Ecommerce Conversations

Eric Bandholz hosts "Ecommerce Conversations" while running Beardbrand, his direct-to-consumer provider of men's grooming supplies. Periodically he diverts an episode to share the details of his business, hoping it helps others. He's done that three times in the last year, a challenging period for many ecommerce companies, including his own. He's addressed Beardbrand'...

Braxton Manley first appeared on the podcast in 2021. As a college student, he had launched Braxley Bands, a maker of Apple Watch bands. Last year he returned with an update on that business after operational and sales challenges. He's back, having launched his latest company, Mystic, a direct-to-consumer maker of health-focused chewing gum. In this episode, he shares the origins of Mystic, m...

The reality of post-pandemic ecommerce has been tough for many direct-to-consumer merchants. Take Molson Hart. His company, Viahart, makes innovative educational toys and sells them on Amazon, Walmart, and other marketplaces. The last two years have been challenging for Viahart. What worked before and during Covid doesn't apply now, Hart says. Host Eric Bandholz shares those sentiments, as Be...

Barry Hott is a longtime Facebook advertising consultant. He says first reactions to an ad largely determine its performance. He advises merchants to create ugly ads, those that people won't skip over. "I'm the Ugly Ads Guy," he stated. In this episode, Hott addresses key Facebook ad metrics, budgeting, testing, and, yes, ugly creative. For an edited and condensed transcript wi...

Lukas Tanasiuk once paid a firm to redesign his Shopify site, a seller of electric scooters. The result was slow page loads and his efforts to improve them. What he found, he says, was a lot of false claims. "I discovered corruption among folks who say they are page-speed optimizers," he says. Page-speed optimization became Tanasiuk's next opportunity. In 2023 he launched The Nice A...

Corey Wilks is a clinical psychologist turned business coach. He helps entrepreneurs and creators improve their mindset and overcome self-imposed obstacles. He says a common obstacle is overthinking a problem. Others involve perfectionism, doubt, and even fear. In this episode, he addresses those mental hurdles and more. For an edited and condensed transcript with embedded audio, see: https://pec-...

Natalie Mounter is a stay-at-home mom and entrepreneur. Her company, Totally Dazzled, sells craft supplies for weddings and creative projects. She says the business has prospered due to other stay-at-home moms — her employees and affiliates. "Being a stay-at-home mom and hiring other stay-at-home moms has been key to our success," she stated. In this episode, she shared Totally Dazzled&a...

Bill D'Alessandro is a 14-year ecommerce owner. Natural Dog Company, an omnichannel seller of canine health products, is his eighth brand. "My niche is acquisition entrepreneurship," he stated. 'll buy a small brand, grow it, improve it, and eventually sell it." Along the way, he's learned lessons such as focus, industry selection, and product pricing. He shares those...

Shahzad Chagani runs operations for PE Energy, a Houston, Texas-based supplier of industrial equipment and supplies. The company collects leads online from worldwide B2B buyers and relies on its Colombia-based sales team to convert them into sales. "Colombia is pretty Westernized," Chagani stated. "We find a lot of college-educated talent there." In this episode, Chagani addres...

For years Brandon Eley's online shoe company, 2BigFeet, prospered by reselling prominent brands. But the profit margins slowly narrowed as did the sources for large footwear sizes, Eley's niche. The solution is Michael Ellis Footwear, Eley's direct-to-consumer brand, launched in 2021. "We finally decided to take matters into our own hands," he said. In this second appearan...

Mickey Friedman co-launched Flair.ai in 2022, a year after graduating from the University of Chicago. The company, which has raised $5 million in seed funding, deploys artificial intelligence to perfect product photos, providing entire virtual scenes and setups. The process, Friedman says, dramatically lowers the cost of photo shoots while improving quality. In this episode, she addresses the rise...

Matt Ragland is a 10-year email marketer, first at ConvertKit and now at Good People Digital, the Nashville-based agency he launched in early 2023. His approach to superior email performance is storytelling. He says, "Brands that excel at email marketing frequently tell a story to their ideal audience." In this episode, he addresses storytelling tactics, email design, automation strategi...

In 1962 Arto Alajian arrived in the U.S., having fled Egypt and his shoe-manufacturing business. He became a milkman in Los Angeles, and then a ceramic tile installer, and then a tile maker. That was 1966. Fast forward to 2024, and ARTO, the company, is a global supplier of handcrafted ceramic, porcelain, and concrete products. Armen Alagian, the founder's son, now co-owns the business. In th...

Before Shopify, YouTube, and Facebook, there was OverstockArt. David Sasson launched the company on the Yahoo Store platform in 2002 in Wichita, Kansas. It sells original, hand-painted reproductions of works by Van Gogh, Monet, and more. Much has changed since 2002, but not Sasson's passion and resilience. He has faced legal crises, replatforms, and competitors. Yet OverstockArt thrives. In t...

No one can accuse ecommerce copywriter Chris Orzechowski of mimicking others. In an era of image-heavy emails, he prefers plain text. Amid the Facebook-Google advertising juggernaut, he likes X. Orzechowski is an 11-year writer and marketer, first as a freelancer and then, in 2020, at Orzy, the agency he founded. In this episode, he addresses his keys to successful product copy, frustration with M...

Rabah Rahil first appeared on this podcast in September 2022. He was the chief marketing officer of Triple Whale, an analytics platform. He addressed customer acquisition, attribution, and more. He’s now the CMO of Fermàt Commerce, a SaaS provider of customized customer journeys. Founded in 2021, it has raised nearly $30 million in venture capital funding. In this episode, Rahil discusses Fermàt’s...

The post-Covid ecommerce hangover has hit Roman Khan. He launched his first direct-to-consumer brand in 2013, acquired others, and in 2021 founded Peak 21, an aggregator with equity investors. The outlook was good. Fast forward to 2024, and many ecommerce companies are struggling. Mergers and acquisitions have cratered. Yet Khan perseveres. His team reviews dozens of purchase candidates every mont...

Faraz Kahn began losing his hair at age 21. Years later, when searching for startup business ideas, he focused on own experience. The result is Fully Vital, a direct-to-consumer seller of hair loss serums and supplements that he launched in 2021. In this episode, Kahn addresses his launch of Fully Vital, marketing challenges, and lessons learned along the way. For an edited and condensed transcrip...

BGR is a media site covering consumer technology, such as games and devices. Jonathan Geller launched the company in 2006 and sold it to Penske Media in 2010. He remains its president and general manager. The site has long relied on organic search traffic, which it monetizes with advertising and affiliate commissions. But the tsunami of low-grade AI content has upended search rankings and thus BGR...

Phillip Jackson launched Future Commerce in 2016. The company produces articles, newsletters, and podcasts focusing on coming trends and developments in business. He believes commerce produces a gentler society, one that fosters culture and stability. Commerce is culture, he states. In this episode, he discusses his company's mission, large versus small brands, the maturity of ecommerce, and...

Study a successful entrepreneur, and you'll likely uncover resilience. Take Aaron Marino. Twenty years ago his first business, a fitness center, failed, leaving him with half a million dollars of debt.  Fast-forward to 2024, and Marino is a YouTube celebrity and thriving serial entrepreneur, mainly with men's grooming products. He first appeared on the podcast in 2020. In this episode, h...

Jake Zaratsian is a content creator at Jungle Scout, the Amazon seller platform. He's also a part-time brand owner on that marketplace, selling disposable dinnerware plates made from palm leaves. Curious, we asked him, "Why palm plates?" He cited three reasons. He sought a product with at least 300 monthly sales, a selling price of $20 each, and consumable for repeat buyers. Disposa...

Andrew Faris once managed huge Meta Ad budgets while CEO of ecommerce brands. He still manages huge budgets, but now at his agency on behalf of ad clients.  We asked him for pointers on advertising bread-and-butter commodity-type products. "Directness is the answer," he replied. "The more tightly you communicate your product and what it does, the better." This is Faris's t...

Bryant Jaquez picked a heck of a time to become a CEO. A longtime CMO for direct-to-consumer brands, Jaquez accepted the CEO job early this year for BuddyLove, a Dallas-based women's apparel company coming off a pandemic-fueled boom and a dismal 2023. "The overhead and debt service caught up with them," he said. "Thus far my job has been a lot of restructuring, evaluating expen...

Allen Walton is the founder of SpyGuy, a seller of surveillance cameras from his base in Texas. He's also a world traveler and a seasoned acquirer of airline travel points. Ecommerce merchants who pay with a rewards credit card for advertising, shipping, and other expenses can "rack-up crazy points," he told me. In our recent interview, his third for this podcast, he elaborated on h...