A show dedicated to helping you deliver eCommerce WOW with real talk about building our online stores. Every Thursday.
Join Matt Edmundson and guests, experts and founders who've been in the trenches, built the stores, and learned the hard way — so you don't have to.
eCommerce Conversations with Dave McAnally & Alan Osetek
When someone asks ChatGPT for the best hiking boots, it names brands, not links, about 97% of the time. Search veterans Dave McAnally and Alan Osetek explain how AI is compressing the ecommerce funnel, why the answer often comes from YouTube, Reddit and third-party review sites rather than your own website, and how a 6,000-subscriber creator ended up answering for Adidas. Inside, a practical checklist covering FAQ blocks, schema, video and niche-source relationships, how to measure AI traffic in GA4, what's coming with OpenAI ads, and why small brands can still beat the giants by owning the questions no one else is answering.
Catch up on our latest conversations with eCommerce leaders.
Everyone suspects email is dead. Laryssa Wirstiuk, who has run email and SMS for a decade, says the channel is fine, it's the way we use it that's broken. In this episode she signs up to 360 brands and finds 44% never send the welcome offer they promised, explains why cutting a list from 20,000 to 1,500 saved a business, and shows why the emails people are actually waiting for aren't the ones you're focused on. Practical, honest and useful whether you send weekly or three times a day.
Gabriel Lindh has spent two years and a hundred weekly newsletters building Nordic Dudes, an anti-chafing swim shorts brand, and still hasn't sold a pair. He and Matt Edmundson unpack the pre-launch playbook: validating demand with paid pre-orders before spending a penny, building an audience while the product is still in development, launching at good enough rather than chasing perfect, and the small packaging decisions that turn a purchase into a moment. An honest look at doing the early, unglamorous work of starting an ecommerce business properly.
Brenden Delarua spent eleven years hitting every ROAS target he was set, until a CFO asked why record ad numbers weren't showing up in the bank account. He explains why platform ROAS measures correlation not profit, the free version any small brand can start with (multi-touch attribution plus post-purchase surveys), the YouTube campaign that looked like a 0.2 ROAS disaster but was secretly 3x profitable, and the one post-purchase survey question worth more than the rest.
Cem Atik took a client from $15m to $50m. Then they paid an outside firm 15k to tell them what was going wrong, and his reply was that they already had 100,000 customers who would have told them for free. Cem Atik, Co-Founder of Harucon Ventures in Dusseldorf, joins Matt Edmundson on The eCommerce Podcast to talk about the two mistakes that stall ecommerce growth between $2m and $10m, why a rising customer acquisition cost is not automatically bad news, why retention rather than paid marketing is where the profit actually sits, and the five metrics every operator should be able to recite from memory. He also explains the packaging change that took 25% out of one brand's costs, and the $250,000 he burned on a second business after his first one hit $7m.
After seven years and 300 episodes, Matt's most useful lesson isn't a tactic. It's that "will it move the needle?" says yes to everything worth writing down, which is why notebooks fill up and nothing ships. This episode is the honest report on a 90-day Instagram experiment he committed to on air and didn't deliver, and the framework he should have applied to it. Two questions, a drop-delegate-systematise diagnostic for when an idea fails, and the one-thing rule for what survives. Plus the podcast conversation that took mobile conversion up over 400%, and what 300 episodes have actually been worth.
Jayden Clark, founder of Camper Nation, joins Matt Edmundson on The eCommerce Podcast to talk about the exit nobody sees from the outside. He built a high-ticket garden store in the evenings around his job at Sky, hit seven figures in year one, and sold two and a half years later for £500,000 — roughly half what he believes it was worth with another eighteen months of operations work behind it. The decision came during a 90-minute massage. He explains how a founder builds a brilliant demand engine and no operations, what the fund that bought him taught him during a six-month earn-out, and how Camper Nation now runs on lead magnets, ruthless 80/20 calls and a deliberate 0.3% conversion rate at a £2,000 average order value.
Bawar Ahmad, founder of Ecomma, joins Matt Edmundson on The eCommerce Podcast to explain what buyers actually look at. Around 70 acquisitions and 60 exits in six years, and his team gets from questionnaire to cash in the seller's bank in 14 to 20 days when the industry standard is three to four months. He walks through the 12 to 15 value drivers they run on every store they buy, starting with a day-one round of vendor renegotiation, why voice AI is arriving as the third retention channel after email and SMS, and the three mistakes that quietly cost sellers their price: assuming the sale, rushing to the wrong advisor, and messy financials. Matt pushes him on the other side of the trade too, and how an operator doing a million should think about buying a competitor.
Carolyn Lowe left a $2B division at Dell to build ROI Swift, an Austin agency that's helped 150+ consumer brands generate over $100M on Amazon. Her core argument is that when sales stall, most brands throw more money at ads when the real problem is their product pages. She explains how she grades listings A to F, why roughly a fifth of most ad budgets is wasted, and the clean rule that your main image drives traffic while your content drives conversion. There's also a hard Amazon deadline every seller needs to act on, plus why she backs affiliates over influencers and rates Amazon Business.
Daniel Dunn spent years inside Tesco Clubcard data before co-founding Paper Planes, and he thinks almost every ecommerce brand is ignoring a hugely profitable channel, the letterbox. He explains why direct mail to your warm, first-party customers pulls four to five times the response of email, how a single abandoned-cart postcard nudges buyers back around day seven, and why the right product combinations lift basket spend by 25 to 30 per cent. The real prize, he argues, is the second purchase, loyalty needn't mean discounting, and one loyal customer is worth thirteen who only ever trial your brand. Drawing on his Clubcard heritage, Dan makes the case for mail as the reactivation channel hiding in plain sight.
There are thousands of software companies all chasing the same small pool of brands on Shopify — and AI is quietly dismantling the bloated tech stacks they built. Neal Goyal, a go-to-market advisor who's led sales at some of ecommerce software's biggest names, explains why the "uninstall rate" is surging, how the ecosystem commoditised in three waves, and why agentic commerce is about to change everything again. His advice for anxious founders is bracingly old-school. Stop chasing shiny objects, do the Business 101, and invest in the human relationships AI can't replace. The thing that sets you apart was never the software.
Andrew Deramo, founder of SellTru, on winning on Walmart Marketplace — the mistake that kills launches, the account managers who place your product on virtual shelves, switching your ads off once you rank, and the wholesale play most sellers walk past.
Leo Rodriguez, VP of River Plate, has spent years watching ecommerce brands quietly overpay on shipping, sometimes billed for 18 pounds on a parcel that weighs two. In this episode he breaks down dimensional weight, cartonization and carrier rate-shopping, the moves that save $2 to $3 on every order and protect margin at scale. He also explains why smaller brands got hammered hardest by the new tariffs, the international shipping gray zones that get products stuck in customs, and why fuel surcharges and packaging costs look like the new normal. Essential listening for anyone shipping physical product.
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