Insights
What we see running DTC, eCommerce and marketplace businesses: the store, Amazon and Walmart, paid media, the P&L, and how brands end up in the answer when a buyer asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity.
Shopify Plus pays for itself when you need something only Plus offers, such as a fully customizable checkout, unlimited B2B catalogs, expansion stores for other markets or much higher API limits. It rarely pays on lower card fees alone, because the rate saving only covers the higher plan price at large online sales volumes. If no Plus-only feature is blocking a real project, stay on Advanced and put the money into the store.
ReadIn 1P (Vendor Central) you sell to Amazon at wholesale and Amazon sets the retail price. In 3P (Seller Central) you sell directly to shoppers, set your own price and pay Amazon fees. For most DTC brands, 3P is the better default because it keeps pricing, data and inventory in your hands. Choose 1P, or a hybrid, only when the contribution after every allowance and chargeback beats what you keep selling direct.
ReadA safe Shopify migration has seven parts: move and clean your data, map every old URL to its new one with redirects, replace your apps and integrations, move email and subscription programs without breaking them, check SEO before launch, launch in stages, and monitor closely for the first few weeks. Most lost traffic and revenue after a replatform comes from skipped redirects and untested checkout and email flows, not from the platform itself.
ReadROAS tells you how much revenue an ad platform credits to its own ads. It ignores product cost, shipping, discounts and returns, and platforms often claim the same order twice. A campaign can show a strong ROAS and still lose money on every order. Manage paid media to contribution margin after marketing, using blended numbers from your own store, and treat platform ROAS as a steering signal, not a profit measure.
ReadA low Shopify conversion rate usually has one or two specific causes, not twenty. The fastest way to find them is to split the rate by device and traffic source, then check in order: product pages, collection pages, shipping costs and checkout, site speed and apps, and finally the quality of the traffic itself. Fix the biggest leak first and measure before moving on.
ReadContribution margin is what an order leaves you after every cost that moves with that order: product cost, discounts, fulfillment, shipping, payment fees, returns and the marketing it took to win it. Gross margin stops after product cost, so it can make a SKU look healthy when it loses money. Calculate it per SKU and per channel, and use it to decide what to promote, price up or cut.
ReadMeasure AI search visibility by asking a fixed set of real buyer questions in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers every month, then recording how often your brand is named, how it is described, which competitors appear instead and which sources are cited. Pair that "share of answer" with AI referral traffic in Google Analytics. You can start by hand for free; paid trackers help once the question set grows.
ReadA full-time Head of eCommerce gives you a permanent owner with all their hours. A fractional Head of eCommerce gives you the same ownership and decision rights part time, for a fixed term, and can start sooner. An agency executes a defined scope but does not own the business result. Hire full time when the role is full and the playbook works, go fractional when you need senior ownership now, and use agencies for execution under whoever owns the number.
ReadA fractional Head of eCommerce is usually paid a flat monthly retainer for a fixed weekly time commitment, though some work hourly or charge a fixed fee for a defined project such as an audit. The price varies with the hours, the number of channels in scope, and how much decision authority the role carries. Compare it with the fully loaded cost of a full-time hire, not just the salary, and ask what result the fee is buying.
ReadAEO (answer engine optimization) is the work of getting your brand named and cited when someone asks an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity a question. SEO competes for a ranking in a list of links; AEO competes for a place in a single written answer. GEO (generative engine optimization) is another name for the same goal. Most of the foundations overlap, so AEO builds on good SEO rather than replacing it.
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