AI will not run your ecommerce store on autopilot. Cyril Golub joins Matt Edmundson to explain how to actually put it to work, as a supervised assistant you give a clear goal, not a magician you hand the keys to. It is a practical, often funny conversation about where AI genuinely helps online sellers and where it just burns tokens.

Summary

Cyril Golub has been building ecommerce software since 2003, so he watches the AI wave with the eye of someone who has seen a few hype cycles come and go. In this episode he and...

Ecommerce Merchandising, and How to Stop Advertising Sold-Out Stock

Most stores are quietly leaking sales, and ad spend, to products customers literally cannot buy. In this episode Matt Edmundson talks merchandising with Leon Bart-Williams, co-founder and CEO of Akikumo, a merchandising-intelligence app for Shopify brands. Before Akikumo, Leon built the first shoppable-TV commerce experience at NBCUniversal and helped hundreds of brands scale on Amazon, so this is a proper operator conversation about the part of ecommerce almost nobody owns.

Summary

Merchandising is the most overlooked driver of conversion, and it is far more...

Drew Morgans spent 15 years and around $50,000 building an AI trained on his own work, and it now helps run his Amazon agency.

Summary

Drew Morgans, founder of the Amazon and marketplace agency Marknology, returns to the eCommerce Podcast for a conversation that is all about AI in the real world rather than the hype. Drew explains how he fed 15 years of his own work into an AI system, roughly 500,000 emails, around 300 podcast episodes, blogs, SOPs, playbooks and won and lost proposals, to build something that thinks the way he does. The pair get into the...

How do the best brands actually win on TikTok Shop, and where does AI genuinely earn its keep in the process?

Summary

Matt Edmundson talks with Sohun Sanka, founder of Clankers and former head of growth at the TikTok Shop outreach tools Euka and Reacher. Having audited more than 2,000 affiliate programmes and seen the backend of over 150 agencies and 1,000 brands, Sohun has a clear read on what separates the brands that win on TikTok Shop from the ones quietly burning through samples.

The conversation moves from the biggest mistake most of us make...

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...

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.

Summary

Laryssa 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...

Two Years, 100 Newsletters, and Not a Single Sale Yet

Gabriel Lindh has written 100 weekly newsletters and taken 20-odd pre-orders for a pair of swim shorts he still hasn't sold.

Summary

Gabriel 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...

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.

Summary

Brenden 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...

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 b...

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...

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 str...

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.

Summary

Bawar 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...

Amazon is shrinking product titles to 75 characters from 200, enforced 27 July 2026, and Carolyn Lowe explains exactly what to fix first.

Summary

Carolyn Lowe spent years at Dell — including running the consumer side of Dell.com — before leaving corporate life to build ROI Swift, an Austin agency that helps consumer brands grow profitably on Amazon. In this episode she and Matt dig into the single mistake she sees most often, which is founders throwing more money at ads when the real problem sits somewhere else entirely — a weak product page, a poor main image, or a listing the al...

Direct mail to your warm customers pulls four to five times the response of email, and most ecommerce brands aren't using it at all. This week Matt sits down with Daniel Dunn, CEO and co-founder of Paper Planes, to make the case that the letterbox is the reactivation channel hiding in plain sight.

Summary

Daniel Dunn spent years working on Tesco Clubcard data strategy before co-founding Paper Planes, a direct mail platform built for DTC ecommerce. (For anyone outside the UK, Tesco is the country's biggest supermarket and Clubcard is its loyalty scheme, one of...

There are thousands of software companies chasing the same small pool of brands on Shopify, and AI is quietly dismantling the bloated app stacks those brands built. Neal Goyal has spent eight or nine years inside ecommerce software, leading sales teams at names like Tapcart, and he now advises five or six earlier-stage software companies on how to grow. From that vantage point he's watching the "uninstall rate" surge as founders ask a new question of every app they pay for. Do I even need a tool for this at all?

In this conversation Neal walks through...

Most Amazon sellers who try Walmart copy their listings straight across — same title, same bullet points, same ad campaigns — and wonder why it doesn't work. Andrew Deramo has spent seven years on Amazon and now puts 40% of his working time into Walmart. His argument is simple: Walmart is its own search engine, its own customer base, and its own opportunity. Sellers who treat it like a second Amazon are leaving money on the table.

In this episode, Andrew walks through the strategy he uses with his own products and his clients at SellTru — from building platform-specific listings to usi...

Leo Rodriguez has spent years watching ecommerce brands quietly overpay on shipping, sometimes billed for 18 pounds on a parcel that actually weighs two. In this episode of the eCommerce Podcast, Matt Edmundson sits down with the VP of a Los Angeles 3PL to pull apart the unglamorous moves that protect your margin, one parcel at a time.

Summary

Leo Rodriguez, VP of River Plate, Inc., joins Matt to talk through the hidden costs sitting inside every order you ship. It starts with dimensional weight, where a small product in an oversized box gets rated as...

Emma Burke didn't set out to start a business. She was standing on the sidelines of her son's football training in the wind and the rain when a parent looped an elastic band around a boy's boots so his laces would stop coming undone. Everyone else's kids retied their laces three, four, five times a game. His didn't. That was the moment Laceeze was born.

Summary

This is a founder story about turning a problem nobody was searching for into a brand sold around the world. Emma had trained as a vet nurse on £80 a w...

Two people who each host a top ecommerce podcast sat down and recorded a single conversation for both shows. Brett Curry runs OMG Commerce, one of the most respected Google and YouTube ad agencies in ecommerce, and hosts the eCommerce Evolution podcast. Matt buys and builds ecommerce brands. So they did the obvious thing and interviewed each other.

Summary

This is a peer crossover, recorded once and aired on both the eCommerce Podcast and Brett’s eCommerce Evolution. The conversation splits cleanly into two halves. First, how to run an ecommerce business the way an in...

He runs five businesses with zero employees, and he's never written a line of code in his life.

Summary

Dmytro "Dima" Negodiuk calls himself a fractional AI officer, a title his own AI agent came up with. From New York, he runs five-plus businesses across ecommerce, B2B distribution, retail, education and AI consulting, all orchestrated by a single AI agent, and without a marketing, IT or sales department behind him. In this conversation Matt and Dima get practical about where an ecommerce founder should actually begin with AI, why Claude Code is the on-ramp...

Two founders, both wildly successful, just gave completely opposite advice about whether ecom operators should build a personal brand — and Matt is running a 90-day experiment to find out which one is right for founders like us.

Episode Summary

Davie Fogarty (the $200M-a-year founder behind The Oodie) reckons founders shouldn't bother with personal brand until they're past $10 million — the opportunity cost of a single YouTube video runs to roughly $3,200 of founder time, and that money tests paid-ads creative far more effectively. Daniel Priestley and Alex Hormozi argue the opposite. AI can now replicate most of what...

Organic Search for Ecommerce in 2026

What happens to an ecommerce business when paid ads stop working? Matt Edmundson walks through the six organic traffic fronts every founder should be building right now, before paid stops carrying the business on its own.

Summary

Paid ads are getting more expensive, less effective, and harder to justify. Facebook CPMs are up 60–90% over the last few years, paid search clicks have effectively doubled across every vertical, and organic clicks have fallen between 11 and 23 percentage points depending on the industry. Matt opens with the story of switching the ad...

Up to 40% of Amazon US sales now touch Rufus, Amazon's AI shopping assistant — and most sellers haven't optimised a single product for it. That's the gap David Balan, founder of Selluna, walked through with Matt this week. The customer who used to type "blue football" into a search bar is now asking a chatbot what kind of football would suit a six-year-old, and the products that show up first are the ones answering the right 25 questions.

David has spent the last few years helping thousands of brands across the US, UK, Europe and Asia-Pacific sell more on Am...

Rachel Hanretty pays £500 a month for a tool that fact-checks her marketing agency — and she has opinions about why every seasonal ecommerce founder should do the same.

In this episode, Matt Edmundson sits down with Rachel Hanretty, founder of Mademoiselle Macaron, the Scottish brand shipping up to 25,000 macarons a week UK-wide. Rachel built the business from a St Andrews student flat in 2013 after training in Paris, and thirteen years on she has strong views on attribution, agency accountability, the seasonality trap, and the gulf between what Instagram wants and what authenticity actually looks like. The conversation covers Tri...

Most ecommerce sellers limit themselves to one or two marketplaces. Jorrit Steinz, CEO and founder of ChannelEngine, argues that's leaving serious money on the table. With over 1,300 marketplaces now available worldwide, the opportunity to reach new customers has never been bigger — or more manageable with the right tools.

In this episode of The eCommerce Podcast, Matt Edmundson sits down with Jorrit to discuss why marketplace selling is no longer optional, how to choose the right platforms for your products, and why spending on marketplace ads might be a smarter move than pouring budget into Google. Jorrit also sh...

Start a Print on Demand Business on Etsy for Less Than £15

What if you could launch a profitable ecommerce business with no stock, no warehouse, and no design skills for under £15? Nigel Wymer from POD Launch Pro joins Matt Edmundson to walk through exactly how to build a print-on-demand business on Etsy from scratch. With nearly 20 years in ecommerce and almost £40k net earned last year while barely working on his stores, Nigel brings the receipts to match the strategy. In a hands-on episode framed around helping Matt's daughter Zoe start her first business, they cover niche res...

Most ecommerce operators can rattle off their LTV, churn rate, and CAC without thinking. But when Jay Myers asked a room full of subscription experts at SubSummit whether anyone knew their referral rate, only one person raised their hand — and his was zero. That single overlooked metric, Jay argues, is the difference between a business that flatlines and one that grows exponentially.

In this episode of The eCommerce Podcast, host Matt Edmundson sits down with Jay Myers, co-founder of Bold Commerce, to unpack the data behind referral-driven growth — and why a tiny shift in referral rate can mean...

With 56% of CEOs reporting zero ROI from their AI investments, Matt Edmundson takes a refreshingly honest look at the four AI tools he actually uses across his ecommerce businesses right now. In this solo Slingshot episode of the eCommerce Podcast, Matt breaks down his monthly AI spend of roughly £350 and explains exactly how each tool fits into daily operations at Aurion, from deep research sessions to product photography and building what he describes as a digital second brain. Rather than chasing every shiny new tool, Matt shares how his team culled their AI subscriptions and settled on a focused t...

Most ecommerce brands know everything about their customers but communicate like they know nothing. That’s the observation at the heart of this conversation with Max Beech, founder of Athenic and former product manager at Revolut and Yahoo. Max has spent years building personalisation features at scale, and he has a clear view of where ecommerce businesses consistently lose their best customers.

In this episode, Matt and Max explore why the first 14 days after a purchase are the most important — and most wasted — window in the entire customer journey. They discuss why sending a discount code on day th...

Mobile shoppers decide to buy or leave after seeing less than a third of your product page. Adam Pearce from Blend Commerce has seen it happen across hundreds of Shopify stores and shares the fixes that consistently lift conversion rates by 30 to 50 percent.

Episode Summary

In this episode, we dig into the gap between how ecommerce sites are designed (on desktop, in boardrooms) and how they are actually experienced (on a phone, in three scrolls). Adam Pearce, co-founder of Blend Commerce and organiser of eCom Collab Club in London, shares the data-backed changes that move...

Could a simple pre-approved loan quietly destroy your ecommerce business? Fractional CFO Rob te Braake from Insight Matters reveals how platform loans from Shopify and Stripe are creating a death spiral for seven and eight-figure brands — and one of his clients might not survive the year because of it.

Episode Summary

In this episode, we explore the financial blind spots that catch ecommerce founders off guard. Rob te Braake, who works with seven and eight-figure online brands as a fractional CFO, breaks down the three numbers every ecommerce owner should know in their sleep: gross ma...

Most businesses build their brand messaging around themselves. Their logo, their history, their awards. But what if the only place your marketing actually works is the tiny sliver where your story and your customer's story overlap?

Episode Summary

In this solo episode, Matt Edmundson introduces the Story Overlap — a simple Venn diagram concept that reveals why most eCommerce messaging misses the mark. Through a live homepage audit of an accountant's website (with a we-to-you ratio of 2.6 to 1), Apple's iconic '1,000 songs in your pocket' line, and the Netflix headline formula, Matt shows how established brands ha...

Selena Knight has spent 20 years in retail and knows exactly why most e-commerce businesses are undercharging. One of her favourite examples? An Australian party supplies company that charges $6 for $3 paper plates — and their customers keep coming back.

In this conversation, we get into price anchoring, why the businesses that survived 2025 were the ones charging more, not less, the three questions that close every in-store sale, and what she learned from Gary V's organisational psychologist about hiring people who actually think for themselves.

If you're competing on price, this one might change your mind.

Su...

How many ads does your brand actually need each month? Edwin Choi from Jet Fuel Agency reveals the data-driven framework for calculating your exact creative requirements — and why most brands are drastically underproducing content for their Meta ad accounts.

Episode Summary

We explore why most e-commerce brands are guessing their way through Meta ad creative — and paying the price in declining performance. Edwin Choi, founder of Jet Fuel Agency, shares the framework his team uses across hundreds of accounts to calculate exact monthly creative needs using decay rates and win rates. We discuss why Meta's Andr...

What if 99.5% customer satisfaction could still threaten your entire business? Payments veteran Jeff Foster reveals why the economics of chargebacks have shifted dramatically, and why the smartest merchants are giving money back faster than you'd expect.

Jeff has been in payments since 1998, helped process the first CVV and Verified by Visa transactions ever, and now runs Quick Refund to help merchants navigate the tightening thresholds that Visa and MasterCard have imposed. We explore why 25% of chargebacks hit transactions that were already refunded, how friendly fraud became behavioural rather than criminal, and what you can actually control to...

Can you remember the last product description you actually read? Matt Edmundson explores why most eCommerce product copy is invisible and shares the science-backed narrative binding framework that made one UK retailer's descriptions 42% more memorable and boosted revenue per visitor by 36.7%.

Episode Summary

In this solo episode, Matt digs into one of the most overlooked areas of eCommerce: product descriptions. Drawing on his experience rewriting 400 product descriptions at Jersey Beauty Company (before AI existed), he reveals why manufacturer copy turns every site into a commodity and shares the narrative binding framework from cognitive science that...

What if the secret to building a subscription brand isn't clever retention tricks? Joe Welstead took his electrolyte company OSHUN from zero to over 5,000 subscribers in just 10 months, achieving a 42% subscription signup rate and 5% conversion rate.

Episode Summary

In this episode, we explore how Joe built OSHUN with a deliberately different approach to his previous venture-backed, multi-SKU supplement company. After selling that business in 2022, he chose the opposite path: one product, bootstrapped, subscription-first from day one. We discuss why launching with a single SKU is more freeing than multiple products, how spreading decisions across the...

With 57% of Google searches now ending without a click, where are those potential customers going? Matthew Stafford from Build Grow Scale reveals why LLM traffic converts at 5X the rate of traditional search—and how smaller brands can capture this opportunity before the giants catch on.

Episode Summary

Matthew Stafford has spent a decade helping eCommerce brands scale, working with companies doing £200,000 to £3 million monthly. Across every US-based client, he's seen organic traffic drop 20-30% this year. But the brands optimising for LLMs aren't just recovering that lost traffic—they're converting it at rates that make t...

What if your e-commerce platform is actually holding you back? Mikel Lindsaar, founder of StoreConnect and author of the forthcoming book Customer Commerce, explains why most platforms end up controlling your business rather than serving it. We explore how unified data systems enable smarter automation, faster page loads, and the kind of personalised customer experiences that build lifetime value.

Mikel shares practical examples including a museum using AI to identify VIP visitors, automated refunds that create customer delight, and how one company consolidated 76 websites across 26 brands onto a single platform. We also discuss why his strongest advice...

With over 10,000 3PLs in the US alone, how do you avoid choosing one that sinks your business? Dave Gulas from EZDC 3PL shares the horror stories he's witnessed and the questions that separate good logistics partners from disasters waiting to happen.

In this episode, we explore why treating logistics as a commodity leads to problems, how to vet a fulfilment partner properly, and the operational details that matter when you're shipping thousands of orders monthly. Dave's background in the pharmaceutical industry, where urgency is non-negotiable, shaped his approach to e-commerce fulfilment. He shares what he looks for...