If you want to survive in ecommerce, you need to own your channels.

The game of selling things online has never been more turbulent. There are many brands out there living in constant fear of Meta CPMs spiking, an algorithm change tanking revenue, and channels that they once relied on falling away.

Some brands are different. They have mature, reliable revenue channels that don’t depend on an algorithm or some company dictating whether they can reach their customers.

These channels make business more predictable, more sustainable, and often deliver outsized margins vs other channels.

For this week’s newsletter, we’re breaking down the core channels used by ecommerce brands like yours, and ranking them from least to most control.

All are viable revenue channels. But if you’re only getting sales from the top half of the list, your business might not be as stable as you think.

9. LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude)

LLMs as the next big frontier for ecommerce. They might not be a huge driver of direct revenue yet, but they soon will be.

It’s also the channel where you have the least control.

They’re a black box, and show personalized results to each user. You can’t even get a reliable read on how often your products are showing up.

And worse, they get a lot of things wrong. I’ve seen LLMs constantly deliver out of date info and recommendations that just don’t fit the question.

So if you’re ranking channels on “control”, you’ve got to rank a channel near the bottom when you don’t even have full control over your product information.

Who knows if this will change. Hopefully, they’ll get better to the point where they hallucinate less, and pull correct product details with more predictable results.

8. Paid ads (Meta, Google)

With paid ads, at least you own and control the content.

But it’s a purely rented channel.

You pay for every impression. The moment you stop paying, the tap gets turned off. A spike in CPMs or landed costs can flip your unit economics on their head, all of a sudden your business model may be no longer viable.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t run paid ads. It’s the most scalable acquisition channel you have. It’s just a risky place to be if you’re relying on ad spend for the majority of your sales.

7. Marketplaces (Amazon, Walmart)

With marketplaces, you don’t really “own” anything. The marketplace technically owns your listing, your traffic, your customer.

But you do have some kind of control. And though they’ve been largely “pay to play” for a while now, there is the potential to get organic sales here - it doesn’t automatically switch off once you stop paying, like an ad campaign.

You could argue paid ads over marketplaces. With paid ads, you at least own the post-purchase experience. I give marketplaces the edge because they’re channels that can compound, unlike the hamster wheel nature of paid ads.

6. Organic social (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube)

Now we’re starting to get a little more control.

Here, you control your content. You control your messaging. You can build an audience, and you can reach your followers for free.

But you’re still limited by the algorithm. Organic reach, for some time, has been spotty. For some brands it works great, for others, no one sees their posts (even with huge follower counts).

Your channels can get banned from the platform too, and you can lose your audience overnight.

So you’re less beholden to cost on these channels, but they’re still not super reliable as “owned” channels.

5. SEO / Google organic

Organic SEO is another step up in the ownership/control ladder.

SEO has, for a long time, been the most dependable organic traffic channel for any business selling things online.

It’s generally more reliable than organic social - easier to reverse-engineer what works and specifically target buyer queries.

But it’s becoming more and more turbulent.

There are AI overviews eating up space on the SERP. LLMs taking away some searches. And Google updates have been wild, sinking a lot of legitimate sites while average sites still show up.

It’s a powerful channel, as long as it’s going well. But being fully reliant on SEO is always a dangerous thing, for any kind of business.

4. Email

This is where the scale starts to tip in terms of ownership.

An email list is something you own. You’re not reliant on ad spend, a social feed, or Google’s search algorithm to be kind to you.

You don’t “own” it in the sense that it’s yours forever. The customer can unsubscribe, they could change their email. (But what is forever, anyway?)

But it’s where you start to have direct contact with your customers.

The one problem? Deliverability.

You can reach your customer whenever you want. But getting your email seen is not a given. ISPs decide whether your messages land somewhere they’re going to be seen, or whether they disappear into the promotions tab or spam folder.

You own the list, but you don’t own the customer’s inbox.

3. SMS

SMS is similar to email. A direct line to your customers, not going through a random algorithm.

The downside: You pay per send, and TCPA compliance keeps tightening. The customer can opt out in one tap and never come back.

The upside: less filtering (though this is starting to happen on iOS now), and much more reliable visibility. You send an SMS, you can be fairly confident it’s going to be seen.

2. Your website

Your site is one of the few channels you really own.

The domain, the code, the design, the messaging - all under your control.

You control the data from when people interact with your website. And it’s increasingly becoming a conversational surface, too, which is another element you have control over.

The only knock - you might own the surface, but you need another channel to get traffic there. A website on its own is nothing, without traffic.

1. Mobile app

Mobile apps are the #1 “owned” channel for ecommerce brands.

It’s a direct line to your customer. It lives on their device, and you own the user experience, the content, the messaging.

The difference with an app vs your website: an app has a built-in delivery layer too, with push notifications.

It’s not 100% control (nothing is). Your customer can still remove the app, unsubscribe from push.

But your app is always going to be the most reliable channel you have, the one where you have the most control. And it also happens to be the channel where your audience is naturally the most engaged and most loyal.

They’re your best customers, on the channel you own the most. That’s why a mobile app is worth having.

What to take away from this:

The lesson isn’t that you should ditch any channel you don’t completely control.

Control and ownership are just a part of the picture. Paid ads are so powerful because you can scale them essentially forever. Selling on Amazon is great because half of the world only ever goes to Amazon when they want to buy something.

The takeaway is that there are many viable channels (including some we didn’t mention here, like communities or direct mail).

Your goal should be to work towards getting people up (or down?) the ladder - meaning closer to the end of the list, to channels where you have more control

• Paid ads → email capture

• SEO → SMS signup

• Email/SMS → app download

It’s a pretty simple formula. And it’s one that’s going to help you build a brand that scales, and lasts, much better than your competition.

A Better Way to Launch a Custom App

In 2026, just about every brand needs a mobile app. And they need a mobile app that actually matches their brand - and doesn’t take a team of six to run.

MobiLoud is the smartest way for mid-market and enterprise brands to launch a mobile app. The app is powered by your existing web stack, which means no rebuilding, no separate codebase to manage.

You get everything you need in your app, including custom app pages and native push notifications, with all the design and content managed through your existing systems.

Brands like Jack & Jones, John Varvatos, Cold Culture and Estee Lauder use this approach to have high-quality, professional apps that drive millions in revenue, with minimal management required.

Want to see how MobiLoud can help you launch a low-overhead, custom mobile app? Get a free preview of your app or DM me on LinkedIn.

Quick Hits

Amazon replaces Rufus with "Alexa for Shopping," now in the main search bar

Amazon rolled out Alexa for Shopping on May 14, replacing the Rufus chatbot that had 300 million users in 2025. The new assistant lives inside the main search bar, not as a sidebar widget. 54% of US consumers now use Amazon for product research, ahead of Google's 51%: whatever you think of LLMs as a discovery channel, it’s already making a major impact within platforms like Amazon and Google.

YouTube wants your CTV remote to be a checkout button

At Brandcast on May 13, YouTube announced "Buy with Google Pay" for connected TV. Two-click checkout using stored Google credentials, no second-screen handoff, no QR code. Costco and Dollar General joined as first-party data partners for Display & Video 360 targeting. AI tools (Gemini, Nano Banana, Veo) generate the creative; algorithms place it; Google Pay closes the loop. Six features announced in one day, all designed to keep the entire purchase path inside Google.

Shopify adds an "Agentic Storefronts" page to the admin

On May 11, Shopify shipped a dedicated dashboard for tracking how your products show up across AI channels. Merchants can now monitor performance in ChatGPT and Copilot, see which queries their products rank for, and get recommendations on cleaning up product data, all from their Shopify backend.

Stripe and Google plug Gemini into the Stripe payments stack

Announced May 13. Merchants on Stripe can now sell products directly inside Google's Gemini app, with checkout completed in-conversation. Stripe also opened its Link consumer wallet to AI agents, letting them execute payments while the owner approves each one. Google joins Meta, Microsoft Copilot, and OpenAI's ChatGPT in Stripe's agentic-commerce stack.

ChatGPT ads expand beyond the US to UK, Japan, Korea, Brazil, and Mexico

OpenAI announced on May 7 that ChatGPT's ad pilot is rolling out to those five markets "in the coming weeks." Ads appear below conversations, only on free and Go subscriptions. The format: 16-character title, 32-character description, favicon, image. CPM starts at $25-$60; CPC starts at $3-$5. Target, Ford, Mrs. Meyer's, and Adobe are among 1,000+ early advertisers. The pilot reportedly crossed $100M in annualized revenue inside six weeks.

That’s all for this week.

If you have any thoughts on what we discussed here, or anything else you’d like to see covered in relation to retention, CX and growth, just hit reply and let me know.

Until next week,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.

This week, I had Nate Okonkwo from Remarkable AI on the Retention Edge podcast, talking AI, personalization, and winning back lapsed customers.

One number that came up in the conversation really stood out:

$0.11 - that's the industry average revenue per email for post-purchase win-back campaigns. Eleven cents per send. For lapsed customers six months out or more.

Now $0.11 isn't zero. Send enough emails and the math still adds up. But it's the kind of number that tells you nobody's really trying that hard.

Nate's brands are pulling $5 to $17 per email on the same audience.

That's a 50x lift. With no discounts attached.

Once you understand why most brands are stuck at 11 cents, the gap actually makes sense.

The gold mine nobody is mining

Pick any DTC brand that's been around for five-plus years. They have a list. Tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of customers who bought from them once and never came back.

Most of those customers didn't have a grand, well thought-out reason for leaving. They’re not making a statement against the brand.

They got busy. Forgot the brand existed. Got distracted by the next thing.

You already paid to acquire every one of them. You already have their email. You already know what they bought, when they bought it, and what they were browsing the day before they checked out.

That sits there. For most brands, indefinitely.

Nate told me about a customer of theirs who'd been in business for years and had hundreds of thousands of one-time buyers. She'd never set up a system to bring any of them back.

It’s not that she didn’t care. Just no one on their team had time, and the tools they used weren’t doing the job.

It's the same story at almost every brand I talk to.

Why most win-back systems are broken

There are three versions of the problem, and most brands are guilty of at least one.

The first: most brands aren't running win-back campaigns at all. No flow. No automation, no tracking. The customer hasn't ordered in a year and the brand has no system that triggers on it. That's the majority.

The second: the flow exists, but it's stale. It was built five, eight, sometimes ten years ago in Klaviyo or whatever email tool was hot at the time. The marketer who set it up has long since left the company. The flow is still pushing products that don't exist on the website anymore. Nobody touches it because nobody owns it. The numbers haven't moved since 2019.

The third: the message is generic. "We miss you. Here's 10% off." Same email, discount, subject line as every other brand on the planet. The email lands in the promotions tab, and the customer doesn’t even see it.

There's a structural reason underneath all three. Legacy email automation tools were built for a human to log in and configure. They assumed every brand would have a CRM lead with the time to maintain a thirty-step lifecycle program.

Look at any DTC brand right now. The marketing team is half the size it was two years ago. They're managing a customer base that's twice as big. They're firefighting Mother's Day campaigns and BFCM planning. Nobody on that team has the time to go back and rebuild the win-back flow that was set up before they joined the company.

So it sits there producing 11 cents per customer.

What high-performing win-back campaigns look like

The blueprint behind a successful win-back system is creating campaigns and emails that look almost nothing like a typical "we miss you" blast.

Take Melinda Maria, a jewelry brand Nate’s company works with. The brand has a lifetime guarantee on every piece, which most customers don't realize when they buy. So the win-back message is something like, "Hey, how's that necklace working out for you?"

That's it. Not even a discount.

What happens is interesting. Most people don't reply. They just go back to the site and buy something else.

Some people do reply, sometimes saying things like, "Honestly, one of the stones fell out and I haven't worn it in months." The brand replaces the piece for free. The customer is shocked a brand actually cares. Then they buy again.

That brand is generating $17 per email - with no discount.

Here’s a deeper breakdown of the mechanics behind the most successful win-back flows:

Real context, not segments. Not starting with "lapsed buyers in the $50-$100 AOV cohort." Starting with order history, browse behavior, support tickets. The richest signal in your CRM is usually the support log, and almost nobody is reading it back into their email program. If a customer asked about sizing two months ago, your win-back email should reference that. If they returned an item, your win-back email should not push them the same item again. Most brands are blasting customers about products they literally just bought.

The next product in the routine. A beauty retailer Remarkable worked with wanted to push haircare, skincare, and bodycare, but not fragrance or makeup. The system routes each customer to the next-best product in their actual routine. Bought a cleanser? Next email recommends a sunscreen. Not a fragrance launch, not the trending makeup collab, not whatever's on sale that week.

No discount. This is the part that breaks people's brains. The math is so much better when the email is genuinely helpful that you don't need a 10% off lever to pull. Most brands have been training their list for years to wait for the discount. Melinda Maria's flow does the opposite, and they're at $17 a send.

The luxury world has been pulling these numbers for decades, doing it by hand. Personal stylists, real follow-ups, "how did you enjoy the piece" outreach from someone in the store. It works. It's never scaled below the luxury tier because no one had the time to do it for 100,000 customers.

That's the actual unlock here. AI doesn't make the email smarter. It makes the human-feeling email scalable.

The math

When you run the numbers, you see how much upside there is to fixing your win-back flows.

A beauty retailer ran a pilot with Nate’s company. The target was $20,000 in revenue from reaching out to 4,000 lapsed customers. They hit $26,000 from 1,500 customers. Less than half the audience, but more than the goal.

Versus a control group, the top campaigns drove a 3x lift.

Across their book, the average is $5 to $17 per email. Industry baseline is $0.11.

Even at the low end of that range, you're at 45x. At $17, you're at 154x.

Round it down to 50x and it's still the highest-leverage change you can make to your retention program this quarter. Probably this year.

What I'd take from this

A few things from the conversation that apply broadly, whether or not you ever talk to Remarkable:

Audit your lifecycle flows by date. When were they last touched? If the answer is "before 2023," the flow isn't optimized. It's archived. Treat it that way.

Pull the support log into the same brain as the email tool. The reason "how's it working out" lands for Melinda Maria is because there's actually a brand on the other side that responds when a stone falls out. Service-led messaging only works if there's actually service behind it.

Drop discounts from the win-back path entirely, then measure. Easiest A/B test in retention. Almost nobody runs it. Genuine, contextual outreach often outperforms a 10% off code, and it doesn't condition your customers to wait for the next sale.

Stop blasting customers about products they literally just bought. Sounds obvious. Open your own brand's automation flows right now and check.

AI can do some amazing things for you in terms of personalization, but the win-back gap isn't really about AI. It's about the fact that most brands have been treating their list like a list when they should've been treating it like people. AI is what makes that scalable at six-figure customer counts.

The brands that get this right will outpace their categories on profit per customer for years.

Check out the full episode with Nate below:

If you want to hear more, or work with him, find him on LinkedIn or head to beremarkable.ai.

A Better Way to Launch a Custom App

In 2026, just about every brand needs a mobile app. And they need a mobile app that actually matches their brand - and doesn’t take a team of six to run.

MobiLoud is the smartest way for mid-market and enterprise brands to launch a mobile app. The app is powered by your existing web stack, which means no rebuilding, no separate codebase to manage.

You get everything you need in your app, including custom app pages and native push notifications, with all the design and content managed through your existing systems.

Brands like Jack & Jones, John Varvatos, Cold Culture and Estee Lauder use this approach to have high-quality, professional apps that drive millions in revenue, with minimal management required.

Want to see how MobiLoud can help you launch a low-overhead, custom mobile app? Get a free preview of your app or DM me on LinkedIn.

Quick Hits

Amazon Says Rufus Users Are Up 115%, Driving $12B in Incremental Sales

Amazon disclosed at its April earnings that monthly active users on Rufus are up 115% YoY, with engagement up 400%. The number that matters: customers using Rufus are 60% more likely to complete a purchase, and the assistant generated nearly $12B in incremental annualized sales in 2025. Whatever you think of agentic commerce, the on-Amazon version is no longer hypothetical.

Retailers Are Rushing to Build AI Shopping Apps. Almost Nobody's Using Them.

Over 500 shopping apps were added to ChatGPT in May alone, including from Target, Walmart, Sephora, Starbucks, Instacart, and Uber. The catch, per multiple analysts in the piece: there's no visible success story yet. Adoption and conversion are reportedly low, and ChatGPT's own Instant Checkout was quietly retired after failing to drive sales. Most of the rush feels like metaverse-cycle reflex - launch because the technology is trendy, not because the use case is solved.

Etsy Launches Inside ChatGPT (Take Two)

Etsy rolled out a native ChatGPT app this week. Tag @Etsy in a prompt ("help me find a Mother's Day gift under $100 for my mom who loves gardening") and it surfaces listings from Etsy's 100M-item catalog. This is Etsy's second swing at ChatGPT after participating in the now-retired Instant Checkout. Other retailers in the same wave: Angi, SeatGeek, Tubi, Wix.

OpenAI Opens Its Ads Manager to All US Advertisers

OpenAI dropped the $50K minimum on its self-serve ads manager last week. SMBs, startups, and global brands can now buy ChatGPT ads directly. CPA bidding and third-party measurement are "in motion" but unscheduled, and the only ad format right now is a favicon with text. Worth watching, not worth shifting budget yet, but another reminder of how much is being built on top of a platform that didn't exist as an ad channel six months ago.

Amazon Supply Chain Services Goes Public (FBA for the Rest of Your Business)

Amazon opened up its freight, distribution, fulfillment, and parcel network to any business, not just Amazon sellers. P&G, 3M, Lands' End, and American Eagle are early customers. Amazon is positioning this the way it positioned AWS: decades of internal infrastructure exposed as a service. If it works, it puts every 3PL in the country in the same position the data center business was in 15 years ago. And it gives DTC brands a direct route to Amazon-grade logistics without ever touching the marketplace.

Recharge Acquires Skio for $105M, Consolidating Shopify Subscriptions

Recharge announced the acquisition of Skio in April. Together the two platforms power 20,000+ brands and process around $20B in annual GMV, the bulk of Shopify's subscription volume. Both will keep operating independently for now, with the combined roadmap rolling out over the coming months. The two biggest subscription stacks on Shopify are now under one roof, which says something about where the value is in this market: not in acquiring the next first-time buyer, but in building the infrastructure that makes the second, fifth, and twentieth purchase happen on autopilot.

That’s all for this week.

If you have any thoughts on what we discussed here, or anything else you’d like to see covered in relation to retention, CX and growth, just hit reply and let me know.

Until next week,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.

Last four weeks, we’ve been covering the impact of the most underutilized marketing channel in ecommerce: push notifications.

This week, to wrap up the series, I’m going to share a little about what makes push such a versatile channel - how you get crazy value even from notifications that aren’t selling anything.

The three types of push notifications

Every push you send falls into one of three buckets:

1. CX notifications (event-driven). Order updates, shipping notifications - functional notifications that don’t drive revenue, but contribute to a better customer experience.

2. Promotional notifications. Sales, new product drops. The kind built for conversions.

3. “Awareness” notifications. This is is where push is most underutilized, and where you probably don’t realize the true value of the channel.

Push notifications that don’t sell anything

Push is a great revenue channel. Abandoned cart notifications alone can add six figures in new revenue per month (we covered that last week).

It's also one of the best channels for CX & lifecycle messaging. The ability to automate pushes based on key triggers, and reach customers instantly with updates, is unparalleled.

But you don’t need to reserve push for high-value moments.

Push has zero marginal cost. The intrusiveness factor is relatively low. And you’re not relying on an algorithm for reach.

Which means you can use it to do something other channels can't really afford to do: stay top of mind for the sake of staying top of mind.

Weekly tips, notes, check-ins, motivational messages. Things that align with your brand’s values and voice, and keep you in their headspace.

Of course, being able to do this without turning off subscribers depends on the kind of brand you have, the kind of audience you have, and getting the cadence right. Miss the mark, while constantly spamming app users, you can lose subscribers/downloads.

But hit the sweet spot, and you’ve got something with underrated value:

A display ad on your customer's phone.

A billboard on the best real estate in ecommerce

Here's the way I think about it.

How much would you pay for a billboard your customer drives past every morning on the way to work?

A real one. On a real highway. Targeted to your ICP. You'd pay a lot. Brands do pay a lot, all the time, for far less targeted impressions than that.

Now what about a billboard that doesn't sit on a highway, but on the most precious possession your customer owns?

That’s what a push notification is. It’s an impression, an imprint in your customer’s mind. Even if it doesn’t convert, even if it’s not meant to convert, it builds and maintains awareness in a way that businesses pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to Google for.

Why you have an app in the first place

The constant, always-on connection is why you have push - and an app - in the first place.

You get a direct line to your best customers. You can use that connection to sell to them (the easiest customers to sell to, mind you), or just to maintain the relationship.

Even if you can’t prove an incremental revenue boost from your app/push, just keeping your top customers from slipping away is worth the cost of having it.

Treat it not just as a revenue channel, but a presence channel.

Your goal is to be always present in front of your customers. If you do that, and if your buyers know you’ll follow through with a good product and good value when they do buy, you’ll have a stronger and more resilient business than 95% of ecommerce brands today.

The compounding part

Mobile apps and push together are the channel most seven-figure DTC brands haven't really built yet. And it's a compounding channel.

The more app installs, the stronger both channels get. The more people you have a direct connection with, the more you can reach for free with push notifications.

It becomes a stronger and stronger asset (unlike paid channels where you’re on a constant treadmill).

Your app and push list becomes a competitive advantage for BFCM, for when CPMs go vertical and your paid margin evaporates for a week, when new tariffs come in and break your unit economics, when Google or ChatGPT decides to shake things up.

Brands with a real direct channel to their best customers, one they own end-to-end, weather those moments differently.

Once you’ve scaled to around $1M annually, you need to start thinking seriously about adding an app and push to your channel mix, and turning your initial traction into compounding (and sustainable) growth.

If you’re at $5M, you need an app and push notifications already.

The brands that understand this are those with the real retention edge.

The Smarter Way to Launch An App

If you don’t have an app yet, you’re likely closer than you think.

As long as you have a fast, mobile-friendly website, the bulk of your work is already done. You just need to create a native layer on top of that.

MobiLoud makes that simple. MobiLoud turns your existing website into custom iOS and Android apps, with push notifications, native UI, an app-exclusive experiences.

You get a custom app that you control through your web platform, whether that’s Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, or a custom platform. A new channel, no new codebase to maintain.

If this series convinced you that push should be in your retention stack, there's no faster way to get there.

Want to learn more? Get a free preview of your app or DM me on LinkedIn.

Quick Hits

Home Depot Is Relaunching Its Mobile App, Calls It The "Front Door" To The Brand

At Shoptalk last week, Home Depot's EVP of customer experience and online, Jordan Broggi, confirmed a refreshed app coming later this year. Their ecommerce business is now doing $25 billion a year, and they're talking about the app as the connective tissue between site, store, and customer (his exact phrase: "the front door to the Home Depot").

eMarketer: US AI-Platform Ecommerce Will Hit $20B in 2026, $144B by 2029

eMarketer's new forecast pegs US ecommerce sales running through general-purpose AI platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) at over $20B this year, hitting $144B by 2029. That's a 7x climb in three years for a channel that didn't exist as a distribution layer eighteen months ago.

Amazon's "Hear the Highlights" Now Talks Back

Amazon rolled out "Join the chat" on April 28, an interactive layer on top of its AI-generated audio product summaries. Customers can interrupt the AI host mid-summary, ask a question by text or voice, and get a real-time answer pulled from product details and reviews. It's another step toward shopping inside a conversation rather than on a product page.

Whatnot Adds Shopify Plug-In As Live Shopping Approaches $20B in US

Live shopping platform Whatnot launched a direct Shopify integration this week, syncing products, inventory, and orders. Beta merchants like Glow Luxury and FashioNica have already pushed over $10M through it. Users spend an average of 95 minutes a day in the app, and eMarketer expects total US livestream retail to approach $20B this year.

WooCommerce + YouTube Shopping Goes Live, 2.7B Shoppers Within Reach

Google for WooCommerce 3.6 shipped on April 22, letting Woo merchants tag products in YouTube videos and Shorts directly from their catalog. The pitch: 2.7 billion YouTube shoppers, automated AI ad creative across Google's stack, one feed powering Shopping, Performance Max, and YouTube.

AI Is Coming For Resale Too: Digital Closets, Agent-Driven Sourcing, ThredUp Says The Channel "Isn't Mature Yet"

At the inaugural ReCon resale conference, executives from McKinsey, ThredUp, and Tata Bazaar mapped how AI is reshaping resale. The headline from ThredUp's James Reinhart: in-chatbot purchases are "just not mature enough as a shopping channel," but it's a matter of time. Read alongside the eMarketer hit above. The agent layer is being built across every adjacent vertical right now. The brands that come out of this with their margin intact are the ones with a direct retention engine running in parallel.

That’s all for now.

If you have any thoughts on what we discussed here, or anything else you’d like to see covered in relation to retention, CX and growth, just hit reply and let me know.

Until next week,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.

Today’s Retention Edge is about the #1 way mobile apps drive net-new revenue.

It’s a clear answer to the age-old question when you add a new channel - how much of this is really incremental?

It’s also one of the top reasons to launch a mobile app, and a solution to one of the biggest revenue leaks for ecommerce brands.

In this issue we’re going to break down push notifications for abandoned carts - the highest-impact automation you can set up, and the one campaign that could add six figures in new revenue to your bottom line.

The biggest revenue leak in ecom

Around 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout. Those are overall numbers - on mobile it’s over 85%.

This is a big deal. It means, on mobile, out of every 10 customers who add a product to their cart, fewer than 2 go through with their checkout.

That represents a massive opportunity. These are customers who have explicitly shared what they’re interested in and shown a sign of intent. There’s just something blocking them from following through and paying you.

It’s much easier to push these people over the line, compared to going out and selling to fresh customers.

Especially when you have a secret weapon at your disposal.

Why push is different for cart recovery

The idea of following up with abandoned carts is not new.

What is different, however, is the impact of push.

Email and SMS are solid ways to recover carts. They have broad reach, and deliver a decent ROI.

They do depend on the customer being subscribed to that channel, and having the customer logged in and their activity attributed to their profile, though.

It’s not always the most reliable.

On top of that, emails may not be seen, or at least, not right away. Your abandoned cart email might end up in the promotions folder, which the customer might check only once a day, or every two or three days.

SMS costs per send, which isn’t a huge deal, but is worth noting.

Push offers some real juice compared to these channels.

• A push notification arrives instantly, while intent is still high

• It shows up on the lock screen (essentially already “open”)

• The abandoned cart triggers for every app shopper (no login issues or attribution problems; if they have push turned on, they’ll receive the notification)

• There’s zero cost per send

• The notification sends them back to their cart in one tap

It’s direct, it’s instant, it’s low-friction. It’s the perfect way to recover abandoned carts.

The impact of an abandoned cart push notification

Abandoned carts happen for a lot of reasons. But one of the most common (and the one that represents money left on the table) is that the customer got distracted.

They forgot to finish their purchase, they got dragged away, something came up. For whatever reason, they didn’t follow through. But it wasn’t because of a major issue with the product.

These are the easiest sales to recover. Because all you need to do is send a quick reminder.

But the important part: getting through to the customer while intent’s still high.

You’ve got to hit them when they’re still excited. When the FOMO’s still running.

An “Are you still interested” or “Get it quick before it’s gone” doesn’t hit the same when it’s a three-day old email.

Push lands right away. The notification gets seen. And it makes it easy for the customer to come back.

That’s really all you need to bring back a ton of customers who might otherwise have drifted away.

The proof

I’ve seen a real impact here from brands we’ve worked with on setting up abandoned cart push.

We broke down some of them in our Ecommerce Mobile App Benchmark Report.

Multiple brands in our report were driving tens of thousands in revenue per month from abandoned carts.

One brand (Pharmazone) gets 22% conversion rates from their abandoned cart notifications (that’s nearly 1 in 4 notifications leading to a sale).

But the best, and this was crazy, we had one brand that was getting over $200,000 in revenue in a 30-day period, just from abandoned carts.

Time and time again, this channel just works. The impact is often enough, on its own, to more than justify the cost of building and running an app in the first place.

The blueprint for recovering lost revenue on autopilot

Like we explored last week, one of the top benefits of push notifications (and apps in general), is that the best sequences are automated.

They take little work to set up, and very little to manage. They just run in the background, adding to your bottom line.

Abandoned cart notifications are the best example of this.

You set up your notifications. You could do a simple three-message sequence:

• Message 1 (5-15 minutes): gentle reminder (”Your cart is waiting for you. Tap to finish your checkout”)

• Message 2 (3-6 hours): FOMO nudge (”Time’s running out! Check out before your items are gone!”)

• Message 3 (24 hours): The sweetener - offer a small incentive to finish the purchase (”Still interested? Take 10% off, on us”)

It’s so simple, yet it’s one of the highest-impact automations there is.

The notification deep links to the cart page in your app, so all it takes is a couple of taps and the customer can come back to finish their purchase.

It’s that easy. And it works because it’s easy.

Your net-new revenue driver

One more important thing to realize about abandoned cart notifications is that these are net-new sales.

If the channel didn’t exist, the customer would have drifted away.

It’s an answer to the incrementality debate for mobile apps. This channel doesn’t exist without a mobile app. So the revenue you get from abandoned cart push notifications is clear, net-new revenue.

For some brands, that means $200,000+ per month in revenue that didn’t exist before.

It’s not cannibalizing other channels, or coming with $$$ in ad spend attached, or taking a new team to run.

It just works on autopilot.

And it makes for the most compelling reason to launch a mobile app.

The Smarter Way to Launch An App

You don’t need six figures too build an app anymore. MobiLoud turns your existing site into a mobile app, in 30 days - minimal lift with a lower cost than custom apps built from scratch. It’s a much simpler way to get a unique, custom app that looks and feels just like your brand.

You get push as a new revenue channel, and an app that sits on your customer’s home screen, fully synced with your site, with everything done for you, by the MobiLoud team.

This could be the best thing you do this year to scale your brand.

Go to our site to get a free preview of your app or DM me on LinkedIn to learn more about how it works.

Quick Hits

Klaviyo's Co-CEOs Say Agentic Commerce Could Make Most Shopping Redundant

Klaviyo's co-CEOs told Diginomica this week that as agents take over the job of finding and evaluating products, the performance-marketing game as we know it changes. Their pitch: the brands that survive will be the ones with direct relationships to their customers, not the ones best at bidding against AI.

David's Bridal Plugs Directly into ChatGPT and Copilot

David's Bridal rolled out AI shopping integrations on Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI's ChatGPT on April 17, letting users browse and buy without visiting the website. It's a decisive "we'd rather be on the AI shelf than off it" move.

Beauty Giants Race to Own the AI Shopping Moment

PYMNTS reports that L'Oreal, Estée Lauder, and Sephora are all investing hard in being the default answer when a customer asks an AI which foundation to buy. Beauty is a category where discovery matters and algorithms can make or break you. It's a preview of what's coming for the rest of DTC, category by category. If you're not actively shaping how AI describes your brand, someone else is.

Mondelez Hires a Global Lead for "Emerging Commerce Platforms"

Mondelez (Oreo, Cadbury, Ritz) opened a role this week specifically to own agentic commerce strategy. When a CPG giant creates a new leadership seat to tackle something, the trend is no longer theoretical. Most DTC brands won't hire for this, but they should at least be thinking about who on the team owns the answer to "how do we show up inside AI shopping agents."

That’s all for now.

If you have any thoughts on what we discussed here, or anything else (in general) you’d like me to cover related to retention, CX and growth, just hit reply and let me know.

Until next week,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve introduced and broken down the case for push notifications in your marketing stack.

Zero per-send cost, instant delivery, almost guaranteed visibility, no filtering by a third party. There are plenty of huge benefits this channel brings to the table.

But the best one, in my mind?

Effort. Or, more accurately, how little effort push notifications need.

We’re all swamped. Every business I know of is pushing productivity to the limits, and few really have the resources to take on new projects.

But the beauty of push notifications is that the most effective notifications you send are mostly automated ones. You set them up, turn them on, then barely have to touch them again.

It’s what makes push one of the highest-ROI channels for ecommerce.

You don’t need another channel to babysit

It’s a common thing - and I’ve written about this before.

We’re always excited by the flashy new toy, the new channel that promises to 10x our business.

But for most teams, the last thing you need is another channel sapping focus away from other areas.

Push is the opposite. There’s a small amount of setup*, but after that, most of your push notifications are going to run on autopilot.

You’re adding value, not work. Most new channels or big ideas are the opposite. A lot of work, for the possibility of value.

This channel largely runs itself. That’s what makes the ROI such a no-brainer.

*(of course there’s also the upfront cost/effort of building your app - but if you do it the right way, this is negligible as well).

How long does it take to write a push notification?

You could get a ROI, easy, with only automated push notifications (like the examples I’ll share below).

But you’ll probably send some manual push campaigns as well. Promos, new product launches, that kind of thing.

And even these notifications are extremely low-effort, high-return.

I catalogued over 250 push notifications from 43 mobile apps over the course of 1-3 weeks here.

The examples show you how easy it is to write and send push notifications.

You’re writing around 10 words, give or take. Not a 300 word email.

No templates, no design.

No “Sorry! We forgot to add the link in the last email” followup to write.

It does take a little copywriting ability to do it right, and the notifications need to fit your brand’s voice. But this is honestly one of the things that AI is stupid good at doing.

It also requires good segmentation and data, to ensure the notifications feel personalized and go to the right people - but again, that’s something you do once upfront, not something you have to spend hours configuring for each campaign.

Automated push notifications drive more revenue

Here’s where it gets good (ok it was already good. But it’s getting good-er).

Automated marketing messages actually outperform campaign sends when it comes to open rate, conversion rate, revenue, all of that good stuff.

Omnisend did a report a while back that showed the difference:

Their data covers just web push - but we’ve seen the same pattern from our customers sending native app push notifications.

Automated push notifications perform better because they’re usually more personalized and relevant.

They’re triggered by a certain event - cart action, milestone, app activity, a product coming back in stock.

That means they arrive with context, relevance built-in, which typically means better results.

What kid of push notifications can you automate?

Here are the core push automations you’ll set up:

1. Abandoned cart

Push is so powerful for abandoned carts. It’s exactly what you need to re-capture sales when a customer forgot to finish their purchase. Fast, high-visibility, low friction.

Automated push recovery messages are free to send, land on the lock screen instantly, and one tap takes the customer back to the cart. We see some brands recovering six figures a month from this single automation.

2. Welcome notification

Someone just installed your app and turned on notifications. The first notification here is more important than you think.

It’s a great opportunity to make a sale - Omnisend’s data shows that welcome automations deliver a click-to-conversion rate of 52.98%, and 3x higher AOV than other automations.

And more than that, the welcome notification sets the tone, sets the expectation of what’s to come. It’s crucial for app retention (keeping your user active, keeping the app downloaded on their phone). So aside from the direct revenue, the indirect value (stronger engagement and retention down the line) might make this your most important notification.

3. Back in stock notifications

"Good news! The Everyday Tote you were eyeing is back in stock."

This is money sitting on the table. Someone wanted to buy. The product wasn't available. Now it is.

The notification writes itself. And it converts at an absurdly high rate because the intent was already there.

4. Re-engagement

Your customer hasn't opened the app in 30-60 days - you send an automated nudge: "We miss you. Here's what's new since your last visit."

The cost of sending this is zero. The cost of losing that customer forever is real. Even a small percentage of re-engaged lapsed users is found money.

5. Shipping and delivery updates

"Your order shipped! Tap to track." "Out for delivery today."

These aren't revenue-generating in the direct sense. But they're building trust, reducing "where's my order" support tickets, and keeping the customer engaged during the post-purchase window. Customers expect these notifications. Not sending them is a missed opportunity.

6. Loyalty and rewards

"You just earned 500 points on your last order. You're 200 points from your next reward."

Most loyalty programs underperform, largely because they’re just not visible enough. You’re not giving customers the dopamine hit of earning points.

Push is a great amplifier - and it works for the exact customers who respond best to your loyalty program (app users).

Driving revenue on autopilot

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the economics of push notifications.

It’s just hard to argue about it from a ROI perspective - zero per-send cost, minimal labor and overhead.

A lot of things get sold as running on autopilot (especially now, with AI - the latest tool that’s going to run your CX or supplier negotiations or HR on autopilot).

But push actually does run on autopilot.

80% of the value you get is from systems that you set up once and basically forget.

Right now, with every business trying to be more efficient and more focused, that’s a channel that’s too good to ignore.

The Smarter Way to Launch An App

You don’t need six figures too build an app anymore. MobiLoud turns your existing site into a mobile app, in 30 days, with minimal lift.

The best part? It takes very little ongoing work to manage, since your website and app are fully in sync.

You get the ROI of push notifications, amplified because the overhead of your app is so much less.

If you've been thinking about an app but haven't pulled the trigger, this series might give you the push (pun intended) you need.

Go to our site to get a free preview of your app or DM me on LinkedIn to learn more about how it works.

Quick Hits

Shopify's Agentic Storefronts Are Live, But the Traffic Isn't (Yet)

Shopify quietly turned on AI-powered shopping for millions of merchants through ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Google AI Mode - but early data shows traffic and conversions are still a trickle. Keep this in mind when you’re going all-in on AI optimization and agentic commerce - shoppers habits don’t change so quickly.

AI Traffic to US Retailers Rose 393% in Q1, and It's Converting Better

Adobe data released this week shows AI traffic to US retail sites was up 393% in Q1 and converting 42% better than non-AI traffic in March. A year ago, AI traffic converted 38% worse than regular visitors. That flip happened in twelve months - clear indication of the growing trust in AI discovery channels (even if it’s not all the way there yet).

Allbirds Pivots from Shoes to AI Data Centers

Allbirds sold its shoe business for $39M, raised $50M in convertible notes, and announced plans to rename itself "NewBird AI" and pivot into AI compute. It’s one of the most shocking rebrands we’ve seen in a while.

CBP Tariff Refund Portal Opens April 20 - $127B in Refunds Coming

Customs and Border Protection launches its tariff refund system on April 20 at 8 a.m. EDT, with an estimated $127 billion in IEEPA-era refunds to process. Most payouts take 60-90 days and are electronic only. If you paid these tariffs as an importer, there's real working capital coming back. Worth getting your broker on it day one.

That’s all for now.

If you have any thoughts on what we discussed here, or anything else (in general) you’d like me to cover related to retention, CX and growth, just hit reply and let me know.

Until next week,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.

If you're not thinking about how AI is changing the way people find and buy products, you're already behind.

I’m guessing that’s not a problem, though.

AI, LLM SEO and all the other fun acronyms and buzzwords are everywhere. But these concepts are still very poorly understood.

This week I sat down with Lauren Livak Gilbert, who leads the Digital Shelf Institute, a community of over 10,000 commerce leaders across brands and retailers. She also hosts Unpacking the Digital Shelf, and she's spent the last year deep in conversations with brands trying to figure out what AI actually means for their business.

We had a deep discussion into agentic commerce, the new “digital shelf”, and what you need to do to win in the age of AI.

Here are some of the top takeaways from the episode.

The digital shelf just got a lot smaller

Here's a number that should make every brand operator uncomfortable: when someone searches for a product on ChatGPT, they see eight options.

Eight. Not hundreds. Not thousands. Eight.

On Amazon, you'd get hundreds of thousands of results for something like "gluten free travel snacks." On the digital shelf, maybe 100,000. An infinite scroll of possibilities.

On an LLM? You need to be one of eight.

Lauren put it bluntly: the consideration set is shrinking dramatically. And Google is moving in the same direction with AI summaries at the top of search results. Even if your customer never opens ChatGPT, they're already getting AI-curated answers.

This isn't coming. It's here.

Be found, be relevant, be talked about

Lauren breaks AEO (answer engine optimization) into three buckets, and it's the clearest framework I've heard on this.

1. Be found. Make sure your site is crawlable. Use HTML, not JavaScript. Don't block LLM crawlers. This is the bare minimum and a surprising number of brands are failing at it.

2. Be relevant. Answer the questions your customers are actually asking, in the language they use. Not your internal marketing language. If people search "gluten free" and your content says "wheat free," you might not show up. LLMs aren't always great at inference.

3. Be talked about. LLMs use citations as a signal of authority. The more your brand is mentioned across the web, the more likely you are to surface in AI answers. This is where PR and corporate comms become a direct lever for product discovery.

The good news? It’s not a massive overhaul. Your job is to keep doing the fundamentals, and doing some slight tweaks to make your content more machine readable.

The bad news? If you haven't started, your competitors probably have.

True agentic commerce is far away

There's a lot of hype around AI agents buying products on your behalf. Websites are becoming obsolete, you’re not selling to humans anymore, et cetera et cetera.

But that’s one of the things about the AI hype wave that causes so much confusion. There are many different levels to it.

People may already be searching in LLMs for things to buy, but “true” agentic commerce - people using agents to buy - is still a long way off.

ChatGPT already pulled back from instant checkout. Turns out, building a commerce engine is really hard. Companies like Shopify have spent years figuring it out, and OpenAI realized they can't just bolt it on.

The bigger barrier is trust. Most people are still doing research in an LLM and then going to the retailer they already know to buy. They want to use their loyalty program. They want to pick the seller.

The practical takeaway: stop worrying about agents buying things and start worrying about agents recommending things. That's the shift that's already happening.

AI is a threat if you refuse to see it as an opportunity

Lauren was on a debate panel at Shop Talk on this exact question. Her answer was perfect: "It's a threat if you don't accept it as an opportunity."

She shared a story that stuck with me.

Someone came up to her after the panel and said people at their company were boycotting AI because they didn't want to lose their jobs. Lauren's response: they're going to lose their jobs anyway because they can't keep up with someone who is using it.

I feel this in our world too. The developers and teams who've embraced these tools in the last few months are operating at a completely different level. It's not just about speed. It's about the kind of work you can take on. Data analysis, system integrations, reports that give you visibility you never had before.

But Lauren made an important point: you still have to know the fundamentals. She mentioned an article about Claude going down and developers not knowing what to do. The tool is a superpower, but it's not a substitute for understanding the work.

Large organizations don't change overnight. Start now. Upskill your team. Test and learn. Because if your people are still pretending this isn't happening, that's a leadership problem, not a technology problem.

Personalization is the retention play, but your data isn't ready

The cost to acquire a new customer has gone up 222%. Acquisition is brutal, and it’s now essential (if it wasn’t already) to have an effective retention system, marketing and generating value from your existing customers.

With retention channels like email, SMS, and push: it's all about value and intentionality. People don't want to get blasted. They want relevant, useful communication from brands they care about.

The personalization opportunity is massive. Lauren's gluten-free example was great: "I would love a world where I don't get shown non-gluten-free products. I'm not going to buy them." Same for her dog: "Don't show me small toys. I only want to see extra large."

But here's the catch. Most brands can't do this because their data is disconnected across systems. They can't map the customer journey because their CRM doesn't talk to their POS doesn't talk to their email platform.

Her advice: get brilliant at the basics first. Get your data connected. Get your taxonomy clean. Because AI will amplify whatever you already have. If your data is messy, AI just makes the mess bigger, faster.

The thread through all of this: the brands that win are the ones doing the boring work right now.

Clean data, crawlable sites, intentional communication, AI-literate teams. None of it is glamorous. All of it compounds.

Optimizing your brand for AI search is essential. It’s clear by now that it’s not going away, it’s not a flash in the pan.

But the fundamentals of selling remain largely the same.

You can catch the full episode on YouTube or Spotify. Wherever you watch or listen, be sure to like, comment, share if you found it useful.

I’ll back later this week with more to help you grow & scale your brand the right way.

— Pietro

PS - Want to see what your store would look like as a mobile app? Get a free preview here, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn.

Last week I introduced push notifications as one of the best channels in ecommerce, simply from an economics standpoint: push is one of the cheapest, highest-visibility channels you have access to. If you missed it, read it here.

This week, I want to zoom out.

Because push doesn't exist in a vacuum. You’re doing email, you’re doing SMS. These are direct, high-ROI retention channels.

And there’s two common, and largely off-base, takes regarding push and how it sits in your retention stack.

1. I have email and SMS already. Push notifications aren’t giving me anything I don’t already have.

2. Is push supposed to replace email and SMS in my stack?

It’s similar to the case for mobile apps.

A mobile app isn’t meant to replace your website. It’s also not just covering ground your website already covers. It’s a more accessible and convenient channel for the top 10-20% of your customers.

Push is similar. It’s a direct line to your best customers. And it’s a complement to email and SMS, not a replacement.

Here’s the full breakdown of how you can use these channels together to built a bulletproof retention stack.

Three channels, three jobs

Here's the simplest way to frame it:

Email is your workhorse. It carries the heaviest load, has the widest reach. It’s flexible, low-cost, and there’s basically no risk of overusing it. Every brand should be using email.

SMS is your conversion trigger. It's urgent, it's immediate, and it works best when you need action now. It’s also expensive (1-5 cents per message adds up fast), and it's intimate enough that overuse will get you unsubscribed in a hurry.

Push is your always-on presence. It sits between the two. More visible than email, less intrusive than SMS. Zero cost per send. There’s less reach, because you’re only getting in front of app user. But because it reaches your app users (your most engaged segment), it's consistently talking to the people most likely to buy again.

Each channel fills a role. Remove one and you've got a gap.

How they actually play together

These three channels aren’t siloed channels, either. You can (and should - it’s simple enough, particularly when you can use Klaviyo for all three) to use email, SMS and push together in the same campaigns.

Let’s walk through a few scenarios.

Scenario 1: New product drop

• Email (Day -3): Teaser campaign to your full list. "Something's coming Thursday." Build anticipation.

• SMS (Day 0, morning): "It's live. Early access for VIPs. Link here." Drive immediate traffic from your highest-intent SMS subscribers.

• Push (Day 0, afternoon): Notification to app users. "The new collection just dropped. Tap to shop." Catches anyone who missed the email or SMS, plus gives your app users their own moment.

• Push (Day 2): Follow-up. "Selling fast. Your favorites are still in stock." Zero cost, keeps the momentum going.

No single channel could do all of that. Email builds the anticipation. SMS creates the urgency. Push sustains the visibility.

Scenario 2: Abandoned cart

• Push (15 min): "You left something behind. Tap to finish checkout." Immediate, free, hits the lock screen.

• Email (1 hour): Full cart recovery email with product images, reviews, the whole treatment.

• SMS (6 hours): "Still thinking about it? Here's free shipping." Reserved for higher-value carts where the SMS cost is justified.

• Push (24 hours): "Last chance, your cart expires tomorrow."

The push is doing the first and last touch. It's instant, it's free, and it bookends the recovery sequence. Email does the heavy lifting in the middle. SMS is the surgical strike for high-value opportunities.

Scenario 3: Staying top of mind (between purchases)

This is where push really earns its keep.

Your emails go out regularly, but don’t always get seen.

Your SMS, maybe once a week at most (unless you want unsubscribes).

But push? You can send 3-5 notifications a week without burning out your audience. Quick tips. "Back in stock" alerts. Content your customers might care about. New arrivals. Community moments. And all of them get seen.

It's not that any single notification is going to change the game. It's the cumulative effect of your brand showing up consistently on their phone, in a space where the only other things competing for attention are texts from friends and app notifications they actually use.

Email can't do that at that frequency without fatigue. SMS definitely can't. Push can.

The audience layer

The biggest part? Each channel reaches a different slice of your audience.

• Email: Broadest reach. You can get in front of anyone who gave you their email.

• SMS: Narrower. People who opted in to texts (smaller list, higher intent).

• Push: Narrowest, but most engaged. These are people who installed your app. They've made the biggest commitment.

Some customers respond better to email. Some live in their SMS inbox. Some are app-first.

If you're only using one or two channels, you're systematically missing the customers who prefer the channel you're not using. And you're not giving your best customers (app users) the channel that reaches them most effectively.

The takeaway

The biggest takeaway, above everything: you should be investing more in retention.

Acquisition is expensive, and it’s a treadmill. It only keeps going as long as you keep paying, and as long as the cost stays manageable.

Retention channels like email, SMS and push are so much more profitable, more sustainable.

And your current retention stack probably has room to grow.

Brands that use email, SMS and push together, in a smart way, have a leg up over their competitors. They’re getting more repeat customers, they’re making more profit, and they’re able to reinvest that profit to put more money into acquisition.

Your retention stack is the thing that makes everything else run smoothly.

And the best part? A lot of what you do with push is automated.

Next week I’ll explain why the highest-performing push notifications you'll ever send are the ones you set up once and never touch again.

The Smarter Way to Launch An App

You don’t need six figures too build an app anymore. MobiLoud turns your existing site into a mobile app, in 30 days, with minimal lift.

The best part? It takes very little ongoing work to manage, since your website and app are fully in sync.

You get the ROI of push notifications, amplified because the overhead of your app is so much less.

If you've been thinking about an app but haven't pulled the trigger, this series might give you the push (pun intended) you need.

Go to our site to get a free preview of your app or DM me on LinkedIn to learn more about how it works.

On the Pod

After a couple of weeks off, we’re back with a new episode of the Retention Edge podcast.

On this episode I was joined by Lauren Livak Gilbert, Executive Director of the Digital Shelf Institute, for a deep dive into AI commerce.

This is probably the most important topic right now for any online brand. I had a blast talking about how consumer habits are changing, and what to do about it.

Check it out below: (also make sure to go ahead and subscribe to our new channel, dedicated to podcast episodes & clips)

Quick Hits

Shopify Opens Native B2B Features to All Paid Plans

As of April 2, Shopify merchants on Basic, Grow, and Advanced plans can now access native B2B features at no extra cost: company profiles, up to three custom catalogs, volume pricing, payment terms, and ACH payments. Previously this was Plus-only territory. If you're already getting wholesale inquiries, this removes one of the bigger barriers to serving them through your existing Shopify setup. Worth exploring as a revenue diversification play.

EU Ends De Minimis Exemption Starting July 2026

Starting July 1, the EU will impose a fixed customs duty on every low-value ecommerce parcel from outside the bloc, ending the duty-free treatment for items under €150. Fashion, beauty, accessories, and most consumer goods are directly affected. If you're a DTC brand selling cross-border into Europe, landed costs just went up. Another reason to focus on repeat customers and higher AOV, not just volume.

Klaviyo Makes RCS Messaging Generally Available

Klaviyo rolled out RCS (Rich Communication Services) for all users, in partnership with Google. RCS lets you send branded, interactive messages with carousels, buttons, and rich media, all inside your customer's native texting app. It auto-falls back to SMS when RCS isn't supported. POPFLEX reported 23% higher revenue and 136% higher conversion rates with RCS compared to standard SMS. If you're already running SMS through Klaviyo, this is essentially a free upgrade to a more engaging format. Worth turning on.

Klaviyo's Spring 2026 Updates Go All-In on Multichannel

Beyond RCS, Klaviyo's Q1 updates are a clear signal of where retention marketing is heading. Composer, their new AI campaign builder, generates complete campaigns (subject lines, copy, audience, send logic) from a simple prompt. Next Best Product recommendations now work across SMS, push, and WhatsApp, not just email. Personalized Send Time optimization is live, and a new Audience Optimization feature automatically excludes profiles likely to unsubscribe before you hit send. The trend is obvious: one platform, every channel, all personalized.

Meta Ad Costs Keep Climbing in 2026

Meta's Q1 2025 CPMs hit $10.88, up 19.2% year-over-year, and the trend hasn't slowed. Ad costs jumped 14% against only a 6% increase in impressions. Cost per lead is up 21%. If you're funding growth primarily through paid acquisition, the math gets worse every quarter. It's another argument for investing more in the channels that don't charge you per impression: email, SMS, and push.

That’s all for now.

If you have any thoughts on what we discussed here, or anything else (in general) you’d like me to cover related to retention, CX and growth, just hit reply and let me know.

Until next week,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.

Today I’m going to start a five-part series on the most underused channel in ecommerce.

Native push notifications are underused for a reason - you need a mobile app to send them.

That’s a much larger bottleneck than collecting an email address or a phone number for SMS, or sending direct mail to someone’s address (which you already have, if they’re a customer).

But many still don’t realize how strong a channel push can be. And how it’s basically worth the cost, on its own, of building and launching an app.

(Of course, that depends on the cost. If you’re spending $150K on an app, perhaps not. But if you’re doing it a more efficient way, spending a few thousand at most, it’s a completely different story.

Here’s what David Cost, the VP of Ecommerce at Rainbow Shops (a billion-dollar retail & ecommerce brand), told us a while back:

The fact that other channels are getting harder is part of it. You’ve probably noticed email open rates declining. SMS can get expensive (as well as annoying), and there are mounting regulatory concerns.

But these are still strong channels, with a great ROI.

Push is not about replacing email and SMS. It’s about adding to these channels.

It’s about getting more sales from high-margin, low-lift sources, which will make a small but significant shift to your overall business economics.

And push is the ideal channel for this.

What makes push different

On a message-for-message basis, push is the highest-ROI channel you have.

A large reason why is that there’s no per-message cost. The cost structure is like email: you pay a service based on the # of subscribers you have, and then you’re basically free to message them as much as you like.

Yet the visibility and engagement is like SMS. Perhaps even better. You land on the lock screen, instantly, with messages with your brand’s logo attached, and that are almost guaranteed to be seen.

You’re not getting mixed in with other texts, like SMS. Your notifications stand on their own.

(Again, SMS has its own benefits. The reach is much wider. But the point is that in a vacuum, a push notification is usually a more effective way to reach someone).

Cost-wise, it’s realistically less than email, because email comes with more creative and labor lift. Copywriting, design, scheduling. There’s much less work with push - it’s short, snappy, and the kind of writing that AI is actually good at.

And the limitation of push - the fact that the customer needs your app installed - is actually a benefit in a way.

The audience quality is different. Someone who installed your app has already made a commitment. They gave you real estate on their phone. That's a fundamentally different relationship than someone who opted in on your site in exchange for a 10% discount.

It’s just easier, and your efforts go further, when you’re marketing directly to your best customers.

A different mindset

The tendency is to compare push to email & SMS.

And that does make sense. But it’s not the only way to look at it.

Another way: compare it to retargeting ads or display ads.

Here, you’re paying for impressions. You’re paying a lot for them.

Push is essentially a display ad on your customer’s lock screen. It’s, at worst, a constant reminder that you exist.

How much would you pay for ad space on your customer’s phone?

I gather it would be less than what you’d spend on push.

The math

Let's put some rough numbers on this.

Say you have 10,000 app users with push enabled. You send 3 notifications a week.

That's 30,000 impressions a week. At zero cost. With near-guaranteed visibility. In front of your best customers.

Now compare that to getting 30,000 impressions through paid social. Or through email, or SMS. You’re paying a lot less, or (in the case of email) sending a lot fewer messages.

And because push has a fixed cost, you just need a relatively tiny conversion rate to come out ahead.

A 1% conversion rate on your push notifications, assuming the above numbers with a $75 AOV, is $22,500 in weekly revenue.

A 5% conversion rate (not a crazy benchmark) equals $112,500 in weekly revenue.

Scale it further, with more app users, higher push opt-in rate, more impressions, higher conversion rate or higher AOV, and the profit increases while overhead doesn’t. The only cost is whatever you're paying for the app itself.

That’s not nothing. But, again unless you drastically overpay for your app, you’re looking at a relatively minor cost for the potential return.

The bottom line

The core takeaway is that it’s hard to argue against push notifications. The economics, at no fixed cost and guaranteed visibility, are just too good.

The most common arguments are some form of “no one downloads apps” or “I hate getting push notifications”.

But the key thing is that not all shoppers think this way. You may not be your ideal customer.

Your best customers do want an app. They do want to get notified that there’s a sale on or a new product launching, or that one of their favorite lines is back in stock.

You’re not trying to get in front of your whole audience, just your top 10-20%.

For a small number of brands, apps and push notifications legitimately don’t make sense. If you’re a furniture company, sending three push notifications a week asking someone to buy a sofa may not be a winning strategy.

But for consumables, for businesses with high repeat purchase potential (beauty, fashion, F&B, home & kitchen, pets, baby & kids, hobbies, automotive), or for businesses with high AOV and moderate repeat purchase potential (luxury fashion, jewelry, electronics), it’s an oversight not to have an app.

Even if zero people ever open the app on their own accord, push notifications alone are likely to cover the cost of launching 100x over.

As David from Rainbow Shops says - push notifications are the reason to have an app.

And as getting in front of your customers gets harder and more expensive every day, the case for push notifications only gets stronger.

The Smarter Way to Launch An App

The economics of push notifications only work if you’re not spending six figures per year on a complicated custom build.

Luckily, you don’t need anything like that. MobiLoud turns your existing site into a mobile app, in 30 days, with minimal lift.

The best part? It takes very little ongoing work to manage, since your website and app are fully in sync.

You get the ROI of push notifications, amplified because the overhead of your app is so much less.

If you've been thinking about an app but haven't pulled the trigger, this series might give you the push (pun intended) you need.

Go to our site to get a free preview of your app or DM me on LinkedIn to learn more about how it works.

Quick Hits

Shopify Launches Agentic Storefronts Across ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Google AI Mode 
Millions of merchants can now sell directly through AI chatbots, with products, inventory, and pricing syncing automatically across all surfaces. They also launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) with backing from Walmart, Target, Etsy, Amex, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa. The pitch is that merchants keep ownership of their customer relationships while gaining access to new AI channels. Whether that promise holds as these platforms mature is the real question. Either way: agentic commerce just went from theoretical to live.

Walmart and OpenAI Team Up on Agentic Shopping 
Walmart is working with OpenAI to build agentic shopping capabilities. The details are still emerging, but the direction is clear: the largest retailer in the world is betting that AI agents will handle a meaningful share of purchases. If you're a DTC brand, this is the environment you're competing in. Another reason to invest in channels (like push) that reach your customers directly, without a platform in between.

OpenAI Is Testing an Ads Manager (With $200K Minimums) 
OpenAI is quietly building an ad business inside ChatGPT. Early testers get a dashboard for running campaigns with weekly CSV reports on clicks and impressions. The catch: $200K minimum spend, and one retail advertiser reported a 0.91% CTR (vs. 6.4% on Google Search). Over 100 brands have already advertised, 44% in retail. It's early and expensive, but OpenAI is clearly serious about making ChatGPT a commerce platform, not just a search tool.

Visa Launches "Agentic-Ready" Programme for AI-Driven Payments 
Visa is preparing banks and merchants for autonomous AI transactions. The programme helps financial institutions adapt their systems for agent-based payments. When the biggest payment network on the planet starts building infrastructure for AI agents to spend money, it tells you where things are headed. The plumbing for agentic commerce is being laid right now.

Google Expands Agentic Commerce Standard 
Google is expanding the capabilities of its agentic commerce standards, building on the UCP co-developed with Shopify. Between Google, Shopify, Visa, and Mastercard all moving on this in the same month, agentic commerce just had its "infrastructure moment." The question for DTC brands isn't whether this is coming. It's whether you'll have a direct customer relationship when it does.

That’s all for now.

Next week we’ll dive into push from another angle - looking at the different roles each of your direct marketing channels play in a healthy retention strategy.

If you have any thoughts on what we discussed here, or anything else (in general) you’d like me to cover related to retention, CX and growth, just hit reply and let me know.

Until next week,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.

Sarah Sathaye has been with NAADAM and its portfolio brands for a decade. They've scaled to pop-ups in New York, LA, and Chicago. They have a product line that practically sells itself on repeat. And until this month, they've never had a loyalty program.

This week I sat down with Sarah to talk about why, what changed, and how she's thinking about AI, physical retail, and driving repeat purchases in a business where you're always fighting to reacquire customers.

Here are my top takeaways from the episode.

Pop-ups as a retention channel, not just a revenue play

NAADAM's business is seasonal. Instead of committing to permanent retail, Sarah's team opens pop-ups in August or September and closes them at the end of January.

Smart. But what caught my attention was how she frames it: pop-ups are a marketing channel and a revenue channel.

The stores in NYC, LA, and Chicago aren't just about selling sweaters in Q4. They're building the kind of in-person connection that makes someone come back to the website in March.

Physical retail feeds digital loyalty. You think of pop-ups as temporary, but NAADAM uses them with long-term retention in mind.

If you're a seasonal brand sitting on the fence about retail, the pop-up model is worth studying.

They're launching a loyalty program this month

One thing Sarah said I think is particularly relevant right now:

"We are in a business where we are constantly going to always have to acquire a really significant chunk of our customer base every year."

That's the reality for a lot of brands. Especially in categories where the product lasts. A cashmere sweater isn't a monthly purchase.

So for 2026, they're going all in on loyalty. First official program ever. It's one of their top goals for the year.

Why now? Because they've hit the point where acquisition alone can't sustain growth.

Sound familiar? If you're still running without a formal loyalty program, ask yourself: are you leaving repeat revenue on the table just because you haven't built the structure to capture it?

AI adoption starts with giving your team space to experiment

Every brand is looking at AI right now, and trying to find the right way to use it to 10x revenue and halve expenses.

The reality is sometimes a little behind the hype.

Sarah's team is using AI for segmentation, PDP imagery, color correction. A lot of practical things; not culling headcount and reimagining their company as AI-native.

She was honest about how they’ve incorporated AI so far: "I won't go out on a limb and say that we've done that perfectly around the organization yet."

Her focus is on driving adoption internally. Giving people space to learn and experiment before mandating anything.

That's the right order. Most brands buy the tool first and figure out adoption second. The ones getting real value are doing it the other way around.

Your website needs to answer questions like an AI would

This was the most forward-looking part of the conversation.

With AI becoming mainstream, shopping habits are going to change. Not massively - the age of autonomous shopping agents isn’t here yet - but in some minor, but notable ways.

1. AI is changing how customers discover products. Search queries are getting more conversational, more specific, more personalized. Your content needs to match that depth.

2. Customers are going to start asking your website questions the way they ask ChatGPT. If your on-site experience can't handle that, you'll lose them.

It’s not an enormous shift, but it’s enough that you can get left behind if you’re still building your site with 2024’s playbook.

VIP treatment doesn't have to be complicated

When it comes to driving repeat purchases from their best customers, Sarah keeps it simple: proactive outreach with things they can't get elsewhere.

• Holiday gifts

• Early access to new drops

• Special sale access

Nothing revolutionary. But that's the point. Your VIP customers don't need a complex program. They need to feel like you actually know they exist.

Sometimes a well-timed email with early access to a new collection does more for retention than any points system.

The most important thread running through all of this: NAADAM is a brand that's been acquisition-first for a decade and is actively making the shift to retention. 

Loyalty program, pop-up strategy, AI experimentation, VIP treatment. It's all part of the same move.

If you're at that inflection point too, this episode is worth your time.

You can catch the full episode on YouTube or Spotify. Wherever you watch or listen, be sure to like, comment, share if you found it useful.

I’ll back later this week with more to help you grow & scale your brand the right way.

— Pietro

PS - Want to see what your store would look like as a mobile app? Get a free preview here, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn.

Hope March is treating you well.

A report caught my attention recently. It was on loyalty & retention - the bread and butter for the Retention Edge - with some stats that I think are super relevant for DTC brands today.

If you’re not on board with the importance of retention yet, you should be.

It’s the unlock for everything - profit, ROAS, growth… everything works better when you have customers coming back and buying multiple times.

Someone on my team sent me Attentive's 2026 State of Loyalty & Retention report this week, and it got me thinking, not just about the importance of retention, but also the “how” - how to bring customers back, get them spending more, how to build a loyal base of VIPs who power your store’s growth.

There were a few specific things I picked out. Let’s get into them now.

1. 88% of consumers tried a new brand in the last 3 months. Only 18% plan to repurchase from most of them.

Shoppers aren’t shy about trying new brands.

Getting someone to try your products isn’t the hard part. With enough money and marketing, you can capture one sale.

The hard part is getting them to come back.

This is where you can stand out - and get ahead.

It’s the biggest avenue for growth for most brands. Not hollow growth but real growth. Profit and cashflow, not empty revenue.

Your move: Look at your first-to-second purchase conversion rate. If it's below 30%, that's your single biggest growth lever. Focus on getting the people who already said yes to say yes again.

2. 52% of consumers shop regularly with just 3-5 brands. Only 5% go above 10.

This chart that looks like a middle finger sums up consumers’ brand loyalty quite nicely.

One massive bar at 3-5 brands. Everything else is tiny.

That means more than half of all consumers have an "inner circle" of about 3-5 brands they buy from repeatedly. And once you add in the 26% who shop with just 1-2 brands, you're looking at 78% of consumers who have room for five brands or less in their routine.

The inner circle is real, it's small, and it's hard to break into.

But it’s the most valuable place to be, when you do break through and earn a customer’s loyalty.

Your move: Stop thinking about retention as "getting people to buy again" and start thinking about it as "becoming a default." That means every touchpoint after the first purchase is an audition for their inner circle. Post-purchase experience, product quality, how you communicate - it all either moves you closer to "default brand" status or keeps you in the "bought once, forgot about" pile.

3. 52% say deals drive their second purchase. 45% say product quality does. Together, that's almost the whole playbook.

It’s easy to overcomplicate this.

The two biggest drivers of a second purchase are a good deal (52%) and a good product (45%). Stack those two and you've covered the vast majority of what gets someone to come back.

Deals work. A well-timed offer after the first purchase is one of the most reliable tools you have.

Product quality is the other half. It makes sense. This is the buyer-seller contract. They give you money, you give them a good product. You keep up your end, they’ll keep up theirs.

There are more things that matter, and can move the needle, but the core of it is often simpler than you imagine.

Your move: If your second-purchase rate is low, ask two questions before you do anything else. First: is the product actually delivering? (Check reviews, returns, NPS.) Second: are you giving people a timely nudge to come back? A strong product plus a well-placed offer after the first order isn't a sophisticated strategy. It's almost the whole game. Everything else is about staying available and getting in front of them.

4. 69% say post-purchase content increases their confidence in a purchase.

This is the most underinvested moment in the customer journey.

Seven out of ten customers feel better about their purchase when you follow up with useful content.

Why? Because this is a key window that shapes the customer’s lasting impression of the product (and the brand).

The moment after someone buys, there's a window of doubt. "Did I need this? Is it worth it? Should I have gone with the other brand?"

You can make the most of this window by reinforcing their decision, clearing up any doubts or objections, and helping them get real value from their purchase.

Your move: Map out your first 7 days post-purchase. How many touches does a customer get? What do they say? If the answer is "a shipping confirmation and then nothing until a review request," you're leaving retention on the table. Build a 3-touch post-purchase sequence: day 1 (order excitement + what to expect), day 3-4 (usage tips or brand story), day 7 (check-in + community invite).

5. Shoppers on 2-3 channels are 2x more likely to repurchase from a new brand.

This is the strongest case for channel stacking I've seen in a single stat.

A customer who gets your emails AND your texts is twice as likely to buy again as someone who only gets one.

It’s about being everywhere.

Related, here’s another key stat:

43% of people unsubscribe from a brand because they receive too many messages. But 60% are fine seeing the same promo across channels.

The finding is pretty clear. Blasting someone with email after email, or text after text annoys them. The impact is a lot different if your brand just shows up everywhere.

They get an email, an SMS, a push notification. They see your brand on Instagram or TikTok too.

More touchpoints, more coverage, but it doesn’t feel as overbearing as a string of messages on one channel.

Your move: Increase channel coverage. You should be sending emails, using SMS, on social, active through your app, if you have one. Realize that attribution data can lie to you. Just because an email or a push was the last thing they saw before the sale, doesn’t mean there weren’t other channels working to drive this sale.

6. The strongest loyalty driver: exclusivity

This one ties back to stat #3.

We said deals work. But the report goes deeper: it's not just any deal. When asked what type of offer is most likely to bring someone back, the #1 result (41% of people) is exclusive VIP discounts.

The discount part of it is honestly secondary. What people really love is getting something that’s not available to everyone.

It makes you feel special, and it makes you feel part of a tribe. You’re part of an elite group. It’s basic human psychology. We’re wired to seek this kind of thing.

Your move: Build an exclusive, VIP “inner circle”. This could be a specific tier in your loyalty program, your app users, or people with multiple orders. Then treat them like VIPs - and give them “just for you” offers that make it clear they’re part of your top customer segment.

7. 71% of shoppers stay subscribed for sales

For nearly three quarters of shoppers, the reason to stay subscribed to a brand’s marketing messages is for sale/promo notifications.

That’s not to say it’s the only way to get them to come back. But it’s the most common subscriber retention driver.

It’s what creates FOMO when someone thinks about hitting “unsubscribe”. That they might miss out on a great deal because they didn’t get the email or the push notification.

You can still leverage that attention to drive full-price sales in between, though. That’s the key - not all discounts; but promos talk.

Your move: Discount smartly. Run a few well-timed promos (and throw in exclusive subscriber promos) to keep the FOMO high. This holds your customer’s attention - use that attention to drive sales between promos too.

The Thread That Connects Everything

If I had to summarize this entire report in one sentence, it'd be this:

Customers are easier to acquire and harder to keep than ever before.

Yet the basics are still nothing ground-breaking.

• Post-purchase content that reinforces the buying decision

• Channel stacking that meets customers where they are

• Fewer messages, but across more surfaces

• Segmented retention that respects generational differences

• Loyalty mechanics that create momentum, not just status

None of this requires a massive tech investment or high-end expertise. Most of it requires paying attention to the moments you're currently ignoring.

The Channel You’re Missing

Speaking of channel stacking, one of the highest-impact "channels" most ecommerce brands still haven't activated is their own mobile app.

Mobile apps are the ultimate VIP channel. Always on, your brand’s logo showing up on the customer’s home screen, push notifications landing on their lock screen.

These are all the things that turn a "bought once" customer into a repeat buyer. MobiLoud makes it easy to launch - no $200K build, no separate system to manage. It’s your store, directly converted into an app, with everything done for you.

Get a free preview of what your store would look like as an app, or DM me on LinkedIn to chat about how to launch your app.

Quick Hits

Amazon passes Walmart in annual revenue for the first time $716.9B vs $713.2B. After 13 years of Walmart holding the #1 spot, Amazon takes the crown. Worth noting: AWS alone did $128.7B, so it's not an apples-to-apples retail comparison. But the signal is clear. The biggest company in the world, by revenue, is now a tech-first commerce company.

Ecommerce hits 16.6% of total US retail sales Q4 2025 ecommerce sales hit $316.1B, growing 5.3% year-over-year while overall retail grew just 2.7%. Online is eating share faster than ever. Check out the full data from the Census Bureau here.

Amazon expands Shop Direct: buy from other retailers without leaving Amazon Over 100 million products from 400,000+ merchants, now with third-party feed support from Feedonomics, Salsify, and CedCommerce. Amazon's AI assistant Rufus can complete purchases on your site on a customer's behalf. Free access to 200M+ Prime members without marketplace fees. Sounds great until you realize Amazon now sits between you and your customer in a whole new way.

Customer reviews are the new SEO as AI reshapes product discovery ChatGPT users run 84 million shopping queries per week in the US. AI engines pull from reviews to make product recommendations, so brands are getting aggressive about soliciting them. One brand is offering $25 for five-star reviews. Another delays review requests until customers see real product results. Feels like SEO circa 2010, but for AI.

Shopify captures nearly half of all new online stores in Europe Out of 324,000 new European stores, Shopify grabbed 148,044. That's 54% in the Netherlands, 49% in France, 41% in Spain. WooCommerce came in second with 99K. New DTC brands are overwhelmingly choosing Shopify. The moat keeps getting wider.

Amazon requires senior engineer sign-off on AI-assisted code after outages A six-hour outage on Amazon's main ecommerce site was linked to AI-generated code. Internal docs cited a "trend of incidents" with "high blast radius" from "Gen-AI assisted changes." Now junior and mid-level engineers need senior approval before deploying AI-written code. A cautionary tale for anyone rushing to automate everything.

That’s all for now.

I’ll be back in touch next week, with more on how successful brands are doing CX and retention right.

If there’s any topic you’d like to see us dive into, for either the newsletter or the podcast, just shoot me a message here.

Until next time,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: want to boost retention, revenue and profitability? If so, launching your own app could be the best move you make this year.

See how: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.

Quick question. How much of your marketing strategy from two years ago still works today?

Half of it? A quarter?

Things evolve. Platforms, algorithms, things like AI come along that (it seems) completely change the game.

But in reality, most of the core principles in marketing are the same as they were 5, 10, 100 years ago (and they’ll still be the same 50 years in the future - if we’re all still here).

This week on the pod I was joined by Phill Agnew, host of the Nudge podcast and behavioral science marketer, who's spent years translating academic research into practical marketing tactics.

Phill's thing is simple: learn the psychology that drives human behavior, and you'll never be scrambling to keep up with the latest platform change.

This episode is a timely reminder that the classic marketing and sales playbooks are not obsolete - and likely never will be.

Now let’s jump into the top takeaways from the episode.

Technology changes. The brain doesn't.

Your LinkedIn and X and Bluesky feeds are full of people saying AI will revolutionize your job. And we can't help but click on it.

But a psychologist would tell you the human brain takes millennia to evolve. It hasn't changed in 20,000 years.

We still follow the crowd. We still value things that look like they took effort. We still make snap decisions based on shortcuts our ancestors developed to survive.

As a marketer, you have a choice. Either learn the technologies that affect your job this week, or learn the psychology that will affect your job in 50 years.

One is a bit more future-proof than the other.

That doesn't mean ignore AI. It means build your strategy on the stuff that doesn't expire.

Social proof is ancient. And still works.

Phill referenced a study from Richard Shotton's book The Choice Factory.

A pub in East London put up a sign saying "This is our best-selling beer" next to London Pride (a warm ale that, for the record, Phill does not like). The result: sales went up 2.5x, just like that.

And the interesting part: sales of other beers didn't really drop. People were just adding London Pride because it seemed popular.

This is the same reason McDonald's used to put the exact number of burgers sold on their signs. The same reason Aperol Spritz succeeds partly because it's visually distinct, so you can see other people drinking it. The same reason Apple's white iPod headphones worked.

The practical takeaway for ecom: you're probably sitting on social proof you're not using. Best-seller labels, real-time purchase notifications, loyalty card walls (like Katz's Deli in New York, where completed loyalty cards cover an entire wall behind the counter).

It doesn't have to be complicated. It just has to be visible.

Show your work, and people will value it more

In the episode, Phill walked through a series of studies on what researchers call the "labor illusion" or "input bias."

The core finding: if people believe more effort went into something, they value it more. Even if the output is identical.

• Presentations: Participants were told one presentation took 8 hours to prepare and another took 30 minutes. Same presentations. People consistently preferred the one they believed took longer.

• Real estate: Agents gave clients the same house lists. Half were told it took 8 hours to compile; half were told 30 minutes. The "8-hour" group went on more viewings, made more offers, and bought more houses.

• Starbucks: Head office trained baristas to do "parallel pouring," making four lattes at once instead of two. Faster service. Customers hated it. Satisfaction dropped. They had to ban the technique. The coffee was the same; it just didn't look like enough effort went into it.

• Kayak.com: When the travel site showed a loading screen that listed everything it was searching ("checking British Airways flights... checking Delta... scanning hotels within 25 miles of Zagreb"), people valued the results more and were more likely to book, even though the search actually took longer than the plain loading wheel.

Phill tested this himself. He ran two Reddit ads for his end-of-year episode. One said "Learn the 6 best marketing insights from Nudge this year." The other said "I've spent 480 minutes listening to marketing experts this year. Here are the 6 best lessons."

The effort-showcasing version got a 15% higher click-through rate.

For DTC brands, this is gold. If your product takes time to source, make, or curate, say so. If your team hand-picks every item, show that. Don't optimize for speed when you should be optimizing for perceived quality.

As Phill put it:

Stop gaming for clicks (and destroying trust)

Like any tool, behavioral science can be used for good or bad.

On one side: Guinness's "Good things come to those who wait" campaign. That's leveraging input bias and the labor illusion in a way that builds the brand over time.

On the other: those fake "accidental internal email" campaigns that DTC brands keep running, where a founder "accidentally" sends their whole list an email that looks like a private Slack message with a coupon code.

Both use psychology. But one builds trust and the other burns it.

Phill pointed to research showing that short-term sales coupons give you a boost, but in the long term push people away from your brand. The fake email campaigns do the same.

Opt for an alternative: campaigns that show thought and creativity.

Danny Zane's research found that consumers can tell when a marketer has put real effort into a campaign, and they value it more. A dog wash company giving 50% off for "International Pet Day" will get some clicks. The same company giving 50% off because it's the founder's dog's birthday (the actual company mascot) will generate more sales, because there's a real, thoughtful connection to the brand.

Behavioral science as creative guardrails

Phill doesn't see behavioral science as replacing creativity. He sees it as giving creative people useful constraints.

Painters are more creative with a smaller canvas. Bands develop their sound because they only have certain instruments. Marketers have an overwhelming number of options, and behavioral science narrows the field to approaches that are backed by peer-reviewed research.

You learn that social proof works. Then you get creative about how to show it. You learn that effort signals quality. Then you figure out what effort to highlight. The science gives you the guardrails. The creativity happens within them.

The biggest takeaway for me: stop chasing the tactic of the month.

Trends and hacks constantly change, but the principles behind why people buy, trust, and come back don’t.

You can spend all your time and energy chasing the latest thing, or you can learn these basic principles once, apply them everywhere, and you won't have to reinvent your strategy every time an algorithm updates.

You can catch the full episode on YouTube or Spotify. Wherever you watch or listen, be sure to like, comment, share if you found it useful.

I’ll back later this week with more to help you grow & scale your brand the right way.

— Pietro

PS - Want to see what your store would look like as a mobile app? Get a free preview here, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn.

In the last week, a couple of headlines caught my attention.

They’re both related to AI (what isn’t). But they’re both, at a deeper level, related to one of the most important parts of running a business (especially in ecommerce):

Owning your audience.

It’s a push and pull moment for DTC brands right now. Platforms are trying to take your audience away; but your customers are not on board (just yet).

Let’s elaborate - and explain why this is such a critical juncture for ecommerce brands.

In the news

Story one: OpenAI is pivoting away from Instant Checkout.

It was major news last September. OpenAI announce in-chat purchasing inside ChatGPT. Browse a product, buy it, never leave the conversation.

It looked like a massive moment for ecommerce. A new Amazon competitor, essentially. Customers bypassing your storefront, searching and buying right inside an LLM.

But The Information reported on March 5 that OpenAI is pulling the plug on Instant Checkout. Instead of buying inside ChatGPT, users will be redirected to the merchant's own website or use third-party apps.

OpenAI said they were "evolving our commerce strategy to better meet merchants and users where they are."

Why? A few reports cast some light on the situation.

• Reports say Instant Checkout had near-zero conversion rates.

• Out of the million-plus Shopify merchants announced, roughly a dozen actually integrated. (Merchants weren't exactly lining up to pay a 4% fee on top of their existing payment processing costs.)

• Also, as of February, OpenAI still hadn't built sales tax compliance. (Kind of important if you're trying to run a commerce platform.)

Customers weren’t ready. OpenAI wasn’t ready. And merchants weren’t on board.

Story two: Google was granted a patent for AI-generated landing pages.

Here's how it works: the system scores your existing landing page on conversion rate, bounce rate, and design quality. If you fall below a certain threshold, Google generates its own version of your page, personalized to each individual user, and sends shoppers there instead of to your site.

Now, it's a patent, not a product. It's limited to shopping and paid search. It might never ship.

But it tells you exactly what Google is thinking: "Your page isn't converting well enough, so we'll replace it with ours."

And one way of seeing this is that it’s a sneaky ploy by Google to take control of the customer journey.

Just as OpenAI tried with Instant Checkout (and will likely try again).

The takeaway?

Every platform wants to own your customer.

The Amazon playbook

A friend of mine used to run an Amazon SaaS. He talked to Amazon-only sellers all day. And the number one anxiety, the thing that kept these merchants up at night: you don't own your customers. Amazon does.

If you sell exclusively on Amazon, you typically don't have email addresses of your customers. You don't have phone numbers. You don't have a relationship. You have a listing on someone else's platform, subject to someone else's rules.

Sellers build $5M, $10M businesses on Amazon. It’s powerful, but it’s not stable.

One algorithm change or one account suspension can wipe their business out overnight.

It’s an extreme example of what’s threatening to happen with agentic commerce, platforms like ChatGPT and Google facilitating transactions.

You don’t build billion or trillion-dollar companies without understanding the importance of owning customer relationships.

It's platform capture. Amazon perfected it - now you’re seeing other major tech companies trying to emulate them.

If they do? You’re the one who loses.

What should make you optimistic

Instant Checkout not taking off is a good sign (for now).

People are absolutely using ChatGPT to research products. Capgemini found that 53% of US consumers have made purchases based on AI recommendations.

People are discovering products on ChatGPT and other AI platforms. And this is only going to increase.

But they’re not comfortable buying from ChatGPT.

ChatGPT (and AI in general) hasn’t built the trust yet to fully own the customer journey.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. Amazon spent decades building the trust required for people to hand over payment details. They have the A-to-Z guarantee. They have 30 years of reviews. They have a return policy everyone knows by heart. They earned it.

ChatGPT doesn't have that. Perplexity doesn't have that. Maybe they will eventually, maybe they won't.

The point is: customers still want to buy from someone they trust. That's why your brand still has a competitive moat - and why you need to continue marketing to your customers on a personal level.

It's like we wrote a couple of weeks ago: your customer is not an API. They're a person with preferences, habits, and loyalties.

ChatGPT isn’t. And that’s your edge.

Is Agentic Commerce finished?

Does this mean that agentic commerce is not going to be a thing, that customers are never going to be comfortable buying through AI?

I don’t think so.

We’re seeing real proof that people are discovering products and fine-tuning their searches through AI.

And while the checkout piece failed for now, that doesn’t mean it’s done for good. AI is still incredibly new, and in time, I think people will come around to buying in ChatGPT, or even letting agents buy for them.

Want proof? Look at what's happening on Amazon, and their Rufus AI assistant.

• 250 million shoppers used Rufus in 2025.

• Andy Jassy said it's on pace for $10 billion in incremental sales.

• During Black Friday, Rufus-assisted sessions converted at double the rate of non-AI sessions.

The difference? Rufus comes with the Amazon brand attached. And people trust Amazon.

Agentic Commerce is coming. Not as fast as some think, but it’s coming.

And that only makes it more important to double down on customer relationships.

The only thing that matters

Controlling the customer relationship should be at the front of your mind.

Right now, customers are telling you that they want to buy from someone they trust. They don’t just want to buy whatever the Matrix told them to buy.

When that fades, when trust in AI grows, just being a real brand won’t be enough anymore.

You’ll need to have a real connection with your audience. You need a level of trust that ChatGPT can’t easily match.

If you don’t, when AI arrives, you risk surrendering your sales to the mercy of their algorithm.

Just like an Amazon seller needs to build a protective moat outside of Amazon, you need your own protective moat against AI deciding whether or not your brand gets a sale.

Your customer lists are increasingly valuable assets.

• Email

• SMS

• App users

• Communities

• Mailing lists

The relationships you’ve built up. Brand recognition.

The brand is only getting more important. Don’t neglect yours.

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The most underrated revenue channel in ecommerce

Too many brands are ignoring one of the most powerful, highest-ROI channels in ecommerce.

70% of ecommerce traffic is mobile, and your best customers are shopping their favorite brands on mobile apps.

A mobile app isn’t for everyone. It’s for your best customers. Those who buy when you tell them to buy, who hang on for every new product launch, restock, seasonal drop or promo.

MobiLoud helps you launch a mobile app that could add 20-30% to your revenue - without the stress and cost of rebuilding and managing a separate storefront.

Click here to get a free strategy call and see what an app could do for you

On the Pod

On the latest episode of the Retention Edge Podcast we had Nate Littlewood on to talk finance.

It’s one of the most important, but often poorly understood topics in ecommerce. Your P&L can look great, but if you don’t have money coming in, you’re not going to be able to keep the lights on.

Highly recommend checking this out.

Check it out below 👇

Quick Hits

Mastercard and Google Launch "Verifiable Intent" for AI Commerce
This is infrastructure worth watching. As AI agents start handling purchases on behalf of consumers, someone needs to verify that the agent is actually authorized to spend that person's money. Mastercard and Google are building that trust layer now. The companies laying these rails today will shape how your brand gets discovered and transacted with by AI agents tomorrow. The plumbing of agentic commerce is being built whether you're paying attention or not.

66% of Brands Think CX Is Improving. Only 17% of Consumers Agree.
That's a 49-point perception gap. And it's getting worse, not better. Other findings: only 22% of consumers feel "very loyal" to any brand, 40% have switched brands recently, and over half say brands should infer satisfaction from behavior rather than sending surveys. If you're measuring CX and patting yourself on the back, your customers might disagree.

37% of Consumers Now Start Searches with AI, Not Google 
This stat from a new study should grab your attention. More than a third of consumers are going to AI first for product research. 60% say AI delivers better, clearer answers than traditional search. But here's the nuance: 85% still double-check AI answers elsewhere, and 47% say AI influences which brands they trust. It's a hybrid journey now. Your brand needs to show up in both worlds.

Stripe Expands Payment Methods for Agentic Commerce 
While OpenAI steps back from checkout, Stripe is quietly building the plumbing for the next attempt. They've launched Shared Payment Tokens, letting AI agents initiate payments with a customer's permission without exposing card details. Now adding support for Mastercard Agent Pay, Visa Intelligent Commerce, and BNPL through Affirm and Klarna. Etsy and URBN (Anthropologie, Free People, Urban Outfitters) are already on board. The infrastructure for agentic commerce is being built whether the consumer is ready or not.

The "Zero Results" Dead End (and How to Fix It) 
A good tactical read from RiseDTC. When a customer searches your site and gets zero results, you've just lost your highest-intent visitor. They came ready to buy, typed what they wanted, and you showed them a blank page. The fix: show related products, suggest refinements, surface popular alternatives. Turn dead ends into recovery points. Small change, real revenue.

That’s all for now.

I’ll be back in touch next week, with more on how successful brands are doing CX and retention right.

If there’s any topic you’d like to see us dive into, for either the newsletter or the podcast, just shoot me a message here.

Until next time,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: want to boost retention, revenue and profitability? If so, launching your own app could be the best move you make this year.

See how: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.

You're moving volume. Revenue's up. So why does your bank account tell a different story?

This week for the Retention Edge pod I sat down with Nate Littlewood - fractional CFO and founder of Future Ready CFO.

Nate works with seven-figure ecom and CPG founders to help them understand their financials. Before becoming a CFO, he bootstrapped his own ecommerce brand (Urban Leaf, indoor gardening) to seven figures. Before that, Wall Street.

So he's seen the numbers from every angle. And he has an eye for the most common financial blind spots in ecommerce businesses.

This is an important topic to pay attention to.

Now let’s jump into the top takeaways from Nate’s appearance on the pod.

The most common profit leaks

Nate runs what he calls a "hidden profit audit" with new clients. Nine times out of ten, he finds the same problems.

Gross-to-net revenue leakage

This is the gap between what your customer pays and what you actually keep after discounts, refunds, coupons, replacement orders, and shipping adjustments.

The average ecommerce business gives away about 13% of gross revenue here. When your EBITDA margin is 8-10%, that 13% is enormous.

The worst part: it creeps up when brands panic about hitting targets.

Overstocked? Start throwing discounts.

Tracking behind on revenue? More coupons.

Every one of those decisions chips away at margin.

Inventory misalignment

The products getting the marketing budget aren't always the products driving profitability. That disconnect creates excess storage, shrinkage, and financing costs that don't slap you in the face the way a stockout does, so they go unnoticed.

The consequences of overstocking are real, they're just quieter than the consequences of understocking. So founders default to carrying too much.

Financing costs (the fine print)

By the time you get to the bottom of the income statement, a lot of founders lose the thread. They think they're profitable at the contribution margin level, but the lender is eating the rest.

Nate's seen founders who are essentially working for their financing provider and don't realize it.

Is lifetime value the wrong metric for physical products?

Nate doesn't use LTV the way most people in ecom talk about it. For SaaS, sure, revenue-based LTV works. Delivering another unit of software to a customer costs almost nothing.

But for physical products? The cost of fulfilling that next order is real. So he uses lifetime gross profit instead: the actual profit generated over the course of a customer relationship, not just the revenue.

From there, every business falls into one of three buckets:

• First-order profitable. Gross profit on the first purchase covers CAC. You're in the clear.

• Profitable, but not on first order. You need the repeat buy to break even. That gap between acquisition and breakeven is a financing problem you need to solve.

• Never profitable. CAC exceeds lifetime gross profit. You need to reduce one side or increase the other, or the business is not going to work.

Knowing which bucket you're in changes everything about your strategy.

If you're in bucket two, retention becomes the one metric that holds your business together.

Cash conversion cycles (how growing brands go bankrupt)

Nate broke down a concept that every operator should understand: the cash conversion cycle.

This is the time it takes for a dollar to move through your business, from purchasing inventory to receiving customer payment.

There are three components to this:

• Days inventory outstanding - how long product sits in your warehouse

• Days to receive payment - Shopify pays quickly, Amazon takes two weeks, retail can be 60-90 days

• Supplier payment terms - if your vendor gives you terms, it shortens the cycle; if you pay upfront, it lengthens it

Even a fast-growing, profitable brand can go bankrupt, if the cash conversion cycle is long enough.

If this is the case, the cash you're laying out for inventory can exceed the cash the business is generating. You're profitable on paper and insolvent in practice.

That's a real scenario. Nate's seen it happen. And it’s the number one reason why you need to understand your finances inside and out (and not just P&L).

You might have too many products

Heard of the jam study?

Researchers set up a jam display in a supermarket. Six varieties: solid sampling-to-purchase rate. Twenty-four varieties: more people stopped to look, but fewer bought.

The reason? Cognitive overload. With 24 options, the fear of picking wrong was higher than the desire to pick at all.

The same thing can happen to ecom brands. One of Nate’s clients had a revenue-per-SKU of about $6,000. That was a reality check. She'd been focused on building products because that's what she loved doing, but the catalog had outgrown what the business could actually support.

Nate sees this a lot. Typically from a certain founder archetype - the “product person” - someone who loves designing and launching, and this tends to over-index on SKUs.

The point isn't that new products are bad. It's that adding products should solve a financial problem (like a lifetime gross profit gap), not scratch a creative itch.

Otherwise, that new product line could end up being a net-negative for your business.

The riches are in the boring stuff

Founders get distracted by shiny objects.

• The next attribution tool.

• The AI thing everyone's talking about.

• The TikTok strategy their friend swears by.

Nate's seen it all, and he was a victim of it himself when he was a founder (so have I!)

His unlock was realizing that exploring all those things wasn't making him successful. What made him successful was discipline and focus. Tracking margins. Managing inventory properly. Negotiating contracts. Understanding financing terms.

None of it is exciting. But it's the stuff that actually moves the bottom line.

He uses three frameworks with clients to decide what to focus on:

1. ROI math. Collect every idea on a board. Periodically review them. For each one: what's the potential return, what's the investment (dollars, time, or both)? Calculate ROI and rank.

2. Bottleneck analysis. Look at traffic, conversion, AOV, repeat purchase. Benchmark against the industry. Find where the constraint is. Fix that one thing. That's where your resources should go.

3. Skills alignment. A seven-figure team has two to eight people. They're not experts in everything. Don't assign them projects that require skills nobody on the team has. Put balls in front of the founder that they can actually kick into goal.

That last one is underrated. Nate's line:

The biggest takeaway for me: most ecom operators are over-complicating growth. The answers are usually already sitting in your financials. You just have to look.

You can catch the full episode on YouTube or Spotify. Wherever you watch or listen, be sure to like, comment, share if you found it useful.

I’ll back later this week with more to help you grow & scale your brand the right way.

— Pietro

PS - Want to see what your store would look like as a mobile app? Get a free preview here, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn.

There’s so much advice online, so many shiny new toys, it’s natural to want it all.

You could spend thirty minutes on LinkedIn or X and come away with at least four posts that convince you that they have the missing piece your business needs to scale.

So you try them - because you’re a type A person, you do them all. You’ve unlocked the secret to growth; launching seven new sales channels and eight new product lines.

But the whole thing fails. What you’re probably going to do is blame the channel, or the product ideas. “This doesn’t work for us.” “Our customers don’t want this product.”

I got thinking about this because of a couple of ecommerce stories that were in the headlines recently.

One was the Honest Company shutting down its DTC website and mobile app in December, to focus solely on retail.

The other was Allbirds closing most of its physical stores, leaving just four stores globally, down from 60 a couple of years ago.

The headlines you’re going to read:

• DTC is dead

• Physical stores are dead

• [Channel] doesn’t work

That’s the lazy, clickbait story.

The real story is about focus, and how a business - even those doing mid-9 figures in annual sales - needs to be smart about how it distributes this.

Is DTC dead?

The Honest Company story made for some juicy headlines - and LinkedIn hooks.

I didn’t read them all, but I’m sure there were one or two using this as proof of DTC’s demise. Perhaps the takeaway being that the branded ecommerce site/app is dead.

Same thing with Allbirds. It’s proof that DTC brands shouldn’t open their own stores, that this business model doesn’t work.

Both sides are missing the real takeaway.

It’s that both companies have chosen to narrow their focus on different areas.

Honest Company isn't abandoning its customers. It's refocusing on wholesale, through Walmart, Target, Amazon, Kroger. The brand is projecting 4-6% organic revenue growth in 2026 after making the cut.

Allbirds isn't giving up on selling shoes. It's shifting resources to ecommerce and wholesale partnerships, channels that offer "greater reach, flexibility and operating leverage" in their words.

It’s not an indictment on the channel. It’s an indictment on spreading yourself too thin.

The real cost of a channel

When you think about running a new channel or project; a new acquisition channel, a retention channel, selling on a new platform; you look at the dollars and cents.

Ad spend, platform fees, rent on the retail space.

That’s easy, because it’s out there. Numbers on a spreadsheet.

What you don’t see is the cost on your team’s focus.

Taking your team’s time away from other projects. The hiring. The meetings. The tooling. The context-switching. The mental bandwidth your leadership team spends thinking about, worrying about, and troubleshooting that channel instead of doing something else.

When you just try to fit this channel into everything else you’re doing, it usually doesn’t get the attention it needs.

Or it takes focus from other areas of your business. Or - here’s the worst case - none of your channels get enough attention, and everything suffers, because you’re trying to do too much.

Sometimes less is more.

My experience

This is not a new or novel idea. It’s just something that we tend to forget.

I see it myself - internally and externally.

In our business, we’re constantly tempted by the shiny new thing, an unproven channel that could be a game changer. Yet what happens too often is just like I said up top - it doesn’t get the attention it needs, and it draws away from channels that we know work for us, like organic content marketing.

I also see it from brands we talk to.

It’s a common thing with mobile apps.

A brand decides they need a mobile app. They hire a developer or an agency to build it. They get the app, it looks great, it has all the native bells and whistles.

It cost a decent amount, but once it’s done it’s done - and they’ll recoup the money, they figure.

But they don’t budget for the focus cost (and the work it takes to manage a new platform).

Maintaining and updating this new platform takes too much time and effort. Thus, it ends up getting ignored, it falls out of date and out of sync, and ends up in the graveyard of failed projects.

The takeaway ends up being that mobile apps don’t work.

They do - the dollars and cents prove it. I just read that Simple Modern do roughly $10M in GMV through their app (as much as they do from SMS), and they’re not even the ideal fit for apps.

The monetary equation works for apps. The biggest downside (and why so many brands still don’t have one) is taking focus away from the rest of your business.

That’s why we do what we do at MobiLoud - helping brands launch mobile apps that stay automatically in sync with their site, managed for them - so the focus cost is cut to near-zero. It removes the biggest downside/risk of launching your own mobile app.

But it’s not just apps. TikTok Shop, Applovin, content marketing, retail, influencers, affiliates, international expansion…

A new channel = more potential revenue.

But you need to stop and think about whether you have the bandwidth to take it on.

The focus equation

Before you add any channel or start a new project, I think there are three questions worth sitting with.

1. Do I have the bandwidth to sustain this?

Not "can we launch it?" Launching is the easy part.

The question is: can you run this channel at the level it needs, six months from now, twelve months from now, without other parts of your business suffering?

If the honest answer is "we'll figure it out as we go," that's a red flag. "Figuring it out" means someone on your team absorbs the work, and whatever they were doing before gets less attention.

2. What am I pulling focus from?

This is the question nobody asks. Every hour your team spends on the new channel is an hour they're not spending on an existing one.

What's getting less attention? Is it your email program? Your website experience? Your core product?

If you're a 10-person team and you add a channel that takes 15% of your team's time, you didn't just add something. You reduced everything else by 15%. That's the tax.

3. Is there a lower-overhead path in?

This is the big one. Sometimes the right answer isn't "don't do this channel." It's "do this channel differently."

• Hire an agency to run your TikTok Shop instead of building an internal team.

• Use a managed service for your mobile app instead of building custom.

• Bring on a consultant to launch your retail presence instead of hiring a full-time head of retail from day one.

• Market on a channel where you’re re-purposing content you already have, instead of creating brand new content.

The goal is to get the channel's benefits without paying the full focus tax.

If you can enter a channel at 10% of the management overhead, the math changes completely. Even if the results are slightly lower than doing it fully in-house, the net impact on your business is often better because you didn't sacrifice everything else to get there.

Less can be more

The most underrated growth strategy is doing fewer things better.

It's not exciting. Nobody writes LinkedIn posts about the channel they chose not to launch.

But the brands that are successful, in terms of what really matters - profitability after opex - go deep on the channels they know they can devote their time and energy to.

They’re not the ones dipping their toes in everything.

With AI, you might now have the ability to spread yourself further, enter new channels and launch new projects, without doubling your headcount or halving the attention you’re giving to other channels.

But just take an honest look at the situation and make sure you’re not robbing Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes (translated: taking resources from one area and spending them somewhere else).

The brands that grow sustainably are the ones that know when to say no, or at least "not yet."

The most underrated revenue channel in ecommerce

Too many brands are ignoring one of the most powerful, highest-ROI channels in ecommerce.

70% of ecommerce traffic is mobile, and your best customers are shopping their favorite brands on mobile apps.

A mobile app isn’t for everyone. It’s for your best customers. Those who buy when you tell them to buy, who hang on for every new product launch, restock, seasonal drop or promo.

MobiLoud helps you launch a mobile app that could add 20-30% to your revenue - without the stress and cost of rebuilding and managing a separate storefront.

Click here to get a free strategy call and see what an app could do for you

On the Pod

On the latest episode of the Retention Edge Podcast we hosted Slava Sabirov, who dropped the most unique take on pricing I’ve heard in a while.

Are you doing it wrong by telling your customers how much they should be paying? What if you asked them what they wanted to pay, instead?

It’s a fascinating listen. Check it out below 👇

Quick Hits

The Fractured, Fragile US Consumer

Retail Dive's deep look at where the US consumer stands right now. The short version: functional but fragile. The K-shaped economy narrative is real but also an overgeneralization. Lower-income households are getting squeezed by prices and a slowing job market, but spending patterns don't split neatly along income lines. Consumers are hypervigilant about where their money goes while still willing to spend. For brands, the takeaway is that blanket assumptions about "the consumer" are increasingly useless. You need to know your consumer.

Shopify Says AI Shopping Will "Not Bypass" Its Checkout

Shopify is positioning itself as the transaction layer beneath AI commerce. Products from Shopify merchants will get discovered and bought inside ChatGPT and Claude conversations, but the actual checkout still runs through Shopify. Harley Finkelstein's line: "LLMs do not bypass Shopify's checkout." Smart move. Let AI own the discovery, own the infrastructure behind the purchase.

ChatGPT Ecommerce Traffic Converts 31% Higher Than Organic Search

Interesting data on ChatGPT-referred ecommerce traffic. Conversion rate: 1.81% vs. 1.39% for non-branded organic. Traffic grew 1,079% over 2025. But before you get too excited, it generated $474K vs. $32.1M from organic. Still a rounding error in terms of volume. The thesis is "intent compression" - people refine what they want inside ChatGPT before clicking, so they arrive closer to purchase. Worth watching, not worth restructuring your strategy around. Yet.

Brands Are Battling a Surge of AI-Driven Return Fraud

Returns already cost ecommerce brands an expected $379 billion in 2026. Now fraudsters are using AI to generate fake damage photos, fake receipts, and convincing claim narratives to get refunds on products they never return. Boll & Branch's CEO caught AI-watermarked fake photos showing cotton fraying patterns that don't exist in real life. 14% of all retail returns are considered fraudulent. Another operational headache that gets worse as AI tools get better.

From Lollipops to Lobsters: Whatnot Pushes Into Food

Whatnot, the livestream shopping platform, is now selling fresh seafood and meat alongside candy and snacks. The food category grew 30% month-over-month from July 2025 to January 2026. Users average 105 minutes daily on the app. A Jolly Rancher drop sold ~900 units in under five seconds. This is live commerce continuing to find its footing in the US, category by category.

Meta Tests AI Shopping Assistant

Meta's testing an AI shopping tool inside its chatbot that shows product carousels with brand, retailer, and price. No in-app checkout yet though - users click through to merchant sites. Joins OpenAI (Instant Checkout in ChatGPT), Google (agentic checkout), and Perplexity in the AI commerce race. The sobering stat: only 2% of US digital buyers have actually started a product search with an AI assistant. The infrastructure is being built fast, but consumer behavior hasn't caught up.

That’s all for now.

I’ll be back in touch next week, with more on how successful brands are doing CX and retention right.

If there’s any topic you’d like to see us dive into, for either the newsletter or the podcast, just shoot me a message here.

Until next time,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: want to boost retention, revenue and profitability? If so, launching your own app could be the best move you make this year.

See how: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.

The topic of pricing is at the same time simple… and not.

On one hand, it’s just math. COGS + markup.

In reality, though, there are a lot of minute details and lot of testing that go into settling on the perfect price point (I’ve definitely found that in my business).

But what if the biggest mistake in ecommerce pricing isn't setting the wrong price - it's setting a price at all?

This week I sat down with Slava Sabirov, founder of Batna, to talk about something I hadn't encountered before: letting customers negotiate their own deals in real time.

Not coupons or flash sales or bundles. An actual multi-step dialogue where the system figures out the optimal deal for each individual buyer.

It challenged a lot of assumptions I had about how pricing should work.

Here are the top takeaways from a fascinating conversation, and the thought behind Slava’s unique approach.

Fixed pricing is guesswork (especially in fashion)

Pricing is mostly art, not science.

If you're selling consumer goods that don't change much season to season, you can gradually find optimal price points through data.

But fashion? You're swapping out your entire assortment once or twice a year. Every new SKU is a guess.

How much is this jacket worth, but in gray? How about a slightly different shade? The demand could differ by 10x, and you have no way of knowing until it hits shelves.

Slava's argument is that the biggest pricing mistake brands make is not making it personal. Because value is deeply subjective - two customers looking at the same product will have completely different willingness to pay.

A fixed price captures some of them and loses the rest.

This resonated with me. We talk so often about personalizing the shopping experience; personalized recommendations, personalized emails, personalized landing pages.

But the price itself? That's still one-size-fits-all for most brands.

A dialogue captures more value than any fixed price

Here's how Batna actually works.

On the product page, next to the normal "Add to Cart" button, there's a second button. The customer clicks it, enters a price they're willing to pay, and starts a multi-step negotiation with the system.

The system is more than just haggling. It's doing two things:

• Understanding the customer's willingness to pay through the conversation itself; no CRM data, no purchase history, nothing. Just the dialogue.

• Running a real-time valuation of every SKU based on demand velocity, stock levels, and how that product compares to others in the catalog.

If the customer's offer makes sense against that valuation, the deal goes through.

If not, the system counters - often by requiring the customer to add another item to unlock the discount. That second item is also selected based on real-time valuation, which means it helps move slower stock.

The results: negotiated orders are 30-54% larger than non-negotiated orders. That's not a typo.

You don't need customer data to personalize a deal

This one surprised me. I asked Slava whether purchase history and CRM data would improve the system. His answer was basically: probably, but by less than 20%.

The dialogue itself is that powerful. The back-and-forth tells the system everything it needs to know about this person's price sensitivity in this moment, for this product.

They don't track who they've negotiated with before. They don't pull Shopify customer profiles. They don't need it.

Slava acknowledged there's room for improvement here - tracking repeat negotiators, building behavioral profiles - but the point stands: the real-time conversation is a better signal than historical data.

Most personalization tools try to predict what a customer wants based on past behavior. Batna just asks them.

There's something refreshingly direct about that.

Salespeople will always give away the maximum discount

One of the most important things Slava said, especially for anyone running physical retail: if you give salespeople the power to discount, they will always give the maximum.

Every time. Because their incentive is revenue, not margin.

If they can do 10% off, they'll do 10% off. They don't care that you'd have closed the deal at 5%.

Batna's system does the opposite. It's optimized to give the smallest possible discount that still converts the sale. And it's surprisingly good at detecting when someone is negotiating for fun versus genuinely price-sensitive.

Those "just trying my luck" customers? The system still finds a way to convert them (usually through a bundled deal that works for both sides).

This is a real problem in brick and mortar that most brands just accept as a cost of doing business. Slava's team has gotten up to 80% of in-store transactions coming through negotiations. All profitable for the retailer.

Final thoughts

It’s rare that someone comes along with an app or a service that’s completely different to what anyone else is doing.

Slava’s take on pricing certainly did that.

The big takeaway here is that pricing doesn't have to be a guessing game followed by damage control. There's a version of this where every customer gets a deal that works for them, and for you.

Whether you use Batna or not, the insight is worth sitting with: your customers already know what they're willing to pay. The question is whether you're asking them.

Catch the full episode on YouTube or Spotify. Like, share, comment if you found it useful or heard anything the piqued your interest.

We’ll be back later in the week with more to help you grow & scale your brand the right way.

— Pietro

If you spend any time online, you’ve seen this thrown around a lot lately.

It’s some version of: "Your customer is about to become an API." AI agents are going to do the shopping. Humans won't browse anymore. You need to optimize your entire business for machines.

You might have even seen it here. I’ve definitely been guilty of buying into the hype.

And I’ll be clear: the world, particularly the ecommerce world, is going through a monumental change right now with AI.

But I had a eureka moment this week reading one of these posts. A realization that a lot of brands are going to get themselves in a lot of trouble with this thinking.

The Take That's Everywhere

You can't scroll LinkedIn or open an ecommerce newsletter without seeing the “your customer is now an API” pitch.

The idea: before too long, AI agents will shop on behalf of your customers. They'll compare products, evaluate specs, check reviews, and complete purchases, all without a human ever visiting your site. Your product pages need to be machine-readable. Your data needs to be structured. Your checkout needs to speak API.

Google just launched Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard for AI agents to browse, compare, and buy across retailers. Shopify rolled out Agentic Storefronts so merchants can sell directly inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. OpenAI has checkout built into ChatGPT.

The agentic commerce shift is happening.

But, contrary to what you’re being told, your customer is not about to become an API.

An API doesn’t use your product.

An API doesn't wear jeans. It doesn't use razors. It doesn't take supplements or drink soda or wear makeup.

We've Seen This Movie Before

This is not the first time retail evolved.

When ecommerce first took off, you could have had people making the argument that “you're not selling to a person anymore, you're selling to a computer.”

That didn’t happen.

Yes, people started buying through screens instead of in stores. The transaction was mediated by technology.

But it’s still the people who buy, the people who consume. The people who matter.

Agentic commerce? Largely the same thing.

The Risk: Brands That Forget Who They're Selling To

Agentic commerce is a big shift. It changes a bunch of things on the technical side of ecommerce.

Your PDPs need to be machine-readable. Your site needs to be plugged into the Matrix.

The majority of brands will get it. That it’s a new technical layer for ecommerce, not a 180° shift.

But I can already see that a lot are going to take it way too far.

“AI-native” brands, all in on “agentic optimization”, redesigning their entire brand for bots.

They're going to strip out the brand storytelling, the editorial, the personality, because an AI agent doesn't care about your About Us page. They're going to treat every product like a commodity with a spec sheet.

The real danger is when you start to see an uptick in traffic from AI agents. You see it as validation that your AI-first pivot is working.

So you go deeper. And doing so, you quickly strip away what makes your brand resonate with real people.

And the people you’re selling to are real.

How You Should Approach Agentic Commerce

You need to adapt to the changes that are happening. To ignore it completely would be a mistake. I genuinely believe that AI surfaces (ChatGPT, Google’s AI) are going to be a significant sales channel before long.

The risk isn’t in acknowledging agentic commerce as a thing. It’s in treating it as the only thing.

Here’s how to approach the “new” ecommerce:

Make your data clean and structured

Accurate product data. Good schema markup. Clean feeds. This isn't some revolutionary agentic commerce strategy. It's just good ecommerce hygiene.

If your product catalog is a mess, fix it. Not because AI agents demand it, but because it makes everything work better - search, marketplaces, social commerce, all of it.

Don't confuse the channel with the customer

An AI agent is a channel. Like Google. Like TikTok. Like email. Like your app.

Optimize for it the way you'd optimize for any channel: make sure your products show up correctly and your data is accurate. But don't reorganize your entire brand around it.

The brands HBR recently profiled as best positioned for agentic commerce? They're the ones that "speak to both humans and agents." Not one or the other.

Double down on the stuff AI can't replicate

Brand. Community. Experience. The emotional connection that makes someone choose you over a cheaper alternative that an AI agent surfaced.

73% of consumers can now spot AI-generated marketing and more than half actively disengage when they sense it.

Human-first marketing and content is going to become much more sought-after.

The irony of the "optimize everything for AI" crowd is that consumers are simultaneously developing antibodies to anything that feels automated.

Use AI for internal efficiency; work on being more human externally.

Protect your customer relationships

AI search turns brands into commodities.

The brand that fits the algorithm best wins. The right intersection of price/features/availability.

Anyone who’s built a business on an algorithm (Google SEO, Amazon) knows how perilous this is.

The brands who go all-in on agents at the expense of humans will have no customer relationships to fall back on. They’re at the mercy of machines.

Business is about relationships. Make sure you have contact with your audience, through email, your website, communities, your app. Make sure you know your customers, what’s important to them, how they think.

You can make the backend of your business hyper-optimized for bots. But the front-end of your business should be the opposite.

Hyper-personal. Real.

The Bottom Line

The infrastructure around agentic commerce is real. Google, Shopify, OpenAI, huge companies are all building it. You need to make sure your products are machine-readable and your checkout can handle agent-initiated transactions.

But if someone tells you "your customer is an API," push back.

Your customer is a person. They have a medicine cabinet, a closet, a kitchen. They have preferences that aren't in your product data. Their loyalty can't be earned through structured markup.

Build a brand that humans love. Make sure the machines can find it.

Not the other way around.

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We've been talking about owned channels and protecting your direct customer relationship.

That's exactly what a mobile app does. It puts your brand on your customer's home screen, not on an AI agent's comparison table. When they want to reorder, they tap your icon. When you have something new, you send a push notification. No algorithm decides whether they see it. No agent shops around for a cheaper alternative first.

The whole point is that this is your channel. Your customer chose to install it. They come back because they want to, not because an AI sent them.

MobiLoud builds native apps on top of your existing site. No rebuilding, no duplicate work. Your full experience, on their phone, live in weeks (not months).

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Quick Hits

Reddit Is Testing a Shopping Product Experience in Search

Is Reddit about to become a shopping platform too? Reddit is currently testing AI-powered product carousels in search results, surfacing products directly from community recommendations with pricing and buy links. Reddit has quietly become one of the most trusted product research platforms on the internet. Turning that trust into a transactional layer is a natural (and potentially powerful) move. Worth keeping an eye on.

Amazon and Shopify Are Now Half of U.S. E-Commerce 

Amazon (35.7% share) and Shopify (14%, up from 12% last year) now account for roughly half of all U.S. e-commerce. One is a centralized marketplace, the other is decentralized infrastructure powering millions of independent storefronts. Everyone else, including Walmart, eBay, and TikTok Shop, is fighting over the other 50%. If you're a DTC brand, your entire commerce world increasingly runs through these two rails.

Amazon Surpasses Walmart in Annual Revenue for the First Time 

Amazon hit $716.9 billion in 2025 revenue, edging past Walmart's $713.2 billion. The symbolic shift matters less than what drove it: AWS, advertising ($68B alone), and third-party seller services now make Amazon a tech and services company that also sells stuff. Walmart's still winning grocery (60% of its sales), but the question is whether it can make the same leap into higher-margin businesses.

Amazon CEO: Shoppers Will Choose Retailers Over Third-Party AI Platforms 

Andy Jassy's argument is simple: horizontal AI agents like ChatGPT can aggregate selection, but they can't match a retailer on pricing, delivery, trust, and shopping history. Amazon's betting its own AI agent Rufus (300M users in 2025, 60% more likely to convert) beats any third-party middleman. Whether he's right or not, the subtext is clear: the battle for who owns the AI shopping layer is on.

Meta Integrates Manus AI Into Ads Manager 

Meta's $2B+ Manus AI acquisition is already showing up in Ads Manager, offering automated data analysis and report generation for advertisers. Zuckerberg says agents are valuable because of "the unique context they can see," including user history and interests. For DTC brands running Meta ads, this could mean less time pulling reports and more AI-assisted optimization. Early days, but worth watching.

The Path to Purchase Just Got Dramatically Shorter 

The funnel is collapsing. This holiday season, a larger share of purchases happened with fewer touchpoints, with conversions at or near first exposure. Digital wallets, seamless checkout, and social platforms where discovery and purchase happen in the same environment are compressing what used to take weeks into moments. The implication: if you're not winning at first impression, you might not get a second one.

On the Pod

This week we hosted Brian Massey on the Retention Edge podcast.

Brian is the Founder of Conversion Sciences - a company that uses science to help you get more conversions.

He had a lot to say on A/B testing, common UX mistakes that kill conversions, analytics blind spots, and a ton more useful CRO insights.

Recommend giving this a watch/listen. Check it out below:

That’s all for now.

I’ll be back in touch next week, with more on how successful brands are doing CX and retention right.

If there’s any topic you’d like to see us dive into, for either the newsletter or the podcast, just shoot me a message here.

Until next time,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: want to boost retention, revenue and profitability? If so, launching your own app could be the best move you make this year.

See how: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.

Most ecommerce brands think they have a traffic problem. They think the answer is better targeting, better creative, more ad spend, more traffic.

Brian Massey has spent nearly two decades proving that what they actually have is an on-page problem.

This week on the Retention Edge pod I sat down with Brian Massey, founder of Conversion Sciences, to talk about what separates brands that convert from brands that just get visits.

Brian's been running conversion optimization since 2007. No paid media, no growth hacks, just figuring out why people aren't buying and fixing it.

He shared some killer advice for ecommerce brands - which only gets more important as ad costs go up and traffic becomes more scarce.

Here are Brian’s top tips on CRO, testing, mobile-optimization, AI and more:

Stop Testing Random Ideas

Brian's biggest frustration is brands that run optimization like a brainstorm session.

They meet once a week, someone throws out an idea, they test it. The test is inconclusive.

They do it again. After a few months of flat results, the whole program dies.

The fix is boring (and that’s why most don’t do it).

• Start with the data.

• Look at where people are actually dropping off.

• Watch session recordings.

• Study heatmaps.

Using this data, you’ll form an accurate hypothesis and have something real to test.

Brian said something that stuck with me:

Even the experts get it wrong most of the time. The difference is they let data narrow the list before they start spending resources.

The industry standard is one winning test out of seven. Brian's team hits one in three or four. They don’t have better ideas than everyone else, they’re just better at filtering them to increase hit rate.

Your Product Page Is Probably Your Best Landing Page (Treat It Like One)

Brian's team has had real success turning product pages into something closer to a landing page. Not the typical layout of image, title, price, add to cart, done. Instead, leading with a hero section, then expanding into more visuals, more copy, more context below.

Whether that works depends on the purchase. The more considered the decision, the more information you need on the page. Emotional, impulse-type purchases need less.

But the underlying point is that most product pages are lazy. They're just data fields rendered into a template.

Brian's argument is that your product page is the most important landing page on your site; especially for paid traffic. Treat it that way.

A few specific wins he mentioned:

• Images with callouts baked in. Borrow from the Amazon playbook - overlay the value proposition onto the images so people don't have to read the description.

• Sticky add-to-cart on mobile. Keep the button visible as they scroll. Simple, but it works.

• Ratings and reviews, including bad ones. People look for the worst-case scenario. If the worst review is about packaging, they'll buy with confidence.

Mobile Isn't Just "Desktop But Smaller"

We talked a lot about mobile, and Brian confirmed something I've believed for a while: most brands are still delivering a shrunk-down desktop experience on mobile and wondering why conversion rates are half of what they are on desktop.

His take: design mobile first, then expand to desktop. Not the other way around.

The specific problems he sees on mobile:

• Checkout forms are painful. Auto-correct changes things. On-screen keyboards are clunky. Every extra field is a reason to abandon.

• Single-step checkouts create cognitive overload. You keep scrolling and more fields appear. "This is going to take a while" kicks in, and that's when you start second-guessing the purchase.

• Hidden costs kill conversions. If someone has to fill out their entire address before they find out what shipping costs, you've already lost a chunk of them. Show estimated costs early. Better yet, offer free or flat-rate shipping so there's no surprise.

Mobile conversion rates are about half of what they are on desktop. But the problem isn't that people don't want to buy on mobile. It's that filling out forms on mobile costs more cognitive energy.

Every friction point withdraws from a limited bank. Make too many withdrawals and people talk themselves out of it.

AI Is Changing Copy, Not Strategy (Yet)

Is AI going to disrupt how we do CRO? If so, how (and how much?)

On the strategic side; analyzing data, watching session recordings, building hypotheses; AI isn't there yet. No agent can replace an experienced optimizer who knows what to look for.

But it’s already making a difference on the copy side.

Brian’s team uses LLMs to rewrite product descriptions in different voices for different audience segments.

The power move is not getting AI to write “better” copy. Your team can do better. But with AI, you can test multiple versions of copy across hundreds of products consistently. A human copywriter can't do that at scale without drifting.

Signals That Drive Retention (From Day One)

Brian made a point about brand identity that I think most retention-focused teams miss:

Retention starts with signaling who your brand is for.

Not after the first purchase. Not in your post-purchase email flow.

On the homepage. In the navigation. In the product descriptions.

Buying from a brand is joining a tribe. People come back because the brand signals their in-group. If your site looks and sounds like everyone else's, there's no tribe to join.

The practical advice is to look at your navigation bar. If it says "Shop" and "Discounts," it's not telling anyone what you stand for. Replace it with specifics - what you sell, what you promise, what makes you different. Use your product descriptions to reinforce the same identity.

"Help me know what group I'm joining," Brian said.

That's the foundation. You can't retain someone who never felt like they belonged in the first place.

Summing Up

The through-line from this conversation: stop guessing.

Whether it's what to test, how to lay out your product pages, or who your brand is for, let data and clarity do the work.

Decisions made on data will always beat those built on guesswork.

You can catch the full episode on YouTube or Spotify. Wherever you watch or listen, I’d love it if you could like, comment and share if you found it useful.

I’ll back later this week with more to help you grow & scale your brand the right way.

— Pietro

PS - Want to see what your store would look like as a mobile app? Get a free preview here, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn.

A lot of founders are stressed right now.

On the surface, you can have a great business - solid brand, good product, growing, doing mid-7 figures (perhaps edging towards 8 figures).

But the situation under the hood looks like this:

• CPMs keep climbing

• Your Meta rep keeps telling you to spend more

• ROAS used to be comfortable - now it’s getting tight

• Revenue is scaling, but margins fluctuate

A common question is “how do I fix my acquisition?”

The answer: "You don't. You outgrow it."

Let me explain.

The Acquisition Ceiling

Acquisition is a starter engine, not a growth engine.

It gets you moving. Builds your initial customer base. Gives you the data and revenue to figure out who you are and what works. Every successful business is built - initially - on finding a way to acquire customers.

But you hit a ceiling with acquisition.

CAC has been climbing steadily for years - 40-60% up over the last few years, depending on which source you look at - driven by more advertisers competing for the same eyeballs, privacy changes making targeting less precise, and platforms extracting more from every impression.

Meta's average CPM climbed to $8.74 this year, up from $7.91 last year. And that's a global average. In competitive categories, it's much worse.

You can optimize your ads. You can improve your creative. You can test new channels. And you should do all of those things.

But there's a floor. You can only push CAC down so far before you hit the limits of what the market will give you. The auction doesn't care about your margins.

Even if you’re Coca Cola, with a TAM of everyone who drinks soda, you’re going to find your market of new customers tapped out eventually.

And even then, scaling through acquisition only matters if you’re making a consistent profit on your first sales.

Most ecommerce brands aren’t.

The LTV Unlock

People talk about LTV like it's a metric to track. It's not. It's the entire business model.

CAC has a floor. LTV has no ceiling.

You can only reduce what you pay to acquire a customer so far. But there's no upper limit on how much value that customer can generate over time.

And when I say value, it’s not just direct sales revenue from that customer.

Higher LTV customers generally contribute more referrals. There are lower support costs associated with these customers. Fewer returns.

On top of that, every additional purchase is almost pure margin because you already paid to acquire them.

And this is the critical part: LTV scales your profits, not just your revenue.

Revenue growth from acquisition is expensive growth. Every new customer comes with a cost attached. Revenue growth from retention is profitable growth. Bain & Company's research found that a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits by 25% to 95%.

Not revenue - profit.

The math on this compounds in ways that are hard to overstate. Customers in months 31-36 of their relationship with a brand spend 67% more than in their first six months. Second-time customers spend 40% more than first-time buyers. By the tenth purchase, they're spending 80% more.

Bottom line is, purchase frequency compounds. It’s not linear. It’s an upwards curve.

This Isn't a Strategy Choice. It's an Inevitability.

Treating retention as just one part of your business is backwards.

Every brand, if it survives long enough, hits the same wall with an acquisition-centric strategy.

Acquisition gets you to a certain size. Then the economics force you to either figure out retention or watch your margins erode until there's nothing left.

It's not a question of if you need to shift your focus. It's when.

The brands that figure it out earlier have an enormous advantage. Because while competitors are burning cash trying to buy their way to growth, retention-focused brands are compounding value from a customer base that already exists.

Think about it this way. Two brands, same category, same size.

Brand A spends 80% of their budget on acquisition. They grow revenue 30% a year, but margins stay flat because every dollar of growth requires a dollar of ad spend to generate it. They're on a treadmill.

Brand B spends 50% of their budget on retention. They grow revenue 20% a year, but profits grow 40% because repeat customers convert at higher rates, spend more per order, and cost almost nothing to reach.

After three years, Brand B is more profitable. After five years, it's not even close.

This is what I mean by inevitable. The math always wins.

What Retention-First Actually Looks Like

I'm not going to give you a checklist of tactics. There are enough "10 retention strategies" posts out there. But I do want to talk about what the shift looks like at a strategic level, because I think that's where most brands get it wrong.

Not treating retention as a department

Retention isn't email marketing. It's not your loyalty program. It's not your CX team (although all of those matter).

Retention is what happens when the entire business is oriented around making customers want to come back. Product quality, post-purchase experience, how easy it is to reorder, how the brand shows up between purchases. All of it.

If retention is siloed as "the email team's job," you're missing the point.

Investing where you own your reach

Repeat customers make up only 21% of the average brand's customer base, but they drive 44% of revenue. Those are the customers you need to be in front of consistently, without paying for the privilege every time.

That means your app. Your email list. Your SMS. Channels where reaching a customer costs pennies, not dollars. Channels where you control the frequency, the message, and the timing.

Every dollar you invest in owned channels compounds. Every dollar you spend on paid acquisition resets to zero the moment you stop spending.

Measuring what matters

Most brands obsess over ROAS and CPA. Those metrics tell you how efficiently you're acquiring. They tell you almost nothing about how profitably you're growing.

Start tracking contribution margin by cohort. How much profit does a customer from Q1 2025 generate by Q1 2026? How does that compare to Q1 2024 cohorts? That's the number that tells you whether your business is actually getting stronger or just getting bigger.

The Bottom Line

I keep coming back to a simple framing.

Acquisition builds your business. Retention is your business.

If you're early and growing fast, lean into acquisition. That's the right move. But start building the retention infrastructure now, because the wall is coming.

And if you're already at scale and your margins are flat or shrinking despite growing revenue? You're at the wall. The answer isn't more ad spend. It's making the customers you already have more valuable.

There's a floor to how low you can push CAC. There's no ceiling on LTV.

That's the whole game.

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A mobile app is one of the highest-leverage retention assets you can build. It puts your brand on the one device your customers check constantly. Push notifications that actually get opened. A home screen icon that keeps you top of mind between purchases. A frictionless reorder experience that makes buying from you easier than searching for an alternative.

And unlike paid channels, every push notification, every repeat session, every saved login compounds. The app gets more valuable the longer a customer has it.

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Quick Hits

Shopify Q4 2025: Cohort Retention Driving Record Results

Shopify just reported Q4 revenue of $3.7 billion, beating estimates. The interesting detail: growth was driven by newer merchant cohorts that are retaining better and generating more revenue over time than older cohorts. Even at the platform level, retention is the growth engine. It's not just a brand-level insight; it's an infrastructure-level one.

eMarketer: How to Make D2C Profitable in 2026

eMarketer's take on DTC profitability is blunt: the math of buying customers no longer works for most brands. Their recommendation? Shift investment toward retention, subscriptions, and omnichannel strategies. U.S. DTC ecommerce is expected to hit $240 billion this year, but the winners will be the brands that figure out how to keep customers, not just acquire them.

TikTok Shop Is Killing Self-Fulfilled Shipping

Starting February 25, TikTok Shop is forcing all sellers into its centralized fulfillment model. Brands can no longer ship orders themselves. It's the Amazon playbook: control the logistics, control the platform. If you're selling on TikTok Shop, you now need to store inventory in their warehouses, ship within 24-48 hours on their terms, and accept their packaging standards. One founder described repeated issues with damaged products. Another pointed out the real cost: "It doesn't matter if it's Nars or Drunk Elephant... it's just another order." The more you build on rented land, the more someone else decides how your brand shows up.

The Retail Advantage Hiding in Your Payment System

Modern Retail makes the case that payment infrastructure is an underrated growth lever. If you're on Shopify, you probably already have this covered. Shop Pay converts at rates most legacy checkouts can't touch. But if you're on an older platform with a clunky checkout flow, you're leaving real money on the table. Not in some abstract "optimize your funnel" way. In a literal "customers are abandoning carts because your payment experience is bad" way. Worth reading if you're not on a modern commerce stack.

AppLovin Is Coming for Ecommerce Ad Budgets

AppLovin, the ad platform that dominates mobile gaming, is making a serious push into ecommerce advertising. They just posted $1.7 billion in quarterly revenue and are projecting $1.45 billion in ecommerce ad revenue for 2026. Their ecommerce conversion rates are still low compared to gaming, but they're climbing. Another platform entering the auction means more competition for impressions, which means higher CPMs for everyone. If you needed another reason to invest in channels you own rather than channels you rent, here it is.

Google Is "Reinventing" What an Ad Is

Google is embedding ads directly into AI-powered search results and rolling out what they're calling "Unified Commerce Protocol," letting AI agents handle transactions from discovery to checkout. Etsy and Wayfair are already on it. Shopify, Target, and Walmart are next. The pitch is that brands can now reach customers during research, not just at the point of purchase intent. The reality is that Google is rebuilding the entire ad layer around AI, and the brands that understand this shift early will have a real advantage. More on this as it develops.

OpenAI Wants to Be a Shopping Platform but Can't Figure Out Sales Tax

OpenAI's ChatGPT shopping feature has a fundamental problem: they haven't sorted out sales tax compliance across U.S. states. Dozens of states have marketplace facilitator laws that could require OpenAI to collect and remit sales tax on transactions. They're also moving away from Stripe to build their own payment infrastructure, which only deepens their operational exposure. It's a good reminder that the "AI is going to replace ecommerce" narrative runs into boring, hard problems fast. Building a shopping platform isn't just about recommendations. It's about tax, logistics, returns, and trust. The incumbents have a bigger moat than the hype cycle suggests.

On the Pod

Our most recent pod welcomed Kira Waite, Director of Operations and CX at Artifact Uprising.

Kira had some great insights to share on how to engineer CX to drive revenue; not just have it be a cost center you’re always trying to cut down.

Check it out below, and subscribe via YouTube or Spotify to get notified about new episodes as soon as they come out.

That’s all for today.

I’ll be back in touch next week, with more on how successful brands are doing CX and retention right.

If there’s any topic you’d like to see us dive into, for either the newsletter or the podcast, just shoot me a message here.

Until next time,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: want to boost retention, revenue and profitability? If so, launching your own app could be the best move you make this year.

See how: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.

Most brands measure retention with the usual suspects. Repeat purchase rate, LTV, cohort curves.

Kira Waite measures it with on-time shipping.

This week I sat down with Kira Waite, who leads operations and CX at Artifact Uprising, a premium photo goods brand.

We talked about why operational excellence is the foundation of retention, why pre-purchase CX might be the most underused growth lever in ecommerce, and what happens when you stop treating your support team as a cost center.

I’m a big believer in this topic too - and it’s only going to get more important as more brands automate their CX to death.

Now let’s jump into the top takeaways we got from the convo with Kira.

On-time shipping is a retention metric

When I asked her which retention metrics she watches most closely, she didn't say repeat purchase rate or NPS. She said on-time shipping.

Getting the order out the door when you told the customer you would.

Her logic is straightforward. We're all conditioned by Amazon. Customers notice every date they see in cart, and they don't forget it.

If you promise Tuesday and ship Wednesday, you've already lost trust. Even if the order arrives on time.

When Artifact hits their shipping targets, everything downstream improves. Fewer WISMO tickets. Higher CSAT. Better sentiment scores. The correlation is strong enough that they treat it as a leading indicator for retention, not just an ops KPI.

The practical takeaway here: the date you show in cart is a promise. And you want to underpromise, overdeliver. And if your ops team and CX team aren't looking at the same shipping data, fix that first.

Pre-purchase CX

Most brands treat CX as reactive and post-purchase. It's the team that handles complaints, processes returns, answers "where's my order." Maybe 60% of the time, that's accurate.

But there's this other 40% that almost nobody is investing in.

Artifact started offering live chat in cart and in their editor, so customers could talk to a human before they bought.

The take rate blew their minds. They had no idea how many people had questions before checkout and were just... leaving.

Customer confidence was the bottleneck, not the product. They weren't doing anything wrong. People just needed a nudge. A customer who feels supported pre-purchase is a customer who comes back.

CX as a growth engine

Most companies fall into the trap of treating CX like a checkbox, and making the goal to keep costs as low as possible.

Kira's team does the opposite. They look for ways to drive revenue through CX, especially during slow months:

• Text outreach to customers who abandoned a project

• Email follow-ups offering design services

• Proactive project reviews where an agent looks at your photo book and gives feedback before you order

Not all of it works. But the project review offering has been a hit, and it directly drives conversion.

Your CX team talks to more customers than anyone else in your company. If you're not using that as a growth input, you're sitting on a goldmine.

Proactive vs reactive CX

Artifact runs a huge chunk of revenue through a five-week window between Thanksgiving and December 18th. So Kira's team started sending proactive deadline reminders: “Hey, it takes a day or two to build a book, and your shipping cutoff is coming up.”

Simple. Not pushy. Just helpful. And the retention impact was real.

They also flag customers who had a bad experience. If something went wrong for you last year, they know about it, and they make sure it doesn't happen again.

That’s a major point of difference to many brands, who prefer to sweep this thing under the rug and pretend it never happened.

Phones aren't as critical as you think

Kira used to believe strongly that phone support was essential: customers want to talk to a human, pick up the phone, have a real conversation.

Well, they tested it. And the take rate wasn't there.

The economics don't work for most brands - expensive to staff, you can't see what the customer sees, and resolution times are worse than chat across the board.

Kira's not fully against it. If a high-value customer says "I need to talk to someone," they'll pick up the phone.

But if you’re agonizing over whether to add phone support, the answer might be: invest that budget into making your chat experience genuinely great instead. Meet customers where they actually are.

Summing up

The big takeaway from our conversation is the impact of operations on retention.

It’s not just a marketing problem. The more you’re able to ship on time, talk to your customers, and fix (or ideally prevent) problems, the better your retention metrics will be.

And these things usually move the needle more than the greatest email copywriting or ad creative.

Catch the full episode on YouTube or. Spotify. Wherever you watch or listen, be sure to like, comment, share if you found it useful.

I’ll back later this week with more to help you grow & scale your brand the right way.

— Pietro

PS - Want to see what your store would look like as a mobile app? Get a free preview here, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn.

What does “winning” in ecommerce look like 5 years from now?

It’s not just about the best products or solid unit economics. It’s about building habits.

I read an article the other day about the standalone AI content apps that OpenAI and Meta are pushing.

To be fair, OpenAI’s Sora app and Meta’s Vibes app haven’t exactly received a great reception. And it’s unclear whether anyone actually wants a TikTok/Reels competitors that’s filter to exclusively show AI slop.

But the point isn’t whether these apps are good or not. It’s the direction these massive companies are taking.

They’re thinking, we need people checking this the way they check Instagram or TikTok; more of a reflex action than a deliberate decision.

Big picture, this aligns with a major shift in ecommerce too.

There’s a common thread behind the biggest trends I’m seeing:

Habitual engagement.

Ecommerce isn’t just about selling things anymore.

It’s not just about listing products on your storefront and running ads and fulfilling orders.

It’s about being part of your customers’ day to day lives - and understanding that the sales will naturally follow.

The Engagement Playbook Isn't New

This isn't some breakthrough insight.

Shein and Temu figured this out years ago. Their apps feel more like gaming apps or social apps than shopping apps.

Their whole aim is to get you opening the app out of habit - on the train, in the elevator, in class, at home on the sofa watching but not really watching Netflix.

Every feature is designed to make you open the app every day:

• Limited-time deals that expire in hours

• Daily bonuses for opening the app

• Spin-to-win games

• Points systems

• Infinitely scrolling product feeds

• 10 push notifications and 7 emails per day

They understand that there’s more than one way to win in ecommerce.

You can win on product - sell the nicest jeans, the most effective creatine, the dining set that makes you feel complete.

Or you can win on experience.

People come for the dopamine, and buy something just because it’s there.

This is evident in other platforms and trends that blew up in 2025.

Whatnot - the fastest-growing ecommerce app in 2025 - is a livestream marketplace. TikTok Shop is the hottest new DTC channel.

Shopping livestreams are enormous business in Asian markets like China and Vietnam… and are starting to make their way to the West now as well.

These are attention platforms that happen to sell things.

Engagement first, commerce second.

Engagement Is the Real Ownership

We talk a lot about "owned channels" today. Email list. SMS subscribers. App installs.

These are certainly important.

But at the same time, having someone’s email doesn’t really mean you own anything. They could ignore your emails or your texts. They could have your app off their homescreen, never opened.

Real ownership is when your brand occupies space in someone's daily life.

It’s when they open your app out of habit.

When they check your content because it's genuinely interesting to them.

When interacting with your brand gives them a little hit of dopamine which keeps them coming back.

In this sense, you can argue there’s more ownership in an Instagram page or TikTok channel that someone loves and engages with than a traditional “owned” asset.

When something becomes a habitual part of your life, that’s so damn powerful. It’s hard to break.

Of course, there’s still risk with social media, that the algorithm could flip and stop showing your content, even to people who subscribe to you or follow you.

The real power is when the engagement comes on your own channel, too.

Crazy Ideas Aren’t So Crazy Anymore

A year or two ago, you would have gotten the advice to keep it simple, to just focus on profitable ads and conversion optimization.

To ignore all the flashy ideas as just noise, to see engagement as a buzzword, not a real thing.

Not so sure this is the case anymore.

Your store as a social platform

What if your website or app felt less like a catalog and more like a feed?

User-generated content. Community features. Content mixed in with products.

Somewhere your customers go for the experience itself, for dopamine, for enjoyment or boredom-busting - not just because they need a new pair of shoes or a tub of whey protein.

Content creators on staff

Organic social (especially brand socials) have been written off as worthless for a while now.

But I think there’s huge potential in this right now.

People are symbiotically linked to their phones and their social feeds. Imagine if your brand can put out the kind of content people actually like seeing on their feeds. That’s the kind of visibility and awareness that brands would pay six figures per month for - you could realistically do it for four figures with one full-time content creator.

Fashion content, beauty content, pets, parenting, home & kitchen, automotive, sports, F&B - there are so many verticals where this works.

I’m surprised this isn’t a priority for more brands.

Gamification

Build fun things on your website/app. Real engagement mechanics.

Daily streaks. Challenges. Exclusive drops for active users.

The kind of stuff that makes people want to check in.

Shein and Temu are running behavioral loops. And they work - despite pretty poor products (and questionable ethics behind the scenes).

That’s how powerful fun is.

Attention as your north star metric

Make this mindset shift.

Stop asking "how do I get this conversion?" and start asking "how do I get my customers to interact with my brand every day?"

Conversions are a downstream effect of attention.

If you have attention - real, daily, habitual attention - conversions tend to follow. The repeat purchases follow. The referrals follow.

It doesn’t work the other way around.

You can’t optimize your way into habit.

What This Actually Means

It’s not that every DTC brand needs to become the next Shein, or send a hundred emails in one week like Temu. That's not realistic and it's not the point.

The point is that the brands who figure out daily engagement, in a form that makes sense for their category and audience, are going to have an enormous advantage over the next five years.

Because the advantage only grows when people are buying directly from ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity conversations, and these AI platforms are deciding for customers what the best product is for their needs.

You can pay $60 CPMs to show up in Google.

Or you can be the brand that people seek out and consciously spend time with.

When you become part of your customers' daily lives, you’re playing a different game entirely.

It's worth spending some real time thinking about what that looks like for your brand.

Brought to You by MobiLoud

We've been talking about engagement. About becoming part of your customer's daily life.

Here's a practical starting point: a mobile app.

An app puts you on the one device people check 100+ times a day. Push notifications reach them on their lock screen. You’re always one tap away. It's the closest thing to a direct line into your customer's daily routine.

MobiLoud turns your existing site into a native app without rebuilding anything. Same experience your customers already love, now on their home screen.

See if it’s the right move for your brand:

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Quick Hits

Zuckerberg Teases Agentic Commerce Tools and Major AI Rollout in 2026

Meta is going all-in on AI agents that shop for you. Zuckerberg called 2026 the year of "personal super intelligence" - meaning AI that knows your preferences and makes purchase decisions on your behalf. If that doesn't make you think about how your brand shows up when a robot is doing the buying, it should.

Amazon Preparing $200 Billion AI Blowout

Amazon just committed $200 billion in capex this year - $50 billion more than Wall Street expected. Google's at $175-185 billion. Meta and Microsoft raised theirs too. Whatever you think about the AI bubble debate, the money flowing into this infrastructure is real and it's going to reshape how people discover, evaluate, and buy products. The downstream effects on ecommerce will be massive - and probably faster than most brands are planning for.

The Rise of Agentic Commerce Could Shift Retailers' Focus to Products

Shopify's Harley Finkelstein predicts agentic commerce will create "merit-based shopping", where AI agents choose products on quality and value, not brand recognition.

His take: "You won't be able to lean on your balance sheet anymore. You actually have to compete on merit of your product." Ulta is already responding with exclusive brand partnerships to stay differentiated. The theory is that brands that win in an AI-mediated world will be the ones with genuinely better products, not just bigger ad budgets.

Bryan Porter on Pivoting DTC Strategy at Simple Modern

Bryan Porter of Simple Modern shares how they did what felt impossible - expanding from an Amazon-native brand to DTC. The biggest takeaway? Pivoting their strategy. They didn’t try to compete on price with Amazon and Target, instead building a unique strategy that only worked for DTC.

5 Uncertainties to Remove to Reduce Churn

When customers don’t come back, it’s not because the product sucks. It’s because there’s uncertainty. Retention comes down to overcoming this uncertainty on five levels.

That’s all for now.

We’ll be back next week with a new podcast episode I’m excited about, as well as another deep dive into what’s happening in ecommerce right now, and how successful brands are doing CX and retention right.

If there’s any topic you’d like to see us dive into, for either the newsletter or the podcast, just shoot me a message here.

Until next time,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: want to boost retention, revenue and profitability? If so, launching your own app could be the best move you make this year.

See how: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.