Posts

It’s never what you expect.

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I was lucky to have a great break over Easter which, as well as allowing me to spend a fortnight with the children, allowed me lots of thinking and processing time. Working with (broadly speaking) startup ecommerce businesses as a consultant is very rarely what I expect it to be, even having done this now for most of 3 years in my career. The most continually surprising aspect has to be that small businesses think their bigger competitors can show them how to grow i.e. it’s simply a case of surveillance and reverse engineering as much as possible and that will help them bridge the gap. They will conquer the world, they calculate, if they can only replicate ~80% of what they are doing in terms of technology, media, marketing.  I’m not going to say there is 0 value in the above theory, obviously we all want to see over the fence, but the reality is a lot more enlightening. In my experience the majority of the established long-in-the-tooth competition have actually lost track of...
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Productivity = Motivation = Productivity

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I think the most under rated part of working as a freelancer is the satisfaction available from working with new clients that need advice and positive change (and quickly!).  A new client that I started working with in February is at a very early stage in ecommerce and it’s amazing to see what can be achieved in only a few weeks with the right commitment from both parties.   There isn’t a quick fix yet for financial compliance (or advertising account compliance for that matter which is another recent snowball) but we have sped through setting up new software platforms and integrations.    It’s been a while since I have managed that type of work directly and the perspective really proves that it’s part of the internet that really has been getting better and better for some time.    Am I using AI? Nope! and honestly the progress in web development in the last 10 years prior is still the real winner - most of our challenges in ecommerce are not unique, mo...
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Seasons change...

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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.
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"You were lucky"

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 “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...
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AI to Search trickle down might be the most bankable current tactic

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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...
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That Could Work: Why “That Won’t Work for Us” Is Killing Your Marketing

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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...
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Want to future-proof your ecommerce strategy in 2026?

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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...
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