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  • How to Get AI to Recommend Your Brand Instead of Your Competitors
    2026/09/23
    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 turfWhy 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 McAnallyMatt 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 McAnallyDave 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 McAnallyDave 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.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.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 McAnallyOn 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 McAnallyAlan 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...
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    51 分
  • She Deleted 19,000 Email Subscribers And Turned Deliverability Around
    2026/09/16
    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.SummaryLaryssa 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 IntoLaryssa'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 WirstiukThe 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 WirstiukDisengaged 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 HurtsList 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 WirstiukOn 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 MetricsA 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 ...
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    53 分
  • Two Years, 100 Newsletters, and Not a Single Sale Yet
    2026/09/09
    Two Years, 100 Newsletters, and Not a Single Sale YetGabriel Lindh has written 100 weekly newsletters and taken 20-odd pre-orders for a pair of swim shorts he still hasn't sold.SummaryGabriel 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 differenceBuild 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 LindhGabriel 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 LindhThey 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 LindhMatt'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 ...
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    52 分
  • Is It Time We Talked About Turning Off Your Ads? (And Yes, You Read That Right)
    2026/09/04
    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.SummaryBrenden 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 ProfitBrenden'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 allThe 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 DelaruaBecause 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 PitOne 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.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.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.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 DelaruaFor 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 ...
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    53 分
  • Why Pay an Agency 15k When Your Customers Will Tell You for Free
    2026/08/21
    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 episode02:57 - Who Cem is and what Harucon Ventures does08:33 - The two mistakes he sees in almost every brand11:11 - Why pay 15k when you already have 100,000 customers13:45 - The $250,000 second business that went bankrupt in five months16:54 - Why a rising CAC is not automatically bad20:45 - What actually happens inside a growth audit24:18 - Cut the feelings and call your customers34:32 - How Cem uses AI to read data he has no time to read43:02 - The five numbers every ecommerce founder should knowThe 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 AtikHe 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 AtikHe 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 AtikThe 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 AtikThe 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 AtikThe 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 AtikCategory 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 ...
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    46 分
  • What I've learned in 300 episodes of the eCommerce Podcast
    2026/08/12
    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 episode01:58 - The 90-day Instagram experiment, and what actually happened06:17 - Origination cost, the expensive part was never the filming09:27 - Entrepreneurial optimism, and the two coaching questions12:33 - Why a notebook full of good ideas creates overwhelm17:21 - Why 8 out of 10, and why "consistent" is the word that matters22:51 - 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 be36:01 - What AI actually changed39:16 - How this podcast started, and what 300 episodes have been worth46:12 - 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, ...
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    52 分
  • The 90-Minute Massage That Cost Him Half a Million
    2026/08/05
    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 episode04:20 — From ten years at Sky to seven figures in year one15:19 — Building the demand engine and skipping the operations17:36 — The massage that ended the business21:10 — The two non-negotiables in business number two25:37 — Why a 0.3% conversion rate is the plan33:33 — Why nobody turns up to the lead magnet workshop39:10 — Most conversion problems are traffic problems44:40 — How to build your first lead magnetThe 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 ClarkFinancial 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 ClarkHe 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)Pick one product — the one you'd sell if you could only sell one thing tomorrowDescribe the dream lead in five specificsReverse-engineer which searches and channels put that person on the pageWrite down what they don't know and what's blocking themBuild the lead magnet around the single biggest blocker, and give away enough that it feels uncomfortableServe the first leads manually, then automate what worksAlso mentionedGeorge Bryant on the APPLE framework — the nurture-sequence approach Jayden recommendsToday's GuestToday's guest: Jayden Clark Company: Camper Nation Website: campernation.co.uk LinkedIn: Connect with Jayden on LinkedIn Email: jayden@foundersclubhouse.co.uk YouTube: Jayden Clark Ecom Community: 1% Ecom Club (on Skool)Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/the-90-...
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    49 分
  • He's Done 70 Acquisitions — Day One, He Calls PayPal
    2026/07/29
    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.SummaryBawar 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 meet03:22 — Seventy acquisitions in six years06:11 — The first deal, a declining shoe brand bought before Black Friday10:04 — What happens in a seller's head once they decide to sell12:28 — Choosing an advisor, and the clean-financials red flag16:02 — Normalisation, SDE and the tax conundrum17:51 — Fourteen days from questionnaire to cash in the bank20:09 — Asset purchase or share transfer on sub-$2m deals24:06 — Profit, risk, and the value drivers that run on day one29:11 — Voice marketing as the third retention channel32:48 — Where to start if you want to buy a business35:25 — Due diligence is for understanding, not just verifying38:32 — When the brand is built entirely around the founder41:09 — Buy for the audience, not the niche46:52 — Structuring a deal when you buy a competitor50:31 — What Ecomma buys, and the free exit-prep checklist53:22 — 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 AhmadHe 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 AhmadThe 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 AhmadThe 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 AhmadBuyers at this level often aren't ecommerce natives, so messy books make a business hard to ...
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    57 分