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Ecommerce Conversations is the long-running weekly podcast from Practical Ecommerce, hosted by ecommerce entrepreneur Eric Bandholz. •• Listen in as Eric interviews in-the-trenches founders and executives who address the essentials of launching, growing, and sustaining an online business. Hear their successes, mistakes, and plans — addressing customer acquisition, web traffic, marketing tactics, on-site conversion, shipping, favorite tools, funding, obstacles, and much more. •• New episodes ...
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Resilience comes to mind when describing Hunter Durham. In eight years, he went from a college graduate to a Facebook employee to a company owner to bankruptcy. Fortunately, he’s willing to share his experience in this episode. It’s a helpful case study on borrowing money, riding an ecommerce boom, and relying on a single client. For an edited and …
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Nathan Chan seemingly had it all. His business, Foundr, is hugely successful, combining media with entrepreneurship training. He interacts with prominent global founders. Then came burnout. "I experienced burnout earlier this year for the first time ever," he told me. "It wasn't good. I realized I had just ground myself out." For an edited and cond…
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Lauren Johnson says high-performing entrepreneurs have similar characteristics as professional athletes. Both have mental traits that lead to inevitable success. She first observed those qualities when working for the New York Yankees, teaching mental performance to accomplished baseball players. For an edited and condensed transcript of this episo…
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Katrina McKinnon owns CopySmiths, a global blog-writing agency for ecommerce companies. Once wary of artificial intelligence-powered writing tools, she now embraces them. Moreover, she sees a coming sea change where storytellers — liberal arts folks — are the AI "prompt engineers" that drive much of marketing. She discusses the evolution of her bus…
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Mike Tecku first appeared on this podcast in 2019 as an Amazon marketplace seller. He then sold that business, a maker of floormats, shortly afterward. He retired, became bored, and in 2022 launched Momentum, a direct-to-consumer nutritional shake producer. He and I discussed that venture last year in his second appearance. He's back. Momentum Shak…
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Eric Bandholz hosts "Ecommerce Conversations" while running Beardbrand, his direct-to-consumer provider of men's grooming supplies. Periodically he diverts an episode to share the details of his business, hoping it helps others. He's done that three times in the last year, a challenging period for many ecommerce companies, including his own. He's a…
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Braxton Manley first appeared on the podcast in 2021. As a college student, he had launched Braxley Bands, a maker of Apple Watch bands. Last year he returned with an update on that business after operational and sales challenges. He's back, having launched his latest company, Mystic, a direct-to-consumer maker of health-focused chewing gum. In thi…
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The reality of post-pandemic ecommerce has been tough for many direct-to-consumer merchants. Take Molson Hart. His company, Viahart, makes innovative educational toys and sells them on Amazon, Walmart, and other marketplaces. The last two years have been challenging for Viahart. What worked before and during Covid doesn't apply now, Hart says. Host…
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Barry Hott is a longtime Facebook advertising consultant. He says first reactions to an ad largely determine its performance. He advises merchants to create ugly ads, those that people won't skip over. "I'm the Ugly Ads Guy," he stated. In this episode, Hott addresses key Facebook ad metrics, budgeting, testing, and, yes, ugly creative. For an edit…
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Lukas Tanasiuk once paid a firm to redesign his Shopify site, a seller of electric scooters. The result was slow page loads and his efforts to improve them. What he found, he says, was a lot of false claims. "I discovered corruption among folks who say they are page-speed optimizers," he says. Page-speed optimization became Tanasiuk's next opportun…
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Corey Wilks is a clinical psychologist turned business coach. He helps entrepreneurs and creators improve their mindset and overcome self-imposed obstacles. He says a common obstacle is overthinking a problem. Others involve perfectionism, doubt, and even fear. In this episode, he addresses those mental hurdles and more. For an edited and condensed…
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Natalie Mounter is a stay-at-home mom and entrepreneur. Her company, Totally Dazzled, sells craft supplies for weddings and creative projects. She says the business has prospered due to other stay-at-home moms — her employees and affiliates. "Being a stay-at-home mom and hiring other stay-at-home moms has been key to our success," she stated. In th…
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Bill D'Alessandro is a 14-year ecommerce owner. Natural Dog Company, an omnichannel seller of canine health products, is his eighth brand. "My niche is acquisition entrepreneurship," he stated. 'll buy a small brand, grow it, improve it, and eventually sell it." Along the way, he's learned lessons such as focus, industry selection, and product pric…
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Shahzad Chagani runs operations for PE Energy, a Houston, Texas-based supplier of industrial equipment and supplies. The company collects leads online from worldwide B2B buyers and relies on its Colombia-based sales team to convert them into sales. "Colombia is pretty Westernized," Chagani stated. "We find a lot of college-educated talent there." I…
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For years Brandon Eley's online shoe company, 2BigFeet, prospered by reselling prominent brands. But the profit margins slowly narrowed as did the sources for large footwear sizes, Eley's niche. The solution is Michael Ellis Footwear, Eley's direct-to-consumer brand, launched in 2021. "We finally decided to take matters into our own hands," he said…
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Mickey Friedman co-launched Flair.ai in 2022, a year after graduating from the University of Chicago. The company, which has raised $5 million in seed funding, deploys artificial intelligence to perfect product photos, providing entire virtual scenes and setups. The process, Friedman says, dramatically lowers the cost of photo shoots while improvin…
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Matt Ragland is a 10-year email marketer, first at ConvertKit and now at Good People Digital, the Nashville-based agency he launched in early 2023. His approach to superior email performance is storytelling. He says, "Brands that excel at email marketing frequently tell a story to their ideal audience." In this episode, he addresses storytelling ta…
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In 1962 Arto Alajian arrived in the U.S., having fled Egypt and his shoe-manufacturing business. He became a milkman in Los Angeles, and then a ceramic tile installer, and then a tile maker. That was 1966. Fast forward to 2024, and ARTO, the company, is a global supplier of handcrafted ceramic, porcelain, and concrete products. Armen Alagian, the f…
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Before Shopify, YouTube, and Facebook, there was OverstockArt. David Sasson launched the company on the Yahoo Store platform in 2002 in Wichita, Kansas. It sells original, hand-painted reproductions of works by Van Gogh, Monet, and more. Much has changed since 2002, but not Sasson's passion and resilience. He has faced legal crises, replatforms, an…
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No one can accuse ecommerce copywriter Chris Orzechowski of mimicking others. In an era of image-heavy emails, he prefers plain text. Amid the Facebook-Google advertising juggernaut, he likes X. Orzechowski is an 11-year writer and marketer, first as a freelancer and then, in 2020, at Orzy, the agency he founded. In this episode, he addresses his k…
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Rabah Rahil first appeared on this podcast in September 2022. He was the chief marketing officer of Triple Whale, an analytics platform. He addressed customer acquisition, attribution, and more. He’s now the CMO of Fermàt Commerce, a SaaS provider of customized customer journeys. Founded in 2021, it has raised nearly $30 million in venture capital …
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The post-Covid ecommerce hangover has hit Roman Khan. He launched his first direct-to-consumer brand in 2013, acquired others, and in 2021 founded Peak 21, an aggregator with equity investors. The outlook was good. Fast forward to 2024, and many ecommerce companies are struggling. Mergers and acquisitions have cratered. Yet Khan perseveres. His tea…
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Faraz Kahn began losing his hair at age 21. Years later, when searching for startup business ideas, he focused on own experience. The result is Fully Vital, a direct-to-consumer seller of hair loss serums and supplements that he launched in 2021. In this episode, Kahn addresses his launch of Fully Vital, marketing challenges, and lessons learned al…
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BGR is a media site covering consumer technology, such as games and devices. Jonathan Geller launched the company in 2006 and sold it to Penske Media in 2010. He remains its president and general manager. The site has long relied on organic search traffic, which it monetizes with advertising and affiliate commissions. But the tsunami of low-grade A…
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Phillip Jackson launched Future Commerce in 2016. The company produces articles, newsletters, and podcasts focusing on coming trends and developments in business. He believes commerce produces a gentler society, one that fosters culture and stability. Commerce is culture, he states. In this episode, he discusses his company's mission, large versus …
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