The E-Commerce Director's Cut

The Smartest Online Businesses Still Rely on Human Insight

2025-08-19T00:00:00Z

AI can predict a customer’s next click, generate endless content, and optimize ad spend in seconds. But if you’re building an online business and want to grow sustainably, the real game-changer isn’t automation—it’s insight.

Not just any insight, but human insight.

The kind that sees beyond the dashboard. That understands why customers abandon a cart, not just that they did. That connects cultural trends with behavioral shifts. That challenges assumptions, asks better questions, and shapes more meaningful experiences.

Human insight brings the nuance that data alone can’t capture. It’s how great digital products are built. It’s how messaging cuts through noise. It’s how brands evolve from transactional to indispensable.

At Mobile1st, we use AI where it makes sense—to analyze quant data, summarize patterns, accelerate ways to grow. But we believe real growth comes from pairing those tools with human curiosity, empathy, and perspective. Because behind every data point is a person—and behind every great business is someone who never forgets that.

This newsletter is where we’ll share those insights—the ones that move the needle because they’re grounded in something more powerful than code: human understanding.

-Jonathan Silverstein, CEO - Mobile1st

Talk to Customers...Like Your Business Depended on It

2025-08-28T00:00:00Z

”If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will.” — Sam Walton

That’s the whole game. Customers aren’t data points,they’re the only people who decide if your product lives or dies.

Companies like Blockbuster, Nokia, Kodak, Toys "R" Us, Borders, BlackBerry, and RadioShack all became cautionary tales after failing to tune in and adapt.

The Excuses That Kill:

“We already know what they want.” You don’t.
“It takes too much time.” Not listening wastes more.
”We’ll lose our vision.” Listening isn’t surrender—it’s survival.

What To Do Instead:

“Talk to your customers” sounds obvious. The hard part is actually doing it. Here’s how it looks in real life:

Put a quick survey on the pages that matter most. Landing page, product page, checkout. Ask one question. You’ll be shocked by what people tell you.
Hand your site to a stranger and watch them try to buy something. Don’t explain, don’t help. Just notice where they get lost.
Ask simple, open questions like “What almost made you leave?” instead of “Did you like our checkout?” One gets you the truth, the other gets you polite lies.
Take what you hear and change something small. Copy, layout, offer. Then see if it makes a difference.
Do it again. And again. The moment you stop listening, your customers stop waiting around.

The companies that grow aren’t the ones with the fanciest dashboards. They’re the ones who actually shut up long enough to hear what their customers are saying.

Because the companies that don’t listen? Suffer. Of course, there are numerous digital apps that can accelerate and structure research (like AI wrote a significant part of this post), but there is also an art to this.

Blunt (and cheap) tools cut poorly. They also create messy results. Mobile1st blends a mastery of site optimization with deftly crafted research that yields insights and persistent RPV growth. Let's chat...and start really talking to your customers.

When Your Customers Only Want One Thing

2025-09-04T00:00:00Z

We all want bigger baskets. More items per order. Higher AOV. But sometimes your customers have other plans. They just want one thing.

That’s what we saw with one client. The average order size was a single item. We could have kept pushing bundles and recommendations, but it wasn’t moving the needle. So we asked a different question:

What if the fastest way to grow revenue wasn’t changing customer behavior, but making it easier for them to do what they already wanted?

Cutting Out the Cart

Here’s what was happening. Customers clicked Add to Cart. Instead of buying, they were sent to a cart page. One more step. One more chance to bounce.

Industry wide, about 70% of carts are abandoned. Every extra click is a risk. For a business where most people only buy one product, that cart page wasn’t helping. It was hurting.

So we removed it. Add to Cart → straight to Checkout. That was it. No magic trick. No complicated upsell flow. Just less friction.

The Results

The test ran for three weeks and touched every dollar of revenue. The lift was hard to ignore:

Conversion Rate: up 8.2 percent
Revenue per Visitor: up 6.8 percent
Results reached a 98 percent probability of beating the control

Yes, AOV dipped a little. But that wasn’t the story. The story was more people completing purchases. And the revenue followed.

What We Learned

Owning e-commerce growth means you’re pulled in a dozen directions. Marketing wants brand moments. Finance wants efficiency. Leadership wants results yesterday.

The instinct is to add more. More cross sells. More steps. More “features.”

But in this case, the answer wasn’t more. It was less. We took out the cart step, and customers bought more often.

Revenue didn’t come from bigger baskets. It came from aligning the flow with how people already shop.

Don’t Just Skip the Cart

That doesn’t mean every brand should start sending shoppers straight to checkout. Your cart should be designed around your products and your customers.

If people often buy accessories, that’s what the cart should highlight. If it’s a big-ticket item, the cart should reassure them on value. If you’re selling bundles, that’s where you help customers see the upside of adding more.

The only way to know what’s right is through research and experimentation. That’s how you figure out whether your cart is helping or getting in the way.

The Next Step

The lesson from this experiment isn’t “always skip the cart.” It’s that your cart should be built around how your customers actually buy. And the only way to know what’s right is to test it.

That’s the work we do with clients every day, uncovering how customers really shop, then building the funnel to match.

Why Your Header is Too Big

2025-09-10T00:00:00Z

Shoppers don’t land on your site hoping for a giant search bar. They just want to find a product and feel confident hitting “buy.”

But here’s the catch: when the information they need is buried, the whole journey slows down.

We work with a large specialty retailer in the sporting goods space. Their catalog is massive, with thousands of SKUs. On paper, that makes search the hero.

Except on mobile, the header with search built right into it was hogging almost a third of the screen. And when we pulled up scrollmaps, it got even uglier. Key details on product pages, like reviews, specs, and pricing context, were shoved below the fold.

Shoppers weren’t absorbing enough of the product story to feel ready to buy.

So we asked the obvious question no one usually asks: what if the thing that’s supposed to help is actually in the way?

The Hypothesis

Maybe conversion isn’t just about removing friction. Maybe it’s about how much information a shopper can actually absorb before they decide to buy.

So we tested a simple idea: shrink the header and give that space back to the products. The bet was that if shoppers absorbed more of the right information, conversion would rise.

The Test

We ran two versions against the conrol:

V1: Shrunk the header, collapsed search into a little icon, and cleared out wasted whitespace.
V2: Did all of the above, but also made the promo “pencil banner” taller so offers were more visible.

Both were designed to put more product information in view. The question was whether promos would add value or just compete for attention.

The Results

The two versions told very different stories.

V1 (the winner):

Conversion Rate: +3.9%

Revenue per Visitor: +6.9%
Average Order Value: +2.3%
V2:

Conversion Rate: -1.4%

Add-to-Carts: -0.2%
Average Order Value: +2.3%

Shrinking the header gave shoppers more room to absorb product details, which drove more confident buying decisions. But when we stuffed that new space with a bigger promo banner, the benefit disappeared.

And because the header sits on every page, the winning version didn’t just help on product detail pages. It impacted 100% of revenue.

Why It Works

This isn’t about minimalism for its own sake. It’s about information absorption.

More product exposure. With less header clutter, shoppers absorb more of the details that actually sell products.
Higher intent search. Search usage dropped about 19 percent, but the shoppers who did search were more serious and converted at a +3.3% higher rate.
Stronger perceived value. Cleaner design aligned with premium brand patterns, which shoppers rewarded with bigger baskets.

The big signal here is that the amount of product information a shopper absorbs may be a leading indicator of conversion.

The Takeaway

This test wasn’t really about hiding search. It was about surfacing the content that matters.

If something as “untouchable” as the site header can choke off product information, what else on your site might be guilty?

That promo banner you’ve been running for years.
The navigation that buries category details.
The product pages where reviews or specs get pushed too far down.

The real question isn’t “how big should the search bar be.”

It’s: how do we maximize the amount of meaningful product information every shopper absorbs before they decide to buy?

Every shopper arrives at your PDP with a specific to-do list — and that might be the most important leading indicator of conversion you’re not measuring.

The Hierarchy of E-Commerce Insights

2025-10-09T00:00:00Z

No one teaches e-commerce teams how to find insights that actually grow a business. Not in college. Not in your MBA. Definitely not in onboarding. You just get dropped into the role and told, “Find the insights that’ll grow revenue.” It sounds simple until you realize that nobody has ever defined what an “insight” really is, or how to tell the difference between one that actually changes customer behavior and one that just looks nice in a deck.

So, we fake it. We stare at dashboards and call them “insights.” We copy “best practices” we saw on LinkedIn and call them “insights.” We ask AI to generate a report, skim it for something that sounds smart, and call that an “insight” too. We’ve confused data with understanding. Because, in reality, a real insight isn’t a number; it’s the story behind the number. “Conversion dropped 12%” is not an insight. It’s a symptom. It tells you that something is happening, but not why it’s happening, what the customer is trying to do, or what got in their way.

Real insights take work. Messy, frustrating, slow work. You have to get obsessed, build a theory, dig through behavior data, talk to customers, and test your assumptions in the wild. Most of those theories will die. But the few that survive, the ones proven through experimentation, become the kind of insights you can confidently build on. Those are the insights that compound. They make you smarter over time.

The Pyramid: A Hierarchy of Insight Quality

If you’ve ever felt like your team is drowning in numbers but starving for direction, it’s probably because you’re operating at the wrong level of insight. I’ve found that most e-commerce teams are somewhere near the middle or bottom of what I call the “Hierarchy of E-Commerce Insights.” It’s a simple way to visualize the quality and reliability of different sources of insight, from pure opinion at the base to validated truth at the top.

At the very bottom, you’ve got the weakest forms of insight: heuristic analyses, AI summaries, and the famous “highest-paid person’s opinion.” These sources are cheap and fast, but they’re built on assumptions, not evidence. They can spark ideas, but they don’t tell you what’s true about your customers. They’re the brainstorming stage of insight generation, not the conclusion.

One level up, you reach what most teams consider “data-driven” territory: user behavior analysis (like click maps, session replays, and funnel drop-off reports) and business intelligence (dashboards full of KPIs). These tools are valuable because they reveal what’s happening, but they still stop short of explaining why. You can see that 70% of mobile users drop off at checkout, but not whether they were frustrated, distracted, skeptical, or confused. You can measure the symptom, but you can’t diagnose the cause.

Then, as you move higher up the pyramid, you enter the realm of fundamental understanding, where customer feedback, surveys, interviews, and user testing start to connect the dots between what people do and what they mean. This is where you start hearing the language of your customers: their anxieties, their motivations, and the gaps between what they expect and what your site actually delivers. It’s where data becomes empathy.

And finally, at the top, you reach the ultimate validation: the winning experiment. The experiment is the moment where your theory collides with reality. You take everything you’ve learned, the behaviors, the feedback, the hypotheses, and you test them in a way that reveals whether they hold up under pressure. A winning experiment isn’t just proof that something “worked”; it’s confirmation that you’ve discovered a truth about your customers’ decision-making. That’s the difference between guessing and knowing.

Why Most Teams Never Make It to the Top

The problem is that climbing this hierarchy takes time, coordination, and the willingness to be wrong. Many teams struggle to progress beyond the middle stage because they get stuck in cycles of reporting rather than learning. Weekly performance updates become rituals of observation rather than discovery. Everyone’s talking about conversion rate changes, bounce rates, and ROAS, but no one’s asking why. Dashboards are tidy, but the reality behind them is messy. Insights live in the mess, in support tickets, reviews, session recordings, and conversations that don’t fit neatly into a chart.

Even worse, incentives often work against the climb. Marketing teams want faster answers. Developers want precise requirements. Executives want slides that look like certainty. But the truth is, certainty only comes at the top of the pyramid, after you’ve done the hard, unglamorous work of combining research, behavioral data, and experimentation into a story that holds up.

How Mobile1st Uses the Hierarchy of Insights

Every engagement we undertake begins with an in-depth investigation that encompasses every level of the hierarchy. The goal is to uncover the kind of insight that almost guarantees winning experiments. I won’t get into the full details of our audit process here, but I’ll share how we use it once we’re working with a client.

For one of our long-term clients, a vehicle parts manufacturer we’ve partnered with for nearly two years, we recently used this process to uncover a significant win.

During our initial investigation, we found that approximately 35% of shoppers left product pages due to a lack of understanding about the installation process. When we dug into chat logs, we found a recurring pattern of questions like: “What else do I need to install this?” and “Does this come with everything required?”

Next, we layered in behavior data. Click maps showed that three of the top ten most-clicked items were accordion sections with detailed product information. That told us customers were actively hunting for clarity. Then we remembered a recent losing experiment: when we removed key product bullet points from the top of the page, conversion rates dropped noticeably. That failure reinforced the same theme: customers wanted more information, not less.

Finally, we evaluated heuristic patterns and design best practices for accordion layouts. The conventional wisdom was to close all accordion tabs by default, making it easier for shoppers to scan and find the section they wanted.

By combining all these signals —behavioral data, customer feedback, past test results, and design heuristics —it became clear what to test next. One of our guiding themes for this client was “make product information easier to find.”

So we set up a simple test:

Control: Product description tab open by default.
Variation A: The most popular tab (Product Includes) open)
Variation B: All tabs closed by default.

Closing all of the tabs turned out to be the winner. It increased conversion rate by 20% and revenue per visitor by 40%.

When we reviewed session recordings of the experiment, the story became obvious. Shoppers were able to locate key product information faster, navigate between sections more easily, and discover complementary products they might need, driving both higher conversion and higher average order value.

This is precisely how the hierarchy works in practice. No single data source provided clear guidance. The win came from combining multiple layers of insight, qualitative feedback, behavioral data, design heuristics, and experimental validation into one clear story about what customers were struggling with and how to fix it.

The Payoff: From Guessing to Knowing

Once you start operating at the top of the hierarchy, everything changes. Your team stops treating optimization as guesswork and starts treating it as an investigation. You stop testing random button colors and start testing theories about human behavior. You stop asking, “What’s wrong with the PDP?” and start asking, “What’s missing in the customer’s understanding that’s causing hesitation?” Those questions lead to changes that move metrics for the right reasons and continue to improve, because they’re built on truth.

Climbing the hierarchy won’t make your job easier, but it will make your results more predictable. It transforms e-commerce from a game of whack-a-mole into a system of learning. And once your team experiences that shift, from reacting to understanding, you can never go back.

Most directors of e-commerce don’t have time to do all of this hard work every day. That’s where Mobile1st comes in. We do this hard work to grow revenue per visitor so you can focus on getting everyone on your team on the same page.

Our Process for Compounding Revenue Without Increasing Traffic

2025-10-16T00:00:00Z

Every e-commerce team thinks they have a traffic problem. They don’t.

They have an insight problem.

Traffic is the easiest thing in the world to buy. Anyone with a credit card and a pulse can spend money on ads. Real insight, the kind that tells you why customers hesitate, why they abandon the cart, or why your best-selling product isn’t your most profitable one, that’s the rare stuff. We laid out exactly how insight quality breaks down in the hierarchy of e-commerce insights.

Most teams drown in dashboards. They can tell you conversion rate by SKU, bounce rate by device, and revenue by channel before their second coffee. They know exactly where customers drop off. But not why. And that missing “why” is usually where the money’s hiding.

Dashboards are great at telling you what’s happening. They’re terrible at telling you what customers are actually thinking.

When the Data Stopped Being Enough

Before working with us, most of our clients thought they were being “data-driven.” They had dashboards stacked to the ceiling. Reports for everything. Product pages. Checkout flows. Cart abandonment. Attribution down to two decimal places.

But when revenue flattened, all that data started to feel like noise. It told them where things were breaking, but not why.

Everyone said, “Trust the data.” But the data never told them what customers didn’t understand about the product. Or what made them hesitate to buy. Or what they believed that wasn’t true.

Once we started working with these e-commerce teams, we started talking to their customers. Real, human, unscripted conversations. We asked them: Why this product? What problem were you trying to solve by buying it? What almost made you leave?

That’s when everything changed.

We Built a System Around That Idea

That obsession with insight turned into our Digital Product Growth System. Our approach to turning customer understanding into experiments that drive real revenue.

It’s not another CRO retainer. It’s not a random pile of A/B tests. It’s a process for making your existing traffic worth more.

We launch an experiment in week one, so we can immediately start driving growth. At the same time, we start with a deep audit, launching surveys on your site, digging through behavioral analytics, and comparing your site to heuristic best practices. From there, we turn those findings into hypotheses, and we prioritize experiments that impact the most revenue. This all but ensures we help you grow.

We break those hypotheses into three big themes, the areas that really move the business, and ignore the noise.

Then we design, launch, and analyze experiments across your store. We roll out the winners, document what we learn, and scale what works.

Every client gets a dedicated growth pod: strategy, UX, data, dev. It’s basically a strike team that plugs right into your existing setup.

And since time is the most expensive resource you’ve got, we keep your time commitment under five hours a month. You *never *have to tell us what to do.

Why Clients Stick Around

You can tell a lot about a company by what its clients say behind their backs.

Ours don’t talk about “great brainstorms” or “fun workshops.” They talk about results.

The VP of Finance at GRAV said our methodology is “100% data-driven. Every test starts with insight and ends in measurable impact.”

The Senior Director of Marketing at Phone.com said, “Each team member comes to calls well-prepared with insightful analysis and excellent questions.”

And one DTC founder said it best: “They knew what they were doing and did things for a reason. They got results.”

That last line might be my favorite, honestly. Because that’s the whole point. We don’t throw ideas at the wall. We find out what matters, test it, prove it, and make it permanent.

Our clients don’t stick around because of contracts. They stick around because growth finally feels calm, clear, and predictable, three words you don’t usually hear in e-commerce.

What Our Clients Get

Every engagement starts the same way: we do the hard work. You get the wins.

You’ll have your own Growth Pod, a strategist, UX researcher, data analyst, and front-end developer, who function like an embedded RPV task force inside your team. Their only job: make every visitor more valuable.

We launch your first experiment within seven days, so you start seeing movement right away. Most clients see their first measurable lift within the first 30 days — long before most agencies finish onboarding.

At the same time, we run a deep RPV audit that finds the biggest leaks in your funnel — messaging, pricing, friction points, missed urgency cues — and build a 12-month roadmap of experiments designed to grow revenue quarter after quarter.

Here’s everything included (and why clients stick around for years):

Customer-first research that goes way beyond analytics — real user behavior, interviews, and voice-of-customer insight so we’re testing what actually drives buying decisions.
Experimentation at scale — 24-48 high-impact tests per year, prioritized by potential RPV lift, not random “best practices.”
Done-for-you delivery — strategy, creative, QA, analytics, and launch. You approve; we run it.
Business intelligence dashboards that tie every test directly to incremental revenue and ROI.
Bi-weekly growth reviews that make it easy to see what worked, what’s next, and why.
Quarterly insight workshops with your merchandising, product, and marketing teams to spread what’s working across the business.
A UX & Analytics audit worth $45K in month one, included free.
An executive RPV dashboard that updates weekly so leadership can literally watch the revenue gains stack up.

And yes, we guarantee it.

If we don’t deliver a meaningful lift in RPV within six months, you get your money back.

Average client results:

More than 12% increase in RPV in the first year
Over 10x ROI on program cost

No fine print. No “let’s revisit next quarter.” Just growth.

You’ll spend less than five hours a month managing it, less time than you spend ordering lunch. We handle the rest.

Most of our clients stay for years. Not because they’re locked in, but because once growth starts feeling predictable, they never want to go back.

The Takeaway

Most e-commerce teams don’t fail because they lack traffic, talent, or tech. They fail because they mistake data for insight.

That’s what the Digital Product Growth System fixes.

It doesn’t just increase conversion. It increases understanding. It turns customer insight into profit.

Revenue per visitor isn’t just a metric. It’s proof that you finally understand your customers.

Searching for sustainable growth, that doesn’t involve discounting before the holidays? Let’s talk.

Every Shopper Lands On Your PDP With a To-Do List

2025-10-23T00:00:00Z

If shoppers can’t finish their to-do list, they don’t buy. Here’s what they’re trying to get done:

Here’s a thought experiment: if you deleted everything on your site except your product detail pages, how much would your business really suffer?

CMOs would panic at this question. The homepage showcases our best lifestyle photography. The category pages took months to design and get right. The “About Us” page underwent 14 rewrites by the brand team.

But if you really look at where money changes hands, it’s not on any of those. It’s on the product detail page.

The PDP is where shoppers stop browsing and start deciding.

You could spend six figures on ads, build the prettiest homepage in your category, and still lose the sale here, because the PDP is where people figure out whether your product is right for them, whether it’s worth the price, and whether they trust you enough to hit “Add to Cart.”

And that’s really the key: shoppers land on a PDP to get jobs done. It’s not random scrolling. They’re trying to answer a set of questions that make them feel confident about buying. When you think of the PDP this way, not as a design exercise, but as a list of customer tasks (and don’t tell me it’s the jobs-to-be-done framework, because I don’t believe in frameworks), it becomes obvious what matters and what doesn’t.

Here’s what every shopper needs to accomplish before they’ll buy.

1. Verify that the product actually solves their problem (and brings them joy)

Every purchase begins with a tiny itch. Something they want to fix or feel. Their dog’s anxious. Their shoes hurt. Their skin’s dry. They need a new shirt (they don’t, they already have 35 in their closet).

When they hit your PDP, they’re looking for reassurance that this thing in front of them actually addresses that itch. They want to see it, read about it, imagine it in their life, and ideally, see other people like them getting results from it.

This is why clear photography, straightforward copy, and honest reviews matter so much. They help shoppers connect the dots between the idea of your product and their actual problem.

A good PDP doesn’t force people to go hunting for answers. It makes all the right information easy to find. Some shoppers will dive into specs. Others will skim reviews or look at lifestyle photos. You don’t get to choose which path they take, so create an information hierarchy that makes it easy for them to find what they need.

2. Decide whether the perceived value is higher than the price

Price is a number. Perceived value is a feeling.

The goal isn’t to make your product cheaper; it’s to make it feel more valuable than whatever number you’re asking people to pay. That feeling is built slowly, through quality cues like good photography, confident copy, and thoughtful presentation.

It’s also built through social proof: reviews, testimonials, and real-world usage that signals, “Other people like me spent this money and don’t regret it.” Add in small psychological sweeteners—free shipping, gifts with purchase, extended warranties, and you shift the mental equation from “Can I afford this?” to “I’d be dumb not to get it now.”

Perceived value is the sum of a hundred tiny signals, and your PDP is where they all have to land at once.

3. Feel trust in the brand and the delivery

Every online shopper has a few scars. They’ve been burned by a sketchy product, a broken item, or a brand that ghosted them after checkout.

So while your PDP might be about the product, part of what they’re really evaluating is you. Can they trust that you’ll deliver what you promise?

That’s why details like shipping timelines, return policies, and guarantees aren’t just fine print; they’re persuasion tools. They answer an emotional question: “Am I safe giving these people my money?”

If you’re not a household name, make it easy for shoppers to feel comfortable. Show where you ship from. Make customer service contact info visible. Use photography that features real people. Show pictures of your office, your product facilities, your team, and your life.

Trust doesn’t come from being perfect—it comes from being human and transparent.

4. Understand how and when they’ll get it

People are buying because they need something, and they may need it right away. So they’re asking: “When will it get here?” Or am I better off getting in my car and finding something similar down the street?

People want clarity. Not “Ships in 2–4 business days” buried in the footer. Real clarity: “Arrives by Friday with free returns.”

The second question is, “What happens if it doesn’t work?” This is where most brands overcomplicate things. If your return process feels like a scavenger hunt, it’s easier for the shopper to close the tab than to trust you.

Clear timelines, easy-to-understand delivery details, and visible return policies build both trust and urgency. Shoppers want to know that the thing they’re buying will be in their hands soon—and that it won’t be a nightmare if it’s not what they hoped for.

One note on returns: if you get people thinking too much about returns on the PDP, they may get cold feet. It’s a delicate balance that can only be figured out through testing.

5. Find the right product if this one isn’t it

Sometimes people land on the wrong PDP. Maybe they searched the wrong color, or your Google Shopping ad linked to a similar SKU. That doesn’t mean the sale is lost; it just means they need help getting to the right thing.

This is where related products, intelligent recommendations, and clear navigation save you. When a shopper realizes, “Actually, I need a slightly different style,” or “I want the bundle instead,” you want that moment to happen on your site, not on Google.

A good PDP doesn’t trap people. It acts like a guide, helping them self-correct without feeling lost.

Pro Tip: your Google Shopping result page can look dramatically different than a PDP because it’s a different experience. Don’t be afraid to show similar products at the top of the page for these shoppers.

6. Justify their emotional decision with logic

By the time a shopper reaches this point, they already want the product. What they’re looking for now is permission.

They need to feel that this purchase makes sense, that it’s not impulsive, but reasonable. This is where technical details, materials, certifications, and even the “why we built it” story come into play. They don’t create desire; they make desire feel safe.

This is the step where someone goes from “I love it” to “I can explain why it’s a smart buy to my partner.”

7. Feel confident they’re not missing something better

Even after they’ve decided, there’s still a flicker of doubt: “What if there’s a better one?”

That’s not logic—it’s fear of regret.

Comparison charts, “best seller” tags, expert recommendations, and social proof are all ways to quiet that voice. They tell the shopper, “You’re making the right choice.”

Your PDP should make that moment feel final, not fragile. The goal is to replace hesitation with confidence.

So they add to cart.

So how do you improve your site?

Knowing these seven tasks is the easy part. Figuring out which ones your PDP fails at is harder.

You may be able to make some quick changes, but first you need insights to prioritize what matters. Start by talking to your customers to learn what they actually care about and how they make decisions.

Once you’ve got a list of potential improvements, priotize by impact ot revenue, and run experiments. Some ideas will lift revenue. Others will quietly break things.

The only way to know is to experiment.

If any of this is overwheling, just too much, and you just don’t have the resources, email me.

If you disagree with this newsletter, tell me.

The Higher the Price, the Longer the Relationship

2025-10-30T00:00:00Z

There’s a direct relationship between how expensive your product is and how long it takes someone to buy it. The higher the price, the more your customers need to hear about your brand, understand your product, and build enough confidence to actually click “buy.” The number of interactions needed to make that happen grows exponentially as price goes up.

That’s why impulse purchases live under $27, while the stuff that costs hundreds, or thousands, requires time, repetition, and reassurance. Nobody wakes up and decides to drop $1,200 on a single piece of outdoor gear or a $4,000 espresso machine. They need to learn their way into trust.

This is true everywhere. It’s why IBM sponsors every major sporting event under the sun. When a decision-maker is watching the US Open, sees IBM plastered on the scoreboard, and thinks, “Oh yeah, I liked that demo last week, I need to follow up with the sales rep,” that’s not an accident. That’s repetition doing its job. IBM knows that closing a $4.5 million consulting deal doesn’t happen after one cold email. It happens because the buyer feels surrounded by the brand, seeing it over and over again in contexts that make them feel confident it’s a safe, smart choice.

Now, that’s an extreme example. But the same principle applies whether you’re selling enterprise software or a $300 aftermarket radiator. The psychology doesn’t change, only the scale does.

The Real Customer Journey (It’s Not Linear)

Let’s say you’re that automotive brand selling radiators. You think you’re optimizing for a clean funnel. Someone sees your ad, visits your site, and buys. Simple, right? Except that’s not how anyone actually buys anything expensive.

Here’s what’s really happening:

A customer first hears about you from a friend who installed your brand’s radiator last year. They make a mental note. A few days later, they’re scrolling and see your brand again on a Reddit post. Now they’re curious. They Google you, land on your site, skim the product detail page, and think, “Cool, looks legit.” Then they get distracted and go back to whatever they were doing.

A week later, your retargeting ad catches them mid-scroll on Instagram. They click again, but this time they’re looking for more detail: technical specs, installation instructions, anything that helps them feel confident it will fit their car. They’re not ready to buy; they’re researching.

Then they head to YouTube to find installation videos. Maybe you have one, maybe it’s someone else’s. Either way, your brand name gets mentioned. They watch it, learn more, and head back to your site to confirm what they just saw. Then they text the link to a friend to double-check they’re choosing the right part number.

They do this over and over again for three weeks. Nine site visits. Three devices. A mix of search, social, and text messages. Finally, they decide: once the next paycheck hits, they’re buying it.

Friday night rolls around. They’re watching TV, beer in hand, looking at your site again, but the Spurs take the lead in the 4th, so they put the phone down. Go Wemby! Saturday morning, they pop the hood on the car, confirm the fittings look right, and finally, finally buy.

Twenty total brand touchpoints, four conversations with friends, and three conversations with themselves, they finally pull the trigger. And a journey your analytics platform has almost no chance of stitching together into a single “session.”

What This Means for Your Site

First, your conversion rate probably isn’t as bad as you think it is. People aren’t dropping off because your site is bad; they’re leaving because they’re doing research on other devices, at different times, in different moods. Most attribution systems treat that like a loss, when in reality, it’s progress.

Second, and more importantly, your site needs to do more than just sell. It needs to educate, reassure, and remind. The more expensive your product, the more your website has to act as both a salesperson and a teacher.

Your homepage may never even enter the equation. The product detail page is where almost all of this needs to happen. But it’s not just about “reducing friction” or getting someone to find the buy button faster. It’s about making sure they can find every single piece of information they might need, no matter where they are in their journey.

That means:

Technical details that are complete, accurate, and easy to find.
Photos that show real-world use, not just perfect lighting.
Installation guides or links to relevant content.
Reviews that actually talk about performance and longevity, not just shipping times.
And maybe most importantly, content that connects your product to the real-world problems it solves.

If you’re investing in great content for TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube that explains how good your product is, make sure those videos are accessible from your product pages. A customer who finds you through social isn’t necessarily ready to buy there, but once they land on your site again, that content can close the loop.

Lastly, if you’re measuring experiments, use revenue per visitor as your key metric. While you’re not going to be able to stitch every touchpoint together, if you can at least prove your change increases revenue across all of the visitors, even those that came back multiple times, it will be a better predictor of long-term growth.

Should You Personalize Your Site Based on Where They Are in the Funnel?

Yes, absolutely. As long as you’re personalizing for every part of the funnel. We’ve written about the top seven ways to use personalization on your site right now — the same logic applies here.

The hard part is understanding the intent signals to know where someone is in the funnel. But let’s say you know that, now you need to provide the relevant content. To do that, you already need to have the content produced and accessible on the PDP. So before you start personalizing, ensure that you have created and organized content for all parts of the funnel on the PDP.

And then once you start personalizing, please, for the love of God, don’t just give discounts to people who show intent signals that they’re ready to buy. That’s just throwing away gross margin. Instead, focus on increasing value through your use of USPs, and shipping and returns messaging.

The Real Job of a Product Page

No matter how expensive your product is, your job isn’t to make the site “convert faster.” It’s to make it easier for someone to stay confident across all those interactions that happen before the sale.

When people are looking at your product page, they’re trying to get 7 things done… It’s hard to tell which one until they engaging with the page, so make it easy to do any of these tasks.

That’s a subtle but critical shift. It’s not just about optimizing checkout or tweaking buttons. It’s about designing your site to support every part of a nonlinear journey that could stretch across six weeks, multiple devices, and countless distractions.

Because people don’t buy products fast. They buy them when they’re ready; after they’ve been convinced, reassured, and reminded. Your site just needs to be there every time they come back, ready to help them take the next step in their decision.

Disagree with something? Send me an email and let me know.

The Ultimate E-Commerce Profitability Model

2025-11-06T00:00:00Z

Customer File Segmentation

Send me an export of your customer file and I’ll find your best customers in a matter of hours.

If I could have any superpower, it wouldn’t be flying or invisibility; it would be omniscience. I want to know everything. I want to see the hidden mechanics behind why something works, the root cause of why it fails, the invisible chain that connects one decision to the next. I’ve always had this obsession with finding the ultimate truth in business, the place where the numbers line up and everything finally makes sense.

In e-commerce, understanding product-level profitability is about as close as we can get to that truth. You can analyze traffic sources, campaign performance, personas, audience segments, whatever you want, but until you break down the business all the way to the product level, you’re just looking at reflections of reality, not reality itself. Our Business Intelligence product is built to automate exactly this kind of analysis.

I’ve spent years trying to get there. At one company, I built a system that pulled daily data from UPS, CRMs, Google Ads, Meta, and our order management platform so that we could see, almost in real time, which products were actually profitable once you factored in everything: the cost of goods, marketing costs, shipping, and returns. It took months to automate. But we didn’t start that way.

We started with a spreadsheet.

And that spreadsheet, simple, ugly, manual, became our bible, or Torah, if you will. Every week we’d update it by hand. It was the one report that every team trusted. The category managers used it to figure out where their margins were slipping. The traffic team used it to see which products actually deserved paid support. The optimization team used it to prioritize their experiments — and as we've written about in your most valuable customers are not who you think, the truth hiding in your customer file is just as revealing as your product data. It was the closest thing we had to truth, and it changed how we worked. This report got the e-commerce team to be literally on the same page.

The document you can download alongside this post is a version of that same sheet. It’s simple, but it forces clarity. Here’s how it works, and what each section tells you.

Product Information, Revenue, COGS, and Marketing Costs for calculating profitablity

Product Information

Start by grounding everything in clear, reliable identifiers: product name, SKU, and product category. This sounds trivial, but most businesses fall apart right here. If your systems don’t speak the same product language, if your ad platform, your analytics, and your order management system all call the same item by different names, every analysis that follows is corrupted. Unifying this data is boring, unglamorous work, but it’s the foundation. Without it, you’ll never find the truth you’re looking for.

Revenue

Once the foundation is solid, you can look at revenue. You want to track the number of visitors to each product, the quantity ordered, and the product and shipping revenue associated with each SKU. From there, calculate a simple but incredibly revealing metric: Visitor to Quantity Ordered Rate.

This single number exposes more about your merchandising and product experience than almost anything else. If a product attracts traffic but barely sells, that’s not a media problem. That’s a value perception problem. Maybe the photography is weak. Maybe the price positioning is off. Maybe it’s just the wrong product. But until you can see it, you’ll never fix it. This metric became the favorite tool of our category managers and onsite teams because it forced everyone to confront uncomfortable truths about what was and wasn’t resonating with customers.

Costs: COGS and Marketing

Now comes the part that makes most people squirm: costs. We all love revenue, but understanding profitability means following the money out as carefully as we follow it in.

Start with cost of goods sold. Then layer on the direct marketing costs—Google Shopping, affiliates, maybe even Meta or TikTok if you can classify your spend by category or product. It doesn’t need to be perfect. We used rough percentages, allocating campaign spend based on each product’s share of total sales. It’s not accounting-grade precision, but it’s close enough to show where the opportunity to improve is.

When you finally see those numbers side by side; revenue next to COGS next to marketing; you start realizing how many products are secretly unprofitable once the real costs are accounted for. Those “hero” SKUs that drive all your volume? Sometimes they’re the ones quietly burning cash.

Shipping, Returns and Profitability for each Product

Shipping and Returns

This is where profitability quietly dies. Everyone loves to talk about CAC, CPM, ROAS, but few people want to look at the real costs of logistics and returns. Outbound shipping eats into your margins right away. Inbound returns double the pain. You lose the sale, you pay for return shipping, and sometimes you refund the entire order but sometimes you get back a restocking fee.

When we started tracking this by product, the results were humbling. Certain categories that looked fantastic on the surface, high volume, good conversion rates, turned out to be nightmares once return rates were factored in. It’s not enough to know how much you sell. You have to know how much of that revenue you keep.

Profitability Metrics

With all of those inputs in place, you can finally calculate what matters:

Gross Margin: Revenue minus COGS.
True Product Profitability: Revenue minus COGS, marketing, shipping, and return costs.
Gross Margin per Visitor: The amount of profit each product generates per site visit.
Gross Margin per Quantity Purchased: The profit per sale, fully loaded with real costs.

These metrics don’t just tell you how healthy your business is—they tell you where to focus. When we first ran this report, we found that several of our top-selling products were actually losing money. Seeing that in black and white changes you. It changes what you promote, what you bid on, what you restock. It changes how you think.

Where to begin and operationalize

Just as we did in the past, I recommend starting by manually filling out this sheet using a series of VLOOKUPS. This will allow you to understand where all this data needs to come from.

Start with revenue and COGS by product. That’s in your e-commerce system, and easy to report on. Next, add in product view data using Google Analytics or your analytics platform of choice. After that let’s integrate with your shipping provider, whether it’s UPS, FedEx or use a tool like Shipstation.

You’re starting to get most of the costs, so let’s now add all the return information. This will be the most revealing for most teams, and help them see that not all sales are equal. Lastly, integrate individually with all of your marketing platforms. These are the most complex, but have the most API access for automation.

To automate this process, I would start with an N8N or Zapier to get all of this information into a single spreadsheet. Once you’ve figured that part out, I’d upgrade to a database and reporting software that can produce this report for custom dates on the fly. This is obviously a more complex job, which may need some database design to complete. Once you have proven that the worksheet is so powerful, it will be easy to wrangle the technical resources to fully automate the process.

Want to use this, but not sure where to begin?

If you want to see how this model could work inside your business, I’m happy to walk you through the process. We’ll look at your systems, your data sources, and figure out what it would take to connect the dots.

Grab a spot on my calendar, and we’ll unpack it together.

Your Most Valuable E-Commerce Customers Are Not Who You Think They Are

2025-11-13T00:00:00Z

Customer File Segmentation

Email me your customer file. I’ll sift through it, pull out your highest value customers, and tell you what they have in common. Takes me a few hours. Could change how you grow for the next year.

My favorite thing to do in any e-commerce business is to tear apart the customer file. I’ll pour a cup of coffee, open a spreadsheet, and start digging: where do our customers live, what are they buying, how big are their orders, and how often are they coming back? Our Business Intelligence product is built to surface this kind of analysis systematically. It’s the most boring-sounding task in the world, but it tells you everything you need to know about how the business really works. The patterns in those rows and columns reveal the truth about what’s driving growth, what’s holding it back, and who’s actually keeping the lights on.

After doing this across dozens of brands, I’ve found a pattern that almost no one talks about. Your best customers are not who you think they are. They’re not your loyal Instagram followers. They’re not the superfans replying to your marketing emails. They’re not even the ones leaving glowing reviews or sharing your content. Your best customers —the ones with the highest lifetime value —are, more often than not, businesses.

The Hidden B2B Engine Inside Every D2C Brand

Yep, even if you think you’re D2C. Even if your site doesn’t have a wholesale tab. Even if your entire brand story is about individual consumers. Once a company crosses around $10 million in annual revenue, I’ve seen it again and again: buried in the order history is a small but mighty group of businesses quietly buying over and over and over again. They’re not loud. They don’t ask for discounts. They rarely reach out to customer support. But they are the foundation of predictable, profitable growth.

Finding them is easier than you’d think. Start by pulling up orders with a company name listed in the shipping or billing fields. That’s your first clue. These aren’t impulse buyers, they’re companies purchasing your products in bulk for their own customers, employees, or resale.

Then, look for your serial buyers, the customers who have ordered five, ten, or twenty times. While most people buy once and disappear, these few keep coming back like clockwork. When you see that kind of repeat behavior, there’s something structural behind it.

And if you really want to see who’s driving the bus, look at your outliers. When your average order value is $200, but someone just spent $8,000 or bought 30 of the same item, that’s not a one-off enthusiast. That’s a business customer hiding in plain sight.

What Not to Do Next

This is where most e-commerce teams get it wrong. They discover these business buyers and immediately think, “We should build a B2B portal.” Don’t. That’s how six months and a hundred grand in development vanish without a measurable return. These customers already figured out how to buy from you. They don’t need a login, a dashboard, or another friction point. What they need is a relationship.

Instead of building software, build a connection. Pick up the phone. Ask how they’re using your products. Ask what made them choose you, and how you can make their life easier. You might learn they’re reselling your product, giving it away as part of a corporate program, or using it inside their own manufacturing process. Sometimes you’ll even stumble into a new distribution opportunity you didn’t know existed. But you’ll never know unless you talk to them.

Serve Them Like Partners, Not Promo Codes

Once you know who these businesses are, stop treating them like everyone else. Segment them out of your normal campaigns. They don’t care about “20% off this weekend” or new lifestyle photography. They care about reliability, lead times, delivery options, and stock availability. Change your communication accordingly.

And here’s a surprisingly effective move: send them something physical. Yes, actual mail. A postcard, a catalog, a handwritten note. Everyone’s inbox is a mess, but physical mail still gets noticed, especially by business buyers who open it thinking it might be an invoice. It’s an easy way to stay top of mind without another ignored email.

Most e-commerce directors spend their time chasing new consumers, tweaking ads, or obsessing over funnel metrics. But your fastest path to sustainable, profitable growth might already be right in front of you. Those repeat business customers are steady, loyal, and far less expensive to serve than the constantly shifting consumer base. They don’t need convincing. They don’t care about your latest ad creative. They just need a reliable partner who ships on time and makes it easy to buy again.

Find them. Call them. Learn from them. Serve them like partners. You might realize your most valuable customers were never D2C at all, and once you do, you’ll see your entire business differently.

Need help finding these customers for your store? Drop me a line.

The View to Buy Report: The One Report That Will Save Your BFCM Week

2025-11-20T00:00:00Z

Insights that Guide You

Are you struggling to pinpoint where to focus? Stuck just guessing? You’re probably not looking at the right reports. Most e-commerce teams aren’t. Want to figure out the right reports? I can solve that for you. Schedule a time here

Why This Report Matters More Than Your Funnel

You are going to be refreshing your funnel reports every five minutes next week like they personally wronged you. You will watch people add to cart, abandon, return, scroll around, and then vanish to go price-shopping somewhere else. Everyone obsesses over Added to Cart and Checkout Started, but the quieter, more important truth is hiding somewhere else entirely. The report you should be glued to is your Product View to Buy report. It tells you which products are attracting traffic, which ones are driving actual orders, and which ones are silently setting your money on fire while you keep sending more visitors to them. In the chaos of BFCM, this report becomes your flashlight. Read the rest to see how I generate the data in GA4, and download my Excel template here.

What the Product View to Buy Report Actually Tells You

How to Build This Report in GA4

Start by creating a new blank exploration in GA4. Add Item Viewed and Purchases as your metrics. Add Item Name as your primary dimension. Drag Item Name into Rows, add your two metrics, and export the whole thing to Google Sheets. This is where the report becomes actionable. In Sheets, create a new conversion rate column using Purchases divided by Item Viewed. Clean up the sheet by deleting the first five rows so your data starts cleanly at the top. Then manually insert a Site Total row in A2, which gives you a baseline for the average conversion rate. Format the conversion column as a percentage so the numbers are easy to scan without mental gymnastics.

Turning Your Sheet Into Something That Actually Helps You

Your report is already sorted by views, but you need to isolate the products that matter. I suggest focusing on items with at least one hundred views, although your threshold may vary depending on your traffic levels or catalog size. Once you have the meaningful set, turn the conversion rate column into a visual map so your brain can quickly see what needs attention. Use Format, Conditional Formatting, Color Scale, and apply a red to green scale with yellow in the middle. Set red to zero and set the midpoint as the site average. Suddenly your underperformers show up in bright red, the average performers hover around yellow, and your winners light up in green.

What To Do With the Red Products

These red products are where you should invest your time. Begin by checking traffic sources. If most of the traffic is coming from paid channels like Google Shopping and the conversion rate is terrible, pull this product from your feed immediately. BFCM is not the time to donate budget to products that refuse to earn their keep.

Next, review the product page itself. Can you upgrade the images quickly? Can you rewrite the copy to make benefits stronger and more obvious? Can you tighten the bullet points so the customer understands the value faster? Customers during BFCM shop like they are sprinting. If your product page does not answer their questions immediately, you should not expect miracles.

Finally, look outside your four walls. Go to Google and search the product category the way a normal shopper would. What are the cheaper alternatives? What objections are obvious? What competitors emphasize? This exercise forces you to confront the actual value of your product, not the version you created in a meeting six months ago. If you cannot clearly justify why your product is worth its price, your shoppers certainly will not try to figure that out for you.

The Real Reason Conversion Rates Don’t Move

You can spend all day obsessing over UX improvements, shaving seconds off load times, or adding more trust badges to the page. None of that will save a product with a weak value story. Conversion rate is a function of perceived value, not button color. If the product does not feel worth the price, your conversion rate will stay low no matter how many optimizations you stack on top of it.

The Bottom Line

Focus on the red products. Fix them if they can be fixed, promote the green ones more aggressively, and stop paying for traffic that goes nowhere. If you can do that, your BFCM week becomes less stressful, less expensive, and significantly more profitable.

We’re taking next week off, but if you have any questions you want answered, we’ll answer them in our next newsletter. Just reply to this email, and ask away.

The E-commerce Playbook is Broken. Here’s the 2026 Reality.

2025-12-11T00:00:00Z

Is your team missing this key role?

I mapped out the 7 biggest headwinds hitting e-commerce next year (and the huge opportunity hidden in them). We are rolling out 3 new AI tools to help solve them. Want a sneak peek?

If you work in e-commerce right now, you’ve probably got a nagging feeling that the ground is shifting under your feet.

You aren't crazy. It is.

I was recently mapping out the landscape for 2026, trying to get past the usual LinkedIn buzzwords and figure out what’s actually keeping retail leaders up at night. It’s not about "embracing the metaverse" or whatever the flavor of the month is. It’s about the fundamental friction points in how we operate.

The golden era of "build a Shopify store, run some FB ads, and print money" is officially dead and buried. The new reality is messier, harder, and requires a totally different organizational approach.

Here is the unfiltered reality of the headwinds, and the hidden opportunities, facing e-comm teams right now.

The "Easy Button" is Gone

Remember five years ago? Media buying was basically a math problem. You used lookalike audiences, stacked interests, and hacked the algorithm with rules.

That’s over. In 2026, targeting isn't rules-based; it's creative-based. The ad platforms’ AI is now smarter than your best media buyer. The only lever you have left to pull is the creative itself: the video hook, the image, the story.

The problem? Most e-comm teams are built for spreadsheets, not for churning out the massive volume of high-quality storytelling needed to feed the beast. Now, you need to deeply understand the audiences you’re targeting and what they actually care about just to build enough unique creative to keep Meta happy.

The Identity Crisis and the Data Fog

Compounding the creative problem is a massive identity crisis. Thanks to privacy changes over the last few years, most retailers honestly have no idea who the personas on their site actually are. We’re optimizing for an "average" customer that doesn’t exist, rather than zeroing in on the high-value cohorts that actually drive profit.

And good luck using your analytics dashboard to figure it out. Let’s be real: GA4 has been a disaster for clarity. It is harder to set up and even harder to interpret. Because so much of the data is now "modeled" (read: guessed) rather than tracked, teams have lost trust in the numbers. When you can’t trust the dashboard, decision-making reverts to whoever has the loudest voice in the room.

The Hangover: Discounts and Returns

We are also suffering from a massive hangover brought on by the "growth at all costs" era.

First, we’re hooked on the "Discount Drug." We spent a decade training consumers to never buy anything at full price. Brands are trapped in a cycle where they can only move volume during a sale, which crushes the already razor-thin margins.

Second, nobody wants to talk about the "Returns Tsunami." As sales grow, reverse logistics are eating profits alive. Too many teams treat a 30% return rate as just "the cost of doing business," rather than what it actually is: a massive failure in marketing promise or product experience. There is almost zero feedback loop between the warehouse team seeing why things come back and the marketing team hyping them up.

The Internal Squeeze

So, margins are lower and budgets are tighter. The pressure for headcount efficiency is immense.

This creates a frantic environment where teams are so busy putting out fires that they have no time to actually talk to customers. I mean really understand why people are choosing your brand, what problems they’re trying to solve, and who else they’re comparing you against. It’s hard, very time-consuming work.

We have a massive empathy gap. We rely on quantitative data (what happened) because it’s fast, and ignore qualitative insight (why it happened) because it takes time.

And then there’s AI. Management is asking teams where the AI ROI is, expecting it to replace staff. But right now, teams are mostly using AI to automate small tasks, creating more mediocre content faster, which just requires more senior oversight to quality check. E-commerce teams haven’t figured out how to deploy AI to be customer-facing yet. Those that have are usually just adding a generic chatbot, which is clunky and rarely helpful.

The Missing Link

When you look at all these headwinds combined, like the need for better creative, the blind data, the profit squeeze, and the disconnected functions, it points to one glaring hole in most organizations.

E-commerce teams lack a "Connector."

There is rarely a dedicated resource whose sole job is to collaborate across design, development, business intelligence, and user research.

We have marketing driving traffic to a leaky bucket. We have product teams building cool features that don’t drive revenue. But we lack someone focused purely on experimentation and Revenue Per Visitor (RPV) growth. We need someone who owns the outcome of the site experience, not just the inputs.

How we’re helping e-comm leaders keep their jobs in 2026

At mobile1st, we’ve been quietly increasing RPV for all of our clients by stepping in as that missing "Connector."

We do the work teams don't have time for: understanding why the customer buys and ensuring that value is expressed on key pages. We talk to the customer through deep user research, and we dive into the messy business intelligence data to find the truth.

The results speak for themselves: We've seen an over 20% increase in RPV this year for our clients.

But even with those wins, we know our clients are still feeling the pressure of 2026. So, we’re evolving our product to meet them there.

Partners who align with our core experimentation product now get access to a new suite of tools that actually deliver on the promise of AI:

True Conversational Commerce: Not just a "dumb" chatbot, but a guided AI experience that genuinely helps shoppers find key information and products, reducing friction.
Data Integrity: A tool that ensures your product data on the landing page matches your PDP, which matches your backend specs. This helps eliminate the errors that cause returns.
Persona Identification: A tool that combines public firmographic info with live browsing behavior to identify your key personas in real-time, helping you prioritize messaging across ads and on-site.

The headwinds are real, but they aren't insurmountable. You just need the right connector.

The Great E-Commerce Hypocrisy: Why You Treat Your Ads Like Science and Your Site Like a Guessing Game

2026-01-08T00:00:00Z

I know what your week looks like.

You are absolutely grinding on customer acquisition. You are feeding the beast. Your creative team is sweating bullets, churning out video assets, static images, and carousel copy faster than a fast-fashion supply chain.

Why? Because you have to.

Ad fatigue is real. Creative burns out in days, sometimes hours. Facebook and Google’s algorithms are hungry little monsters that demand fresh meat constantly to keep your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) from skyrocketing into the stratosphere.

You are obsessively testing. You’re throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what the algorithm catches. You trust the machine. When the dashboard says "Ad A is a winner," you don't argue. You double down. You scale the spend. You high-five the media buyer.

But then... that expensive, hard-won traffic hits your website.

And you treat your website like a museum exhibit while treating your ads like a high-frequency trading floor. It’s the single biggest hypocrisy in e-commerce right now, and honestly? It’s costing you a fortune.

The "Clean Data" Trap (Or, Why You Trust Zuck More Than Your Own Eyes)

Here is the uncomfortable truth: You trust Facebook and Google because they have better marketing than your analytics team.

When you look at Ads Manager, they’ve stripped away all the nuance. They don’t show you confidence intervals. They don’t bore you with p-values or standard deviations. They give you a shiny green arrow that says "ROI GOOD." It looks unquestionable. It looks like absolute truth.

So you act on it immediately.

But when it comes to your own site—the place where the actual transaction happens—you suddenly turn into a skeptical academic from the 1950s.

If someone suggests changing the "Add to Cart" flow or testing a new value prop on the PDP, you freeze. "Is it statistically significant?" "Are we 99% sure?" "What if we break the brand aesthetic?"

Or worse, you fall back on the HiPPO method: The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. You make changes willy-nilly because the CEO didn't like the shade of blue, or because a competitor did something cool last week.

You demand 99% statistical certainty to change a button on your site, but you’ll let Facebook spend $50k on an audience segment based on a "learning phase" algorithm you can’t even see.

Make it make sense.

One Size Fits... Nobody

Think about this: You are paying specifically to target distinct audiences. You have creative for the bargain hunters, creative for the luxury buyers, and creative for the impulse shoppers.

Facebook has done the heavy lifting to find these specific people.

And then you drop them all onto the exact same website.

Why is your site a static monolith when your acquisition strategy is dynamic and fluid? If you wouldn’t run the same ad to every single person on the internet, why are you showing the same homepage to every single visitor? Personalization is how you close that gap.

Okay, So How Do We Fix This Mess?

Stop treating your site like a sacred cow. It’s a product. It needs to grow. We call this Digital Product Growth.

If you want to stop lighting ad spend on fire, you need to apply the same rigor to the post-click experience that you apply to the pre-click experience. But—and this is key—you have to stop guessing.

To actually move the needle on Revenue Per Visitor (RPV), you need to know what matters. That starts with understanding which insights are actually worth acting on.

Don't start with the homepage. (Seriously, stop it. That’s vanity.)
Dig into the data. Where are they dropping off?
Talk to your customers. There is a mountain of evidence regarding what your shoppers actually care about, but you’re ignoring it because it’s harder to find than a CPM metric.
Conduct user research. You need to identify what motivates your buyer, and what other options they have. Watch people struggle to understand why they should buy from you, and why they need to buy from you now. It's painful to watch, but it's the only way to learn.

The "Oh Crap, That Sounds Expensive" Part

I can hear your brain spinning already. "This sounds great, but I’m already stretched thin."

You’re right. Doing this properly isn't a side hustle for your marketing intern. To run a legitimate experimentation program that actually drives revenue, you typically need a "pod."

A Product Manager to own the roadmap and the research.
A Designer to build the variants so they don't look like trash.
A Developer to code the tests without breaking the checkout.
A Data Analyst to tell you if you actually made money or just noise.

If you are doing over $100 Million in online revenue, stop reading this and go hire that team immediately. They will pay for themselves in six months. Seriously, go do it.

But if you are in that $3M to $100M range? That headcount is a killer. You’re looking at $500k+ in salaries just to get started. That’s a tough pill to swallow when you’re trying to keep margins healthy.

There Is a Better Way

This is exactly why Mobile1st exists.

We don’t just "do CRO." We act as your Digital Product Growth partner. For less than the cost of one mid-level employee, you get the whole squad: PM, strategy, design, dev, user research, and analysis.

We own the Revenue Per Visitor metric. We do the research. We find what motivates buyers. We build the tests. We tell you what won.

Our clients like to say, "You guys just do the things that make the money."

It’s not rocket science, but it requires focus, expertise, and a refusal to rely on the HiPPO.

The Bottom Line

You are fighting a war on CAC with one hand tied behind your back.

If you’re going to obsess over new creative to decrease your acquisition costs, you owe it to your business to obsess over new site experiences to increase your revenue per visitor.

Stop letting your ads write checks your website can’t cash.

How we can help you right now

Does your site feel like a leaky bucket?

If you want to see exactly how much money you're leaving on the table, we can calculate that for you.

How to Keep Your E-Com Director Job (And Maybe Get Promoted) in 2026

2026-01-14T00:00:00Z

Here we are in 2026, and the game has changed again. The board wants profitability yesterday, your budget is tighter than a pair of skinny jeans from 2011, and you aren’t getting any more headcount.

If you want to keep your seat at the table, or hell, maybe even snag that VP title, you need to stop doing what worked three years ago.

Here is the unvarnished truth on what I think you need to master this year.

1. Stop worshipping at the altar of "Acquisition"

For the last decade, E-commerce Directors were basically just glorified media buyers. If you could spend $1 to make $3, you were a god.

Those days are over. The enemy isn't your competitor anymore; it's the ad platforms eating your margin alive.

To survive 2026, you have to pivot to profitability. You need to obsess over LTV (Lifetime Value) like your rent depends on it. If you are still high-fiving your agency over top-line revenue while your repeat purchase rate tanks, you’re walking a dead man’s plank.

2. Profitability is the only metric that matters

I don’t care what your ROAS is. I really don’t.

If you can’t tell me the Contribution Margin of your campaigns, you aren’t running a business; you’re running a charity for Google and Meta. If you want to build the model that actually shows you this, read the ultimate e-commerce profitability model.

You need to understand the profitability levers of your entire business—even the ones you hate, like logistics, returns, and COGS. If you don't understand how a 2% increase in return rate destroys your campaign's profitability, you’re going to get blindsided.

3. Get a grip on User Behavior (Stop blaming GA4)

The moment Universal Analytics died, most of you stopped understanding how people actually use your site.

GA4 is actually more powerful than Universal Analytics; you just haven't set it up right.

Want to measure which filters are being used? Stop guessing and set up the custom event.
Want to know if driving traffic to a specific PDP actually impacts profitability? Hook GA4 up to your data warehouse.

Whether you are collecting data in GA4, a warehouse, or a CDP, you need to actually get the data out to make decisions. Our Business Intelligence product is built to do exactly this. And before you say the interface is too hard: Use AI. It will write the queries for you. No more excuses.

4. You aren't Steve Jobs (Test everything)

The biggest threat to your job is the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion). Stop guessing what customers want. You aren't that smart. Neither is your CEO.

Know thy customer: Actually talk to them. Do the user research. Understand the personas.
Test your site: If you aren't running on-site experiments, you are leaving free money on the table. Why are you obsessively testing your ad creative, but not your site?
Creative Velocity: Meta and TikTok need more creative than ever to find the perfectly matched persona. These powerful bidding mechanisms now do the targeting for you, but you need enough varied creative to help them find the right people.

5. Use AI to bypass your busy Dev Team

You aren't getting more employees this year. Your dev team is "sprinted out" and won't get to your ticket until Q3.

Use AI to write the code snippets, troubleshoot the tags, and automate the boring parts of your workflow. Be dangerous enough to solve technical problems when the tech team is unresponsive.

AI is amazing at writing SQL. Need to dissect data but the analyst is busy pulling reports for the CFO? Describe the model to your favorite LLM and it will create amazing SQL for you. Seriously. You should no longer be overwhelmed by technical problems.

Side note: Don't get caught up in the hype. AI search/shopping is cool, but it’s going to be less than 5% of your revenue this year. Treat it like a burgeoning channel, not a savior.

6. Rent the talent, don't buy it

Since you can’t get approval for a $150k FTE, stop trying.

But you can usually get approval for a partner budget. Stop trying to hire "unicorns" internally who claim they can do design, code, and strategy. They usually do all three poorly.

Hire partners to fill the skill gaps. Bring in a sniper (like a specialist agency) for specific growth goals rather than hiring a generalist infantryman who you have to train and manage.

7. Let go: you’re less in control of your promotion than you think

Getting promoted in 2026 has more to do with interest rates and macro-economic conditions than your own competency.

You can be an absolute rockstar, but if the market is trash, the promotion isn't happening. Accept this. It will save you a lot of heartache. Control what you can control (see points 1-6).

8. Go home at 5:00 PM

This is serious. Don’t work more than 40 hours a week. It’s not worth it.

There is a law of diminishing returns in knowledge work. If you burn out, the company will replace you in two weeks. Protect your sanity. Have fun. If you aren't laughing at the chaos, you're in the wrong industry.

Stop Building Online Vending Machines

2026-01-21T00:00:00Z

Almost every e-commerce sites doing between $10M and $100M are basically just high-resolution vending machines.

You know the look. You land on the site and it’s just rows of product cards. Dresses, pants, accessories, repeat. It’s efficient, sure. But it’s sterile.

Then, usually buried somewhere in the footer, there’s a link to an "About Us" page or a blog that talks about the brand’s "lifestyle" and "mission." The “About Us” page, might event talk about charities the company supports.

Unfortunately, though Less than 5% of your traffic ever gets to the About Us page.

If your brand story lives in the footer, it doesn't exist. You’re running a catalog, not a community. And in 2026, catalogs get crushed by Amazon.

The Great "Friction" Lie

I’m going to say something that might get me kicked out of the CRO club: Friction is rarely your problem.

We’ve run thousands of experiments, and the ones focused solely on "reducing friction" lose about 90% of the time. The better move is personalization — making the site feel like it knows who’s on it, and giving them a reason to connect with the brand before they decide to buy.

Your customers aren't stupid. They know how to checkout. The reason they aren't buying isn't because they can't find the button; it’s because they don't care yet. They want to know if the product solves their specific problem ("Is this teacher-appropriate?") and if they trust the brand.

You answer those questions with context, not by shaving 0.2 seconds off your load time.

From Catalog to Cult: The "Outdoor Voices" Effect

Remember early Outdoor Voices? They didn't just sell leggings; they sold the "Doing Things" club.

They hosted runs, took photos of real people, and splashed those gritty, sweaty, happy photos all over the site. When you bought the hat, you weren't buying a hat, you were buying entry into the in-crew. You saw those hats everywhere and you felt part of something.

You don't need a VC budget to do this. You just need to stop hiding your community in the blog and start putting it where the money is.

How to Kill the Vending Machine (Without a Redesign)

You don't need a massive re-platform to fix this. You need to change how you talk, where you put your content, and how your team meets on Mondays.

1. The "First Order" Copywriting Rule

Go read your top-selling Product Detail Page (PDP). Does it sound like a corporate slog written by an SEO agency? "This garment features a poly-blend conducive to..."

Boring.

Rewrite it in the Founder’s Voice. Go back to how you sold the product when you got your very first order. Why did she design this? Did she find the pattern in a vintage market? How does she wear it? When you swap "product specs" for "founder stories," you stop selling a commodity and start selling a connection.

2. The "Below the Fold" Lifestyle Layer

There is a fear that adding "community" content will distract from the Buy Button. That’s nonsense.

Keep the top of the page clean for the transaction, but as they start scrolling, that is your invitation to show them how the product fits their life.

Don't just show the dress. Show the "Teacher's Edit." Show the UGC photos of real customers wearing it in the classroom or at Sunday service. Prove to them that this product belongs in their specific world.

3. Merchandise by Lifestyle

Yes, it’s important to be able to shop by dresses, pants, skirts and shirts… But that’s not the only way people shop. They also think, where will I be wearing this outfit? Or what will I be doing?

You can merchandise in the navigation, on the home-page and even on the PDP by where will this skirt be worn? For Teachers, or Best for Church, or even Moms’ Favorites.

When you merchandise this way, shoppers start to see themselves in these groups and think okay, this will solve my problem. Make these lifestyles front and center as people browse.

4. Search means your Merchandising is Broken

This is a hard pill to swallow, but if a user has to use your Search bar or even your Hamburger menu, you have failed them.

Think about mobile. The navigation is hidden behind an icon. If a user has to tap that icon to find what they want, it means the page they were just on, the PDP, didn't give them a clear path to browse.

Your PDP should be a browsing engine. If they are looking at a floral dress, don't make them search for "more floral." Guide them effortlessly to the "Floral Shop" or the "Maxi Collection" directly from the content they are already consuming.

5. Pivot the "Dreaded" Weekly Meeting

Every Monday, your team probably sits in a room (or a Zoom) and reads a spreadsheet of numbers out loud. Everyone hates this meeting.

Keep the meeting, but change the agenda. Instead of just reporting what happened, share why it happened.

Your Social Team knows that a specific video of a mom packing a lunchbox went viral. Your Ad team knows that "Teacher" messaging is outperforming "Sale" messaging. Those assets usually die in the ad account.

Force the teams to swap those wins. Take the viral lunchbox video and put it on the PDP. Take the "Teacher" messaging and put it in the Founder’s Note.

The Bottom Line You have a story. You have a founder. You have customers who love you. Stop hiding them behind a grid of 400 silent SKUs.

How to steal budget for an experimentation program(me) and look like a genius

2026-01-29T00:00:00Z

I love words that are spelled differently in British English and American English. One of my favourites is colour. There are many words that I somehow learned to spell the British way, and now that’s just my default.

I know the feeling.

Walking into the CFO’s office to ask for more marketing budget feels a lot like being a teenager asking your dad for gas money after you already dented the bumper. It’s painful, it’s awkward, and usually, the answer is a hard "no" followed by a lecture on fiscal responsibility.

But here’s the thing. You probably don’t need new money; you already have the budget, you just aren’t quite sure where to look.

The marketing budget trap

If you’re running a brand doing anywhere between $3 million and $100 million, I can pretty much guess your P&L structure without looking at it. You’re spending somewhere between 10% to 30% of your revenue on marketing. If you’re VC-backed, it’s probably higher, and your burn rate makes me sweat, but that’s a problem for future-you.

You love paid media. We all do. It’s the safe drug. It’s predictable. You put a dollar into the Meta or Google machine, and you hope to get four dollars back. Your ROAS is likely sitting right around 4x. It’s respectable. Everyone in the building understands the model, from the intern to the board.

But deep down, you know the truth. Ad costs are only going one direction, and your efficiency is plateauing.

How to steal the money

You know you should be allocating 10% to 20% of your budget to test new channels. Maybe it’s TikTok, perhaps it’s Connected TV, maybe it’s influencers.

Here is the unlock, though. Stop thinking of "On-site Experimentation" as a separate line item. And unlike TikTok, this channel makes every other channel perform better. Our Data-Driven Experimentation program is exactly what that budget should fund.

Let’s do some napkin math on a hypothetical $7 million store.

If you’re spending 15% on marketing, that’s about $1.05 million a year. If you are doing your job right, you’re allocating 20% of that for "Testing." That means you have roughly $210,000 sitting there, waiting to be torched on a new ad platform that might not convert or pan out this year.

You don’t need $200k to start onsite experimentation. You can run a killer Digital Product Growth program for under $75k a year. That money already lives in your "Test New Channels" bucket. You need to move it from one column to another.

Please don’t try to hire this out.

Now, usually, this is the part where someone asks whether they can hire a full-time person at $75k.

Please don’t do that.

For $75k, you get a junior marketing coordinator who knows a little HTML and will accidentally delete your checkout button on Black Friday. You cannot hire a full team—Strategist, UX Designer, Developer, QA, Analyst—for that price. But you can hire a partner (hi, that’s us) for that price. And we won't break the site.

Proving you aren't an idiot

Okay, so you’ve stolen the budget. Now, the future you will have to prove to the boss that it wasn't a mistake.

Most agencies will bore you to death talking about Conversion Rate. We don't care about Conversion Rate. It’s a vanity metric. I can double your conversion rate tomorrow by lowering all your prices to $1. You’ll go out of business, but your chart will look great.

We care about Revenue Per Visitor (RPV). That’s the only number that pays the bills. If you want to understand exactly what drives RPV, the hierarchy of e-commerce insights is the best place to start.

Let's look at the impact on that $7 million business.

Let's assume we run a solid roadmap. We aren't promising magic buttons, but let's say we get 6 winning experiments in a year. If each win increases your average RPV by 3%, it may seem small.

It’s not. 3% is significant when compounded.

But here is where the corporate calculators get it wrong, and where we need to get real.

First off, you don’t get all 6 wins in January. You get one in February, one in April, one in June, and so on. The first win generates extra cash for 11 months, while the last win might only generate it for one month.

Secondly, winning experiments don't last forever—user behavior changes. Competitors change. That shiny new feature becomes background noise. We conservatively estimate that a winning test degrades by about 15% every 3 months. Why? Because entropy is real, and humans get bored. This is precisely why experimentation isn't a "one-and-done" project. You have to keep feeding the beast.

So, is it worth it?

When you factor in the timing delay and the degradation, what are you actually left with?

On a $7 million business, a program like this can conservatively generate an additional $800,000 in year-one revenue.

That means you spent under $75k (which you diverted from the ad budget) to recover $800k. That is a return better than 10x.

And the best part? That $800k lift occurs on-site. Which means your Google Ads work better. Your email flows convert higher. Your ROAS increases across the board because you fixed the bucket rather than just pouring more water in.

You have the budget. It’s sitting right there, likely about to be spent on a "Brand Awareness" campaign that nobody can track. (I actually really like that brand awareness campaign, to be honest. It’s probably better than the retargeting campaign of people who were already going to convert.)

Take the money. Bet on your own product.

If you’d like to see precisely what this ROI model looks like with your specific traffic and revenue numbers, let's chat. I’ll run the calculator for you, and we can present it to your CFO together.

The 6 Advanced E-commerce Reports To Build a $100M Brand

2026-02-05T00:00:00Z

If you’re running an e-commerce brand doing $5M, $20M, or $80M, I’m going to tell you something your Facebook ads agency won't: Your ROAS is lying to you.

It’s the great industry secret. We’ve all been conditioned to stare at the Shopify dashboard, see that "Total Revenue" line go up, and feel like geniuses. But behind the scenes? Your margins are getting punched in the throat by rising CAC, your inventory is gathering dust like a 1980s workout VHS, and you’re probably sending 20% discount codes to people who would have paid full price.

If you want to move from "scaling by luck" to "growing by design," you need to stop looking at vanity metrics and start looking at these six reports. They aren’t sexy, but they are the difference between a business that’s a cash-flow machine and one that’s just a very expensive hobby.

1. The View to Buy Report (The "Leaky Bucket" Detector)

Most people stare at their site-wide conversion rate. That’s like checking the average temperature of the entire Atlantic Ocean to decide if you should wear a wetsuit in Miami. It’s useless.

The View to Buy Report is the antidote. It zooms in on your Product Detail Pages (PDPs) to see who is actually interested versus who is actually buying.

$$View to Buy Rate = \frac{Unique Purchases}{Unique Product Views}$$

Look, if you have a product getting 10,000 hits a month but only 50 people are buying it, your marketing team isn't the problem. The page is. You’re paying for a crowd to enter the store, but when they get to the shelf, something is turning them off—maybe the photos look like they were taken on a flip phone, or the "Add to Cart" button is playing hide-and-seek.

As we’ve argued before, The View to Buy Report is the one report that will save your BFCM week because it tells you exactly where your ad spend is being set on fire. If a product has a low View to Buy rate, stop throwing money at it. Fix the page first, then turn the tap back on.

2. Product Contribution Margin (The "True Profit" Report)

If I could have any superpower, it wouldn’t be flying; it would be omniscience. I want to see the hidden mechanics of why a business actually works. In e-commerce, that "ultimate truth" is product-level profitability.

Most people look at a "Bestseller" and see a hero. But until you break it down, you're just looking at a reflection of reality. You need a report that follows the money out as carefully as it follows the money in.

$$Contribution Margin = Revenue - (COGS + Shipping + Variable Ad Spend)$$

We’ve built systems that pull daily data from UPS, Shipstation, Meta, and Google to find this number. But you should start with a simple, ugly, manual spreadsheet. When you see your "Hero SKUs" side-by-side with their real costs, it changes you. You’ll find that some of your high-volume items are quietly burning cash because the return rates are nightmares or the shipping eats the margin alive.

Stop being a "revenue at any cost" junkie. When you find the products that have a high Gross Margin per Visitor, those are the ones that deserve the paid support. The rest? They’re just "Profit Vampires" that belong in the footer.

3. Merchandising & Inventory Health

Inventory is just cash that’s sitting in a warehouse, unable to buy you a margarita. This report bridges the gap between the marketing team (who wants to sell everything) and the ops team (who has to deal with the physical reality of the warehouse).

You need to track your Weeks of Supply (WOS). Running ads for a product that only has 2 weeks of supply left is just a great way to pay money to frustrate your customers. It’s a fireable offense.

On the flip side, if you have 40 weeks of supply sitting there, it’s time to get aggressive. Bundle it, discount it, or give it away as a "gift with purchase" to move the needle. Clear the shelf so you can reinvest that cash into something that actually turns over.

4. Product "Gateway" & Affinity

Not all customers are created equal. Some buy a $10 accessory once and never come back. Others buy a specific $80 jacket and end up spending $2,000 over the next three years.

The Gateway Report identifies which specific products act as the best entry points for high-LTV (Lifetime Value) customers.

The "unsaid" truth here? Your most popular first-purchase product might be a "one-and-done" item. It brings in "tourists," not "citizens." You want to find the products that lead to the second purchase. Use those Gateway products for your Top-of-Funnel ads. Even if the initial cost to acquire the customer is higher, the long-term math wins every time.

5. Customer Discount Sensitivity Matrix

Stop being a "coupon crack" dealer. If you send a "20% Off Everything" blast to your entire email list, you are effectively handing cash to people who were perfectly willing to pay full price.

This report segments your audience by their psychological need for a discount. You’ve got:

The Loyalists: They love the brand and buy regardless of price. Stop discounting for them. Give them "Early Access" or "VIP Status" (which costs you $0).
The Bargain Hunters: They only show up when the "SALE" sign is in the window.

Treat your margin like the finite resource it is. Save the deep discounts for the people you’re trying to reactivate or to move that stagnant inventory we talked about in the inventory report.

6. User Cohort with Predictive Revenue

This is where we stop looking in the rearview mirror. Most founders scale until they run out of cash because they don't understand their payback period. They see a low ROAS today and panic, not realizing that specific cohort of customers will be worth 4x that in six months.

Using BTYD (Buy 'Til You Die) modeling, you can project the future revenue of your existing customer base without spending another dime on acquisition. This is the "CFO’s Crystal Ball."

If you know a customer acquired today for $50 will be worth $200 by Christmas, you can stop sweating the daily fluctuations of the Meta algorithm and start outspending your competitors. It’s about scaling with confidence instead of crossing your fingers.

Using this report gives you additional budget to find more new customers, because you can rely on existing ones to come back every month.

Go Build These Reports

If you’re stuck between $3M and $100M, you can’t "hustle" your way to the next level. You can’t just copy what your competitors are doing because, frankly, they’re probably guessing, too.

Most agencies will give you a PDF of "best practices" and some "button color tests." We’d rather look at your View to Buy report and tell you why your site is failing your media spend. Our Business Intelligence product is built to surface exactly these kinds of answers. It’s not always the polite conversation you’ll get at a corporate board meeting, but it’s the one that grows your revenue per visitor.

Ready to see what's actually happening under the hood?** Reach out**, we have products to build these reports for you, or guide your team.

How to Prioritize Experiments

2026-02-12T00:00:00Z

If you’re running a brand doing $20M or $50M, you know the drill. Your backlog isn't a strategy; it’s a graveyard of good intentions. You’ve got the CEO who saw a cool widget on a competitor’s site at 2 AM, the Lead Engineer who is obsessed with a technical spec no customer understands, and a Marketing team that thinks a new font is going to save the quarter.

Most agencies will tell you to "just test everything." They’ll sell you a retainer, run sixteen color-change tests on a button nobody clicks, and send you a pretty slide deck at the end of the month that says a whole lot of nothing.

At Mobile1st, we stopped playing that game. We realized that if we wanted to actually move the needle for brands in that $3M to $100M "growth trap," we had to stop being "yes men" and start being the bouncers of the roadmap. We prioritize experiments like we’re triaging a battlefield. If it doesn’t meet the criteria, it doesn’t get on the site. Period.

Here is exactly how we decide what lives and what dies.

Rule 1: The 60% Revenue Floor (The "Who Cares?" Filter)

I’m going to say the unsaid: Most of the stuff your team wants to change simply doesn't matter.

If an experiment only impacts a tiny corner of your site, like a "refer-a-friend" link buried in the footer or a specialized landing page that gets 2% of your traffic, we don’t care. I don’t care how "strategic" it feels.

At Mobile1st, if an experiment doesn't touch at least 60% of your total revenue flow, it goes to the bottom of the pile. We call this the "Who Cares?" filter.

Why 60%? Because if you’re doing $50M a year and you find a 5% lift on a page that only 10% of your users see, you haven't moved the needle. You’ve just wasted three weeks of development time to buy yourself an expensive coffee. You need to be hunting where the money is. We look at the checkout flow, the high-traffic PDPs, and the global navigation. If it doesn't have the scale to actually change your bank account balance, we aren't touching it.

Rule 2: The Hierarchy of Insights (Data Over Ego)

The second way we kill bad ideas is by looking at the quality of the insight behind them.

Every brand has a "Random Idea Generator." Usually, it’s the person with the highest salary in the room. They say, "I think we should move the search bar."

We don't care what you "think." We care about our Hierarchy of Insights. (If you haven't seen it, check it out here: /news/the-hierarchy-of-e-commerce-insights).

If your "insight" is just an opinion, it’s at the bottom. If it’s a best practice from a blog post? Still at the bottom. But if you show me a heat map where users are rage-clicking a non-functional element, or a user recording where a customer literally says, "I can't find the shipping price," now we’re talking. If we have alrady tested a similar concept on a different part of the site, we make the experiment important. That is the best insight we could ever ask for.

When you have high-quality insightsthat experiment jumps to the top of the stack. We aren't testing to see "if" something works; we're testing to solve a problem we know exists.

Rule 3: The 70/30 Split (Optimization vs. Transformation)

This is where most experimentation programs go to die: they get stuck in the "Optimization Loop."

You change a headline. You move a picture. You tweak a button color. You get a 1% lift here and a 2% lift there. It feels good, but it doesn't change the trajectory of the business.

We believe that 70% of your experiments should be optimization. You have to protect the house. You have to keep refining the current experience to squeeze every cent out of your traffic.

But the other 30%? Those need to be "Business Changing Opportunities."

These are the big swings. The experiments that challenge your entire business model or how you present your value proposition. These are the tests that make people in the office nervous.

I once had a Lead Engineer try to kill an experiment because he thought the specs he wrote were the hero of the page. He spent months on the cooling fins of a product. I told him nobody cared about the fins; they cared if it would fit in their car. We deleted his "innovative" specs and replaced them with a "What's in the Box" list. RPV went up 23%. That wasn't just an optimization; it was a realization that the way the company talked about itself was wrong.

Rule 4: Value Over Speed (The Anti-Friction Rule)

Here is where we really start to piss off the "CRO Gurus."

For the last decade, the industry has been obsessed with "reducing friction." Every blog post tells you to make the checkout faster, remove steps, and get them to the "Thank You" page in three seconds.

We do the opposite. If an experiment is just about reducing friction to help people get to checkout faster, we deprioritize it.

Wait, what?

Think about it: Making a bad experience faster just helps people leave your site sooner. Speed doesn't build brands. Value builds brands.

If an experiment improves the perceived value of your product or helps a customer find the exact right product for their specific needs, it goes straight to the top of the priority list. We want to spend our time helping the customer understand why they should pay you full price, not just making it easier for them to click "Buy" on something they aren't sure about.

Similarly, if we can personalize the experience for almost all users—not just a tiny segment—we do everything we can to test that right away. Personalization that scales is a revenue multiplier. Our Data-Driven Experimentation program is built around exactly this prioritization framework.

Stop worrying about making the "Buy" button 0.2 seconds faster. Start worrying about why the customer is hovering over it and not clicking. Are they confused? Do they feel the value? Do they know this is the right version for them? Solve for value, and the conversion will follow.

The Cold Truth

If you’re leading an e-commerce team right now and you’re still building your plans around "hacks" and "speed tricks," you're playing a game you've already lost. The "vending machine" era of e-commerce—where you put a dollar in Meta and get three out—is dead.

You win now by being more disciplined than your competition. You win by being the person who says "no" to the low-impact friction tweaks so you can say "yes" to the 60% revenue drivers and the big value-based swings.

If you’re tired of the "invisible grind" of running tests that don't matter and managing an agency that’s just a "yes man" for your CEO’s bad ideas, maybe it’s time for a different approach.

We aren't here to be your friends in the boardroom. We're here to be the ones who tell you when your baby is ugly so we can help you build something that actually grows.

Let’s stop "optimizing" and start winning.

Ready to grow RPV by prioritizing the right experiments Reach out.

Your Offer Sucks. Stop Obsessing Over Friction.

2026-02-18T00:00:00Z

Why "optimization theater" is killing your growth and the one thing you actually need to fix.

Let’s be real for a second. Imagine we’re sitting at a bar, I’ve just bought the second round, and you’re complaining about your conversion rates.

You tell me you’ve tried everything. You’ve moved the "Add to Cart" button above the fold. You’ve made it sticky so it stalks the user like a desperate ex. You’ve A/B tested three shades of green because some guru on LinkedIn said "Forest Green" conveys trust.

And yet? Your revenue per visitor (RPV) is flatlining.

Here is the hard truth that most agencies won’t tell you because they want to charge you for billable hours tweaking pixels: Friction doesn’t matter.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever landed on a website, saw a product they kind of liked, but left because the add to cart button was just below the fold.

The problem isn’t friction. The problem isn’t the UI.

The problem is your offer.

The "Optimization Theater" Trap

We call what we do "Digital Product Growth" here, but let's strip the jargon. It’s about making money.

If you are leading an e-commerce brand doing $50M a year, you aren't losing sleep over pixel padding. You are losing sleep over the fact that 60% of your traffic lands directly on a Product Detail Page (PDP), and most of them bounce.

Think about that. They didn't come through the homepage. They clicked an ad or a Google link because something, somewhere, promised them a solution to their problem. They arrived with intent. They want to buy.

If they leave, it’s not because they couldn’t find the checkout. It’s because the math in their head didn't add up.

The Equation is Simple:

Perceived Value > Price Asked

That’s it. That’s the whole game. If the customer thinks your product is worth more than the cash you’re asking for, they buy. If they don't, they leave.

The Commodity Crisis (aka "The Competitor Down the Street")

Here is the "unsaid" part that hurts to hear: Your product probably isn't that special.

I know, I know. You spent years developing it. But to the customer? You’re selling a widget. And the guy down the street is selling the exact same widget.

Maybe you think your "Unique Selling Proposition" (USP) is your free shipping. Unfortunately, everyone has free shipping. Amazon ruined that for us a decade ago.

Maybe you think it’s your 30-day return policy. Again, unfortunately, that’s table stakes, not a perk.

If you and your competitor are selling a similar product at a similar price with similar shipping terms, you are in a race to the bottom. You are a commodity. And commodities compete on price, which is a great way to bankrupt your business.

So, how do you win without slashing your margins? The answer is building a real offer — which is one of the four things standing between your traffic and your revenue.

Constructing "The Offer" (The Secret Sauce)

You need to stop selling a product and start making an offer.

An offer isn't just the item in the box. An offer is the complete package of value that makes the customer feel like they are ripping you off.

To build an irresistible offer, you need to add something that has high perceived value to the customer but low actual cost to you.

Let’s look at some examples of how to turn a boring product into a killer offer:

1. The Tennis Shop

The Product: A $200 Babolat racket.
The Competitor: Sells it for $200.
The Offer: You sell the racket for $200, but you include a "Pro-Ready Prep Package." This includes a premium grip (Cost to you: $2) and free custom stringing if they buy the strings (Cost to you: 15 minutes of labor).
The Result: The customer isn't buying a racket; they are buying readiness. They save time and hassle. You win.

2. The Golf Retailer

The Product: A new set of irons.
The Competitor: Sells them for $999.
The Offer: You sell them for $999, but you throw in a "Virtual Range Session" guide (a PDF or video series you made once) or a voucher for a free 30-minute hitting session at a partner indoor range.
The Result: You aren't selling clubs; you're selling a better golf game.

3. Women’s Fashion

The Product: A summer dress.
The Competitor: Sells a similar dress.
The Offer: You include a "Self-Care Sunday" kit—a branded facial mask and a sleep scrunchie.
The Cost to You: Maybe $1.50 at wholesale.
The Value to Her: "Oh, this isn't just a dress. This is a treat."

If You Have It, Flaunt It

Here is where most Directors of E-commerce fumble the ball. They create a decent offer, and then they hide it in the bullet points below the fold.

Do not be subtle.

If you are giving something away, scream it from the rooftops.

Put it in the Hero Image: The main photo on your PDP shouldn't just be the product; it should be the product plus the free gift, with a badge that says FREE.
Jam it in the Buy Box: Right next to that price, list the bonuses.
Use the Magic Word: "Free." It triggers a dopamine hit that "Complimentary" or "Included" just can’t touch.

"But I Can’t Afford Free Stuff!" (The 'Broke' Excuse)

Okay, fine. Maybe your margins are razor-thin. or maybe your warehouse manager threatens to quit every time you try to add a new SKU to the pick-and-pack list.

I get it. (Actually, I think you're making excuses, but let's play your game for a minute).

If you absolutely cannot add new value to the box, you have to uncover the value that is already there.

Your perception is your reality, but your customer’s perception is the only one that pays the bills. So, if you can’t add more, you need to "Explode the Offer."

Most brands are lazy. They list a "12-Piece Golf Set" as a single bullet point. That is one line item. One line item feels small. One line item feels expensive.

Stop making people guess what is in the box.

Break it down. List. Every. Single. Item.

Don't say "12 Clubs."
List the Driver. The 3-Wood. The Hybrid. The Putter. The Sand Wedge.

Suddenly, that one bullet point becomes twelve lines of value.

And don't stop at the hardware.

Does it come with a piece of paper telling them how to use it? That’s not "Instructions." That is a "Quick-Start Success Guide."
Does it come with batteries? That’s "Ready-to-Use Power Included."

Take what you already have and expand it until it takes up serious visual real estate on the page. Make the list look long. Make the offer look "heavy."

If you can't give them more, make sure they know exactly how much they are already getting.

The Bottom Line

If you are staring at your dashboard trying to figure out how to increase revenue per visitor and nothing is working, stop looking at your code. Stop looking at your navigation bar. Our Offer Creation program is built specifically for this.

Start looking at your value proposition.

It is rarely friction that kills a sale; it is apathy. It is the feeling that "I can get this later, or somewhere else."

Your job is to make the value so overwhelming that they feel stupid saying no.

So, here is my challenge to you: Go look at your top-selling PDP. Ask yourself, "If I were a stranger, would I feel like this is a steal?"

If the answer is no, we need to talk.

Ready to grow RPV by prioritizing the right experiments Reach out.

How E-commerce Directors Should Actually Be Using AI Right Now

2026-02-26T00:00:00Z

If you spend more than five minutes on LinkedIn right now, you’re being bombarded by tech bros and AI evangelists telling you that you need to become a full-stack developer overnight. They want you spinning up Claude Code, deploying custom apps, and fully automating your e-commerce operations.

Let me just say That is a terrible idea.

If you are an E-commerce Director at a company doing $3M to $100M, you should not be building custom software that your team will have to maintain forever. Code rots. APIs change. You are not a CTO managing technical debt; your job is to drive revenue.

But, pretending AI doesn't exist is a fast track to irrelevance. At our digital product growth agency, we use AI relentlessly to run better on-site experiments and make our clients money.

So, I wanted to write a vulnerable, "working document" of where I actually think e-commerce leaders should be deploying AI right now to get shit done.

1. Creative for the "Andromeda" Era of Meta

As we all know, targeting is dead. Creative is the new bidding. But unless you’re sitting on a massive enterprise budget, none of us have the creative teams required to keep up with the velocity Meta demands.

There are a ton of tools emerging to help close this gap. Google just launched Pomelli (currently in Labs), and it's built for exactly this. You feed it your brand DNA and your current product photos, and it spits out a barrage of creative ready to be tested on Meta.

This area is evolving fast, but here are a few other tools to add to your arsenal:

Photoroom: Absolute magic for bulk-removing backgrounds and placing your SKUs into high-end, AI-generated lifestyle scenes.
Pencil (by Brandtech): Generates predictive ad creatives based on what actually works for your specific sector.
Midjourney: Still the undisputed king for raw, high-fidelity lifestyle image generation if you learn how to prompt it right.

2. Advanced Data Analysis (The "Python" Trick)

GA4 is fine for the basics; knowing how people find you or what pages they visit. You should definitely be using the AI tools built into GA4 to quickly confirm hypotheses (if your tracking is actually set up right, which is a whole other rant).

But what happens when you export data from your CRM or ERP and it’s a million lines deep?

Trying to paste massive datasets into ChatGPT and watching it crash, or trying to do complex row-by-row calculations in Excel until your computer catches fire.

Don’t use AI to do the analysis. Ask AI to write a Python script to do the analysis for you.

Here is a concrete example from my own desk: I had a file with a million order rows (with addresses) and another file with 80 physical store locations. We needed to geocode the orders, calculate the distance between every single order and the closest store, and map it on a graph.

I dropped those files into Cursor (Claude Code works too) and asked it to build the script. After a little back-and-forth clarification, I had the Python code in 20 minutes. Funny enough, the script took longer to run (2-3 hours) than it took me to "write" the code.

Before you panic and say, "I don't know Python, I could never do that," listen to me: Let the AI guide you. It will feel intimidating the first time you open a terminal. But once you see that graph pop out, it is incredibly addicting.

3. Creating "Version Zero" for Your Devs & Designers

One of the hardest bottlenecks in development is simply explaining to developers or designers the exact change you want to make. We've all been in that meeting where you draw a wireframe on a napkin, say "make it look like this," and pray they understand.

Stop explaining. Start showing. Depending on the size of the change, here is your toolkit:

For Quick Visual Tweaks: Use Chrome DevTools AI. Right-click the element you want to change, hit "Inspect," and open the AI Assistant. It will look like terrifying HTML, but you just literally tell the AI what you want changed. It will rewrite the page locally just for you. You can even copy the new CSS/HTML to give your devs. It doesn't need to be pixel-perfect; it just needs to say, "Hey, this is exactly what I mean."
For Advanced Features: Use Cursor. Tell it you want to make changes to a specific page. It will download the necessary HTML/CSS and you can describe the exact interactive changes you want to test. It takes a bit longer, but it's perfect for complex UI shifts.
For Brand New Pages: Use v0 (by Vercel). If you are building a landing page from scratch to test a new offer, you can prompt v0 to build a pixel-perfect, fully coded UI in seconds. They look incredible and can serve as the ultimate "Version Zero" wireframe.

These are just a few ways I'm using AI every day to cut through the noise, skip the endless meetings, and actually launch experiments that drive revenue. If you're wondering how to structure the experiments themselves, our Data-Driven Experimentation program is where the rubber meets the road. (If you want to read more of our rants on digital product growth, check out our all our insights.).

What did I miss? What else should E-com Directors be doing in the trenches?

If I got something wrong, send me a message on LinkedIn.

The Four Things Standing Between Your Traffic and Your Revenue.

2026-03-05T00:00:00Z

The same four conversion killers show up on almost every e-commerce site we work on. Here's what they are. Here is what we do about them.

I talk to e-commerce directors all the time, and honestly? The conversation almost always goes the same way. They're doing a ton of things right: great ads, solid product, real investment in traffic. But the revenue per visitor just isn't where it should be, and they can't quite figure out why.

After years of doing CRO for e-commerce brands, we've seen the same four culprits come up over and over again. They're not glamorous problems. But fixing them moves the needle. Here's what they are. Here is how we tackle each one.

Problem #1: Your Ads Are Bangers. Your Landing Page Has No Idea.

Your team is crushing it on Meta. Hundreds of creatives, each one hitting a different pain point, speaking to a different type of person. Someone sees an ad about durability, they click. Someone else responds to the "perfect gift" angle, they click too. The ads are working.

Then both of those people land on the exact same product page. Same headline. Same image. Same everything. The emotional connection your ad just built? Snapped. Whatever resonated enough to earn that click just got ignored the moment they arrived.

This happens on basically every e-commerce site we've ever audited. It's one of the most expensive disconnects in digital retail, and it's almost completely invisible until you go looking for it.

Our Solution: Ad-to-Page Dynamic Content Matching

We pull the creative ID from each Meta ad, download the actual creative, and analyze what message it's leading with. Then we automatically suggest edits to key slots on your product page: the sub-headline, the hero image, the value props, so the page reflects the ad that brought the visitor there. No new landing pages to build and manage. Just smarter, more connected experiences.

We've seen a 15% lift in ROAS from this. And you stay in full control of every version. Nothing goes live without your sign-off.

Problem #2: There's No Real Reason to Buy From You Over the Next Guy

Let's say someone finds a product they want. They're comparing you to another brand selling something almost identical at basically the same price. What tips them your way?

That's your offer, and most brands don't really have one. They have a product and a price. The offer is what makes the perceived value feel bigger than the price tag, and bigger than what the competitor is offering. Most brands reach for a discount when they need this. (We've written a full breakdown of how to build an actual offer — not a discount, but a reason to choose you.) And yeah, it works in the short term. But you can't discount your way to a healthy brand. Eventually it just trains your customers to wait for the sale.

Our Solution: Strategic Offer Development

We dig into what your customers actually value, the stuff that feels premium to them but doesn't cost you much to deliver. That could be a bundle, a guarantee, a how-to guide, a community, early access. It looks different for every brand. We find what clicks for your audience, build it out, and test it. The goal is a genuine reason to choose you that has nothing to do with being the cheapest.

Problem #3: Shoppers Are Landing on One Product and Have No Idea What Else You've Got

Over 60% of e-commerce traffic lands directly on a product page, not your homepage, not a category page. These are people coming from Meta ads or Google Shopping who've already done some homework. They're not browsing. They're evaluating.

Here's the thing though. The product they landed on might not even be the right one for them. Maybe they clicked on product A, but product B is actually a better fit for their situation. But if your product page doesn't guide them anywhere, they just bounce. They never find the thing that would have made them buy.

Our Solution: Intelligent On-Page Product Discovery

We design experiences that surface the right products at the right moment, so people stay on site and find what actually works for them. Not a "customers also viewed" widget slapped at the bottom. Real, contextual product guidance built into the page flow. Less bouncing, more converting, and an average order value that actually reflects your catalog.

Problem #4: Your Site Doesn't Know Anything About the Person Shopping on It

People want to feel like a brand gets them. But most e-commerce sites show the exact same experience to a 22-year-old beginner and a 45-year-old expert who's done this a hundred times. Same page, same messaging, same recommendations.

The tricky part is that you can't figure out who someone is just by watching them browse. Clickstream data tells you what they looked at. It doesn't tell you why, or who they are, or what they actually need. To personalize well, you have to learn more. And the only real way to learn more is to ask.

Our Solution: Zero-Party Data & Personalization

The industry calls it zero-party data, meaning info a customer gives you directly, usually in exchange for something useful like a recommendation or a discount. We build quick, low-friction quiz flows right into your site. A few questions, maybe 30 seconds. Then we use those answers to personalize the on-site experience, and more importantly, to power your email and SMS in a way that actually feels relevant. The difference between "here's our weekly email" and "here's something specifically for you" is huge.

Four Problems. Four Products. One Goal: More Revenue From the Traffic You Already Have.

None of these problems are about needing more traffic. They're about what happens once traffic arrives. Most brands pour money into acquisition and leave a ton of conversion on the table because the on-site experience isn't doing its job.

We've built four products, each one targeting one of these four levers. We use experimentation to test and validate everything, so you're not just changing things and hoping. You're learning what works and doubling down on it.

**If any of these feel familiar, let's get into it. You've already got the traffic. Let's make it work harder. **Find me on LinkedIn and we can solve these problems.

The Top 7 Ways to Use Personalization on Your Site, Right Now

2026-03-12T00:00:00Z

This Week on Checkin to Checkout

This week on Checkin to Checkout, Doug Villella from APG breaks down what it actually looks like to build an e-commerce operation from scratch inside a company that sells O rings — and why talking to customers every week is the only strategy that matters.

🎧 Listen to the full episode

A note from me: We've been quietly rebuilding Mobile1st.com behind the scenes, with the goal of better expressing what we do. I'd love for you to check it out and tell me what you think. And over the next few weeks you'll start to notice some small changes to how this newsletter is structured. Same content, better delivery.

Here's the uncomfortable truth most agencies won't tell you:

Your Shopify template is fine.

Friction isn't actually the problem. You've already fixed that. The buttons are big. The checkout is fast. The mobile experience is clean enough.

So why is revenue per visitor still flat?

Because we left the era of demand capture. Every tweak you made to reduce friction was demand capture logic. Assume the customer wants to buy, remove the obstacles, collect the money.

That era is over.

We're now in the era of demand generation. And that requires something completely different. It requires making someone feel something about your brand before they've decided to buy.

That's emotional connection. And you build it through storytelling and through personalization. We wrote about the four conversion killers most brands ignore — this shift from demand capture to demand generation is at the root of all four.

Talking to your customer based on what they've told you about themselves, or what they've responded to in the past, is the highest-leverage move left in e-commerce. It's the difference between a catalog and a conversation.

Before we get into the tactics, there's something we need to address. None of this works without the foundation underneath it.

The Prerequisite: Your Data Has to Be Clean

Personalization is only as good as the data powering it.

Most brands skip this conversation entirely. They hear "personalization" and immediately start thinking about tools and tactics. Then they implement something, it underperforms, and they blame the tactic. The real problem was upstream the whole time.

Here's what you actually need before any of this is worth building:

UTM hygiene. If your ad campaigns aren't properly tagged, you can't match landing pages to ad creative. You can't attribute traffic to the right source. You're flying blind and calling it personalization.

A consistent customer identity layer. Shopify gives you a customer ID. But are you connecting it to your email platform? Your ad platform? Your on-site behavior data? If those systems don't talk to each other, you have islands of data instead of a picture of a person.

Klaviyo (or equivalent) as your single source of truth. The affinity data, quiz answers, browsing behavior, purchase history. It's only useful if it lives somewhere central and feeds back into every touchpoint. For most Shopify brands, that's Klaviyo. Not because it's the only option, but because it sits at the intersection of on-site data, email, and SMS in a way that actually works.

You don't need a full CDP to get started. But you do need clean UTMs, a connected email platform, and some agreement about where customer data lives. Without that, the tactics below are mostly theoretical.

Get the foundation right. Then build on it.

1. Treat New Visitors and Returning Visitors Completely Differently

This is the most underused personalization lever in e-commerce. It requires almost no data infrastructure. And almost nobody is doing it.

A first-time visitor and a returning visitor have completely different jobs to be done.

The first-time visitor is asking: Can I trust this brand? Is this product actually for me? Why should I buy this instead of something else? They need education. They need social proof. They need the brand story up front.

The returning visitor is asking: Where was I? Did anything change? Give me a reason to finish. They don't need the origin story again. They need to pick up where they left off.

When you serve both visitors the exact same homepage, you're failing both of them. The returning visitor is bored by the intro. The new visitor is overwhelmed by the assumption that they already care.

The fix is straightforward. Detect the visit number and adjust the experience accordingly. For new visitors, lead with trust signals, brand story, and orientation. For returning visitors, surface recently viewed products, pick-up-where-you-left-off messaging, and anything new since their last visit.

It's not complicated. It's just not the default. And that gap is your opportunity.

2. Match the Landing Page to the Ad They Clicked

You probably have 400 social ads running right now.

5 personas. 10 emotional angles. 15 different messages about why someone should care about your product.

And every single one of those ads sends the customer to... the same homepage. The same generic PDP. The same collection page that knows nothing about why they clicked.

The ad said: "Finally, a solution for X." The landing page says: "Welcome. Here are our products."

That's a broken handoff. And it's costing you conversions every single day.

The fix is simple in theory. You match the landing page experience to the ad. If the ad spoke to a specific desire, the landing page leads with that desire. If it featured a specific product angle, the page opens with that angle.

We have a software-assisted solution that does this at scale, even when you're running hundreds of ad variants. Every landing page experience matches the ad that drove the click. The handoff becomes seamless. The story continues.

It works. And it's more fun to build than you'd think.

3. Give Google Shopping Visitors More Than Just the One Product

Someone clicks your Google Shopping ad. They land on the PDP.

Cool. But here's the problem: that might not be the exact product they actually want. It might be close. It might be in the right category. But now they have to go back to Google Shopping, scroll around, hope your other ad shows up, and maybe click through again.

You just paid for that click. And you're sending them back to Google to try again.

The better play? Show them the product they clicked on AND a curated set of similar products right there on the page. Let them find the right fit without leaving your site.

Wayfair does this. Yeti does this. 1-800-Flowers does this.

They turn a single ad click into a discovery experience. The customer doesn't need to go back to Google because everything they need is already in front of them.

This is solvable. If you're sending Shopping traffic to a vanilla PDP and nothing else, you're leaving money on the table every hour of every day.

4. Change the Site Based on What the User Has Shown You

Every time someone visits a product page, applies a filter, or makes a purchase, they're telling you something.

After 2 or 3 visits, you can start to see patterns. They keep looking at a specific brand. They always filter by a specific category. They haven't bought yet, but they're clearly interested in a particular corner of your catalog.

That's affinity data. And most brands just... ignore it.

The smarter play: use it.

Sort category and search results based on the brands and categories they've shown interest in. Add a "Popular in [Category]" section to the homepage that dynamically reflects their affinities, not the site's overall bestsellers. When they come back after a few days, show them recently viewed products right on the homepage instead of making them go find what they were looking at.

This is especially powerful if you have a large catalog. A customer who comes back to your 10,000-SKU site shouldn't have to start from scratch every time. The site should already know where to start the conversation.

You've already collected the data. Now use it.

5. Just Ask Them What They're Looking For

People want help finding the right product. Most brands just never ask.

Buff City Soap is the best example I've seen of this done right. They have a quiz that isn't a sidebar widget or a popup. It's genuinely part of the experience. It asks a few questions. It learns what you like, what you're trying to solve for, what your preferences are.

And then every interaction going forward is shaped by those answers. The product recommendations. The emails. The next time you visit the site.

It's like walking into a specialty shop and having the owner ask you four questions before pointing you toward anything. That's a white glove experience. And it makes the sale feel obvious instead of effortful.

If you have a catalog with any real complexity, multiple use cases, multiple customer types, multiple problems you solve, a quiz is one of the highest-ROI things you can build. Not because it reduces friction. Because it builds connection.

6. Let Email and SMS Finish What Your Site Started

This one gets left out of almost every personalization conversation because it lives "off-site." That's exactly why it's a blind spot.

Everything on-site, the quiz answers, the affinity signals, the browsing behavior, the recently viewed products, has a second life in your email and SMS flows. But only if you've connected the systems.

Think about what's possible when you do:

A customer takes the quiz and doesn't buy. Your email flow picks up exactly where they left off, leading with the product the quiz recommended, not a generic welcome sequence. A customer browses a specific category three times but never adds to cart. Your SMS fires at the right moment with the right product, not a 15% off coupon that trains them to wait for discounts.

The on-site experience plants the seed. Email and SMS water it.

Most brands treat these as separate programs. The ones winning right now treat them as one connected system. The quiz answer that lives in Klaviyo should shape every email that customer ever receives. The affinity data from their browsing should inform which SMS campaigns they're enrolled in.

On-site personalization without the off-site follow-through is a leaky bucket. You're doing the hard work of learning about the customer and then forgetting everything the moment they leave.

Don't let the data go to waste.

7. Use AI, But Not an Open Chatbot

Yes, AI. Obviously.

But not the way most brands are implementing it.

An open chatbot sitting in the corner of your site is not personalization. It's a support ticket waiting to happen. Nobody wants to type a question into a box and wait for a response.

What actually works is a guided tool. Something that proactively helps customers figure out if a product is right for them. Not a general-purpose assistant. A purpose-built experience that walks someone through the right questions and surfaces the right product for their specific situation.

Done right, this increases conversion rate. Not because it removes friction. Because it builds confidence. The customer leaves the interaction knowing they made the right choice, which means they're far less likely to return it and far more likely to come back.

The tool does the work of a great salesperson. And unlike a great salesperson, it scales.

The Through-Line

Notice what none of these have in common with the old playbook.

None of them are about removing friction. None of them are about faster load times or cleaner checkouts or bigger "Add to Cart" buttons.

They're all about creating demand. About making a shopper feel seen, understood, and guided before they've decided to buy.

That's the era we're in now.

The brands that figure this out first are going to pull away. The brands still optimizing button placement are going to wonder why their revenue per visitor keeps flatlining.

Personalization isn't a feature. It's the strategy.

The Friction Playbook Is Broken. Here's What Replaced It.

2026-03-19T00:00:00Z

For a solid decade, e-commerce had one job: remove friction.

Shave 0.2 seconds off the load time. Move the Add to Cart button above the fold. Kill one more step in the checkout flow. The whole industry operated on one assumption. Demand already exists. Your only job is to not screw it up.

And honestly? It worked. For a while.

The Demand Capture Era Was Real

Here's what was actually happening during the golden years of e-commerce growth.

Distribution was the unsolved problem. For the entire history of commerce (we're talking the Silk Road, the British East India Trading Company, Walmart opening its 4,000th store) the game was always getting the product in front of the person who wanted it. Then Amazon came along and solved distribution for almost everyone. Suddenly any brand could reach any customer, anywhere, within a day.

That created a stretch of growth that felt like genius but was mostly timing. You put a dollar into Google Shopping, you got three dollars back. You listed your product on Amazon and sales showed up because people were already searching for what you sold. You optimized your site by removing friction because the demand was already walking through the door.

The entire optimization industry, my industry, was built on this reality. Reduce friction. Capture more of the demand that already exists. Revenue goes up. Everyone's happy.

But here's what nobody wanted to say out loud: we weren't growing demand. We were just getting better at catching it.

Then the Music Stopped

At some point (and you probably felt it before you could name it) the demand capture playbook stopped delivering.

You're still running the same A/B tests. Still shaving milliseconds. Still moving buttons around. But RPV is flat. Conversion rate won't budge. The friction is already gone, and the results aren't improving.

That's because the problem changed underneath you.

The more friction you remove, the less each removal moves the needle.

Distribution is solved. Amazon, Shopify, social commerce. A customer can buy almost anything from almost anywhere in almost no time. The brands that grew by riding that wave have now hit the ceiling. Every competitor has the same access to the same customer through the same channels.

When everyone has distribution, distribution stops being the advantage.

And when the demand that's out there has already been captured (by you, by your competitors, by whoever got there first) removing more friction doesn't create more customers. It just polishes an empty room.

We're in the Demand Generation Phase Now

The brands that are actually growing right now? Not reshuffling sales between channels. Actually growing. They've figured out something the rest of the market is still catching up to.

They're not optimizing for capture anymore. They're building demand that didn't exist before.

And it looks nothing like the old playbook.

I was talking to Dan Pierce, CEO at Sovereign Naturals, on a recent episode of Checkin to Checkout. He put it simply: "You can buy transactions, but you can't buy transactions where there isn't demand."

His team owns 70% of their category on Amazon. They've captured about as much demand as exists. So what does his team spend their time on now? Not bid adjustments. Not checkout optimization.

They brought a videographer on staff to document a product development process that's taken 14 years and counting. They're interviewing the doctors who recommend their products, not to pitch the product, but to tell the doctor's story and make their world bigger. They found out their team had been washing medical-grade bottles as an extra purification step for years, and instead of burying that detail, they turned it into content. Because that kind of specificity is what builds trust at scale.

Their content split is flipping. Less "here's 20% off." More "here's what it actually takes to make this product and why we're obsessive about it." More employee stories. More behind-the-scenes. More celebrating the people who use the product and letting them tell their own story.

Dan told me he obsesses over search volume now. That wasn't even on his radar five years ago. But if more people aren't looking for you, you're not growing. You're just fighting over the same pool.

That's what the demand generation era looks like in practice. It's not one channel. It's not one tactic. It's a team that wakes up every day asking "are more people looking for us than yesterday?" instead of "how do we convert more of the people who already showed up?"

The measurement changes too. You stop living and dying by ROAS on every campaign and start tracking brand momentum. Search volume trends. Social engagement that isn't tied to a promo code. You start investing in things that won't convert this week but build the audience that converts next quarter. And that's a hard conversation to have with a CFO who wants to see a return in 30 days. But it's the only conversation that matters right now.

Not because it's trendy. Because the math requires it.

Why This Matters for Your Site

Here's where this hits home if you're running e-commerce.

If you're still operating like demand capture is the game... if your optimization roadmap is still about reducing friction, removing steps, making the checkout 0.3 seconds faster... you're solving the wrong problem.

Your customers aren't leaving because they can't find the Add to Cart button. They're leaving because they don't have a reason to stay.

The site experience now has to do something it never had to do during the capture era. It has to make someone feel something. Build confidence. Tell a story that makes the price feel irrelevant.

That's a completely different optimization problem. It's not "how do we reduce friction?" It's "how do we increase the value someone perceives before they hit the buy button?"

And the teams that get it? The ones who stop kicking the vending machine and start asking why nobody wants what's inside it? Those are the ones who are going to win the next five years.

The Question Worth Asking

So before you run the next A/B test, before you rearrange the PDP one more time, before you try to squeeze another 0.1% out of checkout... ask yourself:

Am I solving for demand capture or demand generation?

Because if the demand isn't there, no amount of friction reduction is going to save you.

Directors of E-Commerce Don't Get Fired for Missing Revenue. They Get Fired for Not Managing Up.

2026-03-26T12:00:00Z

On this week's Checkin to Checkout, Lauren Goodwin joins Justin to dig into the question every e-commerce brand needs to answer before any tactic makes sense: why you, why now? If you're building the case internally for where to invest next, it's worth a listen before you keep reading.

Someone I know hit 94% of their revenue target last year. The business was genuinely growing. The team was executing. The roadmap was smart.

They were gone in 18 months.

Not because the strategy was wrong. Because the CMO didn't feel informed. Because the CFO got surprised by a Q3 dip they should have seen coming. Because the CEO walked into a board meeting and didn't have the story.

Nobody fired them for bad performance. They fired them for making leadership feel out of control.

This happens constantly in e-commerce. And the people it happens to are almost never the ones doing a bad job. They're the ones so buried in doing the actual work that they forget to tell anyone about it.

Most directors learn this lesson after it costs them something. Here's how to learn it before it does.

Your actual job is making your boss look smart in front of their boss

Most Directors of E-Commerce think managing up means "don't surprise people." That's the floor. Not the ceiling.

The real job is giving leadership a story they can retell.

Your CMO needs to walk into a board meeting and sound like they understand what's happening in e-commerce. Your CFO needs a number they can point to when someone asks about ROI. Your CEO needs to feel like someone on the team has a plan and it's working.

If you're not providing those things proactively, someone else is filling the narrative vacuum. And their version of the story usually ends with your budget getting cut or your role getting "restructured."

Directors of E-Commerce already have two full-time jobs. The first is the one you were hired for: grow revenue. The second is the one you actually do every day: getting people who don't report to you to do work they don't care about, on your timeline, so you don't miss your number.

There's a third job nobody mentions. Keeping the people above you feeling confident about you. Not impressed. Not wowed. Just confident. That's the bar. And most directors never clear it because they're too busy doing the first two.

Six things that keep Directors of E-Commerce employed

1. The Friday 3-bullet Slack

A director I know has been in her role for four years. Two VPs have come and gone above her. She's outlasted both of them.

Her secret is boring. Every Friday afternoon she sends her CMO a Slack message. Three bullets. What's working. What's not. What's next.

Nobody asked her to do this. That's the point.

It takes her ten minutes. It gives her CMO everything they need to walk into any meeting and sound informed. It means her boss is never caught off guard. And when a VP above her gets replaced, the new person inherits a trail of receipts showing she's been delivering consistently for years.

Three bullets. Every Friday. That's it.

2. The "What If" model

Every director has been in this meeting. You're reviewing the quarterly scorecard. Revenue is up 30%. Traffic is up 40%. Looks like a massive win.

Then someone points at the Revenue Per Visitor column. It's down.

Right on schedule: "So did all those experiments you ran actually do anything? Or did we just burn cash?"

If you don't have an answer ready for that question, you lose. Not because the question is fair. Because the perception of failure is now in the room and you didn't control it.

Build a simple model that shows what RPV would have been without your experiments. Here's the logic: when you scale traffic aggressively, especially cold paid social traffic, RPV doesn't stay flat. It dips. That's not a failure. It's math. New visitors don't spend like returning customers.

Your "What If" model shows the gap. This year we ran 12 winning experiments. Combined, they lifted baseline RPV by 23%. Without those tests, with this much cold traffic, we wouldn't just be "down." We'd be underwater. And we would have missed the revenue target by 20%.

That's not a defense. That's a proof point. Have it ready before anyone asks.

3. Pre-announce the dip

If Q3 is going to miss, tell them in July. Not August. Not in the post-mortem.

A CFO who gets surprised is a CFO who fires you. A CFO you warned in advance is a CFO who defends you.

The framing matters: "Here's what's happening. Here's why. Here's the plan to recover." That's three sentences. You can deliver them in a hallway conversation or a one-paragraph email. The medium doesn't matter. The timing does.

Every director I've seen get fired for a bad quarter actually saw the bad quarter coming. They just hoped it would fix itself. It almost never does.

4. Own the channels you don't control

A director I was working with missed his Q1 goals last year. We did the whole forensic review. Paid channels were fine. RPV was decent. Site was performing.

Then I asked about email. He said, "Oh, I don't own email. That's Marketing."

Turns out they were sending one email a month. One. And he thought he could still hit his number by optimizing what he did own.

His CFO didn't care that email wasn't technically his department. 30% of revenue didn't show up. That was his problem.

If a channel affects your number, you need a relationship with whoever runs it. A weekly check-in. A shared dashboard. Something. You don't need to own the team. You need to own the conversation.

The best directors I know are internal lobbyists. They're in every room where their revenue is being discussed, whether they were invited or not.

5. Keep a win inventory

Start a running document. A shared Google Doc, a Slack canvas, a Notion page. Every time something meaningful happens, log it. The date, the result, the metric, and one sentence on why it matters.

It doesn't need to be polished. It just needs to exist.

When performance review season arrives, you don't scramble to reconstruct the narrative from memory. You pull up the inventory. When a new VP walks in and asks "what has this team actually accomplished?" you don't freeze. You send them a link.

The directors who survive long enough to get promoted are the ones who can prove what they've done without having to think about it. The win inventory is how you build that proof in real time instead of trying to recreate it under pressure.

6. The first 90 days with a new boss

Most of the advice in this post assumes a stable relationship with leadership. But the highest-risk window for any director is when a new boss arrives.

A new CMO, a new CEO, a new VP above you. They don't know you. They don't know what you've built. They're forming an opinion of you in the first three weeks whether you realize it or not.

The director I mentioned earlier who outlasted two VPs didn't just survive because of her Friday Slack. She survived because every time a new VP started, she did the same thing: she interviewed them.

Not formally. Just a conversation in the first week. "How do you like to receive updates? What level of detail do you want? What's the one thing that would make you feel like e-commerce is in good hands?"

Then she over-communicated for the first 60 days. More updates than she'd normally send. More context. More proactive flags. Not because the new VP needed it, but because she was establishing her rhythm before they established their expectations.

By the time they settled in, she was already the person they trusted. The person who made them feel informed. The person who never let them get blindsided.

If you wait for the new boss to tell you what they want, you've already lost the first 90 days. You set the tone. You define the relationship. You teach them how to work with you before they figure it out on their own.

Three ways directors accidentally get themselves fired

The dashboard dump.

You send a 40-slide deck full of metrics nobody asked for. You think thoroughness earns trust. It doesn't. Leadership's eyes glaze over. They walk away feeling less confident, not more. I once watched a CEO start writing an email while the director was mid-slide. Nobody told the director because nobody wanted to hurt their feelings. He was gone six months later.

The lone wolf.

You execute brilliantly in your silo. Numbers are up. Tests are winning. The site is humming. And nobody upstairs knows. You think the work speaks for itself. It doesn't. Work doesn't have a publicist. If leadership doesn't hear about it from you, they assume it's not happening. This is exactly what the win inventory solves. You can't publicize what you haven't logged.

The surprise miss.

You knew in June that Q3 was going to be rough. But you hoped the back-to-school push would cover it. It didn't. Now you're explaining a miss in October that leadership is hearing about for the first time. A miss they can plan for is a business reality. A miss they didn't see coming is a firing offense.

The directors who survive aren't always the most brilliant. They're the ones who never let leadership feel blindsided.

The person who got fired at 94% didn't lack skill. They lacked a communication system.

The director who's been in her seat for four years while two VPs came and went above her doesn't have a secret. She has a Friday Slack message, a win inventory, and the discipline to interview every new boss in week one.

Managing up isn't politics. It's the infrastructure that lets you keep doing the work you're actually good at.

Send the updates. Pre-announce the bad news. Own the channels that affect your number. Log your wins. Set the tone with every new boss before they set it for you.

Do those six things and you get to keep doing the part of the job you actually like.

Justin Aronstein is the Chief Product Officer at Mobile1st, where his team helps e-commerce brands increase revenue per visitor through experimentation and customer insight. If you're a Director of E-Commerce who wants a partner that helps you build the story, not just run the experiments, reach out at mobile1st.com.

Your Ads Made a Promise. Your Landing Page Broke It.

2026-04-02T00:00:00Z

This week on Checkin to Checkout: Josh Johnston, Senior Director of Online Experience at Trail Appliances, talks about surviving replatforms, weaponizing customer data in executive forums, and building an AI chat widget that drove a 4x conversion lift.

You've done the work.

Your Meta ads account is a thing of beauty. You've got 47 creatives running across six audiences. You've tested hooks about protein content, hooks about taste, hooks about convenience for busy parents. You've got UGC, polished studio shots, and that one weird iPhone video your founder shot at 6am that somehow outperforms everything.

Every week, your media team is in there cooking. New angles. New formats. New offers. New objection-busting copy. They're testing carousel vs. single image. Short-form vs. long-form. Pain point leads vs. aspiration leads.

They're doing it because they know the game has changed. Creative is the new targeting. And they're right.

But here's the part nobody talks about.

All of that beautiful, segmented, persona-matched creative is driving traffic to the exact same landing page.

The same static page. With the same headline. The same hero image. The same value props in the same order. No matter which ad someone clicked. No matter what promise convinced them to tap through.

Your ads are having 47 different conversations with 47 different people. Your landing page is having one conversation with everyone.

And it's the wrong one for most of them.

The Protein Oatmeal Problem

Let me give you a real example because I've seen this exact scenario play out with enough clients that it haunts me.

A brand sells oatmeal. Good oatmeal. They've got a strong Meta ads operation. One of their top-performing creatives leads with the protein angle. "28g of protein in every bowl." The ad shows a gym bag, a shaker bottle, and a bowl of oatmeal. The copy talks about how hard it is to hit your protein goals and how this is the easiest breakfast swap you'll ever make.

Someone who cares about protein sees that ad. They click.

They land on a page that says: "The Best Tasting Oatmeal You've Ever Had."

The hero image is a family at a breakfast table, smiling. The first three value props are about flavor variety, kid-friendly options, and a money-back taste guarantee.

Protein? Mentioned once. Below the fold. In the fourth bullet point of a section most people never scroll to.

That customer came looking for a protein solution. They landed on a taste pitch.

Some of them will convert anyway. The product is good. The price is fair. But a meaningful percentage of those protein-motivated visitors just bounced. Not because the product was wrong. Because the page didn't finish the conversation the ad started.

Now multiply that by every creative you're running.

The ad about convenience for busy parents lands on the same page as the ad about clean ingredients. The ad about the subscription discount lands on the same page as the ad about the founder's story. Every single ad, with its carefully crafted hook and its specific persona target, lands on a page that ignores all of that context.

It's like running a personalized email campaign where every link goes to your homepage.

If this sounds like your ad account right now, we built something that fixes it automatically. Keep reading and I'll show you the data.

Your Site Doesn't Know What Ad They Clicked

This is the core of the problem, and it's so obvious that most teams just… accept it.

Your media team spends hours every week building creative that speaks to specific people about specific things. They vary by persona, hook type, format, offer, persuasion angle, and objection. They know exactly who they're talking to in each ad.

Your site knows none of this.

When a visitor lands on your page, your site has zero context about where they came from or what convinced them to click. It treats the protein-obsessed CrossFit guy exactly the same as the taste-focused mom looking for something her picky toddler will eat.

And look, your site is good. You've optimized it. You've thought about the big problems customers are trying to solve. You've got solid product photography, clear pricing, and a checkout flow that doesn't make people want to throw their phone.

But it's static. It's a fixed experience that tries to be everything to everyone, which means it's not quite right for anyone.

The ad did the hard work of finding the right person and saying the right thing. Then the landing page undoes half of it by changing the subject.

What Happens When the Ad Matches the Page

We started noticing this pattern a few years ago. Client after client, the same disconnect. Incredible ad programs feeding traffic into landing experiences that had no relationship to the creative that drove the click.

So we tested it.

We took clients who were already running strong Meta creative and matched the landing page experience to the ad. When someone clicked an ad about protein, they landed on a page that led with protein. When someone clicked an ad about taste, the page led with taste. Same product. Same price. Same checkout. Just a different conversation based on what the visitor already told us they cared about.

The results were hard to argue with.

Revenue per visitor went up 20% or more for those matched experiences.

Not conversion rate. Revenue per visitor. The number that actually tells the truth about whether your site is working.

And it makes intuitive sense if you think about it. You already did the hardest part. You already found the right person and got them to click. All you have to do is not change the subject when they arrive.

That's a low bar. But almost nobody clears it.

We're giving newsletter subscribers a free month of Throughline to see this for themselves. Subscribe to The Director's Cut and we'll set you up.

Why Nobody Does This (Even Though Everyone Should)

If matching ads to landing pages is so obviously valuable, why aren't more teams doing it?

Because it's a nightmare to execute manually.

Think about what it would take. You'd need to catalog every active creative. Classify each one by persona, hook, funnel stage, and offer type. Then build or modify landing page variations for each classification. Then set up the routing logic so the right visitor sees the right page based on the right ad.

For a brand running 50+ creatives, that's an enormous amount of work. And it changes every week as your media team launches new creative and pauses underperformers.

Most e-commerce teams are already stretched thin. The Director of E-Commerce is already juggling platform migrations, email calendars, inventory headaches, and a CMO who wants to "protect the brand story." Nobody has time to build and maintain a manual ad-to-page matching system.

So teams just accept the mismatch. They optimize the landing page for the broadest possible audience and hope for the best.

It's not a strategy. It's resignation.

We Built Throughline Because We Got Tired of Watching This Happen

After seeing this same problem with client after client after client after client, we built a solution.

It's called Throughline.

Here's how it works.

We download all of your Meta ads. All of them. The images, the videos, the CTAs, the copy, the headlines. Everything that's live in your account.

Then we ingest all of that creative and classify each one across multiple dimensions. We calculate the persona it's targeting. We identify the funnel stage. We determine the hook type. We classify the persuasion angle, the objection being addressed, the offer structure, and several other dimensions that matter for landing page relevance.

Once every creative is classified, we can dynamically update the landing page to match the ad for anyone clicking through that specific creative.

Protein ad? Protein-led landing page. Taste ad? Taste-led landing page. Convenience-for-busy-parents ad? You get the idea.

Same product. Same checkout. Same brand. Just a landing experience that actually continues the conversation your ad started instead of starting a new one from scratch.

The visitor doesn't know anything changed. They just feel like the page "gets" them. Because it does. It knows exactly what brought them here, and it speaks to that.

The Math Is Simple

Your media team is already doing the hard work. They're testing hooks, iterating on creative, finding the angles that resonate with different audiences. That work is generating clicks.

But every click that lands on a mismatched page is a leak. You paid for that click. You earned that click. And then your static landing page fumbled the handoff.

When you match the landing experience to the ad creative, you're not adding a new channel or increasing spend. You're making every dollar you already spend work harder.

Our clients have seen 20%+ gains in revenue per visitor when they follow this process. That's not a rounding error. On a $10M revenue base, that's $2M you're leaving on the table because your landing page doesn't know what your ads are saying.

Want to See It for Yourself?

If you subscribe to our newsletter, The Director's Cut, we're giving away a free month of Throughline so you can see what matched landing experiences do for your numbers.

No pitch meeting. No demo you have to sit through. Just connect your Meta account, let us classify your creative, and watch what happens when your ads and your landing pages finally start speaking the same language.

Click here if you want in →

Because your media team is already doing the work. Your landing page just isn't listening.

Justin Aronstein is Chief Product Officer at Mobile1st, where he helps e-commerce brands grow revenue per visitor through experimentation and ad-to-page personalization. He also co-hosts Checkin to Checkout, a podcast for e-commerce operators who'd rather build than babysit dashboards.