Nice product. Ours now.

FROM OUR SPONSOR:

You’ve optimized your listings, tested your pricing, and dialed in your PPC - but if your fulfillment isn’t keeping up, you’re leaving money (and customer trust) on the table.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce our logistics partner WAPI - a smart fulfillment platform helping fast-growing sellers scale across Europe with confidence.

• Centralized inventory management across
• European fulfillment with fast delivery from 15+ local warehouses
• Local support
• Cash-on-delivery (COD) options that boost conversion rates
• Smart courier routing & real-time tracking
• Seamless integration with your sales channels

Whether you’re handling cross-border orders or expanding to new marketplaces, WAPI helps you streamline operations, reduce delivery times, and increase profit margins - all without adding complexity to your stack.

WAPI also works great for Shopify, WooCommerce, and more - perfect if you’re building a multichannel brand.

Congratulations on Your Profitable Product. Here Come the Copycats.

There is a very specific phrase uttered by doomed people throughout history. The captain of the Titanic said it. The guy in Jurassic Park petting the dinosaur probably said it. And today, Amazon sellers say it constantly: “I’m just reselling.”

That sentence is usually followed by the sound of margins collapsing.

That phrase has the same energy as saying, “I’m sure no one else will notice this extremely profitable thing I found on the internet.” Which is charming. And delusional. Like trying to hide a cheeseburger in a room full of raccoons and hoping for the best.

Somehow, many sellers have convinced themselves that business moats are reserved for gigantic brands with Super Bowl ads, legal teams and founders who talk about “mission” while wearing monochrome outfits. Meanwhile resellers apparently believe they can survive forever on raw hustle, vibes, and the fact that they were “early.”

Early to what? Google?

Because ecommerce, especially marketplaces like Amazon, is not a polite farmer’s market where everyone agrees to respect each other’s booths. It’s a knife fight in a phone booth, except the phone booth is on fire and Jeff Bezos is watching from orbit. If you sell something that makes money, other sellers will appear. Not might. Will. Immediately. Sometimes before your first payout clears. And when they arrive, they do not innovate. They do not differentiate. They copy your listing, drop the price by twelve cents, and then act shocked when everyone’s margins evaporate and the Buy Box looks like a crime scene. This is not bad luck. This is what happens when there is no moat.

And the most effective moats are aggressively unglamorous.

Take supplier exclusivity. Is it exciting? No. Is it Instagrammable? Absolutely not. But if you are the only seller who can legally source a product, congratulations - you have just created a tiny monopoly. And monopolies, it turns out, are very good for profit. It’s not flashy branding. It’s paperwork and relationship management. Which is exactly why most people don’t do it.

Then there’s logistics speed. Customers say they care about price, but what they actually care about is not having to wait eight days while their package takes a scenic tour of three distribution centers and a post office that may or may not exist. Faster fulfillment, better inventory planning, and fewer stockouts quietly win. This is a moat built out of competence, which is devastatingly effective because so many sellers are bad at it.

Listing optimization is another deeply unsexy weapon. If your product shows up first, looks trustworthy, answers questions clearly, and doesn’t read like it was written by a confused robot at 3 a.m., you convert better. And conversion is leverage. Your competitor can match your product, but matching your ranking, reviews, and click-through rate is a much taller order.

And finally, there is the moat no one brags about at conferences: catalog depth. Being boringly comprehensive. Carrying every variation, refill, accessory, and oddball SKU in a niche. This works because customers are lazy in the best possible way. If they can buy everything from one seller, they will. Everyone else becomes “that other option I’ll never scroll far enough to see.”

The uncomfortable truth is this: if your only advantage is “I found this product first,” then your business is not a business. It’s a temporary situation. And temporary situations are not where long-term profit lives.

You don’t need a logo worth six figures. You don’t need a brand story about your childhood dream of selling silicone spatulas. You need something - anything - that makes it harder for the next seller to replace you.

Because on Amazon, the question is never “Will competitors come?” The question is whether, when they arrive, they bounce off your moat - or march straight through your margins like an invading army with free shipping.

And history suggests armies love free shipping.

The Internet’s Most Intense Hobby: Buying Online Stores and Calling It “Basically Passive”

This episode takes on the world of ecommerce mergers and acquisitions, a field that sounds dull, looks dull, and is therefore extremely dangerous, because no one is paying attention while large sums of money quietly change hands.

It explains why buyers today have collectively decided that revenue is a lie, or at least a suggestion, and now focus instead on discretionary earnings, recurring sales, and subscription models - because nothing reassures an investor quite like predictable cash flow arriving every month, whether or not anyone is still passionate about scented candles.

The conversation pulls apart what buyers actually want, what sellers desperately think they’re selling, and the current state of ecommerce M&A - an ecosystem where optimism is high, multiples are debated like religion, and everyone insists their business is “basically passive.”

All of this unfolds in a discussion that reveals how internet businesses are really valued, why that process is deeply strange, and how an entire economy now runs on spreadsheets and hope.

Tune in above and check.

Headline Sold Separately

Google Discover: The Traffic Source You Didn’t Optimize For, But Now Desperately Need

There is a specific kind of panic that sets in when an ecommerce seller realizes his website hasn’t dropped in rankings - it’s simply no longer being visited. And that panic has arrived at the same time as Google Discover has quietly become one of the few remaining sources of organic traffic. Or, as it is more accurately known, “That Weird Feed on Your Phone That Knows You’re Thinking About Buying Hiking Boots Before You Do.”  Because while traditional Google Search is being slowly, lovingly replaced by AI overviews that answer questions so thoroughly they actively resent your website’s existence, Discover is over here like, “Hey buddy. Want some traffic?”

Let’s talk about the problem first. Search traffic for ecommerce is being eaten alive. AI summaries now sit at the top of results, calmly explaining which blender to buy, which mattress won’t ruin your spine, and which dog food will prevent your pet from developing a personality disorder. Shopping agents are comparing prices, reading reviews, and buying products without ever visiting your site. Your product page isn’t losing a ranking - it’s being bypassed entirely. It’s the digital equivalent of someone reading the menu outside your restaurant, deciding what to eat, and then cooking it themselves at home.

And suddenly Google Discover fits in. Google’s personalized, query-less content feed that appears in Google’s mobile apps and on Android home screens. You do not search Discover. Discover searches you. It watches what you read, what you linger on, and what you accidentally tap without meaning to, then decides what else you might like. It is less “search engine” and more “nosy friend who won’t stop making recommendations.”

And crucially, Discover still sends clicks. Real clicks. Human clicks. The kind where someone actually lands on your site instead of absorbing the answer from a glowing AI paragraph and moving on with their life. In 2026, that alone makes Discover feel like a rare endangered species.

For ecommerce sellers, this is suddenly very interesting. Because Discover doesn’t care much about keywords. It cares about interest. You’re not optimizing for “best air fryer under $100” anymore. You’re trying to be fascinating enough that Google thinks your content deserves to interrupt someone mid-scroll between a news article and a video explaining why one oddly specific household item is ruining your life.

That means product pages alone won’t cut it. Discover wants content that feels editorial: buying guides, trend breakdowns, explainers, comparisons, and stories that make your products feel relevant to real life. If your content reads like it was written by a human who has met another human, you’re already ahead of the game.

Of course, Discover is also wildly unpredictable. You don’t rank in Discover. You are simply chosen. One day you’ll get a traffic spike so large you assume something has gone wrong. The next day, nothing. Discover is not a strategy so much as a weather system. You prepare for it, you benefit from it, but you do not control it.

Google has also been quietly raising the bar. Clickbait headlines, thin content, and recycled nonsense get filtered out. Discover wants originality, strong visuals, and content that people actually engage with. If users click and immediately leave, Google notices. If they stick around, Discover shows it to more people. It’s basically a popularity contest where the judge is an algorithm with trust issues.

The upside is that Discover can level the playing field. Smaller ecommerce brands with focused expertise can outperform massive retailers by being timely, specific, and genuinely useful. You don’t need to outspend Amazon. You just need to be more interesting than whatever bland content they approved in a meeting that should have been an email.

So no, Google Discover is not a replacement for search. It’s a complement, a hedge, and possibly your next unexpected traffic spike in a world where AI is quietly eating the old one. It is chaotic, opaque, and deeply uninterested in your business goals. But it still does something radical: it shows people content and lets them click it.

And in 2026, for ecommerce sellers watching their search traffic disappear into an AI-shaped void, that alone feels like a small miracle.

Why Mystery Works

Nobody didn’t take blind boxes seriously at first. When they started showing up outside of toys and collectibles, they felt like a novelty brands would play with for a quarter or two before moving on. Something you’d see during a slow sales month or a campaign brainstorm that ran out of better ideas. A gimmick, basically.

But then they didn’t go away.

Read the whole story...

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So… Did This Banksy on Ecom Newsletter Hit the Wall or Just Hit You in the Face?

• Yes — a proper masterpiece.

• Decent… but I could out-spray you in my sleep.

• Nope — back to the alley with it.