2026-04-08
This is a textbook example of a service designed around the operational convenience of the business, not around actual customer behaviour.
2026-04-23
Handing ecommerce to the marketing team is one of the most persistent structural errors in companies with an online channel.
2026-06-02
Most ecommerce teams focus almost exclusively on the pre-sale journey. This is one of the most costly habits in ecommerce. The payment is not the end of the funnel, but the beginning of the customer relationship.
2026-06-08
Many retailers view the consent banner as a legal obligation, implementing it once and then ignoring it. This approach is flawed, as the banner sets the mood for first impressions, determines the amount of marketing data retained, and influences regulatory risk.
2026-06-15
TikTok Shop isn’t just something your social team is testing anymore. In the UK, it’s now a real sales channel with its own economics, and it should be managed that way.
2026-06-25
You don’t see the real cost right away. It builds up over time. Engineers call this technical debt, and it works like real debt: every shortcut adds up and comes with a price.
2026-06-29
Most online product descriptions could be switched between products without anyone realising. Read the article for tips on structuring product descriptions that drive sales.
2026-07-01
Big sales events bring in big revenue, and those numbers often get celebrated. But we should look at them more carefully. A record day built on deep discounts and smaller orders can actually lose money on many sales.
2026-07-06
The real answer is that it depends on whether the traffic is truly incremental. It can quietly waste money on clicks you would have gotten for free.
2026-07-08
The in-house versus agency debate isn't about the cost. In reality, it’s about control, and making the wrong choice can be costly in ways that don’t appear on your invoice.
2026-07-13
56% of users check the product images before even reading the title. Many galleries are arranged in the wrong order, which hurts your conversion rate unless you know what to look for.
2026-07-16
Major retailers have invested a lot of time and money in bringing AI assistants to shoppers. Let’s look at a number that should make any board think twice.
2026-08-02
Customers could not find a group of products we sold perfectly well. Live, in stock, sensibly priced, decent photography. The problem was that the thing which made them a coherent group in a customer's mind was not something our catalogue recognised.
2026-08-06
Buy now pay later stopped being an unregulated product in the UK. Deferred payment credit is now inside the FCA perimeter, and the Consumer Duty applies to it. Here is why it is a trading story.
2026-08-10
A five-star average sells worse than a 4.5. Negative information has greater diagnostic value since it separates good products from bad ones more effectively than praise does, simply because praise is something that is expected by everyone.
2026-08-12
The EU packaging regulation started applying yesterday, and the thing worth understanding about it is not environmental. It is that the cost of selling into Europe has stopped scaling with volume.
2026-08-18
A return fee does not reduce returns. It moves who pays for them, and it changes what your policy signals.
2026-08-20
Retail media is the most profitable thing most retailers have ever sold, and the mechanism that makes it profitable is the same mechanism that makes it dangerous. It monetises attention the retailer has already paid to acquire. Nothing new is manufactured, warehoused, picked or delivered.
2026-08-24
When I opened the sort dropdown for a client's biggest category, I saw that it was set to price, low to high. This had been the case since the site went live. No one had changed it; it was the platform's default setting and had therefore been silently determining which products were sold for four years.
2026-08-26
The low stock message is one of the few things in ecommerce that reliably produces a number in the right direction on the first test. Add "only 2 left" to a product page, watch add-to-cart rise, ship it to 100% of traffic, move on. I have done this. Most people reading this have done this.
2026-09-14
Category experience is a proxy. It is cheap to verify, easy to explain to a board, and simple to defend if the hire goes wrong, because nobody has ever been criticised for recruiting from a direct competitor.
2026-09-21
Conversion rate optimisation is four things held together at once, and only one of them belongs to marketing. That placement decides the ceiling of the work before any of the results.
2026-09-23
A chargeback gets filed under fraud. A good share of them are caused by the returns policy, and this year they cost considerably more than they did last year.
2026-09-28
If the tools are so good, can a junior employee using AI carry out what a senior employee did at half the cost?
2026-09-30
When a shopper ticks "Long sleeve", the site keeps every dress marked long and drops everything else, including the dresses where nobody filled in the field. She never sees them, and she has no reason to think anything is missing. The filtered list looks like the answer, so a short list reads as a thin range.
2026-10-05
Most gift cards sold this Christmas will be spent in January, by someone who never chose your brand themselves. That visit behaves unlike almost any other, and the decisions that shape it get made around now.
2026-10-07
Any promotion that is predictable comes at a cost which is not shown in the promotion report. Namely, the losses from full-price sales during the weeks when customers have learned to wait.
2026-10-12
Web designers, UX designers, and what the difference does to conversion
2026-10-19
What an outage does to shopping habits, what the evidence says about getting customers back, and why the plan belongs to ecommerce