eCommerce Conversations

Paolo Vidali has a suggestion for merchants looking to add advanced features to their ecommerce sites: Be careful. Focus first on profitability, he says, and solve the basics of product returns, customer service, and free shipping. Paolo is a developer and marketer who launched Hidden Gears, an ecommerce agency, in 2014. It's now a Hawaii-based...

Nate Lagos is a seasoned conversion rate optimizer, yet a recent A/B test surprised him. A client used all caps in key landing page headlines. Nate, having read a tip on X, suggested they test headlines that capitalized only the first letter of each word. The result? Conversions increased by 25% Nate first appeared on...

Thanks to companies such as Printful, an enterprising entrepreneur can select a product, upload an image to place on it, sync it with her ecommerce site, sell it, and then pay for it. Print-on-demand is big business, and David Hooker is a prominent participant. He's the brand director at Printful and a long-time SaaS executive....

The last few years have been rough for Beardbrand, the direct-to-consumer company that host Eric Bandholz founded over a decade ago. He says pretty much nothing has worked post-pandemic. The business is finally seeing revenue growth, but costs are rising too. In this week's podcast episode, Eric departs from interviewing guests to share his own...

In 2019 Dane Witbeck had a problem familiar to parents: What were his kids doing on their smartphones? That problem became his motivation to launch Pinwheel, an Austin, Texas-based seller of Android phones with parental controls for apps, usage limits, monitoring, and more. Fast forward to 2026, and Pinwheel is thriving and profitable. In this...

Florence Morin is an artist-turned-engineer-turned-entrepreneur. She graduated from Canada's Polytechnique Montréal in 2013, only to realize she disliked engineering work. She longed to earn a living from making art. Fast forward to 2026, and Florence Art & Drawing is her online art school, launched in 2020, selling classes and instruction. Her 10-person team includes web...

For four years Eric Steckling has run two direct-to-consumer brands. Brio, the company he founded in 2014, sells beard trimmers and related goods. In 2022, he acquired Ollie, then a seller of teeth-whitening strips and now an expanded oral care provider. Eric first appeared on the podcast in 2023. In this latest conversation, he addresses...

Please enjoy this repeat of a popular episode first aired in April 2025. Mehtab Bhogal is the co-founder of Karta Ventures, a Canada-based acquirer of troubled ecommerce businesses. The firm seeks companies with “issues,” such as unpaid taxes, regulatory problems, and founder disputes. He says buying distressed companies is like salvaging a crashed car. “What...

When he appeared on this podcast in 2021, Bryan Mahoney had just co-founded Chord, an ecommerce platform that separated the public frontend from the nuts-and-bolts backend. It was a “headless” structure that enabled merchants to connect with their preferred external providers rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. The problem, Bryan says in retrospect, was a complicated...

We've hit a plateau at Beardbrand, the direct-to-consumer business I launched 15 years ago. Our revenue is down from its peak. We've made mistakes. The beard care space has dried up. We've moved from a blue ocean of growth and opportunity to a red ocean of fierce competition. If Beardbrand grows, a competitor loses, and...