Practical Ecommerce

Sarah Levinger consults with ecommerce brands on marketing psychology. She says shoppers’ emotions drive ad performance, and success comes from aligning messaging with those feelings. She did that with a D2C maker of hop-flavored teas, lowering acquisition cost by 30%. We discussed that example and other tactics in our recent conversation. Our entire audio is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length. Eric Bandholz: What do you do?

Effective cart abandonment emails and text messages do more than remind shoppers about items left behind. They use product details, reassurance, and incentives to address customer concerns and reopen a conversion path. After three decades of online shopping, cart recovery remains important. Most cart recovery programs rely on fixed sequences that cannot distinguish those concerns. That is because an abandoned cart records an outcome, not a reason.

Every week we publish a rundown of new services for ecommerce merchants. This installment includes updates on drone deliveries, image and video editors, site and product search, AI-native advertising, warehouse automation, agentic marketing, multichannel commerce, and cross-border payments. Got an ecommerce product release? Email updates@practicalecommerce.com. Wink expands creative toolkit with AI enhancement and video cleanup.

List-style articles are popular because they’re easy to read and understand. Examples are lists of solution providers, gift ideas, and experts. Listicles traditionally ranked highly in organic search, and now, for visibility on generative AI platforms, they can drive citations to a brand when it appears alongside other trusted providers. Unfortunately, success with listicles has inevitably led to abuses. AI-generated. Many sites have published AI-generated listicles.

September 2026 offers ecommerce content marketers an array of topic opportunities, including Back to Hogwarts Day, bacon, emergency preparedness, Grandparents Day, and fall home resets. Content marketing is the creation, publication, and promotion of articles, videos, podcasts, and similar content to attract, engage, and retain customers. It works on the principle of reciprocity.

Nabeel Azeez runs a Dubai-based email marketing agency with clients in ecommerce, SaaS, and more. He emphasizes engagement-based segmentation and high frequency, sending for one client eight emails per day, each to a unique segment. In our recent conversation, he shared his methods for driving revenue from ecommerce emails, including unorthodox views such as the open rate is a vanity metric and never unsubscribe dormant recipients. Our entire audio is embedded below.

Proposed legislation introduced last week in the U.S. House of Representatives could give marketplace sellers new protections against alleged policy violations that result in frozen revenue and stranded inventory. Ecommerce marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart offer merchants tremendous opportunities. Even the tiniest enterprise can put its products in front of millions of potential customers. Once sales start rolling in, however, a seller can become dependent on the marketplace channel.

Our rundown this week of new services for ecommerce merchants includes updates on post-purchase, in-game commerce, payment options, analytics, multi-platform ad campaigns, logistics, content syndication, intelligent search filters, chargebacks, and fraud prevention. Got an ecommerce product release? Email updates@practicalecommerce.com. Maersk expands ecommerce capabilities through partnership with ShippyPro.

I speak with many international merchants looking to enter the U.S. market. Nearly all of them plan to launch on Amazon. But channels such as branded ecommerce sites and the fast-growing TikTok Shop increasingly offer alternatives. Here’s an example. I consult with a hair-care brand that launched in the U.S. in 2021 via Instagram, then added Shopify and TikTok Shop. The brand’s average basket is $59.

Google’s newly updated “Crawling infrastructure” documentation includes “Optimize your crawl budget,” a section with pointers on how websites can expose more pages to the search giant’s bots. The topic is important, as pages must be crawled to appear in Google’s index and search results. The documentation addresses the need for a “budget” given the sheer number of global URLs. A poorly organized website will likely take longer to crawl and thus have fewer indexed pages.