing headlines, applied to video.

Where to Begin with AI on TikTok Shop

55:38

Sohun's single starting move is to connect your Claude or ChatGPT connector to your TikTok Shop outreach tool. That tool holds every affiliate activation you are running, so one connection lets the model learn all of it. From there he asks it to lay the whole flow out on a FigJam board, note what should be switched on and off, and show where the leaks are. You will still need TikTok Shop domain knowledge to sense-check what it says, but it is a fast way to see what is actually going on.

Sohun's question for Matt's audience: what is the thing that scares you most about getting started with AI? Matt will be answering it on social, so come and join the conversation.

Today's Guest

Sohun Sanka is the founder of Clankers and previously served as head of growth (employee number one) at the TikTok Shop outreach tools Euka and Reacher. With a background in influencer and affiliate marketing, he now helps brands and agencies build custom in-house software with Claude Code and become genuinely AI-enabled across their TikTok Shop and creator commerce operations.

• Website: clankersapp.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sohun-sanka

About the eCommerce Podcast

The eCommerce Podcast helps you deliver eCommerce WOW. Every Thursday, Matt Edmundson talks with experts and founders who have built the stores and learned the hard way, so you can grow, scale and eventually exit your own business.

• Website and newsletter: ecommerce-podcast.com
• YouTube: youtube.com/@ecommercepodcast

Like and subscribe wherever you listen, and sign up for the weekly newsletter to get the episode notes and AI prompt straight to your inbox.

Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/how-to-sell-on-tiktok-shop-with-ai

When someone asks ChatGPT for the best hiking boots, it names brands 97% of the time. Is yours one of them? That question sits at the heart of this episode, the second time the eCommerce Podcast has hosted two guests at once.

Matt Edmundson talks with Dave McAnally and Alan Osetek, two search veterans with almost 30 years each in the game, about how AI search is reshaping ecommerce ahead of Q4. They dig into "funnel compression", why your own website may not be where AI gets its answers, and the surprising story of a YouTuber with roughly 6,000 subscribers who ended up answering more questions about Adidas than Adidas itself. There is a practical checklist too, from FAQ blocks and schema markup on product pages, to video and Reddit, to the niche third-party sites AI keeps citing. They also cover how to measure it all with GA4's new "AI Assistant" channel, the early days of OpenAI's ad program, and why AI overviews on ecommerce searches are jumping from around 9% to 25% this year.

Here is where to jump in:

• [07:28] The biggest mistake ecommerce brands are making right now
• [10:11] Why your website isn't where AI finds its answers
• [17:54] The two-part checklist for product and category pages
• [25:45] The Adidas story and the 6,000-subscriber YouTuber
• [32:35] Measuring AI search and getting ready for Q4
• [47:10] Owning the niche and defending your turf

Why AI Is Compressing the Sales Funnel

[07:28] Dave McAnally's core point is that AI collapses the old research-then-shortlist journey into a single prompt. Instead of browsing ten links, a shopper asks one question and gets a handful of brands back. If you are not on that shortlist, you are not in the conversation.

"97% of the time, if you ask a question like that, ChatGPT is going to give you brands. So you're going from that real high level, just kind of exploring, learning about a product to a shortlist. And if you're not on that list..." — Dave McAnally

Matt tested it live on Perplexity during the recording, asking for the best men's hiking boots for rainy days. It came back with two options, the Salomon X Ultra 5 GTX and the Lowa Renegade Evo GTX, along with a detailed reason for each. As Dave put it, that is a very different experience from a page of blue links, and it means brands are being recommended far earlier in the journey than they used to be.

Why Your Website Isn't Where AI Gets Its Answers

[10:11] Oddly, the answer often does not come from your own site at all. When Matt clicked through Perplexity's cited sources, they were third-party review and media sites, one packed with verdict scores, pros and cons, comparison tables, cut-open boot photos and even waveform charts. AI loves that kind of structured, corroborated data.

"YouTube is the 2nd biggest source for Gemini. Right now for where it gets answers." — Dave McAnally

Dave shared the standout example. This spring, when people asked about Adidas's return policy, the most-cited source was not any Adidas property. It was a YouTube channel run by a woman with around 6,000 subscribers, plus a Reddit thread.

"None of their own properties were even part of that answer." — Dave McAnally

Dave also flagged a shift in how the models behave. Compared with last summer, ChatGPT names fewer brands per answer, but cites roughly three times as many sources to get there. That means your product story needs to line up with what third parties are saying, and it means PR now includes building relationships with small bloggers and niche channels, not just the big review titles.

A Simple Checklist for Product and Category Pages

[17:54] Asked for the obvious things any brand can do straight away, Dave named two that move the needle.

1. Add proper FAQ blocks to product and category pages that mirror Google's "People also ask" questions. AI is not just answering the question you asked, it is anticipating the next few, so give it those answers directly.
2. Use schema markup, including FAQ schema. It helps AI agents understand what your content actually is, from price to product attributes.

"They're not answering the one question you ask. They're anticipating the next 4 or 5 that you might ask." — Dave McAnally

On schema specifically, Dave noted a useful quirk. Google has said it no longer reads FAQ schema, but ChatGPT still does, and OpenAI's crawlers are all over sites right now. His broader advice is to write product descriptions around real use cases and pain points rather than marketing fluff, because that is what the AI grabs onto.

"Google did say they don't read it anymore, but ChatGPT still does." — Dave McAnally

Alan Osetek added a strategic layer. Before spending anything, do an honest assessment of the opportunity. Work out what share of your ecommerce sales comes from AI search today, what it could be in 6 to 12 months, and what it costs you to do nothing. He drew the parallel with the early days of search and TikTok, when smaller players who went in early beat much bigger rivals.

How to Measure It and Get Ready for Q4

[32:35] The scale of the shift is the reason this matters now. Last year, AI overviews appeared on roughly 9% of ecommerce queries. This year Dave expects that to hit about 25%.

"This year, it's going to be about 25%. So 1 in 4 ecommerce searches are going to have that AI in there." — Dave McAnally

To track it, Google added an "AI Assistant" channel to GA4 in May, covering the likes of Perplexity and OpenAI, with an AI-overview breakout still to come and already visible in Search Console. Filter your ecommerce reporting by that channel and you can build a trend line. Dave also noted that AI-referred visitors tend to convert at higher rates, because they arrive already informed rather than cold.

[38:09] On paid, OpenAI has launched an advertising program that slots products into relevant prompts. Dave has tested it on a golf accessory brand and found conversions roughly in line with organic, with costs closer to Bing than Google. It is cheap to experiment with right now, though still limited and, at the time of recording, US-only. Alan pointed out the program had reportedly hit around $1 billion in revenue in roughly six months.

[42:28] As for who wins, Dave's view is that reports of Google's decline are overstated. Google still holds around 90% of search, has strong momentum with Gemini and the Apple deal to power Siri, and years of crawler advantage. Clicks may be down about 20%, but the traffic that does come through is more qualified.

"I do say I think rumours of Google's death are greatly exaggerated." — Dave McAnallyOwn the Niche, or Defend Your Turf

[47:10] Both guests closed with clear, opposite advice depending on your size. For small and mid-sized brands, Alan's steer is to hunt for the niche questions where you can win.

"Find those niche questions that people are asking on the AI engines where you can own or dominate those questions." — Alan Osetek

For the bigger players, the message flips.

"Defend your turf, make sure you're defending your turf." — Alan Osetek

Dave's parting advice for everyone is to treat product marketing as mission critical, drive descriptions with real pain points rather than brand fluff, and not to ignore video. Unboxing videos and how-to content on YouTube, which trades with Reddit as the most-cited source, are shaping what AI recommends this holiday season.

Today's Guests

Dave McAnally is Head of Content Orchestration and SEO at Resolution Media, part of Omnicom Media Group, where he grew the SEO practice into a major share of the business over around a decade and works with Fortune 500 brands. He has spent almost 30 years in search and now also consults with ecommerce and Shopify brands. Connect with Dave on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dave-mcanally

Alan Osetek has spent almost 30 years across the global ad agency holding companies and ad tech, including as Global President of Resolution Media, which is where he and Dave first worked together. He now advises in the retail media and ecommerce space, including Brandlight, an AI-visibility platform that monitors and manages how brands are represented across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Connect with Alan on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alan-osetek

About the eCommerce Podcast

The eCommerce Podcast helps you deliver eCommerce WOW with real talk about building online stores. Every Thursday, Matt Edmundson sits down with experts and founders who have been in the trenches, built the stores and learned the hard way, so you do not have to. It is a show for Digital Davids, the small-to-mid-size founders running at the giants they face.

• Subscribe and find every episode at ecommerce-podcast.com
• Watch on YouTube at youtube.com/@ecommercepodcast
• If you enjoyed this one, please like, follow and subscribe wherever you listen, and share it with a fellow founder who is figuring out AI search.

Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/ai-search-optimization-for-ecommerce-get-found-by-chatgpt

Email isn't dead. It's just being treated like a newsletter, and that's why so many of them get ignored. Laryssa Wirstiuk runs a boutique email and SMS agency and joins Matt Edmundson to explain what actually works in Klaviyo right now.

Summary

Laryssa Wirstiuk, founder of the Klaviyo-focused retention agency Joy Joya and host of the Marketing with Laryssa podcast, sits down with Matt to talk about the channel everyone underrates. Her core point is simple. Email is the owned list, the CRM, the lifecycle, the one place where people have actually opted in and want to hear from you. The two biggest mistakes brands make are not valuing it enough, and being so afraid of annoying people that they never send.

The conversation moves through the fears founders bring to email and why the numbers rarely justify them. Unsubscribe rates are almost never as high as owners imagine, and disengaged contacts harm deliverability, so letting them go is a gift, not a loss. Laryssa shares a client whose inherited list of around 20,000 was cut to roughly 1,500 genuinely engaged people to escape the spam folder and recover revenue. She and Matt dig into segmentation thresholds, list cleanup, the transactional emails most brands ignore, why simple content beats elaborate design, how to handle dark mode, and which metrics still tell the truth in a world of Apple Mail Privacy Protection and Gmail's AI summaries.

Email Is the One Channel People Actually Opted Into

Laryssa's definition cuts through the jargon. Unlike social ads, SEO or paid traffic, where people are effectively being shouted at, email and SMS reach people who have expressed interest and asked to hear from you. That changes the job entirely. The relationship is already there. The work is keeping it going. And because you own that list outright, unlike a rented social audience, the data and the relationship are yours to keep.

"Behind it all, it's just the owned list, the CRM, the lifecycle of it that I don't think is ever going to go away." - Laryssa Wirstiuk

The word "email" is what makes it feel unsexy, she says, but the mechanics underneath are as valuable as ever. The two mindset barriers she meets most often are brands that only half believe in it, and brands that believe in it but are terrified of bothering people.

Why the Unsubscribe Is Nothing to Fear (It Protects Your Deliverability)

The fear of hitting send comes from a real place. It is easy to judge our customers by our own inbox habits and assume everyone will unsubscribe. Laryssa watches the actual numbers, and the reality is calmer than the anxiety.

"Most of the people on that list, they want to be there. And you know what, if they don't want to be, that's a good thing because they're just holding you down." - Laryssa Wirstiuk

Disengaged contacts who never open or click send a signal to inbox providers, Gmail chief among them, that your mail has no value. That is how good senders drift into spam folders, and it is slow to recover from. The distinction between spam and value is about intent. Spam is a concerted effort to exploit or harass. Value is styling tips, gift ideas, education, new arrivals, a full picture of what you offer. Frequency is managed with segmentation, not silence.

Clean the List, Even When It Hurts

List cleanup is the scary phrase most of us resist, and it is one of the most important things we can do. Email addresses go stale, people stop checking inboxes, and dead weight drags down deliverability for everyone still engaged. The mechanic is a sunset flow as a last-chance effort, then suppress or archive.

"We cut it down, I want to say, to like 1,500 from 20,000. We basically started over and turned it around, got it out of spam, started getting revenue conversion rates back up." - Laryssa Wirstiuk

On segmentation, her rough thresholds are practical. It starts to matter once a brand is sending two to three times a week and the list is somewhere north of 10,000 to 15,000. Below that, a weekly send to the whole list is usually fine, minding the disengaged. Segment by engagement windows, 90, 180 and 365 days, blending email engagement, site activity, purchase activity and how new someone is to the list.

Simple Content, Sensible Design, Honest Metrics

A recurring theme is that plainer wins. One idea, one desired action, and get the reader moving. Matt shares a rule from one of his own sites where no block of text ran longer than three lines, which lifted conversion, and the same discipline holds in email. Long-form only earns its place as a rare one-off, like a founder's annual update, and even then it has to stay customer-focused.

Two often-overlooked wins came up. Transactional emails, the order confirmation and shipping notification, are among the most-read messages a brand sends, yet most ship raw Shopify defaults or leave the shipping note to the courier. Branding them is a real opportunity. And Matt's own brands found their highest-grossing revenue emails are the ones announcing a new podcast episode, though only because they sit inside a wider mix rather than replacing the offers.

"There is sort of an art to that type of email too. You still have to make it customer-focused while sharing the information that you want to share about your brand." - Laryssa Wirstiuk

On design, the emerging best practice is a hybrid of plain text and HTML, so something still renders and delivers if part of it breaks. Image-based emails give the most brand control but must be sized and compressed. Always A/B test the fancy version against the simple one, and always test for dark mode, mobile and different devices before sending. Gmail now runs its own AI to summarise emails, so give it real text or strong alt text to read.

For metrics, open rate has become unreliable since Apple's Mail Privacy Protection auto-marks opens, so treat it as a trend signal only. Click rate is the honest measure of engagement, with two to three percent a healthy benchmark and anything under two worth fixing through CTA placement, contrast and layout. Revenue per recipient is a useful newer metric, and unsubscribe rate should sit under one percent.

The Unhinged Study

Laryssa signed up to the welcome offers of around 360 ecommerce brands across different verticals and logged exactly what happened after each opt-in.

"44% of this random sample did not send anything, even though it was promised to me." - Laryssa Wirstiuk

Roughly 12 percent went straight to spam. The lesson is to go back to basics. The welcome email or text is the single most important message in the whole programme, because it is the only moment a subscriber is genuinely waiting to hear from you. Nailing that first touchpoint matters more than chasing a fancier next level. She released the full findings as a free report.

Today's Guest

Laryssa Wirstiuk is the founder of Joy Joya, a boutique email and SMS marketing agency specialising in Klaviyo and retention for product-based ecommerce brands. A former creative-writing instructor, she niched her agency from the jewellery industry into email and SMS marketing. The name is a nod to that origin, since "joya" means jewel in Spanish. She also hosts the Marketing with Laryssa podcast.

• Website: joyjoya.com
• Free report (the "unhinged study"): joyjoya.com/frontdoor
• Podcast: Marketing with Laryssa, available on audio everywhere and on YouTube
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lawirstiuk

Find every episode, the show notes, blog posts and more at ecommerce-podcast.com.

Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/email-deliverability-for-ecommerce-brands-what-actually-works

Two Years, 100 Newsletters, and Not a Single Sale Yet

Gabriel Lindh has written 100 weekly newsletters and taken 20-odd pre-orders for a pair of swim shorts he still hasn't sold.

Summary

Gabriel Lindh is the co-founder of Nordic Dudes, a Swedish brand making anti-chafing swim shorts for "guys, or Vikings, with bigger legs". The idea was born on a painful 40-minute beach walk in Australia, sat dormant for a couple of years, then came back to life when Gabriel and his brother decided to build it together.

What follows is a rare, honest look at the pre-launch grind. Before a name or a product existed, they asked around 60 to 70 people whether they would actually pay, and 20 to 30 pre-ordered up front. Two years later, after three or four manufacturers and endless sample iterations, they have just placed their first production run of 200 pairs, and they still haven't sold a thing to the public.

The through-line is patience. Gabriel has published The Weekly Pillage newsletter every week for around 100 weeks, building an audience while the product was still in development. Matt and Gabriel dig into demand validation, the "theory of eights", and why the unboxing matters as much as the shorts.

In this episode:

• [05:51] The origin story: a chafing beach walk in Australia
• [09:56] Why the build took four times longer than planned
• [14:09] Validating demand before spending a penny
• [21:53] Building an audience before the product exists
• [37:13] The unboxing as a point of difference

Build the Audience Before the Product

[21:53] Most founders wait until they have something to sell before they start talking. Gabriel did the opposite. The nordicdudes.com landing page collects newsletter sign-ups, and The Weekly Pillage has gone out every week for roughly 100 weeks, sharing the messy reality of building the business as it happens.

The goal is trust. By the time the shorts launch, the audience already knows who Nordic Dudes are, so the product lands with people who are warmed up rather than starting cold.

"We haven't missed an email in, I think, 100 weeks at this point, which is pretty crazy."Gabriel Lindh

Gabriel is candid that social media has lagged behind, something Matt gently pushes him on: with a humour-led brand and samples in hand, Instagram is an open goal. The lesson is less about the channel and more about the principle. Start building the audience long before you have anything to sell them.

Validate Demand Before You Spend a Penny

[14:09] Before committing money to manufacturing, Gabriel and his brother built a list of 60 to 70 people they thought might want the product, drawn from friends, friends of friends, and his brother's ice-hockey team. They reached out one by one and asked a simple question: would you actually buy this?

Most said no. But 20 to 30 said yes and paid up front through Swish, a Swedish payment app. There was no promised delivery date and the money was fully refundable, yet the cash in hand gave them the confidence to commit.

"We should test something to just make sure that we're not spending all this money and time on something that nobody wants in the end."Gabriel Lindh

They never set a formal minimum. Instead they worked to a rough sense that two orders would not be enough, but twenty or thirty would. Real money from real people, even a small amount, is a far stronger signal than a survey or a like.

It Takes Longer and Costs More Than You Think

[09:56] Gabriel and his brother expected the build to take four to six months. It has taken more than two years, with no real e-commerce background between them beyond a bit of dropshipping that earned around $400. Their first sample, ordered off a text message with no tech pack, was unusable. They eventually paid a Fiverr designer for a proper tech pack and worked through three or four manufacturers, iterating on every sample.

"It's the most difficult thing I've ever done."Gabriel Lindh

Matt's "theory of eights" gives the mindset a name: aim to consistently hit an 8 out of 10 rather than exhausting yourself chasing a 10 you will rarely reach. Launch at an 8, then improve with real customer feedback. Gabriel's own advice echoes it.

"Take it one step at a time... what's the most important thing that I can do right now to get a little bit closer to where I want to go?"Gabriel LindhThe Unboxing Is Part of the Product

[37:13] Nordic Dudes will ship in a reusable cotton bag printed with the logo, an idea that came from Gabriel's mum. A bag beats a box on several counts: it is cheaper, it takes less space, it won't get crushed in transit, and customers can reuse it for their swim shorts, towel and water at the beach. The fabric bag being a surprise is deliberate, a small moment of delight when the parcel is opened.

Matt's own beauty company made the same bet. Swapping plain padded envelopes for a gift-style box, with tissue paper and popcorn as packaging material, cost less than 10 pence per parcel, yet it changed everything. Customers stopped using social media to complain and started posting about the popcorn instead.

"The more you can create a remarkable opening experience, the more you're going to create a loyal customer base."Matt Edmundson

There is also a case for packing your first orders yourself. Nordic Dudes will fulfil manually from Sweden to begin with, and Matt argues that founders who pick and pack early understand their product and their customer in a way a third-party warehouse never will.

Today's Guest

Today's guest: Gabriel Lindh

Company: Nordic Dudes

Website: nordicdudes.com (sign up for the newsletter, The Weekly Pillage)

YouTube: Gabriel Lindh (personal brand documenting the build)

Instagram: Nordic Dudes

About the eCommerce Podcast

The eCommerce Podcast is dedicated to helping you deliver eCommerce WOW, with real talk about building online stores. Every Thursday, host Matt Edmundson sits down with guests, experts and founders who have been in the trenches, built the stores, and learned the hard way, so you don't have to.

For show notes, past episodes, the link to today's guest, and the free eCommerce cohort groups, head to ecommercepodcast.net. While you're there, sign up for the weekly newsletter and you'll get the notes and links from every episode straight to your inbox.

If you're an eCommerce founder with a story to tell, click the "Be a Guest" link at ecommercepodcast.net and come and share it on the show.

Your best-ever ROAS month can still lose you money. Brenden Delarua explains why the number on your ad dashboard rarely matches the number in your bank account, and what to measure instead.

Summary

Brenden Delarua spent 11 years in paid media, hitting and smashing ROAS targets across Meta, Google and Criteo, until a CFO asked him a simple question at a quarterly review. If the ad numbers are this good, why is revenue down? That question sent him into causal measurement, and he now runs Stella (Growth Intelligence), a marketing-measurement company that helps brands work out what is actually driving sales rather than what the platforms claim.

In this conversation Brenden unpacks why platform-reported ROAS is a correlation metric that can overstate how well your ads are working, and how chasing it pushes marketers into retargeting and branded-search quick wins that flatter the dashboard without growing the business. He walks through the practical ladder any small brand can climb, from multi-touch attribution and post-purchase surveys up to full geo-holdouts and media mix models. Along the way there is a YouTube campaign that looked like a disaster, a lesson on why branded search is not always what it seems, and the one post-purchase survey question worth more than the rest.

ROAS Is Not the Same Thing as Profit

Brenden's whole approach traces back to one uncomfortable review meeting. As a media buyer he had beaten every ROAS goal he was set, then presented record-breaking results, and still got questioned by the CFO.

"If you're showing us that ROAS is so high, why am I not seeing that in our actual bank account?" — Brenden Delarua, on the CFO question that started it all

The problem is what ROAS actually measures. It is a correlation metric. Someone saw or clicked an ad and later converted, so the platform claims the sale.

"ROAS is not correlated with profit, even though a lot of people think it is." — Brenden Delarua

Because ROAS rewards clicks, it tends to deprioritise channels you cannot click, like connected TV or audio, and it tempts marketers to pile budget into retargeting or branded search for a quick win. The dashboard looks great. The business stops growing. Brenden's point is that what owners ultimately care about is profit, not a platform-reported number.

The YouTube Campaign That Looked Like a Money Pit

One story makes the gap between platform numbers and reality concrete. Brenden runs ads for a client spending heavily on YouTube, a channel infamous for a poor click-to-convert ratio.

• In-platform, the YouTube ROAS sat at around 0.2, so the account ROAS looked like it was suffering.
• The obvious call was to question why so much was going into a channel that appeared to be losing money.
• Then he pulled the post-purchase survey data from NoCommerce, and around 7% of buyers said they came from YouTube.
• Set against the spend, that share of revenue worked out at roughly a 3x return, and the channel was actually very profitable.

The lesson is not that YouTube always works. It is that a single click-based number can hide the truth, and a second data point, in this case a qualitative survey, can change the whole decision.

"Sometimes increasing incremental ROAS is the opposite of increasing platform ROAS." — Brenden DelaruaWhat is Causal Measurement?

Brenden is keen to stress that incrementality is not just a big-brand concern, and you do not need to turn off ads to benefit from the thinking. He lays out a practical ladder that scales with the business.

1. Start with proper multi-touch attribution. For e-com tools he rates Triple Whale and Northbeam. It maps the customer journey by stitching anonymised touchpoints together until someone converts, then shows first touch, last touch or a fairer linear model.
2. Add post-purchase surveys. Even a brand-new store can ask buyers where they came from and, more importantly, why they bought. Tools like NoCommerce can use conditional logic to ask which specific ad someone remembers.
3. Add causal analysis when you are big enough. Once sales volume is there, usually for brands over roughly 10 million a year running on two or three platforms, holdout testing and media mix models come into play.

"You don't have to do holdouts to understand that what's causing sales to happen might be different from what you're seeing in ad platforms." — Brenden Delarua

For a brand doing a million a year, the same issues exist at a smaller scale. The trouble is that as you grow, working out what is really driving growth gets harder, not easier.

What are iROAS and Holdouts?

For brands ready to test properly, Brenden explains the terms plainly. A holdout study means turning ads off in certain geographical regions and watching your source-of-truth revenue, usually Shopify, against the regions that stayed live. The measure that comes out of it is iROAS.

"iROAS stands for incremental return on ad spend, every dollar we put in that gives us back money that would not have happened without that investment." — Brenden Delarua

A few practical points from the conversation:

• Test in a cycle, from channel level (all of Meta, all of Google) down to tactic level (branded versus non-branded) and then individual campaigns, then start again.
• Holdouts typically run 20 to 30 days, with top-of-funnel channels like CTV closer to 45.
• Branded search is often called non-incremental, but not always. If the brand name is effectively the product category, it can be highly incremental. Matt's own analogy landed it well, as if a company selling omega-3 were simply called Omega-3.
• Media mix models look back over around two years, factor in seasonality and other variables, and are forward-looking, so they can forecast how to allocate next quarter's budget. Brenden recommends using holdouts and media mix models together, with the holdout calibrating the model.

There is a catch, and Brenden names it. A holdout is a snapshot in time, shaped by your bid strategy, the platform algorithms and how many competitors are in the market that month. His ads in February behave nothing like his ads in the run-up to Black Friday.

"The moment you get that iROAS report back, the next day it starts to shift. We call it causal decay." — Brenden DelaruaThe Post-Purchase Question You Should Ask

Asked for his best parting tip, Brenden returned to post-purchase surveys and one question in particular, credited to Jarrell Blades, VP of Growth at Tushy.

"I love asking what almost stopped you from converting, because that gives you tons of insight into your messaging and targeting." — Brenden Delarua

His advice is to begin with the end in mind, borrowing the idea from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and design the survey around the answers that will actually help you convert more people. Surveys surface the things attribution never sees, like a friend's recommendation or word of mouth. They also reveal which ad someone remembers, which is not always the ad they clicked. When the most memorable ad differs from the clicked one, that tells you something powerful about which creative is really doing the work.

Today's Guest

Today's guest: Brenden Delarua Company: Stella (Growth Intelligence) Website: https://www.stellaheystella.com/ LinkedIn: Connect with Brenden on LinkedIn TikTok: @brendanbuilds (the lighter, more sarcastic side of his marketing content)

Resources Mentioned

• Triple Whale and Northbeam — multi-touch attribution tools Brenden recommends for e-com
• NoCommerce — post-purchase survey tool, including conditional logic on higher plans
• Jarrell Blades, VP of Growth at Tushy — source of the "what almost stopped you from converting" survey question
• Neil Hoyne, former Google data specialist and author of Converted — a previous EP guest, referenced for the shopper whose single purchase involved 236 touchpoints
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — for the "begin with the end in mind" principle applied to survey design

Keep Listening

Find the full archive, free tools and everything else at ecommerce-podcast.com. New episodes land every week. If you are getting value from the show, subscribe on your podcast player of choice and share this episode with a fellow founder who is still judging their ads by the dashboard alone.

Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/is-it-time-we-talked-about-turning-off-your-ads-with-brenden-delarua

A brand Cem Atik helped scale from $15m to $50m paid an outside firm $15,000 to be told what it was doing wrong. It already had 100,000 customers who would have said the same thing for nothing.

Cem co-founded Harucon Ventures in Düsseldorf, in western Germany, and spends his days pulling apart the numbers behind ecommerce brands in the UK and the DACH region (Germany, Switzerland and Austria). He has been in the space for 13 years. He scaled his own first business to $7m, then burned more than $250,000 on a second one he started alongside it and went bankrupt in five or six months.

That failure shapes most of what he says here. The two things holding brands back, he argues, are a loose grip on unit economics and the ego that arrives somewhere between $2m and $5m in revenue. He makes the case that ecommerce only really starts past $10m, that retention rather than paid marketing is where the profit is made, and that a rising customer acquisition cost is only a problem if the repurchase rate is low. He also walks through what happens inside a growth audit, including a packaging change that took 25% out of one client's costs before any extra ad spend.

In this episode

• 02:57 - Who Cem is and what Harucon Ventures does
• 08:33 - The two mistakes he sees in almost every brand
• 11:11 - Why pay 15k when you already have 100,000 customers
• 13:45 - The $250,000 second business that went bankrupt in five months
• 16:54 - Why a rising CAC is not automatically bad
• 20:45 - What actually happens inside a growth audit
• 24:18 - Cut the feelings and call your customers
• 34:32 - How Cem uses AI to read data he has no time to read
• 43:02 - The five numbers every ecommerce founder should know

The Two Mistakes He Sees in Almost Every Brand (08:33)

Asked for the single biggest mistake ecommerce businesses make, Cem named two.

The first is having no control over unit economics. His opening question on a first call is what the brand's customer acquisition cost to lifetime value ratio is, and he asks it less for the number than to find out whether the founder knows it at all.

The second is ego, and it tends to show up between $2m and $5m in annual revenue.

"The first call that I have with people is usually like roasting them for 30 minutes." - Cem Atik

He is not dismissive of that milestone. Getting a business to $2m or $5m is difficult and most people never do it. His argument is that the game changes afterwards.

"Ecommerce is actually, if you're just asking me, starting after you're passing the $10 million, because then you just really start to feel pressure, competition, and you also just need to play the game differently, or otherwise you die within like a 3-month period." - Cem Atik

He has paid for the lesson himself. His first business reached $7m in revenue, at which point he assumed everything he touched would turn to gold. He started a second business alongside it, spent over $250,000 and went bankrupt inside five or six months. Matt offered the same story back from his own history, copying the code behind Jersey Beauty Company to launch Jersey Gift Company, which died in about three weeks.

"People only learn with pain. You just need to feel this pain at least once or twice until you understand." - Cem AtikYour Customers Already Know What Is Wrong (11:11)

A brand Harucon had helped take from $15m to $50m told Cem it had hired an outside firm for $15,000 to identify what it was doing wrong. Harucon has invested in that business, so Cem asked the founder why.

"Marcel, you have 100,000 customers to ask for what you are doing wrong. Why are you just hiring a company?" - Cem Atik

The founder's answer was that it felt like the next step.

"Who say you that this is the next step? You're just only increasing your OpEx cost for no reason." - Cem Atik

The objection Cem expected was credentials, so he dealt with it directly.

"These guys have like huge reference. And your customers has no reference. They buy, they bought your product. So what kind of reference you need more, right?" - Cem Atik

The catch is that free feedback still has to be accepted. Cem's view is that a sparring partner is only useful to a founder who can take criticism, provided the criticism comes with a reason and a fix rather than just a verdict. Matt tied that back to Jim Collins in Good to Great, and the idea that a great leader confronts the brutal facts while holding on to a belief that the future can be different.

Retention Is Where the Profit Sits (16:54)

A client complains that their customer acquisition cost is rising. Cem's first question is the repurchase rate. At 40%, a rising CAC is not a problem. At 10% or 15%, it is.

"A raising cost number doesn't mean that something is going bad or good. It more shows you where your business is moving on." - Cem Atik

Category matters here. Beauty products tend to bring in new customers, supplements should bring the same customers back, and a supplements brand without a repurchase rate of 30% to 40% is leaving money on the table.

His wider point is that paid marketing has a ceiling.

"You cannot stay always profitable with your marketing if you just reached 100, 150, 200 million. That is not working. Marketing is not made for that." - Cem Atik

Retention, conversion rate on the shop and signup forms are the levers that turn unprofitable traffic into profit.

"Retention is the only channel that is generating your pure profitability." - Cem AtikScaling Usually Starts Before the Ad Spend (20:45)

Harucon runs two due diligence workstreams before it touches anything, marketing with Cem's team and finance with his partner Tobias Münnich and his team. The scan covers rates, supply chain and process, and the fixes it surfaces are rarely about buying more traffic.

One food and beverage client was producing in Poland and Bulgaria, shipping the product to Germany, unpacking it, repacking it, then selling it. Finishing the packaging at the point of production took roughly 25% off the packaging cost. A separate change to fulfilment on the same brand saved another 12%.

The findings get delivered in what Cem calls the second roast meeting, where the brand hears exactly what is wrong, why it is wrong and how it gets fixed. He is firm that the last part is what makes the first two worth anything. Naming the problem is cheap. Handing over the method is the bit brands can act on, and it leaves them free to run the fix themselves or bring Harucon in to do it.

Cut the Feelings and Follow the Data (24:18)"Your ecommerce brand is your baby. You just grow it up from the beginning and there is a lot of emotion into it. Cut it. It's hard to say, but cut it." - Cem Atik

A 15% to 20% return rate does not need a dashboard or a consultant. It needs phone calls to the customers who sent the product back.

The same instinct applies inside the data. One of Harucon's partner brands asked why repurchase rate fell away after the third order. The numbers showed no gifts, no welcome series and no contact of any kind after the first purchase.

"It takes us 5 minutes to fix something that you just thinking about like 2, 3 weeks." - Cem Atik

For founders with nobody to ask, his suggestion is LinkedIn. Message ten people who work in the area. If eight of them say the same thing, fix that. He answers his own messages, prompted by his team when one has been sitting there a day or two.

The last piece is pace. One of the larger private equity operators Cem knows describes himself as not especially smart, but says he understands how pace and execution work together. He runs five things at once, cuts whatever is not working inside a month and rotates. He burns money doing it, roughly 5% or 6% of it, and that buys him the other 90%.

"If you are not able to sacrifice 5, 6 or even 10% to generate another 90% which are insanely profitable, you are leaving money on the table and you are just wasting your time." - Cem AtikThe Five Numbers He Names (43:02)

Asked to close with the metrics every ecommerce founder should be able to state, Cem gave five.

• Customer acquisition cost
• Average order value
• New customer share, meaning the percentage of customers coming in who are new
• Lifetime value
• Repurchase rate

His closing advice was borrowed, heard on another podcast and repeated because he thinks it is true. Work so hard and so much that it makes it unreasonable not to succeed, and do not let pace and execution be the last thing you care about.

Cem's Question for Matt

Every guest leaves Matt with a question, and he answers it on social rather than on the show.

"If you compare your biggest success with your biggest failure, which one teaches you more? Failure, for sure, right? But are you sure about that?" - Cem Atik

Matt's answer goes up on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Today's Guest

Cem Atik (pronounced "Jem") is Co-Founder of Harucon Ventures GmbH, based in Düsseldorf, Germany. Harucon is a growth partner for ecommerce brands in the UK and the DACH region, which covers Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Cem runs it with his partner Tobias Münnich, who leads the finance side. The firm works on a performance-based model, caps itself at 15 brands at a time and takes equity positions in some of the companies it scales. Cem has been in ecommerce for 13 years and posts regularly on LinkedIn, where he answers questions from founders he has never met.

• Website - harucon-ventures.com
• LinkedIn - Cem Atik

About the eCommerce Podcast

The eCommerce Podcast helps you deliver ecommerce WOW with real talk about building online stores. Matt Edmundson talks to experts and founders who've built the stores and learned the hard way, so you don't have to.

Subscribe at ecommerce-podcast.com for a new episode every Thursday.

Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/why-pay-an-agency-15k-when-your-customers-will-tell-you-for-free-with-cem-atik

Three hundred episodes in, and the most useful thing Matt has learned isn't a tactic. It's that the question we all use to filter ideas doesn't filter anything at all.

In May, on episode 289, Matt committed on air to a 90-day Instagram experiment, personal brand against a paid-ads benchmark, numbers published either way. This is the honest report. The benchmark never got run, the reels never hit cadence, and the two-to-three hours a week he'd allowed for it were never once spent. So it wasn't time, and he argues it wasn't discipline either.

What it was is a cost he never budgeted for, and a coaching question he's asked of a thousand other founders and failed to ask himself.

This is also the last episode ever recorded in the home studio, the Edmundsons move house in a week, after 22 years.

In this episode

• 01:58 - The 90-day Instagram experiment, and what actually happened
• 06:17 - Origination cost, the expensive part was never the filming
• 09:27 - Entrepreneurial optimism, and the two coaching questions
• 12:33 - Why a notebook full of good ideas creates overwhelm
• 17:21 - Why 8 out of 10, and why "consistent" is the word that matters
• 22:51 - Does it fail because of you, or because of the task?
• 25:51 - The conversation that lifted mobile conversion over 400%
• 31:58 - When the guest is right and you don't want them to be
• 36:01 - What AI actually changed
• 39:16 - How this podcast started, and what 300 episodes have been worth
• 46:12 - Should you start a podcast?

The Promise That Didn't Get Kept (01:58)

The setup on episode 289 was a proper argument. Davie Fogarty, the Oodie founder doing around $200m a year, reckons founders under $10m shouldn't bother with personal brand, the opportunity cost is enormous and that time is better spent on ads creative. Alex Hormozi and Daniel Priestley say the opposite. Show up on camera or AI eats your business.

Matt said he'd settle it. Ninety days, head to head, numbers published.

"The ads benchmark never actually got run. Not that it underperformed, it never actually happened. So I can't give you the comparison that I promised you, which I can only apologise for."Origination Cost (06:17)

The filming was never the problem. Matt has three studios and, in his words, more iPhones than he knows what to do with. The expensive part was deciding what to say and then getting in front of a camera cold, from a blank page, every single time.

The one reel that did work, building an AI assistant like KITT from Knight Rider rather than Jarvis, hit eight or nine thousand views, the best on his channel. And he didn't script it. Hook written word for word, landing written word for word, prompts in the middle, everything else ad-libbed.

The Two Questions (09:27)"Will this move the needle between where I am and where I want to be? And can I be a consistent 8 out of 10 at doing this?"

Two questions Matt has put to a hundred, maybe a thousand founders over the years. He broke the second one in public, on his own podcast, and the thing that got him there he calls entrepreneurial optimism. The blind confidence that we can just do the thing.

Your Notebook Isn't Full of Bad Ideas (12:33)

Matt takes pages of notes on every episode, conference, book and coaching call. It's a genuine gold mine. It's also, he suspects, a library of good intentions.

"The problem isn't that the ideas themselves are bad. The problem is that every single idea written in my notebook is good."

Which is exactly why question one filters nothing. Everything in the notebook passed it, that's the only reason it got written down.

Why 8, and Why Consistent (17:21)

Ten out of ten is a fantasy, and chasing it means never starting. Eight is where things produce real results and where Matt and the team can still sustain them on a Thursday afternoon when everyone's tired.

"Ten out of ten is perfectionism wearing a business suit."

The word doing the real work is consistent. Hitting an 8 once is a good afternoon. Week nine is the test. And a brilliant idea managed at 4 out of 10 sporadically is worth close to nothing, arguably less, because of what it eats.

"It could slowly improve your guilt score. But that's a KPI not worth measuring."

There have been three or four points across seven years where Matt seriously considered stopping the show. He didn't, and that consistency is the entire argument.

Drop, Delegate, or Systematise (22:51)

When something fails question two, there's one more question. Does it fail because of you, or because of the task?

If it's the task, drop it and feel good about it. If it's you, work out which steps genuinely need you and which you've only assumed do. With the reels, the honest answer was thirty seconds of face on camera, the ideas, the beat sheets, the edit and the scheduling never had to be Matt's.

Three exits. Only one of them is a no.

What It Looks Like When It Works (25:51)

Episode 280, March this year. Adam Pearce of Blend Commerce on the first three thumb scrolls of a mobile product page, you get about three before somebody buys or leaves, and most of us waste them. Across his client base he was seeing 30-50% conversion lifts from fixing them.

Question one, obviously yes. Question two, no. Matt isn't a CRO specialist and won't become one. Had the plan been "Matt learns mobile UX," it would have died in week three.

So they changed who does the doing. The conversation became research, then a Claude Code tool that audits the mobile experience and tells the developers how to fix what it finds, then a three-phase implementation plan.

"We have worked through two phases of that three-phase plan. As things currently stand, our mobile conversion is up by over 400%."Capacity, Not Appetite (31:58)

A warning, because the filter can be abused. Back on episode 35 in October 2020, Chloe Thomas told Matt to get moving on Black Friday. He agreed out loud and dismissed it internally, they'd done this before, they knew what they were doing, there was time.

There was not time. They've been early every year since.

Question two is about whether you can sustain something, not whether you fancy it. "I could do this at 8 out of 10 every week, I just don't want to" isn't a fail. That's a Tuesday afternoon.

What AI Actually Changed (36:01)

The gap between an interesting idea and a decision you can act on is enormous, because answering question two honestly means holding the whole business in your head at once. SAM closes that gap, those conversations run from fifteen minutes to two or three hours of genuine pushback.

"It doesn't do the thing for you. It doesn't get me in front of a camera. But it does close the gap between me doing it and not doing it."Where It All Started (39:16)

Matt's best friend Tony told him he had a great face for radio. That was, more or less, the strategy.

They already had the kit from a 2012 podcast run for a beauty business, which made hundreds of thousands of pounds in ways nobody predicted. Season one of EP was mostly Matt talking, until he got bored of his own voice and switched to interviews. He has never scripted an episode or his questions since.

And the most listened-to episode of all 300 is still episode one, the one he made before he'd learned anything.

There was never any sponsorship. Measured that way, the show is a failure. Measured on seven years of weekly hours with people who know things he doesn't, it's worth millions, plus the part nobody plans for. Jared Mitchell (episode 74) and his family have stayed at Matt's house, and Matt and his daughter have stayed at theirs. Chris George (episode 130) led to recording live at SubSummit and doors that wouldn't have opened otherwise.

Should You Start One? (46:12)

Yes, with one condition, which by then you can guess. Only if you can be consistent at it. Ignore the download numbers and have great conversations with interesting people.

"This podcast is definitely not the best idea that I had in 2019. Not even close. It's just that this particular one I have been able to do at a consistent 8 out of 10 for seven years, week after week. And that, I think, is the entire reason it has worked."Your Turn

Go and find your list, the notebook, the doc, the Slack channel, wherever the graveyard is. Run it through both questions. Where something fails the second, ask whether it's you or the task before you delete it.

Most people end up with two or three things. And that tends to feel like an enormous relief.

Download The 8/10 Filter, one page, free, at ecommercepodcast.net under the resources link.

Jayden Clark sold his first ecommerce business for £500,000 — and the decision came to him during a 90-minute massage.

Two and a half years earlier he'd started it in the evenings around a job at Sky. It hit seven figures in year one and got both him and his wife out of corporate work. It also had nothing holding it up underneath. Jayden had built the demand engine and skipped the operations, and the gap between what the business sold and what it could actually support kept widening until he broke.

In this episode he's unusually straight about what that cost him — he reckons another 18 months of operations work would have made it a seven-figure exit — and about what the fund that bought him taught him during a six-month earn-out he didn't want. He then walks through how he's building Camper Nation differently, including why a 0.3% conversion rate is deliberate, why he stopped selling his second best-selling brand, and the lead magnet sequence he'd run if he were starting tomorrow.

In this episode

• 04:20 — From ten years at Sky to seven figures in year one
• 15:19 — Building the demand engine and skipping the operations
• 17:36 — The massage that ended the business
• 21:10 — The two non-negotiables in business number two
• 25:37 — Why a 0.3% conversion rate is the plan
• 33:33 — Why nobody turns up to the lead magnet workshop
• 39:10 — Most conversion problems are traffic problems
• 44:40 — How to build your first lead magnet

The Gap That Breaks Founders (15:19)

Jayden's strength is demand — ads, SEO, everything up to conversion. So he pushed demand, and kept pushing, while the operational side went unbuilt.

"What I am not very good at and what I don't enjoy is what happens after the sale. And so you keep doing this, this, this with the demand, and the gap between what the business is doing and what the business can realistically sustain just gets bigger and bigger and bigger." — Jayden Clark

Financial pressure made it worse. With two corporate salaries gone and roughly £10,000 a month needed out of the business, every profit increase became a choice between hiring help and banking the security. He kept banking it and working the extra hours.

The 90-Minute Massage (17:36)

Two years in, a spa day after his UK wedding ceremony. Ninety minutes, no distractions, and a head full of liabilities and bad hires.

"For me at this time that was like hell, because it was 90 minutes in silence with my own thoughts, thinking about all the liabilities that exist." — Jayden Clark

He came out and said he needed to sell — not because the offer was right, but because he couldn't face the work required to make the business sustainable. The fund that bought it made him stay six months, because he'd built a business only he could run. That earn-out became the operations education he'd never had.

Why 0.3% Conversion Is Deliberate (25:37)

Camper Nation converts at 0.3–0.4% against a 1–2% benchmark, with an average order value around £2,000. At that price the scoreboard changes — Jayden runs the business on traffic-to-lead conversion, not traffic-to-purchase.

The mechanic is concrete. A customer wants an awning but fears ordering the wrong one. So Camper Nation asks for the registration and vehicle type, returns a guaranteed-compatible list, and covers return shipping if it's still wrong.

"If they don't feel confident that awning is right for their vehicle, no matter how many times you bombard them with the product and more traditional remarketing, they are never going to get to the point where they're ready to purchase." — Jayden ClarkMost Conversion Problems Are Traffic Problems (39:10)

When people bring Jayden a conversion problem, he says at least two times out of three the real issue is the intent of the traffic arriving. Someone searching for a sleep supplement with two specific active ingredients is a different buyer from someone searching for help sleeping better.

"You can optimise on-page and conversion rate and lead magnets as much as you want, you are always going to be running uphill if your traffic source is not intended correctly." — Jayden ClarkJayden's Lead Magnet Sequence (44:40)

1. Pick one product — the one you'd sell if you could only sell one thing tomorrow
2. Describe the dream lead in five specifics
3. Reverse-engineer which searches and channels put that person on the page
4. Write down what they don't know and what's blocking them
5. Build the lead magnet around the single biggest blocker, and give away enough that it feels uncomfortable
6. Serve the first leads manually, then automate what works

Also mentioned

• George Bryant on the APPLE framework — the nurture-sequence approach Jayden recommends

Today's Guest

Today's guest: Jayden Clark Company: Camper Nation Website: campernation.co.uk LinkedIn: Connect with Jayden on LinkedIn Email: [email protected] YouTube: Jayden Clark Ecom Community: 1% Ecom Club (on Skool)

Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/the-90-minute-massage-that-cost-him-half-a-million-with-jayden-clark

Bawar Ahmad has bought around 70 ecommerce businesses in six years, and the first thing he does after the money clears isn't marketing. It's ringing the vendors.

Summary

Bawar Ahmad co-founded Ecomma, a Dubai-based micro private equity firm that buys, scales and sells Shopify businesses. Around 70 acquisitions and 60 exits later, with a team of 40 and a target of 30 to 36 more acquisitions this year, he has turned what most people treat as a once-in-a-lifetime event into a repeatable system.

He walks Matt through the 12 to 15 "value drivers" his team runs on every store they acquire, why valuation comes down to just two things, and the mistake that quietly costs sellers a chunk of their exit. He also explains how Ecomma gets from first questionnaire to cash in the seller's bank in 14 to 20 days when the industry standard is three to four months.

Matt, who has bought and sold ecommerce businesses on very different terms, pushes him on the other side of the coin, which is growth by acquisition. If you're turning over a million and want to get to five, should you double from scratch or go and buy someone?

• 00:00 — Welcome, and two ecommerce dinosaurs meet
• 03:22 — Seventy acquisitions in six years
• 06:11 — The first deal, a declining shoe brand bought before Black Friday
• 10:04 — What happens in a seller's head once they decide to sell
• 12:28 — Choosing an advisor, and the clean-financials red flag
• 16:02 — Normalisation, SDE and the tax conundrum
• 17:51 — Fourteen days from questionnaire to cash in the bank
• 20:09 — Asset purchase or share transfer on sub-$2m deals
• 24:06 — Profit, risk, and the value drivers that run on day one
• 29:11 — Voice marketing as the third retention channel
• 32:48 — Where to start if you want to buy a business
• 35:25 — Due diligence is for understanding, not just verifying
• 38:32 — When the brand is built entirely around the founder
• 41:09 — Buy for the audience, not the niche
• 46:52 — Structuring a deal when you buy a competitor
• 50:31 — What Ecomma buys, and the free exit-prep checklist
• 53:22 — Saving the best till last, get your data room ready

(Chapter markers aligned to the episode video.)

The Day-One Phone Calls That Move the Numbers (24:06)

Valuation comes down to two things in Bawar's model, profit and risk. Ecomma either grows one or removes the other, and about 20% of the time they add value without touching profit at all — building a team, adding backup suppliers, getting better contracts in place, removing the dependencies a buyer would discount for.

The rest is a standardised playbook of 12 to 15 value drivers, and the first one he gives away is negotiating costs down. On day one, the team rings every vendor on the account. The Klaviyo bill, the PayPal transaction fee, the supplier, the 3PL. Then they ask for better pricing.

"You'll be surprised how much of the vendors were like, we're waiting for this call for some time." — Bawar Ahmad

He reckons that alone moves profit by roughly 20% almost overnight. On the payments line specifically, his framing is blunt.

"So on PayPal, we've added 20% of valuation on the first day." — Bawar Ahmad

The next two drivers are marketing ones.

• Creative volume. If a brand is shipping 8 new videos a month on Facebook, Ecomma pushes it to 20 or 30 and expects ROAS to follow.
• Untapped retention channels. SMS flows and campaigns get switched on, then voice.

Stack enough of those small percentages and, in his words, before you know it you've doubled the business in 90 days. His stated average across the portfolio is a 150% uplift in 90 days.

Don't Assume the Sale (10:04)

Bawar says he sees the same sequence in about 90% of sellers. Life changes, they Google whether they can sell, they land on a valuation form promising a big number, they list, and the interest floods in. Then, 30 or 50 conversations later, the buyers go cold and the seller starts drifting away from the business.

That's where the damage happens. New creative doesn't get made. The influencer deal gets shelved. Inventory doesn't get reordered. Performance dips, and buyers can read a declining chart as well as anyone.

"You don't want to run the business as you're gonna sell it." — Bawar Ahmad

The example he gives is illustrative rather than measured, but the shape of it holds. A business doing $100,000 profit a year at a 3x multiple is a $300,000 exit. Let performance slide during the sale process and that same business might fetch $150,000. Two or three more months of running it properly is, on his maths, worth the difference.

Clean Financials Beat a Good Pitch (12:28)

Bawar's third seller mistake is the one he came back to at the end of the episode when Matt asked for the best advice he hadn't yet given. Plenty of brands doing millions a year are still run on Google Sheets, with the car lease and the Uber Eats going through the same entity as the stock.

"It's just a red flag." — Bawar Ahmad

Buyers at this level often aren't ecommerce natives, so messy books make a business hard to underwrite and easy to walk away from. His fix starts at least a full financial year before you go to market.

• Separate every personal cost out of the business
• Get a proper P&L, balance sheet and cash flow reporting in place
• Keep the bookkeeping current and the invoices tidy
• Have the SOPs, systems and team documented alongside the numbers

Matt raised the obvious British objection, which is that a limited company owner legitimately puts as much through the business as possible to reduce their tax bill, and in doing so reduces the profit their valuation is built on. Bawar's answer is normalisation. Costs that are genuinely personal get added back as seller discretionary earnings, or SDE, and the valuation reflects the real economics — but that only works if the books are clean enough to prove it.

"You have to start thinking as an asset. This is a business, this is a system, it's not a lifestyle business." — Bawar Ahmad

The preparation argument runs into deal speed too. Both of them have a phrase for it.

"Time kills deals." — Bawar Ahmad"Deals are like concrete — the longer you leave them, the harder they get." — Matt Edmundson

That's what the data room is for. If a buyer asks a question and the answer takes three or four days to dig out, the deal cools. If the answer takes five minutes, it doesn't.

Fourteen Days, Not Four Months (17:51)

From the moment a seller returns Ecomma's questionnaire to cash hitting their bank is 14 to 20 days on average. An offer goes out within 24 hours of getting access, due diligence takes seven days, contracts add a couple more, then handover.

Bawar is clear that this isn't standard. A normal go-to-market process runs three to four months, and Matt's own exits have taken six. The gap exists because most buyers don't understand ecommerce well enough to move quickly, so they compensate with time and paperwork. Knowing the model means knowing which checks actually matter.

One structural note for anyone selling. Around 99% of deals below $2m are asset purchases rather than share transfers, so the buyer takes the assets and leaves the entity, its contracts and its history behind. Matt's caveat is that the tax treatment differs between the two, so talk to your accountant before you decide.

The Third Retention Channel (29:11)

Almost every Shopify store has an abandoned-cart email flow. A smaller number have SMS. Bawar's argument is that voice AI is arriving as the third one, and that 95% of brands haven't turned it on.

The mechanic is straightforward. Someone adds to cart and leaves, and roughly ten minutes later an AI agent phones them. It might be one in the afternoon, it might be one in the morning.

"These agents, the softwares never sleep." — Bawar Ahmad

The agent asks what they were looking for, hears the answer, and offers the discount code. Ecomma sees it add around 5% to revenue. The side benefit is the recordings, because you get to hear a mother buying a toy for a ten-year-old explain in her own words why she was on the site, which is intelligence that paid ads and email don't give you.

He expects it to be as ordinary as email within three years. Matt's gentler on-ramp for anyone nervous about letting AI talk to their customers is the voice memo, sent over SMS or WhatsApp, recorded by an actual human on the team.

Buying a Business to Grow Your Own (41:09)

For an operator doing a million a year who wants to get to five, acquisition is the other route. Bawar's filter for what to buy is not the product category.

"I would just go with audience first." — Bawar Ahmad

A skincare brand serving 35-year-old women with acne shouldn't buy a phone case company for the extra revenue, and shouldn't buy a mascara brand either, because that's a different customer wearing the same label. It should buy the supplement brand those same women are already asking about, and build around the audience rather than the niche.

Matt's live example is a vegan supplement business whose customers keep asking for two things, electrolytes and protein. The electrolytes are developed. Protein quotes from manufacturers came back in the hundreds of thousands of pounds to get started, which makes buying or merging with an existing vegan protein brand the live question.

Three things Bawar would tell a first-time buyer.

• Set aside 5% of the transaction for advice. On a $1m business, that's about $50,000. Rushing to the wrong advisor is the second most common mistake he sees.
• Use due diligence to understand, not just to verify. The seller has three or four years of hard-won knowledge about which buttons, which suppliers, which price points. Go in blind and you'll be a step behind them permanently.
• Run strategy sessions with the team before any money moves. Sit down with the people who'll be doing the work and talk through what happens if the deal completes.

"Put emphasis as the owner or as the buyer more on the understanding and let your advisors do the verifying." — Bawar Ahmad

Two risks he's paid for personally. The first is founder-led brands. Ecomma bought one built entirely around its founder, kept her on a compensation package with everything on contract, and watched the money change her plans anyway — holiday, thoughts of children, video quality and involvement falling away. A two-month dip, then another month or two to recover after replacing her. Now they either ask the founder to make themselves replaceable and prove the business runs without them, or they leave it alone.

The second is culture. When you buy a competitor and keep the owner involved, put a call or put option into the structure so there's a clean way out if you don't sync. Matt spends real time assessing values and culture before a deal for the same reason. Bawar's own preference is simpler.

"I think it's cheaper than figuring out the culture." — Bawar AhmadToday's Guest

Bawar Ahmad is a Founder at Ecomma, a Dubai-based micro private equity firm that buys, scales and sells Shopify businesses. He co-founded it with Wieger Sietsma after running Young Metrics, a paid-media agency that worked with around 400 ecommerce brands. He holds an econometrics degree from Erasmus University. Ecomma has completed roughly 70 acquisitions and 60 exits in six years, with a team of 40 and a target of 30 to 36 acquisitions this year.

• Website — ecomma.co
• LinkedIn — Bawar Ahmad
• Email — [email protected]

What Ecomma buys — brands doing between $30,000 and $1m a month in revenue, not seasonal, profitable for at least a year, and trading for more than a year.

Free from Bawar — email him at [email protected] (that's .co, not .com) and he'll send over his due diligence and exit-prep checklist, covering how to get your business ready before you go to market and the pitfalls to watch for. There's also a valuation calculator on the Ecomma website at ecomma.co.

About the eCommerce Podcast

The eCommerce Podcast helps you deliver ecommerce WOW with real talk about building online stores. Matt Edmundson talks to experts and founders who've built the stores and learned the hard way, so you don't have to.

Subscribe at ecommerce-podcast.com for a new episode every Thursday.

Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/hes-done-70-acquisitions-day-one-he-calls-paypal-with-bawar-ahmad