Ecommerce Conversations
Ecommerce Conversations is the long-running weekly podcast from Practical Ecommerce, hosted by ecommerce entrepreneur Eric Bandholz.
•• Listen in as Eric interviews in-the-trenches founders and executives who address the essentials of launching, growing, and sustaining an online business. Hear their successes, mistakes, and plans — addressing customer acquisition, web traffic, marketing tactics, on-site conversion, shipping, favorite tools, funding, obstacles, and much more.
•• New episodes every Friday. Subscribe to the podcast here, and then read a condensed transcript at https://www.PracticalEcommerce.com/tag/podcasts.
Episodes
598 episodes
Emotion-Led Ads Cut Costs 30%
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, l...
Email Pro: Open Rate Is a Vanity Metric
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 t...
The Top Cause of Wasted Ad Spend
Brett Fish sees a lot of wasted ad spend. His company, TagHero, tracks clients' advertising performance on platforms such as Meta, Google Ads, and TikTok. He says the platforms are merely algorithms that respond to data. Good data leads to good...
A One-Two Punch Drives Ecommerce Growth
Sean Stone advises ecommerce merchants to adopt a one-two punch for growth. Punch one is developing a profitable, branded website. Punch two is converting the likely spillover traffic on Amazon.That tactic inspired the name of Sean’s la...
Nail Profit before Site Extras, Owner Says
Paolo Vidali has a suggestion for merchants looking to add advanced features to their ecommerce sites: Be careful. Focus first on profitability, he says, and solve the basics of product returns, customer service, and free shipping.Paolo...
Avoid All-Caps Headlines, Says CRO Pro
Nate Lagos is a seasoned conversion rate optimizer, yet a recent A/B test surprised him.A client used all caps in key landing page headlines. Nate, having read a tip on X, suggested they test headlines that capitalized only the first le...
Printful Exec on Profitable Print-on-Demand
Thanks to companies such as Printful, an enterprising entrepreneur can select a product, upload an image to place on it, sync it with her ecommerce site, sell it, and then pay for it.Print-on-demand is big business, and David Hooker is ...
Building a Life, Not Just a Business
The last few years have been rough for Beardbrand, the direct-to-consumer company that host Eric Bandholz founded over a decade ago. He says pretty much nothing has worked post-pandemic. The business is finally seeing revenue growth, but costs ...
Pinwheel CEO on Selling Kid-Safe Phones
In 2019 Dane Witbeck had a problem familiar to parents: What were his kids doing on their smartphones?That problem became his motivation to launch Pinwheel, an Austin, Texas-based seller of Android phones with parental controls for apps,...
Engineer Quits, Launches Online Art School
Florence Morin is an artist-turned-engineer-turned-entrepreneur. She graduated from Canada's Polytechnique Montréal in 2013, only to realize she disliked engineering work. She longed to earn a living from making art.Fast forward to 2026...
2 Bootstrapped D2C Brands, 1 CEO
For four years Eric Steckling has run two direct-to-consumer brands. Brio, the company he founded in 2014, sells beard trimmers and related goods. In 2022, he acquired Ollie, then a seller of teeth-whitening strips and now an expanded oral care...
Ecommerce Investor on Turnaround Tactics (Encore)
Please enjoy this repeat of a popular episode first aired in April 2025.Mehtab Bhogal is the co-founder of Karta Ventures, a Canada-based acquirer of troubled ecommerce businesses. The firm seeks companies with "issues," such as unpaid ...
Chord Commerce CEO on Pivoting to Data
When he appeared on this podcast in 2021, Bryan Mahoney had just co-founded Chord, an ecommerce platform that separated the public frontend from the nuts-and-bolts backend. It was a "headless" structure that enabled merchants to connect with th...
Inside Beardbrand's Expansion Plan
We've hit a plateau at Beardbrand, the direct-to-consumer business I launched 15 years ago. Our revenue is down from its peak. We've made mistakes.The beard care space has dried up. We've moved from a blue ocean of growth and opportunit...
Viahart Founder Eyes Sales in China
Contrary to much U.S. sentiment, Molson Hart sees opportunity in China. His direct-to-consumer toy brand, Viahart, sells mostly on Amazon, though growth has slowed in recent years. China, he says, offers promise.In this our third interv...
Surviving D2C's Boom and Bust
Chris Wichert is an investment banker turned direct-to-consumer entrepreneur.His luxury shoe brand, Koio, launched in 2015 and quickly scaled. Then the pandemic hit. By late 2022, he says, the D2C hype and funding had collapsed....
Iris Founder Talks AI-Powered Finance
Host Eric Bandholz has interviewed a slew of impressive entrepreneurs on this podcast. He says Drew Fallon is among the most versatile. Drew last appeared on t...
EcomFuel Founder on 2026 Industry Trends
For years EcomFuel has surveyed its community of ecommerce merchants about their growth, margins, tactics, and more. The company released this year's findings last week.In this episode, founder Andrew Youderian recaps the report, addres...
My Ideal Second Business
Molson Hart is the founder of Viahart, a D2C toy brand, and Edison, a legal technology company. He says every entrepreneur should own two businesses, where one offers more opportunities to scale, is more profitable, or diversifies risk....
Content Beats Design, Says CRO Pro
Dave Diederen is the founder of Syntra, a Netherlands-based conversion rate optimization agency. He encourages ecommerce brands to test product pages, ads, and, well, everything. He says merchants often prioritize their sites' aesth...
Ditch the Discount, Says Brand Marketer
Since 2013 Cherene Aubert has managed, advised, and executed ecommerce marketing campaigns. She's worked for agencies, merchants, and as a freelance consultant. Her D2C advisory firm, Growth Capital, helps scale premium, high-growth brands....
How Vessi Sells Waterproof Shoes
Ray Hua is the director of ecommerce at Vessi, a Canada-based direct-to-consumer seller of waterproof sneakers. The brand launched in 2017 after its founders developed and patented breathable fabric that repels water. Ray joined the company in ...
From Teacher to Fashion Brand Founder
In 2019 Nasrin Jafari was a middle school teacher in New York City. She had no ecommerce experience but was drawn to creating and building, which led her to sew and sell face masks during Covid.Fast forward to 2026, and Mixed, her direc...
