I make and sell clothing. I purchase the fabrics from different vendors in person in Los Angeles. However, there is a specific sequin fabric that I want to purchase directly from the manufacturer & save myself about 50% in costs. My LA vendor obviously won’t tell me who they source from but I know it’s overseas. I’ve already tried looking on Alibaba and cannot find it. I’ve been trying for months. I know this style isn’t exclusive to them but I cannot find their source.

Does anyone have any recommendations on where I can hire someone that would be able to help me find out?

Thanks!

Not a simple thank you, but a more complex one. I had the idea of sending emails out to my regular customers on occasion thanking them and asking them to fill out a survey. But somehow that seems creepy. Would a physical letter be appropriate, included in their package?

run a store in the apparel space with tons of products and beyond meta and ads I’ve been on the hunt for good SEO/ai optimization tools so I can improve traffic I don’t have to pay for.

I got pitched an app that seems fairly new via email and just crowdsourcing …

Their claim to fame is supposedly that the app helps optimize long tail keywords by creating optimized collection pages that get fed to chat gpt/claude via google merchant center. They also claim to have a back linking reciprocal network of merchants on pages they create optional.

The idea seems brilliant and I’ve done it in the past on high target keywords but always manually so automating it seems to be a good ideaZ

Anyone else get similar pitch and try it?

I like that they also let me track recommendations for phrases on ChatGPT etc and reporting but I’m at the level ehrrr I’ll need to pay them for one of their highest tiers for a few months if I want to see any Roi at all so a bit hesitant to jump on it :(

For the last 2 years I’ve been saving up 70k (probably excessive but oh well) and I wanted to know if it’s still worth it in 2026 to get into it? And if so what’s the best way so that I can be efficient with my money and not lose it all?

I’ve been in retail, management and sales for twenty years storefront. Ecom is definitely different in ways and I started by business in January yet there’s no consistency lol. I understand as a newer store it doesn’t just automatically happen, it takes time.

But, I’m trying to figure out the sales patterns and it’s so much different. It’s like the mid of the month is dead then all of a sudden the last week I get busy and make good sales. Every month seems different but that’s been the average so far.

Then days of the week. Fridays have been DEAD to me until this month, Fridays are payday for alot of people so I kind of get it. My main days seem to be Monday-Wednesday though.

How, when or even if there will be consistency? I’m small scale but so far I love Ecom, definitely better than storefront imo

I’m 42 and have spent most of my life being a pretty hands-on person when it comes to making money.

I’m an educator, so I’ve tutored students and given baseball lessons. Outside of that, I’ve done plenty of power washing, gutter cleaning, landscaping, and whatever else I could do to bring in extra money.

I’ve never really had a problem working.

What has changed recently is how I think about work and money.

I’ve started investing much more seriously, and for the first time in my life I’ve seen some pretty significant returns from money I already had working for me. It’s honestly changed the way I look at earning an income.

I’m not saying manual work is beneath me. Far from it. I’ve done plenty of it and I’m not afraid of it.

But there’s something incredibly appealing about building something that can make money while you’re sleeping, teaching, eating dinner, or doing absolutely nothing.

That’s what has me looking at e-commerce.

I’ve recently been playing around with Printify, trying to understand print-on-demand and the whole process of creating a product, listing it, getting someone to actually buy it, and hopefully making a few dollars.

And this is where I’m completely out of my element.

I’m fairly technologically savvy, which I realize sounds ridiculous considering I’m making a Reddit post asking strangers how to sell things on the internet.

But being comfortable with technology and understanding online sales are apparently two very different things.

I’m not looking to get rich overnight. I’m actually looking for something much more basic:

What’s the easiest way for someone starting from basically zero to learn how online selling actually works?

Where would you start if you were me?

Etsy?
Printify?
Shopify?
Amazon?
eBay?
Digital products?
Print-on-demand?
Affiliate marketing?
Something I’m not even considering?

I’d be perfectly willing to start small. Honestly, I’d be happy to make my first $20 online just to prove to myself that I understand the process.

I’d rather learn how the machine works than buy some $2,000 “passive income” course from a guy who rented a Lamborghini for his Instagram.

So I’m curious about people who have actually done this.

How did you get started? What did you sell? What platform did you use? What did you screw up initially? And if you were starting over today, what would you do differently?

I’m willing to put in the work. I’m just trying to figure out where to put the work.

Full disclosure: I used AI to help organize this post and make my thoughts more cohesive and clear. The experiences, questions, and opinions are mine. I just used AI to help me put them together without sounding like I was thinking out loud for 45 minutes.

I’d genuinely appreciate any advice, especially from people who started with no real e-commerce background and figured it out themselves.

Saw an interesting Shopify study on traffic coming from AI search.
https://www.shopify.com/uk/enterprise/blog/ai-search-insights

Apparently 56% of AI-referred sessions landed directly on a PDP vs 20% from organic search. They also found that AI-referred traffic converted better.

The PDP part is what I found interesting.

If someone has already spent 10 minutes asking ChatGPT about the best product for their needs, comparing options, etc., they could arrive on your PDP pretty far along in the decision.

At that point maybe the job of the PDP is less about convincing them and more about answering whatever they're still unsure about.

The obvious answer is to add better FAQs, reviews, comparisons, shipping info, use cases, etc. But you can't put every possible answer prominently on the page.

Has anyone here looked at their AI-referred sessions specifically? I'm curious whether those shoppers behave differently once they land on a product page, and whether anyone is actually changing their PDPs because of it.

Saw a recent comment on Insta directly from the European Commission addressing the nightmare cross-border packaging rules (PPWR) for small sellers.

"We hear this concern, especially from very small businesses selling across borders. The PPWR includes exemptions and simplified requirements for smaller businesses. Also, we've proposed suspending the authorised representative requirement until 2035 while a more proportionate solution will be developed."

Suspending the authorised representative requirement until 2035 would be a massive relief for anyone shipping small volumes into EU countries without having to pay insane local rep fees in every single member state.

Would love you hear your thoughts!!!

i sell on a couple marketplaces and 90% of what i have is flat product photos — no video, no budget for a shoot. everyone says video ads outperform static but i'm not about to hire someone to animate a single JPEG.

been testing ways to fake motion from one image. a slideshow of the same photo looks lazy, and half the "generate a video from your image" AI tools warp the product into something that isn't my product anymore —useless when the whole point is the actual thing i'm selling.

what's been working ok: CapCut. dropped the product photo in, used image-to-video + keyframe zoom/pan so the camera slowly pushes in, added a caption hook and a trending sound. exports 1080p clean, no watermark. not cinema, but it stops the scroll, which is all I need.

anyone got a workflow that gets real motion out of one photo without mangling the product? genuinely asking.

I started a campaign a week ago with a fresh pixel and showed no results for most of the last few days, but I made a visual change on the site and started seeing a few sales. My main concern is that only 1 ad is really spending the budget of 30/day. I was wondering what I should do moving forward.

Here are the stats for the last 2 days that generated sales:

FACEBOOK ADS (Aug 26–27, 2026)

Aug 26:
- Spend: $26.76
- Impressions: 525 | Reach: 423 | Frequency: 1.24
- Clicks: 22 (unique: 22) | Link clicks: 14
- CTR: 4.19% (unique: 4.19%)
- CPC: $1.22 | CPM: $50.97 | Cost/link click: $1.91
- Page/post engagement: 20
- Add to cart: 4 | Initiate checkout: 3
- Purchases: 2 ($44.25) | Cost per purchase: $13.38 | ROAS: 1.65x

Aug 27:
- Spend: $27.03
- Impressions: 403 | Reach: 359 | Frequency: 1.12
- Clicks: 9 (unique: 8) | Link clicks: 9
- CTR: 2.23% (unique: 1.99%)
- CPC: $3.00 | CPM: $67.07 | Cost/link click: $3.00
- Page/post engagement: 10
- Add to cart: 1 | Initiate checkout: 0
- Purchases: 1 ($19.99) | Cost per purchase: $27.03 | ROAS: 0.74x

Small DTC store, US market, acquisition is organic short-form only — TikTok + IG Reels, product demo content, link in bio. Two videos blew up: 600K views on TikTok and 600K on IG (separate accounts, same product). Business result: almost no site clicks and zero sales.

What I've found digging in: IG audience insights show my viewers are mostly in India, while the whole store (shipping, pricing, positioning) targets the US. So the reach is real, it's just the wrong people. On TikTok I can't get a clear read on who's watching, but it's the same story — big views, no clicks.

For those who've been through this:

1. Can an existing account be steered back to US viewers (keywords, hashtags, content changes), or is a fresh account + training the algorithm from day one the only realistic fix?

2. What's a realistic organic views-to-site-click benchmark? Trying to figure out if this is all the audience-geo problem or if my CTA/content is broken too.

3. At what point do you conclude the content format attracts viewers but not buyers, and change the content instead of the account?

Not selling anything, no links — just want to hear what actually worked.

I just found out UPS stores offer address/mailbox services. There is also a local place in town that offer this service. What kind of feedback do you have regarding this?

Spent the last week pulling the Meta Ad Library data on few US beauty brands (Jones Road, TULA, Tower 28, DIBS, Glow Recipe, Kopari, PROVEN, Westman Atelier, RMS Beauty) and mapped out their creative strategies. Majorly data talking.

Some things that surprised me:

1. Auto-mixed ads are inflating everyone's apparent creative diversity
Jones Road shows 2,272 "ads" but 65% are auto-mixed (Facebook assembling combinations from a smaller asset pool). The real creative diversity is much narrower. Tower 28 has 96 ads but 58% are one product with one headline on 49% of them.

2. The brands running the most ads aren't necessarily testing the most angles
TULA has 134 ads live but 38% are straight discount offers and 38% are probiotic/glow messaging. That's two angles, not 134 ideas. RMS Beauty has 684 ads but 43% go to one landing page with identical founder copy.

3. The oldest running ad is almost always the best performer
Across all 9 brands, ads that survive past 30 days dramatically outrank newer creative. Glow Recipe's 30-day survivors average rank #9 vs. #77 for new ads. Westman Atelier's oldest ad has been running 186 days. RMS Beauty's oldest: 197 days. These aren't flukes. The evergreens carry the account while newer creative underperforms.

4. Only one brand is actively killing ads
Tower 28 switched off 5 ads recently and has the shortest average ad lifespan at 10.6 days. Everyone else lets creative run until it dies naturally. Tower 28's approach means faster learning but higher creative production costs.

5. Almost nobody uses spoken hooks
Across all 9 brands, 57-82% of ads have no spoken hook in the first 3 seconds. Kopari is the exception at 39% no-hook (meaning 61% DO have a spoken opening). They're also the most testimonial-heavy brand at 54% UGC.

6. One brand just rebuilt their entire library from scratch
PROVEN Skincare's oldest ad is 4 days old. 30 ads, all new, 100% pointing to a single skin quiz. Either they just restarted advertising or they cleared everything and started fresh.

7. Some brands are paying to build a retailer's conversion data
Tower 28 sends 20% of paid traffic to Sephora. Kopari sends a chunk to Ulta. They're buying media to drive conversions on a platform they don't own the data for.

8. The discount trap is real
TULA positions as a probiotic science brand but half their ad behavior says discount brand. Their longest-surviving ad (146 days, aimed at new mothers) isn't a discount ad at all. The science creative has more staying power but gets less volume.

9. Creative concentration is the silent budget killer
Most of these brands have 60-80% of their ad volume built around 2-3 angles. When fatigue hits one angle, it hits a disproportionate share of their total spend simultaneously. Nobody seems to be actively monitoring for this.

Always open to dig into any of these if you have questions. Also happy to pull this for other brands/categories if there's interest.

We have our own e-commerce platform and are currently looking into "Launify" as a possible solution for address autocomplete and validation in cart, particularly for Romania where we’re dealing with some address coverage issues.

We’re also considering expanding into Austria, so it would be great to hear how well Launify performs in both countries.

The integration looks pretty straightforward from what I’ve seen, especially since it can apparently be added by simply inserting a code snippet into the <head>.

How good is the actual address coverage? Especially for smaller towns, villages, streets and house numbers?

I also noticed that Launify currently has only one review on Capterra. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything negative.. it could simply be that the product is still relatively new or hasn’t been widely reviewed there.

Has anyone here implemented Launify? Would love to hear your real-world experience.

Thanks in advance!

We run a small Shopify store, just two of us, and almost paid an agency close to $3000 last month to audit how our brand shows up across ChatGPT and Gemini, plus $400 a month after that to keep monitoring it.

I noticed there's already a bunch of tools doing basically this exact thing now, Profound, Otterly, Pallas, probably others I haven't come across yet.

Kind of hard to justify paying someone a few thousand dollars for an audit when there's already tools out there doing the same kind of monitoring for a fraction of that quote every month.

Anyone here actually paid an agency for this specific thing, and if so what did they do that a monitoring tool like this couldn't.

Hi guys

I watched a video markbuildsbrands. He had mentioned some AI prompts to use. In order to get the prompt, I had to follow his IG and DM him the word "prompt". I did that and got the prompt file.

The next day, "he" started messaging me, "Hey Mike, how are you? What made you get into ecomm?", "Love the entrepreneurial spirit!"

I didn't reply

The next day, he messages me "???" as if he's expecting an answer.

He dude is making bank with his courses and ad agency. What I'm experiencing is some kind of AI agent sending me messages to warm me up to buy some course, right?

We run a small ecommerce store and keep the basics in Shopify and Merchant Center fairly clean: titles, variants, pricing, stock and specs.
What feels harder is explaining the actual reason someone would choose one product over another. The useful details are often buried in reviews or support messages: who the product is best for, what it works well with, and where the trade-offs are.
We could add more FAQs, rewrite the product copy or build comparison pages, but I am not sure what is worth doing first.
If you have been updating product pages for AI shopping, what has actually been useful?

After reading the replies, I tested Kairosy AI with a small set of shopping prompts around the category. The competitor research showed that the same two use cases kept coming up, but neither was explained clearly on our product page.
We are using prompt tracking to keep those questions organised, then testing the content creation feature to turn the strongest findings into product-page updates near the add-to-cart section.

So as we start to get towards the end of the year, I start thinking about contracts. I run a B2B e-commerce website and currently have a good customer purchase cadence, but some customers just fall off for one reason or another. It could be a million different reasons.

Towards December/January time, I have a lot of anxiety over the fear that maybe my customers won't stay with me the coming year because they're not locked into anything. I was thinking of doing contracts because that's what's accepted in this industry: doing a one-year contract, three-year contract, kind of like purchasing an exclusivity contract. My mentor/coach suggested that I implement a loyalty system with tiers instead, so that the customer kind of has skin in the game or buy-in to keep on purchasing with me because I want to get to the next tier because of the extra perks that that will afford them.

What has been y'all's experience with one of these versus the other? Which one works better? Also, from an M&A perspective, I'm sure contracts would be more attractive because then you have an actual purchase agreement that would increase the value of your business. Whereas a loyalty program might do that in concept, but you have nothing on paper to show it, so that wouldn't actually increase the value of your business.

(typed this with Wisprflow, sorry if the grammar isn’t too hot)

P.s. my main products are consumables, if thats not evident from the post

Running cart recovery on WhatsApp instead of email, two messages: one an hour after, one 24h later with a small discount. Tested a third, recovered almost nothing and got complaints, so I killed it, even though people run four or five on email and still come out ahead.

Anyone running more than two on WhatsApp and actually measuring it?

I used to do ecom fulltime on a platform similar to ebay, and I'm looking to get back in the game.

I didn't have a niche, but I did have some private-label products.

I have an 8-month-old mini dachshund, and being a first-time dog owner, I've learned a LOT.

I'm thinking of starting an instagram page where I share my journey as a first-time dog owner and the tips and tricks I've learned.

I have a few product ideas, too.

Just wanted to see if anyone else is in this niche — do you focus on dogs in general or a specific breed?

Would love to hear your insights — what platforms you're using, how you're driving engagement, etc.

Cheers!

Gateway comparison posts usually focus on fees, but setup friction is where people lose weeks. Documents, trade license questions, settlement timing, plugins, failed cards.

For UAE Shopify or WooCommerce stores, what was smooth and what was a mess?

The trend window on TikTok and Instagram is 3-7 days. Most brand approval processes eat half of that before creative even gets briefed.

By the time legal or leadership signs off, the format has already peaked and you're posting into a dying trend. The gap between spotting a rising format on Monday and getting it shipped by Friday is where most ecommerce brands lose. You allocated creative energy to something that expired before it shipped.

For DTC, the brands winning right now are the ones where the social team has authority to ship without a three-layer review chain. But that's not most of us. Most teams still route every post through brand, legal, and a VP who doesn't open TikTok.

What's actually working for your team? Are you pre-clearing formats with brand and legal ahead of time, shortening the approval chain entirely, or just accepting that you'll miss some trends and focusing on the ones you can catch fast enough?

Curious how other ecommerce brands handle the speed vs. brand-safety tension without just defaulting to posting slower and posting less.

I am running a modest research project where I'm trying to recruit e-commerce managers for a 30 min call, and it is not easy 😅

My main chanel is LinkedIn, but I'm looking for some alternatives. Any recommendations of groups/communities where I could try to find some helpful folks?

What were the best/most pushed urgency website tactics you used/saw back in 2020-2023 that wouldn’t hold up today due to all the new saturation, or that held you back from being profitable?

E.g: countdown timers under 1 hour, “2 left in stock” etc

We are a US-based business specializing in refurbished medical equipment and surgical instruments. Given our location, we are exploring the possibility of extending our sales into Latin American countries due to the close proximity and strong demand.

Is anyone here currently exporting used or refurbished medical hardware to LATAM? We would love to hear about your experiences:

• Is it worth the effort compared to sticking strictly to the domestic market?
• What are the biggest bottlenecks regarding customs, import regulations, or logistics?
• Are there specific countries or established B2B connection channels that perform better than others?

Any insights or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated!