This week's episode

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.

Emma Burke spotted Laceeze on the touchline of her son's football training, where a parent had looped an elastic band around a boy's boots to stop his laces coming undone. She joins Matt to share how a £6 band became a global brand, how to market a product nobody is searching for, why she pulled her best seller right before Christmas, and how she turns angry customers into five-star reviews.

Brett Curry of OMG Commerce and Matt Edmundson each host a top ecommerce podcast, so they recorded one conversation for both shows. The first half is about building a business worth buying — thinking like an investor, Jay Abraham's three ways to grow, why a 5% price rise can mean roughly 40% more net profit, and how turning buyers into subscribers and members can lift an exit from a 3x to an 8x multiple. The second half is a 2026 YouTube ads masterclass: why half of YouTube is watched on a TV, the five things every ad needs, turning Meta winners into YouTube creative, and the measurement trap.

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.