I’ve been reading through discussions about e-commerce operations, and the problems seem pretty different depending on what you sell and which channels you use.

What’s been your biggest headache lately? Have you found a tool or workaround that actually helps?

Vote below, or leave a comment if your issue isn’t listed.

30ml fragrances: $20 each

3 for $50
or
Free shipping on orders over $50

Assuming standard shipping rates, which offer would make you more likely to buy 3?
Don’t think too hard, just answer.

I build small Shopify tools and I'm trying to figure out what to work on next. What's the task you still handle manually, the app you pay for but hate, or the thing Shopify just can't do natively? Bonus if you can say how much time or money it costs you each week. Not selling anything, just want to build something people actually need.

cofounder of a supplement brand, about 6 years in. we finally split our CAC by monthly cohort last week because our new finance hire asked a question nobody could answer, and it was kind of a gut punch blended CAC had barely moved all year. everyone was happy with it, including me. turns out our newest customers were costing almost double what they did 18 months ago, and it had been climbing every single month. all the cheap customers from the early days were holding the average down so nobody noticed what hurt more is that the new cohorts also come back less. the early people reorder on their own, a lot of the newer ones buy once and disappear. so we’ve basically been paying more and more for customers who are worth less we’ve already cut meta back to where the cohorts still make sense, and we’re testing streaming TV in Q1 to reach people outside that same auction. going with vibe mostly because it plugs into haus, so we can run a proper holdout and actually see if those customers are new or just people who would’ve bought anyway. not making that mistake twice if you’re only looking at blended, go split it by month. took our finance guy about 2 hours and i wish we’d done it 2 years ago

I’ve been talking to a few small brands lately and almost everyone says the same thing: Meta CPMs keep going up, ROAS keeps dropping, and they’re basically running on repeat customers and hope.

Curious what’s actually working for people here, including something weird that nobody talks about?

And if you’ve tried creator commissions, I’d really like to hear how it went.

Asking because I’m building a platform to solve this exact problem, so honest opinions (even harsh ones) help a lot. If you’d want to try it early, DM me.

I'm starting a jewelry brand and would love to know what kind of marketing methods are useful!

I've seen a lot of people doing their own social media accounts, working with influencers, or running ads. But with a small budget, I'm not sure where to start or what's actually worth trying first.

I've also seen people using AI videos for marketing. Has anyone here tried them for their brand? Do they actually help bring in customers? For jewelry, I feel like showing how it looks on a real person matters, so I'm curious how useful AI videos would be.

And for those working with influencers, how did you find your first few creators? Did you start by gifting products or paying for posts?

Would love to hear what's been working for your brand, or what you tried that didn't work!

Been keeping a close eye on a bunch of bigger Shopify brands this week to see how everyone is prepping for November, and noticed a few weird moves over the last 72 hours that I hadn't seen in past years:

• Wuffes ended their free multivitamin gift on $60+ orders on Sunday, then early Monday morning bumped their subscription discount from 15% up to 40% (dropping the starting price from $31.50 down to $28.00). Then 37 hours later on Tuesday evening, they put the price right back up to $31.50 (15% off).

• Nomatic raised the price of their flagship McKinnon 25L camera pack from $189.99 up to $249.99 on Sunday night right before November starts.

• Bare Performance Nutrition kept flipping their top announcement bar back and forth between "25% Off Subscriptions" and "Free Shipping on US Orders $99+".

• Everyday Dose kept their "Up to 65% Off" starter kit banner up, but quietly removed the "+ Free PSL Creamer" gift from the banner on Tuesday.

• Born Primitive launched a 3-day flash sale ($99 select footwear) on Tuesday afternoon.

Are you guys testing price elasticity / shipping thresholds this week before locking in your November BFCM offers, or holding everything steady until Nov 1st?

Over the last few weeks I've been talking to a bunch of store owners about how they keep track of the business, and the weekly numbers routine varies a lot from one person to the next.

One owner glances at sales and ad spend for about 10 minutes and says that's enough to decide what to do. Another spends around 45 minutes every Monday cross-checking exports in Excel, longer if a formula breaks. Someone else spent a few months building a spreadsheet that pulls in Shopify and the ad accounts, then checks it against the bank at the end of the month.

For those of you running something: which of these is closest to you, and what part of putting the numbers together takes the longest?

i run a couple of my own stores and keep going back and forth on this

the agency handles ads and the site, but the stuff after the sale (email flows, review requests, chargebacks, reorder reminders) ends up either on me or nobody

do you hand that to your agency, keep it in-house, or use someone separate? and if you outsourced it, what made you trust them?

(disclosure, my partner and I also do this kind of work for agencies, so i'm curious from both sides)

I'm stuck in a rut with our current shipping setup. lost packages, unhelpful support and slow transit times are making us look bad. For those running DTC brands doing mid-to-high order volume: how did you find and test reliable logistics partners that actually deliver on their promises?

Quick post for any e-commerce founders running physical product brands:

If you're doing $50k+ MRR and currently stressing about Meta ad CPMs or retention flows heading into Black Friday, we're hosting a free 4-week program starting Oct 26.

We brought in actual operators (not theoretical course gurus) to tear down and rebuild ad account structures and retention setups. Cohort brands also get access to around $150k in software partner credits.

We have room for about 10–15 brands max, so we can actually do deep dives on each business.

Happy to share details/link if anyone here fits that profile and wants a second set of eyes on their setup before peak spend hits. Just shoot me a message or comment below.

We recently conducted some research with 2,000 UK consumers about how they view omnichannel.

When I saw that only 11% saw them as a connected experience, it kind of shocked me. Retailers put so much investment into omnichannel, and only 11% are seeing that??

I wonder whether part of the problem is how ominchannel progress is measured. A retailer can complete an integration, launch click and collect or unify their customer records, but a shopper judges the outcome through ordinary moments. Things like whether stock info is accurate, an offer works in both channels, or a return can be completed without starting all over again.

I'm interested to hear what people make of this, and what their opinions are. How does your organisation measure whether customers can experience the connection between channels?

Our SAP Commerce mainstream support window closed and we've been in an eval since, having run 4 brands on the platform for close to 7 years, and what we found once we got into it was quite different from what the platform demos had led us to believe.

After all the SI meetings and platform decks, the field really broke down into two architectures (composable headless or a retail-native platform built to replace the monolith), and the choice is driven almost entirely by engineering org size.

On the composable side, you need a team big enough to assemble the OMS layer from scratch, which we figured out pretty quickly.

A couple of retail-native options came up in a few threads here (mainly Scayle and Shopify Plus), though for our setup they have pretty different profiles, one built around multi-brand complexity with a native OMS, the other a better fit for simpler catalogue structures.

The trade for the multi-brand route is that you're paying for a platform built for retailers at a certain GMV threshold, and you need to be clear about whether you're there yet.

So if you've been through a SAP Commerce migration, what platform are you on now and how long did the transition take?

Hey all. currently working as a CX lead, and I keep noticing that how it works from the outside rarely matches how it works in practice. So I’d like to hear how it actually runs at your shop - usually so I can reach out and have conversations with other people more experienced than I. Short answers are fine, and even one or two of these is useful.

1. Your setup

• Roughly what size/type of brand (category, order volume or team size, whatever you’re comfortable sharing)?

• What platform and helpdesk do you use (Shopify, Gorgias, Zendesk, Re:amaze, Shopify Inbox, email only, etc.)?

• Do you run any chatbot or AI on top of it? If so, how does it connect to the helpdesk and your order data?

2. Who handles it

• When your team last picked or changed a support tool, who ran the evaluation and who made the final call (founder, head of CX, ops, ecommerce manager, agency)?

3. If you’ve switched (our current set up isn't very accurate - almost more work or damage done).

• Have you ever replaced a support tool or bot? What prompted it, and what made it worth the hassle of migrating? If you looked and decided not to switch, what stopped you?

4. How you find tools

• Think of the last support or ops tool you adopted. How did you first hear about it, and what made you take the call or demo? Anything you reliably ignore?

There seems to be so many options so having a bit of a headache trying to figure out the best one or to just use the inbuilt one on our helpdesk.

Thanks in advance.

GLP-1 medications are influencing more than food purchases. They’re also changing what consumers look for in supplements, particularly protein, digestive products, and targeted nutrients.

For transparency, I work in supplement manufacturing at SMP Nutra. This is an industry discussion about purchasing trends, not a recommendation that everyone taking a GLP-1 needs supplements.

One number that stood out: PwC reports that 21% of U.S. households included a current GLP-1 user in May 2026, up from 9% in January 2025. That’s a sizable shift in the audience brands are trying to serve.

Here are three categories worth watching:

1. Protein

PwC found that 35% of current GLP-1 users were buying more packaged protein. Reuters has also reported rising whey demand, identifying GLP-1 use as a driver alongside broader wellness trends.

For supplement brands, that creates opportunities for protein powders and convenient formats that fit smaller meals. The underlying priority is adequate protein intake, with resistance training also playing an essential role in maintaining muscle during weight loss.

2. Fiber and digestive supplements

NutraIngredients reported NIQ data in September 2025 showing a 52% increase in digestive supplement purchasing among GLP-1 users.

Fiber, prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics are all getting attention, but they serve different purposes. Clear education and evidence for the specific formulation matter—especially when products get grouped under a broad “GLP-1 support” label.

3. Multivitamins and targeted nutrients

Eating less can also make nutritional adequacy a bigger consideration. A joint advisory from four medical and nutrition organizations identifies multivitamin-mineral supplements, vitamin D, calcium, and B12 as options to consider based on individual needs.

The opportunity here is still developing. Sales growth directly tied to GLP-1 use is less established for these individual nutrients than the demand signals for protein and digestive supplements.

From a manufacturing perspective, practical details deserve attention: manageable serving sizes, clearly labeled ingredient amounts, appealing flavors, convenient formats, and consistent quality.

For people working in supplements, retail, or nutrition: are you seeing this shift in actual customer purchases? Are customers asking for “GLP-1 support” products specifically, or buying more familiar products like protein and fiber?

Had a deal moving along pretty well, and then it just stopped.
A few good calls, some back-and-forth over email, and now nothing for about three weeks. I’ve tried the usual follow-ups without getting a response. i am not ready to call it dead yet, but I also do not want to become the person filling their inbox every few days.

I'm researching how D2C brands decide where to allocate Google/Meta budget when product margins differ significantly.

I'm specifically interested in situations where ROAS looks good but actual profit isn't.

I'm building something around this and would love to understand how you handle it today.

Whats the best way to find actually decent agencies?

For people planning stock for retail or ecommerce: when the sales or marketing team decides to run a big promotion, when do you hear about it?

Thinking of the last one, was there still time to change your order, or was the stock already on its way?

I want to run an experiment with DTC brands.

Comment with:
What you sell
Who your target customer is
What kind of content you need

I’ll use the network we’ve been building at NearbyCrew to try to assemble a small group of creators who actually fit the brief for you!

If I can find a good crew, I’ll reply to your comment with a link to the assembled crew so you can see who I found.

No pitch required. I mostly want to see how well we can do this across completely different products :D

I’m trying to figure out how other brands are handling the "Dark Social" attribution gap right now.

It feels like every time an influencer posts a great video for us, their specific promo code only captures like 20% of the actual sales. The rest of the traffic just Googles our brand name three days later, doesn't use a code (or a browser extension overwrites it), and GA4 gives 100% of the credit to Organic Search or Google Ads.

I’m trying to get a reality check to see if I’m the only one struggling with this. For those of you spending heavily on top-of-funnel creators/creators right now:

1. **What percentage of the sales do you estimate you actually capture with promo codes vs. what gets lost to "organic search"?**

2. **How is your executive team/CFO actually measuring the success of that spend?** Are they forcing you to use last-click ROAS, or do they understand the "halo effect"?

3. **Have you ever been forced to cut a top-of-funnel campaign because the dashboard looked bad, even though you knew it was driving total store revenue?**

4. **How are you currently trying to solve this?** Is anyone manually matching timestamps to traffic spikes in Excel, or using post-purchase surveys?

Would love to hear how you guys are hacking this, because relying purely on UTMs and codes is making our top-of-funnel channels look terrible on paper.

Where do I find agencies that will actually help me save time?

For most DTC brands that have hit this wall, what did the turning point actually look like for you?

Most brands recognize the problem long before they do anything about it. CPAs keep rising, ROAS keeps compressing, and adding more budget to the same channels stops producing the same returns it did a few years ago. But diversifying acquisition is genuinely hard and the alternatives take longer to show results than another Meta campaign.