Most ecommerce marketing advice is written by agency folks who sell marketing services (like me).

This article is different. Every tip here came from a real conversation with a founder or operator who learned by doing it: building brands, burning budgets, and figuring out what actually drives ecommerce sales.

Ecommerce Tips and Strategies: Key Takeaways

Customer insights always beat founder assumptions. Survey your customer early, understand their buying intent, and let real feedback shape your messaging.
Distribution is a strategy. There’s no default option. The best channels are often the least obvious.
You don’t have to be great at running every marketing channel, but you should know the basics. Learn enough to hold the right people accountable.

1. Survey Your Customers Before You Finalize Your Messaging

Paula Wise launched Sampleit, a curated snack subscription box for kids, and sold 150 boxes in her first week.

She thought she knew why people were buying, but she was wrong. Her initial marketing plan was built around the wrong customer data entirely, as she had assumed she understood her target audience without asking them.

“I went into it with a very specific mindset of why I thought people wanted this,” she says. “The messaging I went out with initially was: reduce waste, save money, save food. But what I found in the survey was that most people were excited about the convenience and fun of it. They liked having somebody curate these healthy snacks.”

The survey reshaped how she talked about the product entirely. It also revealed something useful about demographics: different customer segments and personas were using the box in completely different ways.

“Getting that data and gathering that feedback was really helpful moving forward in knowing why people are buying this,” she says. “Why do they like it?”

2. Capture Intent The Moment It Happens

Paula Wise had 92 people on a waitlist for Sampleit’s national relaunch. Only 55 of them bought when the doors opened.

She built the list because a podcast she trusted told her to. In hindsight, she wishes she hadn’t.

“I kind of wish I didn’t create that wait list. I wish I used all of that marketing energy and had people just order right then and there.”

The checkout process was ready. The product was ready. The potential customers were there. The waitlist just gave them time to change their minds.

Her advice: “Grab people when you can, because you don’t know if they are going to change their mind.”

3. Get Your Product into Hands Before You Launch

Alex Morel and Ezra Smyser had 30 pairs of shoe prototypes and a problem. They needed to stress test Andiem, their performance basketball shoe designed to prevent ankle injuries, before committing to a production order. So they ran wear tests.

They weren’t trying to generate sales, but that’s what ended up happening.

“People started coming up after the wear test asking, ‘Can I buy this right now?'” says Morel. “The reality was they couldn’t because we needed to literally try to break these shoes and get as much user data as we possibly could. But we said, well, maybe we can sell these when we’re done.”

Their first sales and testimonials came from that wear test community, before Andiem ever officially launched.

“We learned the power of experience,” says Morel. “Months later, after we launched, we were always asking: how can we bring that wear test experience to a commercialized version of the product?”

4. Structure Your Pricing so Paid Ads Can Actually Work

Most ecommerce founders start with product pricing and figure out paid ads later. That’s the wrong order. Product price minus ad spend minus shipping has to leave something on the table.

Greg Rollett says that’s a backwards approach. Rollett has launched more than 800 products through Grommet, a discovery platform for early-stage DTC brands. He says offer construction is the one thing most ecommerce marketing strategies lack.

“One cup is $19.99 plus shipping. That’s not an offer,” he says. “Buy two cups, get one free, plus free shipping? Now you just sold three pieces of inventory, doubled your average order value, and now you can start thinking about paid media acquisition.”

The goal is to increase order value through bundles and special offers so that acquiring a new customer through paid media actually makes sense financially.

“Think about how many people are in your family,” he says. “I’ve got three kids, I need five cups. The sooner you start thinking about offers, the faster you’ll move inventory and the faster you can grow.”

5. Use Amazon to Get Discovered, Not to Build Your Business

Amazon is a discovery channel, not a business model. Treating it like one is how DTC brands end up margin-squeezed and dependent on a platform they don’t own.

Jason Sealand has been running Mad Viking Beard, a DTC grooming brand, for over a decade. He’s expanded to Amazon and Walmart, but he’s deliberate about what role each plays.

“If I wasn’t trying to build a brand and I was literally just looking for things to sell, then let Amazon rip,” he says. “It’s just easier to sell there, but the profit margin is way less and it’s not as glamorous as building a brand.”

His approach is to put a handful of core SKUs on Amazon and use it to drive website traffic back to his online store.

“I’d put a couple core items on there, kind of use this as a top-of-funnel type of deal,” he says. “People see [the brand], they look it up online, and they’re like, wow, they have one-hundred more things I might like.”

6. Call the Channels Nobody Else Is Calling

The most crowded marketing channels are crowded for a reason: everyone defaults to them. Jim Simon built JiMMYBAR, a functional protein bar brand, to roughly $80 million in cumulative sales without following the traditional CPG playbook.

His advice is to go where the competition isn’t. Most food and beverage brands focus on domestic grocery, which means the buyers sitting outside that lane get a fraction of the outreach. Simon’s edge came from calling international retailers that most U.S. brands overlook entirely.

“Call Costco China, call Sam’s in Mexico,” he says. “You’ll find some cool little pieces of business that are not in your backyard, that don’t have 8,000 other bar companies calling them. They’re apt to see you because they don’t get a lot of love from most brands.”

7. Build Your Outreach List Before You Start Pitching

B2B partnerships are one of the most underused growth channels for ecommerce brands. Kate Cervini built 100ML, a travel-sized skincare and wellness brand, almost entirely through cold outreach to boutique hotels, landing partnerships with properties like the Wythe in Brooklyn with no existing connections and no agency help.

Her process was simple: do all the research first, then execute in batches. She used LinkedIn and other contact discovery tools to build a full list of prospects before reaching out to any of them.

“Take the time to build out your list, find the contacts, and get your email ready,” she advises. “Then go out and pitch. It will save you a lot of time on the backend to do all that work on the front end.”

The mistake most founders make is building and sending at the same time, which slows everything down and leads to inconsistent outreach.

“Do it in chunks,” she says. “Do 50 and then send those 50 out, then do another 50. We can build lists for days and months and years. That list is ongoing constantly.”

8. Find Your First Influencer Partners Manually

Can’t afford an influencer marketing agency? Luciano Hernandez says you don’t need one.

Hernandez, the founder of Spirit Fire, a solar-powered cab light brand for pickup trucks, built his brand from zero followers and zero budget by spending seven hours a day for eight weeks messaging truck influencers on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

“I’d go to #LiftedTrucks and look for people with really nice photography and 20,000 followers,” he explains. “I’d message people, ‘Hey, we’d love to send you some lights. If you like them, please send us some content I can use.'”

As people started taking him up on the offer, the business started to collect high-quality, user-generated content. “It looks like people are actually buying it and using it,” he says. “It looks like a real business, and that turns into a flywheel.”

9. Audit Your Influencer Program for Accountability

According to Mira Nair, an effective influencer strategy needs strings attached. Nair is a 17-year veteran of the fashion industry who acquired Azaria, a vegan leather handbag brand in 2023.

“They were effectively giving away product and just crossing their fingers that influencers would post or tag Azaria,” she says about Azaria’s old influencer program. “We would send them a bag free of charge and just hope for the best.”

She prioritized overhauling the program as soon as she bought the company. “Now you have to be accepted to the program, and we have to vet your metrics,” she says.

“And even then, it’s still 50% of the retail value and we charge you shipping. It could get to your door and you could decide there are a hundred other things you’re going to post about besides this bag.”

10. No Paid Ad Budget? Out-Content Your Competitors

Consistent, high-quality content can be a legitimate alternative to paid reach.

Zechariah Thomas built Swift Hockey, an affordable hockey equipment brand, into one of the most followed brands in the sport, despite having a fraction of the marketing budget of competitors like Bauer and CCM.

“We don’t have the marketing budget to be seen everywhere and doing paid ads everywhere,” he says, “But content is free to post, and we do our best to make sure people see it everywhere.”

His content team of four spends two days a week filming and the rest editing, with a focus on videos that tell Swift’s brand story.

“People fall in love with brand stories,” he says about the company’s most successful content. “We don’t even have a call to action a lot of the time. People fall in love with content that tells our story, and they end up purchasing.”

11. Become the Most Educated Voice in Your Category

The brands that win on content aren’t just publishing more. They’re publishing better, and they’ve made it their goal to know more about their category than anyone else.

Dave Munson has been running Saddleback Leather, a premium DTC leather goods brand, for over 20 years without spending a dollar on paid ads. Bill Spohn has built TruTech Tools, a B2B ecommerce store for HVAC professionals, into a category resource known more for education than for retail.

Both landed on the same principle independently: give away everything you know.

“Learn all you can about your industry,” says Munson. “Nerd out. Become a super expert. And then educate, educate, educate everyone.”

Spohn puts it this way: “We’re known as a connector of people between the product, the process, and how to execute it. That separates us from any other ecommerce provider for these tools. They don’t do training like we do. They don’t go to trade shows like we do.”

12. Make Sure People Can Actually Find Your Business

Creating content is only one part of the process. The other part is making sure the people who need to see it can find it.

Blog articles and videos can build trust once someone lands on them, but search engine optimization is what gets people there in the first place.

For ecommerce brands, that means spending time:

Keyword research to understand what your customers are actually searching for.
Building product and collection pages to get your products directly in front of searchers.
Earning links and mentions on other websites to help establish credibility with search engines.

SEO isn’t a shortcut to visibility, but one with compounding ROI over time.

Learn more about ecommerce SEO in these articles:

13. Write for Your Customer, Not Your Industry Peers

The more you know about your product, the easier it is to talk past your potential customers without realizing it. Dave Munson learned this when a customer walked into his showroom and asked a simple question.

The customer had read “full grain leather” on the Saddleback website. He didn’t know what it meant. He just wanted to know if it was real leather.

“It dawned on me that I was talking above everyone’s head because I was so used to the subject,” says Munson. “So I changed our marketing to: we use the toughest leather that we can get our hands on.”

The fix was rewriting his site copy to lead with plain language, then layer in the technical detail for customers who wanted it.

“Watch out for the curse of knowledge,” he says. “Don’t try to explain everything at a high level and impress everyone with how smart you are. If you can explain it to a 10-year-old, you win. And your customers win because they understand it.”

14. Know Enough About Every Channel to Hold Your Agency Partners Accountable

Hiring a marketing agency before you understand what they’re doing is how budgets disappear without results.

Laura Berens built Love and Fit, a nursing and activewear brand for moms, from a Kickstarter campaign to a multi-channel business without outside investors. She learned every digital marketing channel herself before handing any of them off.

She wasn’t trying to master paid ads or email campaigns, but she wanted to understand them well enough to know if someone else was doing them right.

“My biggest piece of advice for people starting companies is you need to learn how to do every single thing in your business before you hire out,” she says. “I learned how to do my email marketing. I learned how to do my ads. And then as we grew, I was like, okay, now I can pass this off.”

The baseline she set made every hire after that easier to evaluate.

“Once you hire, you know if they’re doing a good job or not, because you’ve already done it,” she says. “You’re not going to be great at all these things. You just should know the basics of them. And then you hire someone that’s smarter than you on that topic.”

Thinking about hiring? Here are some helpful articles:

How to Hire a Content Team | How to Choose the Right SEO Agency

15. When You Hire an Agency, Meet the Team That Will Actually Do the Work

The agency that sells you doesn’t always match the agency that serves you.

Jason Sealand of Mad Viking Beard learned this after a bad experience with an agency where the team he met during the sales process wasn’t the team that worked on his account.

His fix was simple. Before signing with anyone new, he asked to meet the people who would actually do the work.

“After the first one didn’t turn out well, I always ask to meet the team that I’ll be working with,” he says. “Ask them questions like, ‘Have you worked with a brand like us before? What do you think of our brand? Really get some feedback to see how they look at your business.”

The agency he works with now is a different story.

“They’ve exploded our email and SMS,” says Sealand. “They understand our model and what we’re trying to do.”

When It Comes to Ecommerce Marketing, Start Where You Are

Here’s the most valuable thing you can do for your ecommerce business: understand your customers. Knowing why they buy, where to find them, and what it takes to earn their trust is more valuable than anything.

If you’re looking for a strategic partner to help you find and connect with your future customers, give us a call.

Intergrowth® helps brand-focused B2C companies get more customers from SEO, content marketing, and Meta Ads. We’ve helped dozens of brands grow their revenue, and we can show you exactly what it would look like for your store.

15 Ecommerce Marketing Tips from Some of Our Smartest Friends

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