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

General

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. […]

Why Your Shopify Analytics Show Ghost Traffic From Iowa

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After a 600% conversion jump on our own store I found sessions from Council Bluffs, Iowa, a market we do not target. It is not customers. It is Shopify’s automated speed testing distorting your Shopify analytics. […]

In Ecommerce, Standing Still Is Moving Backwards

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I found a client account that had been on standby for almost a year, waiting on an ecommerce migration that never happened. The site fell behind while competitors moved. Doing nothing is the fastest way to lose ground. […]

We Did Everything Right and Still Got Zero Sales

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Will and I released a new product design for our own store, followed every best practice, and got zero sales that weekend. The lesson from building my own ecommerce brand: the market pushes back harder than any theory. […]

Why We Charge a Flat Fee Instead of a Retainer

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Most agencies are built to profit at the client’s expense. We chose a flat consulting fee with no hidden costs and no account-manager upsells. It makes our revenue less predictable, and it keeps clients for three years. […]

For Every Ecommerce Success, Nine Businesses Fail

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In ecommerce, for every one success, nine businesses fail. I have watched founders struggle for a decade for less than a job would pay. The difference between the one and the nine is not luck. […]

The Client Who Ignored a Security Audit, and Lost the Business

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We told a Magento brand to run a security audit and stayed on them for five months. They never made time. A few months later the company had shut down. Why security is the risk owners ignore until it ends them. […]

Answered in Seven Minutes on a Weekend: Ecommerce Support Done Right

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For an ecommerce store, support response time is part of the product. A real weekend example: question at 08:56, answered 09:03, fixed 09:10. If your vendor takes days to reply, it is time for a chat. […]

Why Human Connection Will Beat AI in Marketing

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As everyone automates with chatbots and AI avatars, human connection is becoming the rarest thing in marketing. In five years, a phone call from a real person will be how you stand out. […]

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