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Why I Still Answer Emails That Pay Nothing

Founder Insights, General

The standard advice says pre-screen everyone, protect your calendar, and only talk to people who can pay. I generally agree, and I still answer emails from people who will never be clients. In Silicon Valley, founders who had built and exited companies gave their time to a nobody with questions, […]

One Office, a War, and Thirteen Cities

Founder Insights, General

A few years ago I could not have imagined being in the UK. We had just invested about 400K into our own office space in Ivano-Frankivsk, we were serving more than 100 brands worldwide, and revenue was around 2.5M a year. Then everything changed. Today the same team works from […]

Three Calls, Three Ways Stores Break in Silence

Ecommerce Strategy, General

Company A lost half its traffic to broken links created by an automated translation tool. Company B’s sitemap had been dead for eight months because a cron job never made it to the new server. Company C’s caching stopped when a licence quietly expired. Three calls in one day, three […]

Run the Spam Email’s Own Website Through PageSpeed

Ecommerce Strategy, General

You just received an email claiming your website is slow, your rankings are falling, and your links are broken. Before you delete it, here is a sixty-second test that occasionally finds a real one: grab the sender’s own website, run it through Google PageSpeed Insights, and see whether they pass […]

Three Steps to Verify Your SEO Agency’s Work

Ecommerce Strategy, General

Ecommerce marketing managers inherit SEO engagements they did not scope and get asked whether the money is working. Here is the three-step verification I give them: demand the backlink list, test the linking pages against Google’s own index, and read the brand-filtered trend in Search Console. No tools to buy, […]

How a Headless Migration Erased Years of SEO Overnight

Ecommerce Strategy, General

A Canadian agency showed me the Google Search Console chart: organic traffic fell off a cliff on the exact day their client migrated to headless Shopify. Not because of Shopify, and not because headless is bad technology. Because canonical URLs, sitemaps, and robots.txt were never configured. Here is the question […]

The Questions That Expose a Weak SEO Engagement

Ecommerce Strategy, General

Before you contract an SEO consultant or agency, there are five questions your marketing manager should be able to answer, and a sixth that the agency itself has to answer about timelines. None of them require SEO expertise to ask. All of them require honesty to answer. Here is the […]

Ask ChatGPT About Your Brand Before Customers Do

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

The first thing I did when I started using ChatGPT for general searches was ask it about myself and my company. It knew us. It cited customer reviews. And it also mentioned a scam website that had been impersonating our brand. That mix, accurate and damaging in the same answer, […]

Shopify Checkout Changes: Get Your Tracking Right First

Ecommerce Strategy, General

Shopify forced every merchant to reconfigure checkout tracking when checkout.liquid customisations were retired. Deadlines like that are when tracking quietly breaks for months. Here is the configuration strategy we give Shopify merchants: connect natively first, use GTM for the rest, do not reinvent the wheel, and write down everything you […]

Five Checks Before You Sign With Any Agency

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

We review our customers’ websites across development, analytics, Search Console, and Google Ads, which means we also see the wreckage when a partner choice goes wrong. These are the five checks I give clients who ask me how to choose a development or marketing partner, every one of them learned […]

Your Store Does Not Need an AWS Cluster

Ecommerce Strategy, General

A potential client showed me their setup: RDS, EC2, separate cron server, Redis, Elasticsearch, every component on its own node. Over $2,000 a month, and that was just staging. The pages were still slow. We have downscaled three clients this year from $4,000 AWS bills to a single well-configured VPS […]

Fake Orders Are Hitting Magento Stores Through the API

Ecommerce Strategy, General

Over two weeks we watched a wave of suspicious orders land across Magento stores, all following the same script. We debugged it down to the guest-cart options in the Magento API. On a fully patched store these orders are an annoyance. On an unpatched store they are a door someone […]

We Lost a Client by Telling Them the Truth

Founder Insights, General

After two and a half years together, one of our clients left MageCloud this month for a major replatform we advised against. Their non-brand organic traffic was 10 clicks a day. I could not see how a complete front-end rebuild paid back before marketing did. I failed to convince them, […]

Name the Brand First. Worry About SEO Last.

Founder Insights, General

My friend Del Manning sent me five domain candidates for a client’s new brand and asked which one was strongest for SEO. The honest answer: none of them had any SEO value, and that was the wrong question anyway. I named my own company MageCloud ten years ago. It was […]

Why Agencies and Merchants Keep Failing Each Other

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

We support around 140 ecommerce clients and most of them also use other agencies. Not one of those agencies has ever asked to speak with the development team that maintains the site. SEO firms sell £3-5K PDF audits listing problems my developers find for free. PPC agencies run ad spend […]

Why Every Founder Needs a Second of Everything

Founder Insights, General

Three calls in one day. A client whose Polish freelancer vanished behind smiley faces and excuses. A $3M company whose only developer mentally resigned the moment they announced a platform migration. And then the one that hit my own business: Mercury telling us our bank account was closing. Single points […]

Own Your Hosting, Even When an Agency Runs It

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

A potential client showed me their agency contract and every monthly bill had a hosting fee folded into it. The agency owned the server, the code, and the relationship with the hosting vendor. The merchant owned a dependency. Unbundling that one line item was worth $600 a month before we […]

Why UK Businesses Should Look at Ukrainian Developers

Founder Insights, General

When I lived in the United States, the outsourcing conversation was all about Latin America, because the time zones lined up. The UK has the same advantage sitting two hours away and most British businesses have never seriously considered it. After a decade of running a Ukrainian engineering team from […]

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