Blog

Why I Turned My Back Catalogue Into a Knowledge Base

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

I had twenty years of my content turned into one structured knowledge base, and now we use it to repurpose my existing content into new articles. Here is why, and how it works. […]

Scaling an Outdoor Brand From £500K to £4M

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

Scaling an outdoor leisure brand from £500K to £4M takes more than great products and marketing. It takes a tech foundation that does not crack under growth. Here is what it took with AE Leisure, and why the boring infrastructure work mattered as much as anything. […]

Announcing Sansec as Our First Ecommerce Camp Sponsor

Ecommerce Camp

Alongside announcing the speakers for Ecommerce Camp Birmingham, I was glad to introduce our first sponsor: Sansec, experts in ecommerce security and a global leader in protecting Magento and Adobe Commerce merchants from cyber threats. How we choose sponsors says a lot about the event. […]

How Gravel Shed Became a Client Without a Pitch

Founder Insights

You may remember the post about me driving to Wales to explore working together and meet the team at Gravel Shed. No contracts, no pressure, just a real conversation. Fast forward a week, and they are now part of our MageCloud client list. Did I push for it? No. […]

What a No-Contract Visit to Wales Looks Like

Founder Insights

Last week, together with Zach Wilson, I drove to Wales to visit a business. No contracts, no hard sales, just a real conversation about growth, strategy, and the future. It may not be the trendy way to onboard clients, but I keep doing it because it works. […]

Good UI/UX Converts, Bad UI/UX Kills Sales

Ecommerce Strategy

Great UI/UX converts. Bad UI/UX kills sales. Which one does your store have? Customers do not sit and analyse your design. They feel it, in whether the experience is smooth or frustrating, and that feeling shows up directly in your conversion rate. […]

Why I Travel to See My Clients in Person

Founder Insights

I recently visited Tom and James McIlvenny at Avenue 85 to review project progress, and I came away with the same thing I always do from these trips: an enormous boost of energy. Until you have been backstage at a client’s business, you have not really seen the company you […]

What Overnight Success Actually Looks Like

Founder Insights

People love an overnight success story. Here is what one actually looks like when you write down the hours: roughly 215 of them, spread across twelve months, in steady increments nobody would call dramatic. You do not need a lot of money for this. You need patience and consistency, which […]

What One Month Back Managing Shopify Taught Me

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

It has been one month since I went back to managing Shopify projects myself, and I had forgotten how much I enjoy it. Daily calls with my team, meetings with clients, real problems getting solved. Here is what that month actually produced, because the work is more revealing than any […]

Before You Pay for a Bigger Server, Check Caching

Ecommerce Strategy

Your hosting bills are high, and your agency suggests increasing server resources again. Before you agree, read this. I analysed three slow, unreliable sites recently, on three different platforms in three different data centres, and every one of them had the same basic problem hiding in plain sight. […]

Ten Checks Before You Expand Ecommerce Internationally

Ecommerce Strategy

I recently audited several brands, one of them doing around $250,000 a month, and the same international SEO mistakes kept appearing. Missing sitemaps, broken hreflang, the wrong domain strategy. If you are expanding into new countries, these are the checks that decide whether the effort pays off or quietly fails. […]

Why Vague Project Requirements Lead to Bad Quotes

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

We are often asked to quote on projects full of unknowns. Integrate with an API, but no details about the API. Add a service, but no integration guides. As a database engineer, I find that lack of clarity hard to ignore. Yet other agencies quote on the same vague briefs […]

Inside COMERIX, Our Framework for Converting Ecommerce Sites

Ecommerce Strategy

Last year my team set out to build our own framework for high-converting ecommerce projects. We spent about two and a half months studying how the best brands construct their pages, and we turned what we learned into something we call COMERIX. Here is what it is and what it […]

Why Noindex Tags Quietly Kill Your Organic Growth

Ecommerce Strategy

I received a lovely sales email about Ecommerce Camp UK merchandise. The message was so well done that I replied with some honest feedback, because no amount of outreach fixes the real problem. Their site was running on noindex and nofollow, and a blocked site cannot grow organically no matter […]

What Checking Clients After a Google Update Revealed

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

I spent the last few days going through our clients after the latest Google update. We are a development company, not an SEO agency, but our job is to help clients make more money, so I treat this as part of the work. On one project, I found something I […]

Why B2B Brands Can Absolutely Win on YouTube

Founder Insights

I hear the same objection constantly: our product is not for YouTube. We are B2B, we have a different audience, we are not sexy enough. Then I visited Shadow Foam, an industrial product with a 135,000-subscriber channel, and it put every one of those excuses to rest. […]

How a 16-Hour Pilot Won a Times Square Brand

Founder Insights

A 16-hour pilot turned into an entire project and a client running a commercial on Times Square. Paul Ryazanov on why starting small is how you earn the big work. […]

Why We Swap Christmas Parties for Strategy Meetings

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

Paul Ryazanov on why a strategic planning meeting beats a Christmas party for uniting a team, and how aligning business, development, and marketing sets the year. […]

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