This week's episode

Dima Negodiuk runs five businesses with zero employees, and he's never written a line of code. A self-styled Fractional AI Officer, he joins Matt to get practical about where a non-technical ecommerce founder should actually start with AI. They cover why Claude Code is the on-ramp, pointing it at your biggest problem rather than a tutorial project, and the difference between playing with AI and deploying it. Dima shares the 24/7 use cases that give small stores an edge — from an AI call centre to overnight autonomous work — and why a human still has to stay in the loop.

Two founders, both wildly successful, just gave completely opposite advice about whether ecom operators should build a personal brand — and Matt is running a 90-day experiment to find out which one is right for founders like us. Davie Fogarty (the $200M-a-year founder behind The Oodie) reckons founders shouldn't bother with personal brand until they're past $10 million — the opportunity cost of a single YouTube video runs to roughly $3,200 of founder time, and that money tests paid-ads creative far more effectively.

Most ecommerce founders are fighting for organic traffic on one front — Google SEO — while paid CAC detonates around them. In 2026, organic actually lives on six surfaces: AI Discovery, Site SEO, Blog and Content, YouTube, Social SEO, and Digital PR. Matt Edmundson walks through all six, gives one concrete action per surface, and shares the free 6-Surface Organic Audit Kit so you can run the whole playbook in a single Saturday afternoon.

Selluna founder David Balan walks Matt through the three pillars of Amazon — traffic, clicks and conversion — and makes the case for optimising for Rufus, Amazon's new AI shopping assistant, before everyone else does. With up to 40% of US sales now touching Rufus, the brands building Rufus-ready listings today will defend their positions for the next decade, like the SEO winners of 2016. David shares his framework for the top 25 questions, why not A/B testing your main image is criminal, and the line that sums it up — text speaks to the algorithm, images speak to the customer.

Rachel Hanretty ships 25,000 macarons a week — and pays £500 a month for a tool that fact-checks what her marketing agency is telling her. In this episode, she explains why Klaviyo overstates its impact, how she caught agencies dodging accountability, and why every seasonal ecommerce founder feels "gaslit" by their own business between April and September. Rachel is the founder of Mademoiselle Macaron, a Scottish macaron brand she built from a St Andrews student flat in 2013 after learning the craft in Paris. Thirteen years on, she ships UK-wide, colour-matches macarons to Charlotte Tilbury lipstick launches, and runs the attribution gauntlet every seasonal ecommerce brand knows well. Subscribe for weekly conversations with founders and experts who've built the kind of ecommerce businesses worth listening to.

There are 1,300 marketplaces worldwide and most ecommerce brands are stuck on just one or two. Jorrit Steinz, CEO of ChannelEngine, reveals why the biggest mistake sellers make is not exploring marketplace selling at all. He shares a practical framework for choosing the right platforms using seller-to-buyer ratios, explains why marketplace ad spend builds organic ranking in ways Google never will, and tells the story of a German customer running 60 marketplaces with just two people. Whether you are established and looking to expand or just starting out, this episode maps a clear path from Amazon-only to multi-marketplace scale.

What if you could start a profitable ecommerce business for less than £15, with no stock, no warehouse, and no design skills? Nigel Wymer from POD Launch Pro walks through exactly how to build a print-on-demand business on Etsy from scratch. Covering niche research with AI, micro-niche stacking, Etsy store SEO, the algorithm game, pricing strategy, and realistic income expectations, this episode is a practical roadmap for anyone considering print on demand as a side hustle or full-time business.

Jay Myers has been in eCommerce since 1998, and the data his team has collected from thousands of Shopify merchants tells a story most founders haven't heard. Every subscription business hits a flatline — and doubling your ad spend or reducing churn won't break it. What does? A 0.4 increase in referral rate produced fifty-six times more subscribers at the thirty-month mark. In this episode, Jay unpacks the Subscription Death Curve, explains why most referral programmes don't work, and shares the golden ticket strategy behind Bold Commerce's AI reorder app, RePete.

Most ecommerce founders have tried AI but 56% of CEOs report zero ROI from their investments. Matt Edmundson shares the exact four-tool AI stack his company uses daily, costing around £350 a month, and explains how combining Claude Code with Obsidian creates a thinking partner that knows your entire business. From deep research with Perplexity to on-demand podcast creation with Notebook LM to product lifestyle images with Nano Banana, this is practical AI usage that's generating real returns.

Max Beech has spent years building personalisation features at Revolut and Yahoo, and he has identified the exact moment most ecommerce brands lose their best customers — the first 14 days after purchase. In this conversation, Max explains why that window of highest trust gets wasted on silence or premature discount codes, how asking one simple post-purchase question gives better segmentation data than months of behavioural tracking, and why being human beats being a brand every time. From the coffee shop test to the Ritz Carlton giraffe story, this episode is packed with practical ways to keep your customers coming back.

Adam Pearce has optimised hundreds of Shopify stores. Most of them were losing sales in the same place — the first three scrolls on mobile. In this conversation, he shares the simple changes that consistently lift conversion rates by 30-50%, including the one search bar tweak every mobile site should steal and the two trust signals that boosted one client's sales by 34%. Adam is the co-founder of BlendCommerce, a Shopify CRO agency, and runs eCom Collab Club, a monthly ecommerce event in London.

Rob Te Braake is a fractional CFO for seven and eight-figure ecommerce brands — and one of his eight-figure clients might not make it to the end of the year. The reason? A debt cycle that started with one easy, pre-approved platform loan. In this conversation, Rob breaks down the three numbers every ecommerce owner needs to know, explains why he walks away from any business with less than 60% gross margin, and unpacks why Shopify and Stripe loans can quietly eat your business alive. If you've ever been tempted by that "just click here" offer, listen to this first.