This sounds like an incredibly stupid question, but I'm kinda lost here right now. Currently I avg about 1 gaming pc sale a day, but I'm trying to push for 5 a day. Currently, I'm running Meta ads with a budget of about 100$ a day. Is it as simple as just running more ads and increasing spend? Or is there more to it. Should I look into influencer deals? Would be interested in that but I'm not sure there would be enough roi for the cost, considering my cheapest pc starts at 950$. All advice would be appreciated!

I run a small Shopify store in India. We are a men's clothing brand where I have around 20 SKUs at the moment. It is likely to grow to 50 by the end of the year.

It is becoming a headache to manage inventory as it has become a challenge after RTO, product rejection after RTO etc.

Should I stick to typical Google spreadsheet or is there any cheaper paid option available?

I had a look at Zoho inventory but it seems very limiting at the moment.

I am getting traffic to my site but no sales despite follows, likes, and marketing. Advice?

I set up a TikTok and Instagram campaign. I set the audience to what I believe is the best settings and audience that I can think of.

My website analytics show most people don’t go anywhere beyond the Home page.

It is a bit discouraging.

My website is mycutielumi.com. I sell official licensed and authentic Sanrio, Hello Kitty items and accessories and plushies/toys/bag charms.

Any advice is appreciated!

A lot of conversations around ecommerce seem to focus on getting more sales but Im curious about what happens once those orders start coming in. Between fulfillment, inventory updates, shipping issues, returns, and customer messages, there's a lot that needs to go right after someone hits the buy button. For those running their own stores what's the one part of that process that consistently gives you the most trouble? Also curious whether it's something you've managed to fix with a better system or if it's just one of those things you have to deal with.

Has anybody here truly scaled their e-commerce business only through google ads? If yes, how much are you making and how long have you been running ads to reach this scale? Just curious.

I was at a coffee stand near the canton fair yesterday and literally watched the four people in front of me pay in completely different ways. One tapped a card, one scanned some random QR code, one used a specific app, and one paid cash. I just stood there with my standard Visa and Apple Pay—which is literally all I ever need back home—trying to figure out what the default is here.

It feels like every single vendor uses a different fragmented system. I went down a rabbit hole last night trying to find a universal workaround so I don't have to download 5 different local apps, and I kept seeing tenpaygo popping up in random threads.
The claim is that you just sign up with an email and it bridges to Apple Pay. It sounds exactly like the low-effort solution I need, but I’m a bit skeptical. Has anyone actually used it for random small daily purchases when you visit supplier in China? I just don't want to be the guy staring blankly at his phone trying to link a card while the cashier and the line wait on me.

Has anyone replaced their email agency with ai? I feel like they are a middle man at this point. Their strengths are list cleanup, segments and deliverability but I feel like ai connected could do as good?

Sending POs to suppliers, etc.

As an aside, I would love to hear random other ways that people are using AI for anything except cold emailing (bc it sucks for that)

Hello,

I'm setting up a business for the first time and I've just sent a couple of RFQs forward in Alibaba and am looking for advice. I was originally only gonna send detailed techpacks of my OEM travel toiletry bag to shortlisted manufacturers but the manufacturers are now asking for the techpacks from the get go. I get that theyd want more detail for a quote but I'm wondering if I still should just send the techpacks to shortlisted ones. Should I just send them forward and risk them using my designs or is there a way to protect my design from being reused? Or is that actually even an issue?

I'd appreciate any input thank you!!

She wants to sell press-on nail kits for which Shopify feels like the best bet, she also has downloadable decals (digital products) that she's been selling off Etsy but Etsy charges like 10% so she wants to move that over to Shopify too. Not going clean. She sells 1:1 consultations and made to order kits but has been handling that with calendly and spreadsheets. Is working on a course and may drop that on Kajabi or something else. Its getting unwieldy and we are considering building the whole thing ourselves. Wanted to check with this group first if we are missing something and there might be a better way instead of DIY-ing.

Since early October, roughly 5% of what I sell each day shows up as "reserved" instead of landing in my usable balance. On about $6,000 of weekly sales, that's a few hundred dollars just sitting there with no ship date attached.

The reserve page says it rolls based on delivery dates, but when I line up delivered orders against releases, the numbers don't line up — the held amount keeps drifting up instead of settling.

Is this a Q4 thing, a risk-review thing, or did something on my account trigger it? Anyone else seeing a growing reserve this month?

I’ve been looking at AI development companies for a mid-size e-commerce project that needs recommendation engines + some generative features. The usual big names come up a lot, but I’m more interested in teams that actually ship production code rather than just strategy decks.

From what I’ve seen and heard, GeekyAnts, Thoughtworks, and SoftServe keep coming up in conversations with other founders. Anyone here have recent experience with any of them on an AI + commerce type build? Especially curious about how they handle the mobile side (Flutter vs React Native trade-offs) when the AI features need to feel fast on both iOS and Android.

Over the past year, I've been helping out a friend with their shopify site b/c they've been down quite a bit year over year. So much so, they were not paying themselves this year until things got better. I reluctantly jumped on board to help while doing a bunch of other projects, but recently was able to hammer away at their SEO. I wanted to do more earlier this year, but b/c of the other projects, I didn't really do as much. However, after finally optimizing product & collections pages & getting their socials a bump (which was a bit more of the emphasis at the beginning in April when I started), it looks like the metrics are finally looking good (& potentially trending better).

I'd say this is the result of about 3 months of smaller changes, then a full month of really hammering away before this improvement last month in early Sept.

While AI may end up endangering this brand (& all brands) long term in ecomm, for now, organic is definitely doing better and the revenue is reflecting it.

Here are a few highlights (9/24/26 -> 10/14/26 vs. the year before same dates):

• 1170 clicks vs. 496 + 135% (74.4k imps vs. 56.7k)
• CTR 1.6% vs. 0.9%
• Avg position ~9 vs. ~11
• Their homepage traffic almost tripled +192%
• 2nd best page which is a collections +2367%

On November 1st, parcels shipping into the EU from outside must have 3 product IDs on every product contained in the parcel, or else they will be rejected by customs.

https://flavorcloud.com/resources/knowledge-base/eu-product-identifiers-shopify-setup

I spoke to a Flavorcloud rep who confirmed these IDs are:
Your store’s SKU

The product’s global identifier, if it has one (book ISBN, media UPC, etc)

And the MANUFACTURER’s ID. For apparel, that’s the t-shirt blank’s company product code. For electronics, the model number I guess? These can be obscure, and it’s insanely laborious to hunt these all down and update a large product catalog.

By NOVEMBER 1st??? Or else EU customers get stiffed at Christmas???

Is anyone else wigged out about this?

Hi everyone!

I'm fairly new to e-commerce in Algeria and am looking for a viable business idea that I can start off with on a small scale and then build up into a proper business.

I'd be interested to learn from people who have actually done it in the US and European markets.

I'm particularly interested in two areas:

1. Profitable e-commerce niches

What product niches are currently worth looking at in the US and Europe? I'm not necessarily after the latest fad or something that will get you rich quick. I'm after products that have a genuine demand, decent margins and where there's scope for a new business to get in and compete.

1. Products that can be made locally

I'm also very interested in products that can be made in a small local workshop, using materials and skills such as:

- Woodworking

- Metalworking

- Plastic manufacturing

- Sewing and textile production

- Or a combination of different materials and techniques

For instance products that solve an everyday problem, improve people's homes or serve a particular customer group.

My main question is this: if you were starting from scratch today which product categories or niches would you actually be seriously considering and why?

I'd be particularly interested in products that have demand but aren't completely saturated by the big players, and products that a small manufacturer could actually go out and make and sell online.

If you've got a business that's been built around a product made in the UK then I'd be very interested to hear your story. What do you sell? Who are your customers? And what exactly was it that made the business work?

I'm not expecting anyone to spill the beans on trade secrets. A handful of specific product examples, some market observations or lessons learned from your own experience would be extremely useful.

My objective is to learn, validate an opportunity and build something that can be sustainable in Algeria rather than just walking into another saturated niche.

Thanks in advance to anyone who's got any experience or advice to share!

Curious how merchants think about bracketing. Policy change (paid returns, exchange only), UX (fit info on PDP), or just a cost you absorb? What did it do to conversion when you tightened it?

Anyone have your favorite go to podcasts/youtube channels you listen to? I really like Ecomm cowboy and Ethercycle but looking for more resources to learn more.

Picked up a maintenance contract for a mid sized ecommerce site last month. Previous agency left a ton of random things in the head, including a VWO snippet.

Now their marketing lead wants a/b testing on the product pages again and keeps telling me to run it with VWO like they did a few years ago. I’m not too familiar with it and don’t think I can just log back in and go ahead.

Before I go through all this trouble, I wanted to check, is VWO still around? Last time I did any website testing it was a split test in Google Optimize back like 2022. Don’t want to rip the snippet out if it’s still usable, but I also don’t want to build around something that’s on its way out. Spent way too long digging through old docs on this at 11pm so any help appreciated

I run a store and use AI a lot to help me with stuff I'm not necessarily good with and copy is definitely one of those (even though I've read half a dozen books on the topic lol).

I have thousands of SKUs and most of them still have horrible (in my opinion) copy. The obvious move is generating it and plenty of stores clearly have but to me, generated copy reads even worse than my own...

So for anyone whos actually done this at volume, did you AI generate and then edit every one individually, generate from a per product spec sheet or just do the top sellers properly and leave the tail with supplier copy or something? And if you generated, what did you actually check before it went live?

Thank you sooo so much for any help with this! I'm unfortunately not at a point where I can hire a professional copywriter which I know sucks...

Hey all , I am a small retailer here in the US looking to source new products for next year and I have been trying to find marketplaces that also list trade shows or wholesale fairs so I can compare a few suppliers online and then possibly meet some in person.

I did poke around Alibaba where they have so many suppliers listings to choose from but I'd like to know what else is out there or what's worth looking into which leaves me a bit curious Are there platforms to use when looking for upcoming fairs? Are virtual shows useful or is it just better to be there physically?

I have been seeing a lot of discussions about online stores getting visitors but struggling to turn that traffic into sales.

Sometimes the issue seems to be the traffic itself. Other times, it is the mobile shopping experience, unclear delivery information, product pages or checkout friction.

I am curious what store owners here are actually dealing with.

Are you struggling more with getting the right visitors, getting people to add products to their cart, or getting them to complete checkout?

And if you have managed to improve one of these, what change made the biggest difference?

Does anyone know trusted wholesale suppliers for cleaning supplies? Need legit sources that work with small online businesses. Appreciate any suggestions.

So the title explains it. I'm kind of at a loss of what to do. I started a brand earlier this year in the beauty industry (very saturated I know) selling lashes. We have competitors selling very similar if not identical products on TikTok Shop and some on Amazon for dirt cheap. I'm not too worried about Amazon as my team has done some research on the products on Amazon and their quality is not up to par. There are also brands selling the same products at double our price point.

We've talked to many girls and most of them would prefer to buy their lashes off of TikTok Shop. They would see a video of a girl with pretty lashes on and click and buy. Some also told us that most girls find one lash brand and stick to it. How do we compete with that? I am under the understanding that we just have to test as many angles as possible. We are also starting our TikTok Shop but we also want traffic to our websites as we want a more distinctive brand so we can expand to other niches in the beauty industry.

Here is what we've tried so far:

• Static ads on Meta

Very short list. But we've gotten 2 sales so far :). I've since then cut our Meta ads because the static ads were not performing.

How do we compete with well-established brands and TT shops that sell at half our price? We are also currently and actively reaching out to influencers and UGC creators. For influencers, we are starting with people we know. Whereas UGC creators, we are looking for them on Trybe. My understanding is that influencers post the videos themselves to try to get clicks using their personal brand whereas UGC creators produce videos for us to run as ads or to post on our socials. Aside from these two, are there any other methods we should try?

TLDR: started a lash brand and trying UGC and influencer marketing. Are we on the right path?

Edit: We also have a good amount of budget nearing 100k so this isn't really a how to start a brand with $0. I just want to see what y'all thought about our current path.

I manage a small online business and since I've been adding more products, I've begun to give more thought to protecting our brand and to keeping an eye on the way our products are being listed on the internet.

I'd like to know what other business owners use for monitoring trademarks, the unauthorized use of their brand name, or listings that appear to be counterfeit versions of their products. It seems that there are a lot of tools on the market, but it's difficult to determine which ones are really useful and which are just excessive for a smaller business.

What I would like is a system that is able to keep an eye on several marketplaces without forcing me to spend hours manually checking each one; cost is also important since the more expensive enterprise tools may not be suitable for me at this stage.

Has any of you come across brand monitoring software or trademark alert services that you would like to recommend?

What tools have actually been useful and which features are worth paying for?