Ecommerce Playbook: Numbers, Struggles & Growth

Tony Chopp, walks through the Hierarchy of Metrics — the framework our Prophit Engineers use to diagnose problems and take action for 170+ ecommerce brands. In this episode, Tony and Richard break down a real brand example in Statlas, showing how you go from a contribution margin miss all the way down to a specific campaign adjustment in Google Ads. The hierarchy: Business-level metrics (revenue,...

AI is changing how ecommerce brands produce creative. But most brands are using it wrong. They're generating entire ads with AI and wondering why performance drops. Or they're ignoring it entirely and falling behind on volume. In this episode, we break down how to actually use AI in your creative workflow without sacrificing the authenticity that drives results. The brands winning with AI aren't r...

Common Thread Collective is now an owner in Commerce Roundtable. In this episode, Taylor with Jimmy Kim, founder of Commerce Roundtable, to tell the full story of how this partnership came together and why in-person events matter more than ever. Jimmy shares the origin story of Commerce Roundtable, from a 50-person CBD roundtable in a San Diego office in 2019 to a community-driven ecommerce event...

Every ecommerce growth team spends the majority of their time answering the same five questions. The problem? Most brands answer them with disconnected tools, siloed teams, and spreadsheets that have nothing to do with the actual marketing levers they can pull. In this episode, Luke breaks down the five questions that account for 80% of your marketing team's work - and how the Prophit Engine a...

CTC has never had a service offering for brands below seven figures. That changes today. Prophit Engine Lite is for any Ecommerce brand with established revenue below $1M annually. If you're past the startup phase, running ads, generating sales, and trying to figure out how to grow profitably, this is built for you. In this episode, Richard walks through exactly what PE Lite includes: Step 1:...

Most brands are stuck in a cycle: source UGC creators, send product, hope the content is usable, repeat. The hit rate is low, the management is painful, and the content lacks consistency. Adrianne breaks down a different model: a dedicated in-house creator, fully managed by CTC. What this episode covers: Why one dedicated creator outperforms a rotating roster of 50 UGC creators How CTC matches cre...

Most 7-figure brands are stuck in the same loop. They've outgrown guesswork but can't justify a $15K/month agency retainer. Every dollar has to work, and there's no infrastructure to know if it is. Joy Sharma breaks down how the Prophit Engine system adapts for brands in the 7-figure range. What this episode covers: Why "just use AI" doesn't replace the PE - the differenc...

Every brand wants more capacity from their growth team. Most try to solve it by adding people or plugging data into ChatGPT. Neither works. In this episode, Luke breaks down the 3-layer infrastructure behind the Prophit Engine that actually creates capacity: Layer 1: The Database Order-level, finance, marketing, and cost data aggregated in one place. Living in the context of your targets and forec...

Most brands have a media buyer, a strategist, and a creative lead. Everyone's doing their job. Everyone has a dashboard. But when you ask "are we on plan this week?" you get three different answers. In the episode Luke breaks down the three pillars of accountability inside the Prophit Engine: We create the forecast AND execute against it. No handoffs between planning and doing. One p...

Most ecommerce brands are making slower, worse decisions than they realize, and it's not because of bad people. It's because of a broken structure. In this episode, Richard sits down with Luke and Tony to break down one of the most important benefits of the Prophit Engine: total clarity. From fragmented data and siloed teams to a single operator with a full end-to-end view of the business,...

What if one person could replace your entire ecommerce growth team, and get better results? In this episode Richard and Luke break down exactly how the Profit Engine works and why it's changing the way DTC brands scale. Luke walks through the four core functions every ecommerce brand needs — forecasting & target setting, creative strategy, media measurement, and Meta media buying — and exp...

Common Thread Collective just launched the Prophit Engine to the public—and in this episode, Richard and Taylor break down what it is, why it exists, and how it helps DTC brands forecast more accurately, grow contribution margin, and simplify their growth stack for less cost.  You’ll hear how CTC is combining data + methodology + AI-enabled tooling into a system (and a new “Profit Engineer” role)...

In this episode, Richard and Taylor Holiday discuss the rise of the “SEANs” — the Software-Enabled AgeNcy — and why it represents a fundamental shift in how eCommerce brands will build growth teams going forward. Taylor explains how traditional agencies struggle to operationalize institutional knowledge across individuals, leading to inconsistent execution and diffused accountability. The solution...

Incrementality tests are “in”… but the real problem is what you do after the read. In this episode, Taylor sits down with Olivia Kory (Chief Strategy Officer at Haus) and George Davis (CMO at Cozy Earth) to unpack the messiest part of modern measurement: operationalizing incrementality when results swing, channels conflict, and “platform ROAS” can’t be trusted. If you’ve ever asked: “Our holdout c...

Sales tax feels simple—until you hit nexus. In this episode, Ryan Pinkham (VP of Go-to-Market at TaxCloud) breaks down why sales tax gets complex fast for growing ecommerce brands, what happens when you cross nexus thresholds in new states, and how ignoring compliance can turn into a painful (and expensive) distraction. We cover: What sales tax nexus actually means for ecommerce The three “buckets...

Acquisition is getting tighter! In this episode, we flip the script and talk about the lever most brands under-invest in: retention + lifecycle marketing. Taylor is joined by Jennifer Peters, Director of DTC, MarTech & Digital Compliance at OLLY (a Unilever brand), to break down how they think about keeping customers coming back when the brand is sold everywhere — from Target and Walmart to th...

In this episode, Richard and Luke unpack a pattern they couldn’t ignore after running 224 sales call transcripts through an LLM: The #1 issue mid-market ecommerce brands face isn’t that performance is down… it’s that they don’t know why performance is happening. And when you don’t trust the numbers, you can’t trust the decisions. Luke walks through a painfully familiar weekly business review scena...

Scaling a DTC brand from $1M → $10M isn’t about finding more “hacks,” it’s about focusing on the right growth lever at the right revenue stage. In this episode, Richard and Joy, break down a practical “one move per stage” roadmap for scaling through seven figures into eight. What you’ll learn in this video $1M → $2M: Why creative volume is the unlock (and why the benchmark is ~100 ads/month) $2M →...

In this episode, Richard and Luke break down the system we use to help 8-figure ecommerce brands stop guessing and start making confident decisions about budget, creative, and channel investment. They walk through the three core models that answer the questions every operator wrestles with: How much should we actually spend right now? How much creative do we need to support that spend? Which chann...

AI promised clarity. Instead, it delivered information overload. In this episode, we unpack what happens when AI gives ecommerce teams more data than they can reasonably act on, dashboards multiplying, forecasts diverging, tests contradicting each other, and decisions getting harder instead of easier. Taylor and Andrew talk through: Why AI surfaces problems faster than it solves them How “more ins...

In this episode, Richard and Tony break down what agentic commerce actually is, why Shopify and Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol matters, and how AI-driven shopping is quietly replacing traditional websites, checkout flows, and even ads. Instead of customers clicking through pages, filtering products, and checking out manually, AI agents are beginning to discover products, compare options, neg...

Creative strategy doesn’t fail because of bad ideas, it fails because it isn’t operationalized. In this episode, we break down how the Prophit System forecasts creative volume and turns creative production into a predictable, accountable growth lever. Using a real client example, we walk through how creative demand is modeled against spend targets, why most brands under-produce creative, and how f...

Most teams chase growth by adding new tools, dashboards, and AI. But real, durable growth doesn’t come from software, it comes from accountability. In this video, Taylor breaks down why growth stalls when no one owns the outcome, how daily operating rhythms turn forecasts into action, and what it actually takes to build a system that compounds over time. You’ll see why repetition beats reinvention...

Forecasts are always wrong — what matters is how fast you respond. In this episode, we break down how top teams diagnose a miss early, tighten the signal-to-action loop, and use daily accountability to get January (and the year) back on track.

In this episode, Taylor explains why the traditional creative loop—analyzing past ads, chasing CTRs, writing briefs, and hoping for better results—isn’t just inefficient, it’s actively hurting growth. Instead, we break down what actually works in 2026: treating creative like a supply chain, not a brainstorming exercise. You’ll learn: Why creative strategy is no longer about ideas or opinions How t...