The Ecommerce Alley Podcast: Meta Ads, AI Frameworks, and Business Strategy

Starting October 28th, Meta says it will add product browsing to existing ads unless you opt out. That means catalog products show up alongside your ad, and people can shop inside Facebook or Instagram instead of landing on your site, where your upsells and the rest of your funnel live. Meta’s notice says businesses see about 3% more conversions on average. Dylan thinks that’s probably true, and that’s the problem. Heading into Black Friday and Cyber Monday, those extra conversions most likely come from existing customers and people who were already going to buy, which means fewer new customers from the campaigns you set up to find them.

Dylan covers which brands should worry most: if Meta already spends a big share of your broad campaigns on existing and engaged audiences, this will hit you harder. He also walks through two ways it can muddy your read on performance:

• Results drop and you blame creative fatigue or scaling, when Meta is really pushing your $5 refill instead of the $80 product you’re advertising
• Results jump and you credit the creative, when the catalog did the selling, and Ads Manager won’t tell you which sales came from where

Even Meta’s own AI, when someone asked, said to turn it off if you want control over where clicks land.

His recommendation: opt out before BFCM, then test product browsing afterward on a few clearly labeled ad sets so you can actually measure it. Dylan likes the feature. His problem is the timing, and that most advertisers won’t know it’s on.

How to opt out: If you got Meta’s email about this, search your inbox for “product browsing” and opt out from there. If not, use the link below, but don’t tap it straight from your podcast app. Paste it into a note first, swap the 123456789 placeholders for asset_id and business_id with your own IDs (you can pull them from the URL at business.facebook.com), then open it and click Opt Out. If it says your ads aren’t scheduled for product browsing, you’re already clear. If nothing happens, assume you were opted in and are now opted out.

Opt-out link: https://business.facebook.com/latest/home?asset_id=123456789&ir_qe_exposed=1&business_id=123456789&pb_auto_upgrade_optout=1&pb_auto_upgrade_optout_surface=email_deeplink

Dylan expects October 28th to show up as a bad day for a lot of accounts.

🎯 Did Meta have a bad day? Find out: https://ecommercealley.com/bad 

⭐ Loved this episode? Drop us a rating because we’re going for #1 ecommerce podcast in the world and every single rating moves the needle.

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A $5,000 giveaway added nearly 5,600 leads to a Disney fine art brand’s email list in about two weeks, almost doubling it, and roughly broke even after ad spend and cost of goods.

In this episode, we walk through exactly how that giveaway was built for The Quirky Mouse, one of our partner brands, and how to run the same play before Black Friday or as an ongoing list-growth engine. Here’s what’s covered:

• Why giving away your own product beats cash, iPads, or vacations (and how a $1,500 prize cost about $100 to fulfill)
• The thank-you page setup: an instant 10% off code plus 25 bonus entries for every friend referred, built with tools like UpViral or Gleam
• Extra entries for follows, shares, browsing collections, and a survey that 1,570 people completed
• The three-day tiered offer after the winner draw, and how it doubled as a Black Friday discount test
• The full numbers: $0.40 CPC, $0.89 cost per lead, nearly 3,000 free referred visitors, and $7,943 in sales
• Why to keep each cycle under 30 days and cap ongoing spend at 5 to 10% of your ad budget

This is a lead gen play, not direct response. The goal is to cover costs inside 30 days, then profit from a much bigger list when it counts.

Loved this episode? Drop us a rating because we’re going for #1 ecommerce podcast in the world and every single rating moves the needle.

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► Visit Our Website For Training and Resources

► Leave Us An Honest Rating, Email An Image Of Your Rating To [email protected], We'll Send You A $10 Amazon Gift Card As An Appreciation Gift!

► Learn About Our Mentorship Program For Ecom Brands Making Over $10k/month

► Checkout Our Software, Breezeway - Never Second-Guess Your Meta Ads Again

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Molly Pittman launched a pet supplement brand at the end of June, crossed $100K in sales, and runs it with just one or two humans and a team of AI agents for ecommerce. Her "aha" moment came when an agentic AI system built an entire week-long promotion (emails, landing page, design, and Meta ads) live on a Zoom call in about ten minutes, which would have taken her team 2–3 weeks by hand.

In this live episode recorded at Acquire 26, Josh sits down with Molly Pittman, CEO of Smart Marketer and co-founder of Longer Together, to break down how her team uses AI agents to run ecommerce brands, where she draws the line on AI autonomy, and the part of AI productivity almost every founder gets wrong.

Inside this episode:

• How the system is structured: one super agent per brand, sub agents for email, CRO, and paid media, and why talking to 30 AI agents at once falls apart
• Gary, the "wizard" agent trained on over 36,000 touchpoints of Smart Marketer IP (and the AI risk that makes your own IP more valuable than ever)
• Why you can build an AI agent in 2–3 hours, but the real problem shows up afterward
• The Slack setup that stops your team from building AI tools in silos that never talk to each other
• How their CRO agent proposes, runs, and reports on landing page tests, and how much it's allowed to do without approval
• The Eight Sleep story: $100M a year in email marketing with no email marketing director (and why Molly isn't fully buying it)
• How AI cut landing page builds to 15 minutes and turned a weeks-long Black Friday Cyber Monday analysis into an 8-hour job
• Ben Bennett's "AI possible" idea and the AI automation tasks you're wasting time on right now

Most founders who use AI to save time just fill that time with more work. Molly makes the case for doing something very different with it.

Loved this episode? Drop us a rating because we're going for #1 ecommerce podcast in the world and every single rating moves the needle.

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► Visit Our Website For Training and Resources

► Leave Us An Honest Rating, Email An Image Of Your Rating To [email protected], We'll Send You A $10 Amazon Gift Card As An Appreciation Gift!

► Learn About Our Mentorship Program For Ecom Brands Making Over $10k/month

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What would your ecommerce brand do if you could never spend another dollar on ads, send another email, or post on social media? The only way left to grow would be a customer experience so good that people never leave, buy only from you, and refer everyone they know.

In this episode, Josh sits down with Isaac, TEA's director of client experience, to break down how to engineer unforgettable customer experiences that increase customer lifetime value (LTV), lower churn, and turn DTC customers into raving fans.

Inside this episode:

• The "no marketing allowed" thought experiment that exposes where your customer retention strategy is falling short
• How Poppy went from $0 to $500K a month in under a year with a customer onboarding approach most founders would call unscalable
• The 95/5 rule from Unreasonable Hospitality (and the valet parking story that shows what the "foolish" 5% can buy you)
• Why one apparel founder doing $140K a month films a quick video for almost every customer, and what it built for him
• The client who started texting every customer from a separate phone line, and what happened as he scaled from around $60K to nearly $500K a month
• How Sweetwater uses candy on one end of the spectrum and named sales reps on the other to own their category
• The small packaging details (tape, a signed card, even scent) that make customers look forward to opening your box
• The refund empowerment threshold every ecommerce team should set so small problems never turn into lost customers
• The 1922 speakeasy mastermind experience TEA built in about two afternoons with the help of AI
• Three customer experience books every Shopify founder should add to their list

This isn't an episode about being nice to customers. It's about the growth lever most brands staff at minimum wage while pouring everything into acquisition, and why the things that don't scale might be the ones that scale the most.

⭐ Loved this episode? Drop us a rating because we're going for #1 ecommerce podcast in the world and every single rating moves the needle.

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► Visit Our Website For Training and Resources

► Leave Us An Honest Rating, Email An Image Of Your Rating To [email protected], We'll Send You A $10 Amazon Gift Card As An Appreciation Gift!

► Learn About Our Mentorship Program For Ecom Brands Making Over $10k/month

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Meta ad performance fell off a cliff this month, and the bad days started earlier than most advertisers noticed. August 21st. Then the 26th through the 28th. Then September 1st, when Meta itself reported high disruptions with revenue reporting. By September 8th, almost everyone running Meta ads was feeling it.

In this episode, Josh sits down with Robert Reyes, our Director of Coaching and Community, who works with several hundred ecommerce clients, to break down what actually happened and the five things you can control the next time Meta goes sideways.

Inside this episode:

• The two windows every single year when Meta goes heavy on product development and performance gets shaky (and why a bloody September is actually better news than a bloody November)
• The panic cycle almost every advertiser runs: Reddit, mass shutoffs, a wrecked ad account, regret (and why trying to time a Meta recovery is exactly like trying to time the stock market)
• Why launching ads every week stays non-negotiable no matter how bad the numbers look, plus the 50/50 split between iterating on a proven angle and testing something totally new
• Ad spend percentage as your true north metric, the 15–35% range we work inside, and the exact point where we start pulling back instead of killing
• How to offset ad costs with non ad spend activity: email flows, SMS, pop-ups that should be converting 8–10% of your site traffic, and the 72-hour promo sprint when you need an immediate cash injection
• The segmentation move that gets you to seven emails a week without writing seven emails
• The optimization rule that keeps you from killing your best creative during a bad stretch (hint: the last seven days of data might be worth nothing)
• "Bricks in the castle," the build-mode concept for every hour you're not spending panicking, including the AI agent Josh watched schedule a full client email inside GoHighLevel from one voice command

This isn't a "Meta is broken forever" episode. Meta will do this again, roughly twice a year, pretty predictably.

The difference between brands that come out of it scaling into Q4 and brands that spend October digging out of a hole is entirely what they do during the two weeks it lasts.

🎯 Did Meta have a bad day? Find out: https://ecommercealley.com/bad 

⭐ Loved this episode? Drop us a rating because we're going for #1 ecommerce podcast in the world and every single rating moves the needle.

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► Visit Our Website For Training and Resources

► Leave Us An Honest Rating, Email An Image Of Your Rating To [email protected], We'll Send You A $10 Amazon Gift Card As An Appreciation Gift!

► Learn About Our Mentorship Program For Ecom Brands Making Over $10k/month

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Most ecommerce brands kill their website popup to protect margin, and they end up paying more to acquire every customer. On $10,000 in ad spend, a 15% welcome offer moves CPA from $33.33 down to $25 on day one, then down to $17.24 once the email list does its job.

Josh walks through every scenario with the numbers on screen.

Inside this episode:

• The World War II bomber study that explains why "people buy from me without a discount" is the wrong conclusion to draw about your own store
• The full $10,000 ad spend breakdown: 3% vs 4% conversion rate, $33.33 vs $25 CPA, and why a lower AOV still collected $2,600 more
• Why 15% off outperforms the 10% everybody else runs, plus the 8 to 10% opt-in benchmark and what it means if you are above it
• The trail effect, and what the 600 people who opted in but did not buy on day one are actually worth over the next 90 days
• The repeat purchase rule of thumb we use (40% place a second order, then cut it in half every order after) and the $104 lifetime value it adds up to
• Five popup types mapped to customer lifecycle stage, starting with the reminder popup for subscribers who never used their code
• The one-time buyer popup, and the loyalty and subscription popup for anyone who has already bought twice
• Three ways to capture emails without discounting, including the play a luxury brand can run without touching price
• The change to make to your welcome offer before Black Friday Cyber Monday so your offers stop stacking

The real question is not whether to run a popup. It is what the offer costs you today, what the list is worth in 90 days, and whether you have any way to follow up with the people who showed up and walked.

💬 DM Josh on Instagram @joshcoffy and let him know your take. 

⭐ Loved this episode? Drop us a rating because we're going for #1 ecommerce podcast in the world and every single rating moves the needle.

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► Visit Our Website For Training and Resources

► Leave Us An Honest Rating, Email An Image Of Your Rating To [email protected], We'll Send You A $10 Amazon Gift Card As An Appreciation Gift!

► Learn About Our Mentorship Program For Ecom Brands Making Over $10k/month

► Checkout Our Software, Breezeway - Never Second-Guess Your Meta Ads Again

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We know ecommerce brands doing $200,000 a month on Meta ads with a negative 5% profit margin, losing $10,000 to $20,000 every single month. They got past $100K without fixing five things first, so now they're starting over at the foundations.

In this episode, Josh and Dylan get into the five things you have to fix while you're still in the $30K trench, drawn from six years of coaching and more than 700 ecommerce businesses.

Inside this episode:

• The five economics Josh treats as non-negotiables (gross profit margin, AOV, break even ROAS, ad spend percentage, net profit margin) and the ranges he calls healthy vs. excellent
• Why under 50% gross profit margin almost never scales, and the one kind of business that gets away with it
• The one-line math for your break even ROAS (and why a 30% margin has you chasing a 3.33 that no account holds at scale)
• The median AOV, CPA, and cost per click across high-spend brands inside Breezeway, and why a $23 CPA can sit right next to a 1.4 ROAS
• The welcome offer pop-up conversion rate to hit, what it says about your offer if you're under it, and why being over it is also a problem
• The five email flows to build out of the gate, and why getting email to 20 to 30% of revenue works like a raise on your Meta performance without touching your ads
• The cash management system that explains why the profit on your P&L never matches your bank balance, plus Josh's rules on which debt is worth taking and which one buries brands
• Why scaling while you're sitting at your break even number is the fastest way to run a bigger business for free

If you're at 30K a month and the plan for the next level is just more ad spend, listen to this one first. Growth on a hot ad account feels incredible right up until you open the bank account.

Loved this episode? Drop us a rating because we're going for #1 ecommerce podcast in the world and every single rating moves the needle.

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► Visit Our Website For Training and Resources

► Leave Us An Honest Rating, Email An Image Of Your Rating To [email protected], We'll Send You A $10 Amazon Gift Card As An Appreciation Gift!

► Learn About Our Mentorship Program For Ecom Brands Making Over $10k/month

► Checkout Our Software, Breezeway - Never Second-Guess Your Meta Ads Again

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One of our clients was doing $20,000 to $30,000 a month on Meta ads, spending a few hundred dollars a day. She found a pocket that was working in Q4, pushed her spend to $2,000 a day, and closed that month north of $200,000. That was one bet.

In this episode, Josh and Dylan break down why most ecommerce founders stay stuck at the same revenue for years, and why the answer is almost never one more small optimization.

Inside this episode:

• The treadmill problem: why turning up the speed feels like growth while the business stays in the exact same spot
• The 90-degree walking test that exposes how far ahead you're actually looking (and why your brain keeps dragging you back down to 45)
• Why the bets that got you here are the same bets keeping you stuck here
• The "failure engine," a system that lets you fail over and over without ever putting the business at risk
• The motto behind every test we run: test fast, assume failure, exploit success
• How Johnny Cox launched an entirely new brand in under two weeks and took it from zero to $100,000 a month in three months, all while running his seven-figure business
• The $20 CPA ceiling nobody talks about, and what it actually means if you're sitting at $25 to $30 right now
• Reversible vs. irreversible decisions, and the hiring bet we made that we could not undo

Bigger bets do not have to mean bigger risk. The founders who break out are the ones who learned to tell the difference, and most people listening to this are playing far safer than they think.

Referenced in this episode: our deep dive with Johnny Cox of Gold Spartan and Cross & Helm, and our recent episode on the Theory of Constraints.

Loved this episode? Drop us a rating because we're going for #1 ecommerce podcast in the world and every single rating moves the needle. And leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify with the one area of your business where you know you've been playing it too small.

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► Visit Our Website For Training and Resources

► Leave Us An Honest Rating, Email An Image Of Your Rating To [email protected], We'll Send You A $10 Amazon Gift Card As An Appreciation Gift!

► Learn About Our Mentorship Program For Ecom Brands Making Over $10k/month

► Checkout Our Software, Breezeway - Never Second-Guess Your Meta Ads Again

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A client was paying $3 to $6 per click on their Meta ads with a 0.98 ROAS. Two weeks after changing how they prompt AI for ad creative, they're at a $1.05 cost per click and a 2.08 ROAS, with a break-even of 1.69. Same product, same team, completely different creative process.

In this episode, Josh and Dylan break down the exact AI creative workflow Dylan built with that client in person at our mastermind, and why most AI-generated ads come out looking like everybody else's.

Inside this episode:

• The "blah blah blah prompt" that starts the whole process (and why Dylan kept telling the client "more, give me more" until it felt asinine)
• Why AI is trained on generics, and how doing 10% more thinking than everyone else gets you 100% better output
• The 34 inputs that went into one prompt: 10 pieces of deep product info, 10 reasons people buy, and 14 situations they'd use it in
• Why you should have Claude write the ChatGPT prompt instead of writing it yourself
• The ad education section almost every prompt is missing (Claude is not a Meta ads expert, and if you listen to this show you already know more than it does)
• How to use Atria to pull visual diversity from brands in industries nothing like yours, plus the exact brands Dylan starts with
• Why Dylan generated nine creatives for this client and only ran six
• The one line to add at the end of every prompt that changes what the AI gives back
• The ethical dilemma of AI creative, and how to run this process even if you never publish an AI-generated image

This isn't a shortcut for skipping the work. It's the opposite. The brands pulling 2 to 3 times the creative volume and performance out of AI are the ones doing more thinking up front, not less. If your ChatGPT creatives have been coming back flat, this is the missing step.

🎯 Atria is our number one tool for creative inspiration and the exact platform Dylan used in this episode: https://ecommercealley.com/atria 

⭐ Loved this episode? Drop us a rating because we're going for #1 ecommerce podcast in the world and every single rating moves the needle.

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► Visit Our Website For Training and Resources

► Leave Us An Honest Rating, Email An Image Of Your Rating To [email protected], We'll Send You A $10 Amazon Gift Card As An Appreciation Gift!

► Learn About Our Mentorship Program For Ecom Brands Making Over $10k/month

► Checkout Our Software, Breezeway - Never Second-Guess Your Meta Ads Again

►  Follow Josh on social media:
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The Theory of Constraints is the framework Josh uses to answer the question every ecommerce founder asks, which is what do I actually work on next.

In this episode, Josh and Dylan walk through Josh's five-step version of the framework built specifically for ecommerce, including the four constraint areas he uses on coaching calls to find the real bottleneck instead of the obvious one.

Inside this episode:

• The step that has to happen before you identify your constraint (skip it and you'll spend a month solving the wrong problem)
• The four constraint areas in every ecommerce business, acquisition, fulfillment, product dev, and ops, plus the exact symptoms that tell you which one you're sitting in
• Why all roads lead back to acquisition, and what breaks underneath you every time you crank ad spend
• The client who was certain her constraint was Meta ads performance, until Josh walked the process and found the real one hiding behind a $50,000 inventory order
• Why conversion rate optimization is almost never the answer (Josh can't name three coaching calls in the last six months where it was)
• The brand spending $2,300 a day on ads while launching five creatives a week, and the number Josh told them to hit instead
• The difference between optimizing existing resources and allocating new ones, and the one rule you can't break when you free up time to work on a constraint
• The activity Josh gives most founders permission to stop doing this week, plus why "I don't have time for this" is already a diagnosis

Josh draws the entire framework out on his iPad while he teaches it, so the YouTube version is worth watching if you want the visual. And if you've ever ended a quarter busy, drained, and no further ahead than you started, you probably weren't lazy. You were working on the wrong constraint.

Loved this episode? Drop us a rating because we're going for #1 ecommerce podcast in the world and every single rating moves the needle.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

► Visit Our Website For Training and Resources

► Leave Us An Honest Rating, Email An Image Of Your Rating To [email protected], We'll Send You A $10 Amazon Gift Card As An Appreciation Gift!

► Learn About Our Mentorship Program For Ecom Brands Making Over $10k/month

► Checkout Our Software, Breezeway - Never Second-Guess Your Meta Ads Again

►  Follow Josh on social media:
YouTube | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok |