David Butlin Ecommerce Consultant: 20 years in Digital

Well the seasons may be changing but the most common mistakes I see on ecommerce websites are not. So without further ado, please allow me to present: The Top 10 Basic Ecommerce Mistakes 2026.   These are things really shouldn’t keep happening but I see a shocking strike rate in new ecommerce websites (in no particular order): Sticky, slow checkout Half baked desktop / larger screen experience Quick search results are optimised and rapid, but your actual search results page is a complete hash Overlays interfere with key sales conversion paths Form submission errors Price promotions and gimmicks given more real estate than product marketing Brand storytelling completely separate from product storytelling Complete absence of structured data (or some awful 'auto generated' data) Most recent customer reviews are weeks old   Menu structure is 90% soft content, spare parts, off site links, after sales.

 “You were lucky.” I hear that a lot when I'm working on business coaching - usually from someone who hasn’t seen the years of testing, learning, and failing behind the results. Talking recently about pre‑judgement in marketing reminded me of another common blocker I hear from new businesses: the idea that results come down to luck, timing, or circumstance.   There’s often an unspoken assumption that my results would have happened anyway - because we digitised early, rode an emerging category, or caught a lockdown boom (the list goes on). Sure, timing helps. But the truth is, none of those things deliver results on their own.    They work because I’ve spent 20 years applying a consistent marketing process - testing ideas quickly, taking small calculated risks, and acting on the evidence.   I'm really conscious that when you start out as an ecommerce business, even a few million in annual sales looks like a big old hill to climb. And the sheer volume of potent...

I'm always on the lookout for competitive advantage in ecommerce acquisition and I think I might have found a useful new tactic.    Mentions uplifted first, search impressions follow    I've seen this pattern numerous times now in both 1st and 3rd party data: Tiny numbers of AI mentions, in the low hundreds. But search impressions move by the thousands.   And change in tandem, only a matter of hours apart. This chart is a small, keyword-filtered data set (chart below, AI mentions in orange, search impressions in blue), but there’s nothing else in the activity that explains the lift in traditional search performance at this moment. The obvious story is that AI agents are just feeding off search: demand rises in search first, and AI responses reflect that. BUT what I’m seeing in multiple accounts feels more like the opposite: a trickle down from AI answers into classic search demand. The hypothesis is that people discover brands/solutions via AI, then go t...

One of the most limiting mindsets I’ve come across in my career - both in full-time roles and through consultancy work - is the phrase:   “That won’t work for my product / my customers / my market.” Let me be clear: this isn’t about claiming I know your business better than you do. I don’t.   And it’s definitely not about pretending that every strategy works everywhere - because they don’t.  What I *am* saying, though, is that ecommerce brands waste billions each year through self-imposed limits based purely on assumptions.   Not evidence. Not data. Just - prejudice in disguise in 21st century marketing. And I’m not even talking about ideas that have been tested and failed. I mean ideas that never even make it off the whiteboard because someone, somewhere, decided *in advance* that they “won’t work.” Here are a few of the classics I hear all too often: - “Branding doesn’t matter in this market.” - “My customers will never buy online.” - “We’re a distress purch...

Talking to new and potential clients this month has lead me to change the audit format I have used for years and years.  The AEO/GEO opportunity of course has to be included but I'm sure the biggest opportunity this year is to not do the copy paste that - let's be honest - quite a lot of your competition will be doing.  There hasn't been an open goal quite like this one for some time in ecommerce and I'll elaborate on what I mean.  I've been testing as many AI tools as I can with applications for paid advertising, content generation, creatives, SEO/AEO and even whole websites and anyone relying just on those will be committing serious self harm.  And the middle road where everyone is mandated to use AI tools to augment current processes is currently wading through a quagmire (as it seems literally everyone is aware) and the recent Salesforce statement reinforces. So if you want to future-proof your ecommerce strategy in 2026, I’ve updated my default audit format to...

Given how much economic doom and gloom there is around it’s been great to talk to potential clients this month who are starting new projects and ventures and are anywhere between:  (a) determined to make it work regardless, seeing the green shoots and (b) absolutely positively Hegelian AND AND they will make it work regardless.  I’m not sure how much of that is the January factor, but it’s been exciting to see what is out there and to add some proposals to the pipeline.  Website 2 Go >>> I made a website this week in under 30 minutes from start to finish. I only have minimal html knowledge, but now this monkey has a machine gun! Navigation, search, CMS content, media, forms, metadata, speed optimisation - it even has Alt Text as standard, which in 2026 is more than a lot of manually coded websites have! - and then it wraps up all of the DNS and, in a puff of smoke, it’s online.  Admittedly it’s not an ecommerce site, it’s a brochure website, but that is stil...