r/ecommerce

Hi everyone,

Everyone seems to have figured out how to make online money except me from the way it looks from the outside. I have crazy work ethic, have tried lots of different niches, industries, etc, nothing seemed to click. I have a masters in Mechatronic Engineering and am pretty good at automations, using AI to solve problems, and whatnot. I want to work smart from here on out. Anyone free enough to give me a helping hand on just general insights on ecommerce? It looks like if I play my cards right and with a little bit of luck it might pop off for people doing it correctly.

Thank you in advance, looking forward to any help :)

 I was doing some competitive research with AI tools today and it pulled up an actual import-export database. acciowork gave me a full breakdown: product specs, exact quantities, dates, and even the buyer and supplier names for our main competitors.
I am stunned tbh... How is this allowed? It feels like anyone can just spy on our entire strategy with zero effort. Am I missing something here? Is there a way to hide these records or are we just permanently exposed to everyone with an internet connection?

Did a rough time audit last month. Just supplier communication, not including internal ops, not customer service, just the back and forth with suppliers. Came out to about 11 hours a week.

Broken down: about 4 hours on follow-ups that should have been resolved the first time but weren't because the supplier replied with a vague answer and I had to reclarify. About 3 hours on quote requests and comparison. pulling info from emails into a spreadsheet to compare. The rest was ETA tracking, exception handling, and the occasional dispute.

The frustrating part isn't the volume, it's how much of it is reactive. I'm not doing anything strategic in those 11 hours. I'm moving information from one place to another, over and over.

I've started offloading some of this. The follow-up and ETA tracking is now handled through Accio Work. I use it as my general business AI assistant, but it's been surprisingly solid at running these specific follow-up sequences automatically and escalating to me when something is genuinely stuck. That's knocked maybe 5 hours off the weekly total. The quote comparison piece I'm still doing manually because I haven't trusted any tool enough to hand that off completely.

I know some of you are running much higher volumes than I am. How are you handling this at scale? And for anyone in the 200-600 orders/month range what does your supplier communication workflow actually look like?

Not looking for a solution pitch, genuinely curious what other operators have figured out.

I absolutely love what I've been able to do in my business with AI lately. Being able to connect Claude to shopify, google drive, my calender etc has just opened up a whole new world.

The problem is I now feel like I have a backlog of about 1,000 new systems and things I want to implement to automate or improve my business but only so many hours in the day. I have more ideas than I know what to do with.

I want to use Claude to re-order all my collections by profit generated. I want to have ChatGPT analyze all my shipping data to optimize box sizes. I want to have Claude connect to my Meta ads, analyze hooks that work best, visuals that work best, then go into the ad library, find what my competitors are doing and then come up with newer and better ads.

Every day I feel like I have 10 more ideas that I don't have time to implement

I recently started a small online niche fragrance store with one goal in mind, to sell niche fragrances cheaper and make it more accessible! Most reliable stores for niche fragrances are physical stores charging full prices.
I wanted to offer customers authentic products and good rates. But the one thing that has really stood out to me is how difficult it is to build a competitive catalog as a smaller business.

A lot of the products are spread across completely different suppliers, but many suppliers also have fairly high minimum order requirements. So even if I only find a few products from a supplier that actually make sense for my store, I still need to place a much larger order just to check out.
I hardly have room for marketing, shipping, maintenance for my website and everything else that comes with running an e-commerce business.

What I’m trying to figure out is how smaller stores approach this long term. I want to just make 20€ per item so I can spend on marketing and bills but it doesn’t looks like it’s going happen. I am feeling so hopeless. I work all day and don’t even earn after I sell.
I need to expand my catalog but I don’t know how.

Anyways would genuinely love to hear perspectives from other people in e-commerce or small business.

$23 billion in the US alone. From a platform that only launched its shop features in september 2023.

For content that you make TikTok Shop bigger than Target, Costco and Best buy in US ecommerce.

The interesting part is not just the size, its who's buying. The faster growing customer segment on TikTok Shop is not Gen Z. It's middle income Americans earning $55k - $90k annually who are using it for everyday purchases, not just impulse buys.

The "TikTok is just for young people" excuse just ran out.

Brands still treating it as an experimental budget line while going all in on Meta are going to look back at 2026 the same way stores looked back at ignoring mobile in 2012.

Are you actively selling on TikTok Shop or still sitting on the fence?

skincare brand, 8 months in. finally did a proper audit of every customer message from the last 60 days.

340 total. tagged each one.

63% pre-purchase. questions about ingredients, skin conditions, how to use the product alongside other things they were using. people who hadn't bought yet and were trying to decide.

37% actual post-sale. tracking questions, returns, the usual stuff.

i had been staffing the inbox like it was a support channel. it was mostly a sales channel in disguise. people reaching out because the product page didn't answer their question, not because anything went wrong.

rewrote the pages around the questions that kept showing up. pre-purchase email volume dropped in the first two weeks. too early to have clean conversion data but the direction is right.

the inbox problem was a product page problem.

anyone else found this kind of mismatch when they actually looked at what their support volume was made of?

Been running my modern furniture store and with spring cleaning season plus Mothers Day gifts coming up, custom orders are already pouring in. Customers want to change fabrics, leg styles, and dimensions but the online furniture customiser tools ive tried look flat and dont give that confident preview feeling. I researched quite a few options and the prices range from affordable plugins to pretty expensive monthly plans. Most of them also create extra work on the backend for production files. Anyone here found a solid online furniture customiser that delivers realistic 3D views and makes the whole process smoother?

Hi all,

Ive been reading a lot about how CAC increased by 45% in the last 3 years. I wanted to check in to see for those who manage brand what CAC in FB and Google are they seeing in supplements? Particularly in womens health?

Im going to start advertising on FB in the next few weeks and want to get a bench mark.
Thank you!

For a long time I thought my biggest problems were traffic, SEO, ads, or pricing.

But after testing different things for months, I realized a lot of the real problems were actually smaller trust and buyer behavior issues that were hard to notice at first.

Sometimes I was changing listings too fast, overcomplicating product pages, or focusing on metrics that did not really explain what buyers were feeling.

A few practical changes, paying more attention to buyer behavior and trying some analysis/testing tools people mentioned in different Reddit communities slowly helped things start making more sense.

Still learning obviously, but I honestly want to thank a lot of people here because reading different experiences and discussions helped me way more than most random ecommerce videos online.

Hi everyone,

For those who launched a new e-commerce store from scratch and managed to get sales, I’d like to hear your experience.

When you enter a niche where competitors are already established, even if you have a good product angle and a clear offer, trust is still a big issue.

Customers today often check reviews, social proof, previous buyers, brand presence, etc. But when your store is new, you don’t have much of that yet.

Let’s assume the basics are already done:

• clear product page
• benefits-focused copy
• transparent shipping times
• clear checkout
• good product photos/videos
• refund/return policy
• decent ads

My question is more about what actually makes people feel confident enough to take out their card and buy from a new store they don’t know yet.

For people who successfully launched and scaled a new Shopify/e-commerce store:

What helped you build trust quickly at the beginning, before having real reviews and social proof?

Was it the offer, the guarantee, the ad angle, UGC content, founder story, customer support, branding, pricing, retargeting, or something else?

I’m especially interested in real examples from people who went from zero sales to consistent sales, and what made the biggest difference in getting those first customers.

Okay, I need to vent for a sec. I run a small business and use a few different payment processors like Stripe, PayPal, etc. Every time a payment fails, I have to manually retry it through a different one. It's such a time-suck, especially on busy days.

Someone mentioned Payme͏ntKit might smooth this out, but I'm hesitant to add yet another to͏ol. Has anyone actually used it? Is it wo͏rth it, or just another middleman? Open to other suggestions too. 🙏

I'm trying to figure out which model cost less when running real volume. Here is my current setup:

• content agency: $9.5k/mo retainer, gets us around 6 finished pieces per month (so $1.6k per ugc piece)
• platform/marketplace alternative: variable per creator, but i've seen $300 to $800 per piece quoted from a few

At first the platform looks like a no brainer until you factor in the time you spend vetting creators yourself, writing briefs / giving revision notes, managing payment and contracts, and chasing late deliveries

Agency at $1.6k/piece includes all of that. Platform at $500/piece probably adds 4 to 6 hours of internal time per piece if you're doing it right.

So the real comparison isn't $1.6k vs $500. it's $1.6k vs ($500 + around 5 hours of someone making $80k/year), that gets you closer to $700 to $800 actual cost on the platform side. still meaningfully cheaper.

Am i missing something? Anyone running 20+ ugc pieces a month who can share what your real per piece cost ends up being once you load in the management overhead?

Been running our thing for a couple years now and at some point we started getting more customer disputes. That's eating up a lot of time, so we looked at hiring someone part time to just handle those back and forths with customers, refund requests, chargebacks, that whole mess.

We’re talking maybe 10 to 15 disputes a month. Even at part time rates we’d probably be paying someone around 2k a month minimum just to manage that. Our average dispute value is around 200 bucks. When you really sit down and do the math, it just doesn’t feel right. You’re basically paying more to manage the problem than the problem itself is costing you.

And it’s not even just the cost. You still have to train them, trust them with customer communication, make sure they’re doing things properly, and stay involved when something more serious comes up. It doesn’t fully remove the problem, it just shifts it a bit.

Then I started wondering if theres something we're missing. Curious what other founders do when this becomes a thing, do you hire for it ?

A friend has a small Amazon bookstore (about 400 book inventory) that she has offered to sell me at a good price. But from what I've read, transferring store ownership isn't simple. It would be an asset purchase, not an LLC transfer. Gemini claims the following, but other sources tell me it's not this easy:

* **Do Not Delete Anything:** Leave the inventory exactly as it is.

* **Gain Admin Access First:** Have the seller go to `Settings > User Permissions` and add your email address as a user with full administrative rights. Log in from your computer to accept this invitation.

* **Trigger the Tax Interview:** Navigate to `Settings > Account Info > Legal Entity` and start the new Tax Interview. This is where you input your own Social Security Number or new LLC EIN.

* **Update the Bank Info Last:** Once Amazon verifies your tax information, update the bank account details to yours so future payouts route correctly.

Would I be setting myself up for a huge headache by buying the store? I don't want Amazon to shut the store for violating TOS, etc.

Every platform sounds manageable individually, but once enough are running together it becomes:

• syncing inventory
• fixing mismatched details
• handling platform-specific quirks
• checking whether automation actually worked

I understand the logic behind “be everywhere,” but operationally it feels heavier than people talk about publicly.

At some point simplifying almost feels more valuable than expanding.

Took me way too long to figure this out so hopefully this saves someone here some time.

We had a store that was doing okay on paid ads but every time we tried to build organic social traffic it was all over the place. Some weeks great, most weeks dead. We kept blaming the content,wrong format, wrong posting time, not enough volume. So we kept tweaking creatives, tried different content styles, hired someone to help. Nothing moved the needle consistently.

What we weren't looking at was how the accounts themselves were being operated.

Everything was running from a desktop browser. Instagram and TikTok are mobile-first platforms, they know the difference between a real phone user and someone managing an account through a browser or emulator. That inconsistency in how the account behaves signals something to the algorithm and your reach pays for it quietly without you even realising what's happening.

Once we moved to actual cloud phones, we made used GeeLark, and gave each account its own clean mobile environment, the consistency changed. Not overnight but within a few weeks the accounts started behaving more predictably. Traffic stopped randomly dying between weeks and conversions followed because the audience being reached was more stable.

The content was never really the main problem. The foundation it was running on was.

If your social traffic feels random and you've already tried fixing the creative side, look underneath that before you spend more on content or ads…cheers to many success

Hi everyone, very new to Ecom, haven't even tried it out yet, but my background is engineering and I thought to myself let me just automate the whole process:

I've went from automating something that finds products with a mixture of signals from meta/tiktok ad data, websites like minea, etc, hooked it into my own personal ad creator that works similar to higgsfield in the backend, and right now looking to tweak UGC ads I can create on my own similar to Arcads. The product I choose gets scraped, LLM's working in the background to determine if there's a good chance this sells, to automatic landing page creation with custom ads/content about that specific product, and finally hooks the landing page up to a shopify checkout page. Those custom ads get pushed automatically with a predefined budget to campaigns split across whatever socials you're targeting, you choose.

All you have to do is just accept or decline the product on telegram from your personal bot assistant.

I'M NOT HERE TO PROMO THIS SOFTWARE!

I'm here to ask if something like this already exists? If it does, what is it and how much are people willing to pay for this kind of setup?

I put quite a while into this, and I'd love brutal feedback from the people that do this for a living.

TLDR - I've automated the entire process of ecommerce (or how I understand it to be) and would like some valuable feedback from people in the space. Would you use something like this to scale? Would you have any feedback? Any points I'm missing? You get the gist.

Thanks in advance :)

I spent the weekend nerding out on returns data because I kept hearing founders quote "10% return rate" like it's an industry baseline. It's not. And the cost per return is the part nobody actually models.

Here's the 2026 picture (from NRF, Statista, and Eightx data):

• Average ecommerce return rate: ~20.8% (up from 11% in 2020)
• Apparel: 25%, with some fashion sub-segments hitting 40–50%
• Footwear: ~18%
• Furniture/home: 15–20%
• Electronics: 11–15%
• Beauty: 4–12%
• Jewelry (private-label): ~4%

Now the part that broke my brain. Cost per return ranges from $10 to $65 per item depending on category (shipping back, inspection, restocking, depreciation). Furniture is the worst. reverse logistics on a couch can exceed the unit margin.

That's why some brands have quietly moved to "keep it" refunds under a certain price point.

The reason this matters: a 25% return rate doesn't shave 25% off your contribution margin. It shaves closer to 70% once you fold in processing, lost shipping, depreciation, and the chunk of returned inventory you can't resell at full price (only 48% gets back on the shelf at sticker).

What I found really jarring: 45% of all returns are caused by sizing, fit, or color. Another 14% by "inaccurate description." Together that's 59% of returns that are essentially a product-page problem, not a product problem.

Most of the brand owners I've talked to are running 6-8 flat photos per SKU and a single lifestyle shot. The customer is making a buying decision with less information than they'd get holding the thing for 4 seconds in a store. Then we act surprised when 1 in 4 ships back.

Curious what return rates the operators here are actually seeing. And if you've moved the needle on the "59% category" — what actually worked? Better photography? Video? Size guides? AR? I keep hearing different things from different categories.

Linkedin just announced that they are starting to fight AI slop in posts and answers and the results will be up in comming month!

I think it is awesome move towards the quality that Reddit needs as well.

What do you guys think about it and will Reddit join the fight?