eCommerce Podcast

A brand Cem Atik helped scale from $15m to $50m paid an outside firm $15,000 to be told what it was doing wrong. It already had 100,000 customers who would have said the same thing for nothing.
Cem co-founded Harucon Ventures in Düsseldorf, in western Germany, and spends his days pulling apart the numbers behind ecommerce brands in the UK and the DACH region (Germany, Switzerland and Austria). He has been in the space for 13 years. He scaled his own first business to $7m, then burned more than $250,000 on a second one he started alongside it and went bankrupt in five or six months.
That failure shapes most of what he says here. The two things holding brands back, he argues, are a loose grip on unit economics and the ego that arrives somewhere between $2m and $5m in revenue. He makes the case that ecommerce only really starts past $10m, that retention rather than paid marketing is where the profit is made, and that a rising customer acquisition cost is only a problem if the repurchase rate is low. He also walks through what happens inside a growth audit, including a packaging change that took 25% out of one client's costs before any extra ad spend.
In this episode
02:57 - Who Cem is and what Harucon Ventures does
08:33 - The two mistakes he sees in almost every brand
11:11 - Why pay 15k when you already have 100,000 customers
13:45 - The $250,000 second business that went bankrupt in five months
16:54 - Why a rising CAC is not automatically bad
20:45 - What actually happens inside a growth audit
24:18 - Cut the feelings and call your customers
34:32 - How Cem uses AI to read data he has no time to read
43:02 - The five numbers every ecommerce founder should know

The Two Mistakes He Sees in Almost Every Brand (08:33)
Asked for the single biggest mistake ecommerce businesses make, Cem named two.
The first is having no control over unit economics. His opening question on a first call is what the brand's customer acquisition cost to lifetime value ratio is, and he asks it less for the number than to find out whether the founder knows it at all.
The second is ego, and it tends to show up between $2m and $5m in annual revenue.
"The first call that I have with people is usually like roasting them for 30 minutes." - Cem AtikHe is not dismissive of that milestone. Getting a business to $2m or $5m is difficult and most people never do it. His argument is that the game changes afterwards.
"Ecommerce is actually, if you're just asking me, starting after you're passing the $10 million, because then you just really start to feel pressure, competition, and you also just need to play the game differently, or otherwise you die within like a 3-month period." - Cem AtikHe has paid for the lesson himself. His first business reached $7m in revenue, at which point he assumed everything he touched would turn to gold. He started a second business alongside it, spent over $250,000 and went bankrupt inside five or six months. Matt offered the same story back from his own history, copying the code behind Jersey Beauty Company to launch Jersey Gift Company, which died in about three weeks.
"People only learn with pain. You just need to feel this pain at least once or twice until you understand." - Cem AtikYour Customers Already Know What Is Wrong (11:11)
A brand Harucon had helped take from $15m to $50m told Cem it had hired an outside firm for $15,000 to identify what it was doing wrong. Harucon has invested in that business, so Cem asked the founder why.
"Marcel, you have 100,000 customers to ask for what you are doing wrong. Why are you just hiring a company?" - Cem AtikThe founder's answer was that it felt like the next step.
"Who say you that this is the next step? You're just only increasing your OpEx cost for no reason." - Cem AtikThe objection Cem expected was credentials, so he dealt with it directly.
"These guys have like huge reference. And your customers has no reference. They buy, they bought your product. So what kind of reference you need more, right?" - Cem AtikThe catch is that free feedback still has to be accepted. Cem's view is that a sparring partner is only useful to a founder who can take criticism, provided the criticism comes with a reason and a fix rather than just a verdict. Matt tied that back to Jim Collins in Good to Great, and the idea that a great leader confronts the brutal facts while holding on to a belief that the future can be different.
Retention Is Where the Profit Sits (16:54)
A client complains that their customer acquisition cost is rising. Cem's first question is the repurchase rate. At 40%, a rising CAC is not a problem. At 10% or 15%, it is.
"A raising cost number doesn't mean that something is going bad or good. It more shows you where your business is moving on." - Cem AtikCategory matters here. Beauty products tend to bring in new customers, supplements should bring the same customers back, and a supplements brand without a repurchase rate of 30% to 40% is leaving money on the table.
His wider point is that paid marketing has a ceiling.
"You cannot stay always profitable with your marketing if you just reached 100, 150, 200 million. That is not working. Marketing is not made for that." - Cem AtikRetention, conversion rate on the shop and signup forms are the levers that turn unprofitable traffic into profit.
"Retention is the only channel that is generating your pure profitability." - Cem AtikScaling Usually Starts Before the Ad Spend (20:45)
Harucon runs two due diligence workstreams before it touches anything, marketing with Cem's team and finance with his partner Tobias Münnich and his team. The scan covers rates, supply chain and process, and the fixes it surfaces are rarely about buying more traffic.
One food and beverage client was producing in Poland and Bulgaria, shipping the product to Germany, unpacking it, repacking it, then selling it. Finishing the packaging at the point of production took roughly 25% off the packaging cost. A separate change to fulfilment on the same brand saved another 12%.
The findings get delivered in what Cem calls the second roast meeting, where the brand hears exactly what is wrong, why it is wrong and how it gets fixed. He is firm that the last part is what makes the first two worth anything. Naming the problem is cheap. Handing over the method is the bit brands can act on, and it leaves them free to run the fix themselves or bring Harucon in to do it.
Cut the Feelings and Follow the Data (24:18)
"Your ecommerce brand is your baby. You just grow it up from the beginning and there is a lot of emotion into it. Cut it. It's hard to say, but cut it." - Cem AtikA 15% to 20% return rate does not need a dashboard or a consultant. It needs phone calls to the customers who sent the product back.
The same instinct applies inside the data. One of Harucon's partner brands asked why repurchase rate fell away after the third order. The numbers showed no gifts, no welcome series and no contact of any kind after the first purchase.
"It takes us 5 minutes to fix something that you just thinking about like 2, 3 weeks." - Cem AtikFor founders with nobody to ask, his suggestion is LinkedIn. Message ten people who work in the area. If eight of them say the same thing, fix that. He answers his own messages, prompted by his team when one has been sitting there a day or two.
The last piece is pace. One of the larger private equity operators Cem knows describes himself as not especially smart, but says he understands how pace and execution work together. He runs five things at once, cuts whatever is not working inside a month and rotates. He burns money doing it, roughly 5% or 6% of it, and that buys him the other 90%.
"If you are not able to sacrifice 5, 6 or even 10% to generate another 90% which are insanely profitable, you are leaving money on the table and you are just wasting your time." - Cem AtikThe Five Numbers He Names (43:02)
Asked to close with the metrics every ecommerce founder should be able to state, Cem gave five.
Customer acquisition cost
Average order value
New customer share, meaning the percentage of customers coming in who are new
Lifetime value
Repurchase rate

His closing advice was borrowed, heard on another podcast and repeated because he thinks it is true. Work so hard and so much that it makes it unreasonable not to succeed, and do not let pace and execution be the last thing you care about.
Cem's Question for Matt
Every guest leaves Matt with a question, and he answers it on social rather than on the show.
"If you compare your biggest success with your biggest failure, which one teaches you more? Failure, for sure, right? But are you sure about that?" - Cem AtikMatt's answer goes up on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Today's Guest
Cem Atik (pronounced "Jem") is Co-Founder of Harucon Ventures GmbH, based in Düsseldorf, Germany. Harucon is a growth partner for ecommerce brands in the UK and the DACH region, which covers Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Cem runs it with his partner Tobias Münnich, who leads the finance side. The firm works on a performance-based model, caps itself at 15 brands at a time and takes equity positions...

Three hundred episodes in, and the most useful thing Matt has learned isn't a tactic. It's that the question we all use to filter ideas doesn't filter anything at all.
In May, on episode 289, Matt committed on air to a 90-day Instagram experiment, personal brand against a paid-ads benchmark, numbers published either way. This is the honest report. The benchmark never got run, the reels never hit cadence, and the two-to-three hours a week he'd allowed for it were never once spent. So it wasn't time, and he argues it wasn't discipline either.
What it was is a cost he never budgeted for, and a coaching question he's asked of a thousand other founders and failed to ask himself.
This is also the last episode ever recorded in the home studio, the Edmundsons move house in a week, after 22 years.
In this episode
01:58 - The 90-day Instagram experiment, and what actually happened
06:17 - Origination cost, the expensive part was never the filming
09:27 - Entrepreneurial optimism, and the two coaching questions
12:33 - Why a notebook full of good ideas creates overwhelm
17:21 - Why 8 out of 10, and why "consistent" is the word that matters
22:51 - Does it fail because of you, or because of the task?
25:51 - The conversation that lifted mobile conversion over 400%
31:58 - When the guest is right and you don't want them to be
36:01 - What AI actually changed
39:16 - How this podcast started, and what 300 episodes have been worth
46:12 - Should you start a podcast?

The Promise That Didn't Get Kept (01:58)
The setup on episode 289 was a proper argument. Davie Fogarty, the Oodie founder doing around $200m a year, reckons founders under $10m shouldn't bother with personal brand, the opportunity cost is enormous and that time is better spent on ads creative. Alex Hormozi and Daniel Priestley say the opposite. Show up on camera or AI eats your business.
Matt said he'd settle it. Ninety days, head to head, numbers published.
"The ads benchmark never actually got run. Not that it underperformed, it never actually happened. So I can't give you the comparison that I promised you, which I can only apologise for."Origination Cost (06:17)
The filming was never the problem. Matt has three studios and, in his words, more iPhones than he knows what to do with. The expensive part was deciding what to say and then getting in front of a camera cold, from a blank page, every single time.
The one reel that did work, building an AI assistant like KITT from Knight Rider rather than Jarvis, hit eight or nine thousand views, the best on his channel. And he didn't script it. Hook written word for word, landing written word for word, prompts in the middle, everything else ad-libbed.
The Two Questions (09:27)
"Will this move the needle between where I am and where I want to be? And can I be a consistent 8 out of 10 at doing this?"Two questions Matt has put to a hundred, maybe a thousand founders over the years. He broke the second one in public, on his own podcast, and the thing that got him there he calls entrepreneurial optimism. The blind confidence that we can just do the thing.
Your Notebook Isn't Full of Bad Ideas (12:33)
Matt takes pages of notes on every episode, conference, book and coaching call. It's a genuine gold mine. It's also, he suspects, a library of good intentions.
"The problem isn't that the ideas themselves are bad. The problem is that every single idea written in my notebook is good."Which is exactly why question one filters nothing. Everything in the notebook passed it, that's the only reason it got written down.
Why 8, and Why Consistent (17:21)
Ten out of ten is a fantasy, and chasing it means never starting. Eight is where things produce real results and where Matt and the team can still sustain them on a Thursday afternoon when everyone's tired.
"Ten out of ten is perfectionism wearing a business suit."The word doing the real work is consistent. Hitting an 8 once is a good afternoon. Week nine is the test. And a brilliant idea managed at 4 out of 10 sporadically is worth close to nothing, arguably less, because of what it eats.
"It could slowly improve your guilt score. But that's a KPI not worth measuring."There have been three or four points across seven years where Matt seriously considered stopping the show. He didn't, and that consistency is the entire argument.
Drop, Delegate, or Systematise (22:51)
When something fails question two, there's one more question. Does it fail because of you, or because of the task?
If it's the task, drop it and feel good about it. If it's you, work out which steps genuinely need you and which you've only assumed do. With the reels, the honest answer was thirty seconds of face on camera, the ideas, the beat sheets, the edit and the scheduling never had to be Matt's.
Three exits. Only one of them is a no.
What It Looks Like When It Works (25:51)
Episode 280, March this year. Adam Pearce of Blend Commerce on the first three thumb scrolls of a mobile product page, you get about three before somebody buys or leaves, and most of us waste them. Across his client base he was seeing 30-50% conversion lifts from fixing them.
Question one, obviously yes. Question two, no. Matt isn't a CRO specialist and won't become one. Had the plan been "Matt learns mobile UX," it would have died in week three.
So they changed who does the doing. The conversation became research, then a Claude Code tool that audits the mobile experience and tells the developers how to fix what it finds, then a three-phase implementation plan.
"We have worked through two phases of that three-phase plan. As things currently stand, our mobile conversion is up by over 400%."Capacity, Not Appetite (31:58)
A warning, because the filter can be abused. Back on episode 35 in October 2020, Chloe Thomas told Matt to get moving on Black Friday. He agreed out loud and dismissed it internally, they'd done this before, they knew what they were doing, there was time.
There was not time. They've been early every year since.
Question two is about whether you can sustain something, not whether you fancy it. "I could do this at 8 out of 10 every week, I just don't want to" isn't a fail. That's a Tuesday afternoon.
What AI Actually Changed (36:01)
The gap between an interesting idea and a decision you can act on is enormous, because answering question two honestly means holding the whole business in your head at once. SAM closes that gap, those conversations run from fifteen minutes to two or three hours of genuine pushback.
"It doesn't do the thing for you. It doesn't get me in front of a camera. But it does close the gap between me doing it and not doing it."Where It All Started (39:16)
Matt's best friend Tony told him he had a great face for radio. That was, more or less, the strategy.
They already had the kit from a 2012 podcast run for a beauty business, which made hundreds of thousands of pounds in ways nobody predicted. Season one of EP was mostly Matt talking, until he got bored of his own voice and switched to interviews. He has never scripted an episode or his questions since.
And the most listened-to episode of all 300 is still episode one, the one he made before he'd learned anything.
There was never any sponsorship. Measured that way, the show is a failure. Measured on seven years of weekly hours with people who know things he doesn't, it's worth millions, plus the part nobody plans for. Jared Mitchell (episode 74) and his family have stayed at Matt's house, and Matt and his daughter have stayed at theirs. Chris George (episode 130) led to recording live at SubSummit and doors that wouldn't have opened otherwise.
Should You Start One? (46:12)
Yes, with one condition, which by then you can guess. Only if you can be consistent at it. Ignore the download numbers and have great conversations with interesting people.
"This podcast is definitely not the best idea that I had in 2019. Not even close. It's just that this particular one I have been able to do at a consistent 8 out of 10 for seven years, week after week. And that, I think, is the entire reason it has worked."Your Turn
Go and find your list, the notebook, the doc, the Slack channel, wherever the graveyard is. Run it through both questions. Where something fails the second, ask whether it's you or the task before you delete it.
Most people end up with two or three things. And that tends to feel like an enormous relief.
Download The 8/10 Filter, one page, free, at ecommercepodcast.net under the resources link.

Jayden Clark sold his first ecommerce business for £500,000 — and the decision came to him during a 90-minute massage.
Two and a half years earlier he'd started it in the evenings around a job at Sky. It hit seven figures in year one and got both him and his wife out of corporate work. It also had nothing holding it up underneath. Jayden had built the demand engine and skipped the operations, and the gap between what the business sold and what it could actually support kept widening until he broke.
In this episode he's unusually straight about what that cost him — he reckons another 18 months of operations work would have made it a seven-figure exit — and about what the fund that bought him taught him during a six-month earn-out he didn't want. He then walks through how he's building Camper Nation differently, including why a 0.3% conversion rate is deliberate, why he stopped selling his second best-selling brand, and the lead magnet sequence he'd run if he were starting tomorrow.
In this episode
04:20 — From ten years at Sky to seven figures in year one
15:19 — Building the demand engine and skipping the operations
17:36 — The massage that ended the business
21:10 — The two non-negotiables in business number two
25:37 — Why a 0.3% conversion rate is the plan
33:33 — Why nobody turns up to the lead magnet workshop
39:10 — Most conversion problems are traffic problems
44:40 — How to build your first lead magnet

The Gap That Breaks Founders (15:19)
Jayden's strength is demand — ads, SEO, everything up to conversion. So he pushed demand, and kept pushing, while the operational side went unbuilt.
"What I am not very good at and what I don't enjoy is what happens after the sale. And so you keep doing this, this, this with the demand, and the gap between what the business is doing and what the business can realistically sustain just gets bigger and bigger and bigger." — Jayden ClarkFinancial pressure made it worse. With two corporate salaries gone and roughly £10,000 a month needed out of the business, every profit increase became a choice between hiring help and banking the security. He kept banking it and working the extra hours.
The 90-Minute Massage (17:36)
Two years in, a spa day after his UK wedding ceremony. Ninety minutes, no distractions, and a head full of liabilities and bad hires.
"For me at this time that was like hell, because it was 90 minutes in silence with my own thoughts, thinking about all the liabilities that exist." — Jayden ClarkHe came out and said he needed to sell — not because the offer was right, but because he couldn't face the work required to make the business sustainable. The fund that bought it made him stay six months, because he'd built a business only he could run. That earn-out became the operations education he'd never had.
Why 0.3% Conversion Is Deliberate (25:37)
Camper Nation converts at 0.3–0.4% against a 1–2% benchmark, with an average order value around £2,000. At that price the scoreboard changes — Jayden runs the business on traffic-to-lead conversion, not traffic-to-purchase.
The mechanic is concrete. A customer wants an awning but fears ordering the wrong one. So Camper Nation asks for the registration and vehicle type, returns a guaranteed-compatible list, and covers return shipping if it's still wrong.
"If they don't feel confident that awning is right for their vehicle, no matter how many times you bombard them with the product and more traditional remarketing, they are never going to get to the point where they're ready to purchase." — Jayden ClarkMost Conversion Problems Are Traffic Problems (39:10)
When people bring Jayden a conversion problem, he says at least two times out of three the real issue is the intent of the traffic arriving. Someone searching for a sleep supplement with two specific active ingredients is a different buyer from someone searching for help sleeping better.
"You can optimise on-page and conversion rate and lead magnets as much as you want, you are always going to be running uphill if your traffic source is not intended correctly." — Jayden ClarkJayden's Lead Magnet Sequence (44:40)
Pick one product — the one you'd sell if you could only sell one thing tomorrow
Describe the dream lead in five specifics
Reverse-engineer which searches and channels put that person on the page
Write down what they don't know and what's blocking them
Build the lead magnet around the single biggest blocker, and give away enough that it feels uncomfortable
Serve the first leads manually, then automate what works

Also mentioned
George Bryant on the APPLE framework — the nurture-sequence approach Jayden recommends

Today's Guest
Today's guest: Jayden Clark Company: Camper Nation Website: campernation.co.uk LinkedIn: Connect with Jayden on LinkedIn Email: jayden@foundersclubhouse.co.uk YouTube: Jayden Clark Ecom Community: 1% Ecom Club (on Skool)
Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/the-90-minute-massage-that-cost-him-half-a-million-with-jayden-clark

Bawar Ahmad has bought around 70 ecommerce businesses in six years, and the first thing he does after the money clears isn't marketing. It's ringing the vendors.
Summary
Bawar Ahmad co-founded Ecomma, a Dubai-based micro private equity firm that buys, scales and sells Shopify businesses. Around 70 acquisitions and 60 exits later, with a team of 40 and a target of 30 to 36 more acquisitions this year, he has turned what most people treat as a once-in-a-lifetime event into a repeatable system.
He walks Matt through the 12 to 15 "value drivers" his team runs on every store they acquire, why valuation comes down to just two things, and the mistake that quietly costs sellers a chunk of their exit. He also explains how Ecomma gets from first questionnaire to cash in the seller's bank in 14 to 20 days when the industry standard is three to four months.
Matt, who has bought and sold ecommerce businesses on very different terms, pushes him on the other side of the coin, which is growth by acquisition. If you're turning over a million and want to get to five, should you double from scratch or go and buy someone?
00:00 — Welcome, and two ecommerce dinosaurs meet
03:22 — Seventy acquisitions in six years
06:11 — The first deal, a declining shoe brand bought before Black Friday
10:04 — What happens in a seller's head once they decide to sell
12:28 — Choosing an advisor, and the clean-financials red flag
16:02 — Normalisation, SDE and the tax conundrum
17:51 — Fourteen days from questionnaire to cash in the bank
20:09 — Asset purchase or share transfer on sub-$2m deals
24:06 — Profit, risk, and the value drivers that run on day one
29:11 — Voice marketing as the third retention channel
32:48 — Where to start if you want to buy a business
35:25 — Due diligence is for understanding, not just verifying
38:32 — When the brand is built entirely around the founder
41:09 — Buy for the audience, not the niche
46:52 — Structuring a deal when you buy a competitor
50:31 — What Ecomma buys, and the free exit-prep checklist
53:22 — Saving the best till last, get your data room ready

(Chapter markers aligned to the episode video.)
The Day-One Phone Calls That Move the Numbers (24:06)
Valuation comes down to two things in Bawar's model, profit and risk. Ecomma either grows one or removes the other, and about 20% of the time they add value without touching profit at all — building a team, adding backup suppliers, getting better contracts in place, removing the dependencies a buyer would discount for.
The rest is a standardised playbook of 12 to 15 value drivers, and the first one he gives away is negotiating costs down. On day one, the team rings every vendor on the account. The Klaviyo bill, the PayPal transaction fee, the supplier, the 3PL. Then they ask for better pricing.
"You'll be surprised how much of the vendors were like, we're waiting for this call for some time." — Bawar AhmadHe reckons that alone moves profit by roughly 20% almost overnight. On the payments line specifically, his framing is blunt.
"So on PayPal, we've added 20% of valuation on the first day." — Bawar AhmadThe next two drivers are marketing ones.
Creative volume. If a brand is shipping 8 new videos a month on Facebook, Ecomma pushes it to 20 or 30 and expects ROAS to follow.
Untapped retention channels. SMS flows and campaigns get switched on, then voice.

Stack enough of those small percentages and, in his words, before you know it you've doubled the business in 90 days. His stated average across the portfolio is a 150% uplift in 90 days.
Don't Assume the Sale (10:04)
Bawar says he sees the same sequence in about 90% of sellers. Life changes, they Google whether they can sell, they land on a valuation form promising a big number, they list, and the interest floods in. Then, 30 or 50 conversations later, the buyers go cold and the seller starts drifting away from the business.
That's where the damage happens. New creative doesn't get made. The influencer deal gets shelved. Inventory doesn't get reordered. Performance dips, and buyers can read a declining chart as well as anyone.
"You don't want to run the business as you're gonna sell it." — Bawar AhmadThe example he gives is illustrative rather than measured, but the shape of it holds. A business doing $100,000 profit a year at a 3x multiple is a $300,000 exit. Let performance slide during the sale process and that same business might fetch $150,000. Two or three more months of running it properly is, on his maths, worth the difference.
Clean Financials Beat a Good Pitch (12:28)
Bawar's third seller mistake is the one he came back to at the end of the episode when Matt asked for the best advice he hadn't yet given. Plenty of brands doing millions a year are still run on Google Sheets, with the car lease and the Uber Eats going through the same entity as the stock.
"It's just a red flag." — Bawar AhmadBuyers at this level often aren't ecommerce natives, so messy books make a business hard to underwrite and easy to walk away from. His fix starts at least a full financial year before you go to market.
Separate every personal cost out of the business
Get a proper P&L, balance sheet and cash flow reporting in place
Keep the bookkeeping current and the invoices tidy
Have the SOPs, systems and team documented alongside the numbers

Matt raised the obvious British objection, which is that a limited company owner legitimately puts as much through the business as possible to reduce their tax bill, and in doing so reduces the profit their valuation is built on. Bawar's answer is normalisation. Costs that are genuinely personal get added back as seller discretionary earnings, or SDE, and the valuation reflects the real economics — but that only works if the books are clean enough to prove it.
"You have to start thinking as an asset. This is a business, this is a system, it's not a lifestyle business." — Bawar AhmadThe preparation argument runs into deal speed too. Both of them have a phrase for it.
"Time kills deals." — Bawar Ahmad"Deals are like concrete — the longer you leave them, the harder they get." — Matt EdmundsonThat's what the data room is for. If a buyer asks a question and the answer takes three or four days to dig out, the deal cools. If the answer takes five minutes, it doesn't.
Fourteen Days, Not Four Months (17:51)
From the moment a seller returns Ecomma's questionnaire to cash hitting their bank is 14 to 20 days on average. An offer goes out within 24 hours of getting access, due diligence takes seven days, contracts add a couple more, then handover.
Bawar is clear that this isn't standard. A normal go-to-market process runs three to four months, and Matt's own exits have taken six. The gap exists because most buyers don't understand ecommerce well enough to move quickly, so they compensate with time and paperwork. Knowing the model means knowing which checks actually matter.
One structural note for anyone selling. Around 99% of deals below $2m are asset purchases rather than share transfers, so the buyer takes the assets and leaves the entity, its contracts and its history behind. Matt's caveat is that the tax treatment differs between the two, so talk to your accountant before you decide.
The Third Retention Channel (29:11)
Almost every Shopify store has an abandoned-cart email flow. A smaller number have SMS. Bawar's argument is that voice AI is arriving as the third one, and that 95% of brands haven't turned it on.
The mechanic is straightforward. Someone adds to cart and leaves, and roughly ten minutes later an AI agent phones them. It might be one in the afternoon, it might be one in the morning.
"These agents, the softwares never sleep." — Bawar AhmadThe agent asks what they were looking for, hears the answer, and offers the discount code. Ecomma sees it add around 5% to revenue. The side benefit is the recordings, because you get to hear a mother buying a toy for a ten-year-old explain in her own words why she was on the site, which is intelligence that paid ads and email don't give you.
He expects it to be as ordinary as email within three years. Matt's gentler on-ramp for anyone nervous about letting AI talk to their customers is the voice memo, sent over SMS or WhatsApp, recorded by an actual human on the team.
Buying a Business to Grow Your Own (41:09)
For an operator doing a million a year who wants to get to five, acquisition is the other route. Bawar's filter for what to buy is not the product category.
"I would just go with audience first." — Bawar AhmadA skincare brand serving 35-year-old women with acne shouldn't buy a phone case company for the extra revenue, and shouldn't buy a mascara brand either, because that's a different customer wearing the same label. It should buy the supplement brand those same women are already asking about, and build around the audience rather than the niche.
Matt's live example is a vegan supplement business whose customers keep asking for two things, electrolytes and protein. The electrolytes are developed. Protein quotes from manufacturers came back in the hundreds of thousands of pounds to get started, which makes buying or merging with an existing vegan protein brand the live question.
Three things Bawar would tell a first-time...

Amazon is shrinking product titles to 75 characters from 200, enforced 27 July 2026, and Carolyn Lowe explains exactly what to fix first.
Summary
Carolyn Lowe spent years at Dell — including running the consumer side of Dell.com — before leaving corporate life to build ROI Swift, an Austin agency that helps consumer brands grow profitably on Amazon. In this episode she and Matt dig into the single mistake she sees most often, which is founders throwing more money at ads when the real problem sits somewhere else entirely — a weak product page, a poor main image, or a listing the algorithm can't read.
She shares the numbers behind her thinking, from the 18–20% of ad spend most brands are quietly wasting to the 25% packaging saving she found for one client, and the clean rule she keeps coming back to, which is that the main image drives traffic while the content drives conversion. There's also a hard deadline every Amazon seller needs to act on, plus why she prefers affiliates over influencers and why Amazon Business is worth a look.
00:00 — Welcome and two ecommerce "dinosaurs" meet
06:13 — Why more ad spend usually burns money
13:12 — Agencies that think like owners
23:48 — Grading a listing A to F and the 75-character title cut
26:20 — Main image drives traffic, content drives conversion
32:00 — Why Amazon is shrinking product titles
34:55 — Launching her own brand with Vine and TikTok affiliates
40:05 — Where AI actually helps on Amazon
45:20 — Saving the best till last, SKU analysis to Amazon Business

(Chapter markers aligned to the episode video.)
Why Throwing More Money at Ads Usually Backfires (06:13)
Carolyn's view is that most brands reach for the ad budget when sales dip, when the fundamentals are what actually need fixing. If a website isn't converting at 2–3% with an average order value under $100, or an Amazon listing isn't converting at 15–20% or higher, more spend simply pours good money after a bad page.
"If your website isn't converting at 2 to 3% and your AOV is less than $100, go back and fix your product pages." — Carolyn LoweShe points to the 18–20% of ad spend she routinely sees wasted. On a £30,000-a-month budget, that's roughly $6,000 a month set on fire. One example she gives is a women's fertility product whose automated software kept spending on "dog, cat, horse, pet" keywords, which is why ROI Swift uses AI to analyse the data but keeps a human in the loop to make the call.
The Amazon Title Change Every Seller Needs to Action Before 27 July (23:48)
The most time-sensitive point in the episode is Amazon's move to shorten product titles. Titles are dropping to 75 characters (including spaces), down from 200, with enforcement from 27 July 2026. The change applies to all categories except media, and it's largely driven by mobile, which now accounts for the majority of Amazon traffic.
What sellers need to know:
Over-length titles get auto-rewritten by Amazon's AI if they aren't fixed
Only brand-registered sellers get a 14-day review window to adjust
Amazon has added a new Item Highlights field (around 125 searchable characters), so total indexable space stays close to 200

Carolyn's advice is to go back in now, rewrite titles to be compliant and intentional, and get the most important product details in first — before Amazon does it for you.
Why Your Main Image Drives Traffic and Your Content Drives Conversion (26:20)
This is the cleanest framing in the episode. The main image is what earns the click in a crowded search result, so it's a traffic lever. The content further down the page is what turns that click into a sale, so it's a conversion lever.
"Your main image is going to get you more traffic. Your content is going to get you more conversion." — Carolyn LoweCarolyn shares a worked example. Changing a main image from a pair of shorts on their own to the same shorts worn on a person — so buyers could see whether they were 5, 7 or 9-inch — lifted conversion by around 30%. A follow-up change to the content added roughly 12% more, with no extra ad spend. Her category-by-category tips include putting the product next to its box to signal a legitimate brand over cheap knock-offs, and showing the fruit a flavour is based on so shoppers can imagine the taste.
What It Means to Hire an Agency That Thinks Like an Owner (13:12)
Carolyn's differentiator is that ROI Swift thinks like owners rather than vendors, looking at the whole business instead of just the ad account. That's how they spotted a packaging change that saved one brand 25%, switching floss picks from a bag to a box and taking $1 off every unit across 200,000 units a month.
It shows up in how they charge, too — a retainer to keep five specialists working on each account, plus a share of the brand's growth, so incentives are aligned. Their four core values run through the whole approach.
Care about what you do
Make it better
Always be learning
Glass-half-full mindset

"We sort of are in the business of making other people millionaires and billionaires." — Carolyn LoweBefore they wrap up, Carolyn's parting tips are to start with a SKU-level benchmark of where a brand is today, and not to sleep on two growth channels — TikTok Shop and affiliates (she backs paying on sale over paying influencers for visibility), and Amazon Business, where 96 of the top 100 Fortune brands hold accounts and over $30 billion is transacted.
Today's Guest
Carolyn Lowe is the CEO and Co-Founder of ROI Swift, an Austin-based agency that helps consumer brands scale profitably on Amazon. ROI Swift has worked with 150+ brands and generated more than $100M on Amazon. Before founding the agency, Carolyn spent years at Dell, running a large division and the consumer side of Dell.com. She is also the author of Business Growth Do's and Absolute Don'ts and a licensed pilot.
Website — roiswift.com
LinkedIn — Carolyn Lowe
Book — Business Growth Do's and Absolute Don'ts

Carolyn has also offered a free one-page listing audit for any listener doing $5,000 or more on a single Amazon product page.
About the eCommerce Podcast
The eCommerce Podcast helps you deliver ecommerce WOW with real talk about building online stores. Matt Edmundson talks to experts and founders who've built the stores and learned the hard way, so you don't have to.
Subscribe at ecommerce-podcast.com for a new episode every Thursday.
Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/is-amazon-cutting-your-product-titles-to-just-75-characters-with-carolyn-lowe