Blog

Three New Brands, Three Different Worlds of Ecommerce

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In one month we started with three completely different brands: a Shopify culture project, a WooCommerce staffing platform, and a Magento auto-parts powerhouse. Different stacks, one goal. […]

The Agency Game Changed: Now You Compete for Attention

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6am on the platform to London for a 5pm dinner with founders. The ecommerce agency game has changed. You are not just competing with other agencies, you are competing for the attention of owners who are firefighting all day. […]

The Best Ecommerce ROI Is Not at the Big Expo

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Most people think ecommerce events mean big shiny expos with huge stages and endless agencies. The best ROI I have seen comes from small, industry-specific events with real operators and real problems. […]

Your Product Gallery Is Killing Your Conversions

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Even with good traffic and profitable ads, static product images are no longer enough. Adding product page video is one of the biggest conversion levers, and the workflow friction is why most merchants never do it. […]

Ecommerce Is Not for Everyone, and I Am Living It

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Building my own store with Will, it is very clear that ecommerce is not for everyone. Two weeks in, our conversion rate is 0.25% and we have added, removed and restored more components than I can count. The unfiltered founder journey. […]

A Horrible Week, and Why I Am Still Proud to Be a CEO

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If you think being an agency CEO is managing people and driving a Ferrari, you are 100% wrong. Here is a real week: three client fires in three days. And here is why I am still proud of the job. […]

You Cannot Just Be a Dev Agency Anymore

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A conference in Manchester reminded me why a technical agency has to be more than code now. To serve ecommerce clients you have to understand demand and quality traffic. You cannot just be a dev agency, you have to think like a growth partner. […]

Why We Broke Our Rule and Launched on a Friday

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We normally never release on a Friday. But for our own store we broke the rule, because the data said weekends are when our customers actually shop. Knowing your customer’s calendar beats the developer’s rulebook. […]

Now I Think Like a Merchant, and It Is Harder Than It Looks

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Two weeks into running my own store, the CTR is solid but the sales are not where they should be. Building it with my own money taught me what every ecommerce merchant feels: the decisions get much harder when it is your cash on the line. […]

Who Shows Up When Your Business Is in Dark Mode?

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Most agencies show up when times are good and the budget is there. The real question is who stays when cash flow is tight. Over the last six months we let long-term clients keep going and pay later, because trust beats transactions. […]

How to Actually Partner With an Agency (Do Not Lead With Money)

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A lot of ecommerce SaaS vendors try to partner with us, and most get it wrong. The rule for a real agency partnership: do not mix partnership with selling, and never ask to buy the stage or the attendee list. […]

How I Prepare a Conference Talk

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My conference talk preparation starts about two weeks out and ends the night before with 50 slides I have to cut down. The hard part is never finding something to say. It is deciding what to leave out. […]

AI Is Coming for the Agency Model. Here Is What Survives.

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When Tomer Tagrin posted Yotpo’s internal note about sunsetting services, it named something we all feel. AI is reshaping who survives among agencies. The ones with their own product and AI-optimised workflows make it. The manual-labour shops do not. […]

If You Are Starting With Nothing, Get a Job First

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If you have an entrepreneurial mindset, start your own business. But if you have nothing to begin with, no money and no connections, get a job first. My own path: $60 a month in 2003 to founding MageCloud in 2014. […]

I Asked Five Clients Why They Stay. The Answer Was One Word.

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I interviewed five clients about why they keep working with us. All five reasons came down to the same word: dedication. Here is what that looks like in practice, at 1am on New Year’s Eve. […]

Ten Changes That Took Our Conversion Rate From 0.2% to 1.2%

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On our own store we took the conversion rate from 0.2% to 1.2%. Here are the exact ten changes, in order, and the one principle behind all of them: one thing at a time, measured. […]

Black Friday Is the Real Test of Your Ecommerce Build

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For merchants Black Friday is exciting. For developers it is the one weekend we get to test our builds under real load. Here is how our 100+ Magento, WooCommerce and Shopify stores held up, and what actually breaks. […]

A 10-Minute Call Found a Black Friday Disaster

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A founder of a 10M brand emailed the week of Black Friday wanting to move off WooCommerce. We do not take clients that week, but ten minutes on a call surfaced a mobile navigation bug and a broken AWS caching setup. Black friday preparation is a second pair of eyes. […]

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