Running a successful business is all about asking the right questions. 

How do I make better ads? How do I create better offers? How do I build better landing pages? How do I write better copy? How do I increase loyalty and retention? How do I increase my margins? The list goes on and on but I truly believe that the person who continues asking these questions and then honestly and genuinely tries to find and implement the answers is who becomes the best eCommerce operator of us all. 

And I think one of the most important questions on people’s minds right now is, how do I use AI to improve my business? This is a really tough one because there’s sooo much that you could theoretically do with AI and unlike paid ad creative, landing pages, or email and SMS, there isn’t an obvious path to follow.

And I think the problem with asking questions like “How can I improve my business with AI?” is that you don’t want to try to answer that question alone. Just like anything else that you might want to learn, it’s better to do it by finding a trusted network of operators who are on the same journey as you or who have already figured out how to solve that problem so that you can learn faster and level up as a group. For example, in the world of AI, instead of trying dozens of tools myself where I waste my own time, money, and energy, I’d much rather join a community where someone has already tested these tools and can tell me which ones to use, which to avoid and why. A lot of these tactics and stories I’m seeing for how to apply AI to DTC brands are coming out of a community called Ecommerce Equation, made by 4,000+ DTC operators sharing what's actually working in real time. They go super deep on AI and have been leveling up their members in real time. Here's a few stories from their community that recently caught my attention.

For example, I saw a founder inside Ecommerce Equation had already spent $35K with a development agency to build a custom Shopify order management system. A few months went by and nothing shipped for them. After seeing what other operators in the Ecommerce Equation  community were pulling off with AI, their in-house dev sat down with Claude Code for one weekend and rebuilt the entire thing from scratch. Now it’s live and it's handling real orders. It does everything the $35K build was supposed to do but never did. I even learned that a competitor spent $160K on a comparable software which is wild to me. So the founder who built this didn't just save a bunch of money, they also learned new skills that can be applied to anything else they want to build. Now they have time in their team’s calendar to build other apps and tools and it’s improving their business every month. 

Or there was another founder who was running a multi-entity business with thousands of monthly transactions and bookkeeping that was eating up hours of her time every week. That was until she learned how Claude could automate the whole thing in half a day. She built a tool and now it scans her finance email inbox every five minutes, identifies invoices, creates bills in Xero with the correct tax codes, and attaches the original PDF. What used to require dedicated people to manage now runs autonomously with AI. 

I liked this example because I think a lot of us really want the advice of what to build and how to build it, but without true community support and sessions from experts, it’s hard to know where to begin. When you run into problems, what do you do? Who do you call? How do you navigate it? I think this is where I’ve always found the idea of community super helpful. The team at Ecommerce Equation has built a space where other founders and operators get to test, learn, succeed and share their prompts and playbooks with others so they all get better faster than if they were trying to figure this all out alone.

They also told me about a founder who hooked Microsoft Clarity's API directly into Claude. She asked it one simple question which was “Over the last 30 days, what are the biggest friction points on this page, and what are customers looking for that they can't find?” Claude went through the behavioral data from MS Clarity and came back with a specific list of conversion issues, scroll depth, drop-off points, information gaps etc. She used that info and rebuilt her product pages based on those findings, replaced an expensive bundle app with a custom-built one, restructured her pricing to show per-unit cost (the data told her this would drive multi-buy), and built a quiz that segments customers into four groups, each feeding into its own Klaviyo sequence. It took about one week of work but after she implemented this, AOV went up $30 and she was able to cancel multiple other subscriptions. 

Microsoft Clarity is one of my all time favorite tools for optimizing your site and landing pages. I’ve started using this Claude workflow on a few of our client sites and it’s sped up the entire process of analyzing the data then actually communicating the brief to my developers around exactly what needs to change. It’s a huge hack for sure.

Or on the creative side, they had a military-themed apparel brand who needed new cinematic campaign imagery. The kind of stuff that's expensive and logistically difficult to shoot for real. They wanted war-zone backgrounds but with a realistic and believable aesthetic. Instead of booking a production crew, the founder used ChatGPT to write detailed image prompts, keeping everything in the same thread so the AI maintained consistent brand tone throughout, then fed those prompts into Nano Banana for the image generation. That creative went straight into Meta top-of-funnel. Their audience, men 50 to 70, probably had no idea that it was AI-generated but once they launched the new creative, they saw 8X ROAS with a $20 dollar cost per purchase. They sold 200 hoodies in ten days. They made creative that would have cost thousands of dollars to produce for less than $30 and it outperformed everything else in their ad account.

Or they shared a story about a founder with zero technical background who spent twelve hours building a custom t-shirt designer app from scratch after an Ecommerce Equation event. The app worked after one full workday of building and it was better than the $3,000 developer build she’d previously paid for. But she made one key mistake where she didn’t save a handover document at the end of the session. The next day, Claude had no memory of what they’d built. She had to spend hours backtracking and reconstructing the context. Her lesson that she now shares with other members is that at the end of every session, you have to get the AI to write a comprehensive handover doc and commit your work to GitHub. That one learning and change leveled up so many people in the group. 

Or during a live Ecommerce Equation coaching call, their AI lead built a fully designed Father’s Day landing page in under a minute. But speed wasn’t the main point. The point was how he actually did the work. He showed everyone on the call how he used a five-checkpoint framework that they could follow to define the role you want the AI to play, the process to follow, the heuristics to keep in mind, the guardrails (i.e what not to do), and the expected output. Before writing a line of code, he asked Claude to reverse-engineer the purchase decision from the customer’s perspective. The AI reflected back a manifesto of everything it planned to build, and he reviewed it and edited it before it started. The result was a landing page that addressed real objections (like a delivery cutoff date, which they’d never thought to include before). Members who had been struggling with sloppy AI outputs immediately saw the difference where they realized the brief is the actual product. If you get the brief right, the AI will deliver.

These 6 examples should show you that the biggest AI wins in ecommerce right now aren't coming from ad copy. They're coming from founders who looked at their P&L, found the costs they were already struggling with, i.e developers, bookkeeping, overpriced SaaS, really expensive creative production, website design, etc and replaced them with AI. The founders who are leaning in here are getting more margin, more speed, and they are creating less dependency on people/tools that were quietly crushing their bottom line.

The other thing I'd add, and I've seen this firsthand running the Microsoft Clarity workflow on a few of our own client sites, is that most brands already have the data they need to make better decisions. It's just sitting unused in Shopify, Klaviyo, Clarity, their ad accounts etc. The ecommerce founders getting ahead right now are feeding that data into AI and asking it what's broken. That alone, before you build anything, is probably the highest leverage thing most operators aren't doing.

I also think that the founders getting the best AI results right now aren't necessarily the most technical. They're the ones who have clarity across their entire business. They know their numbers, they know where the leaks are, and so when they pick up an AI tool they know exactly where to point it.

That's what Ecommerce Equation has built around 4,000+ operators sharing what's actually working, inside a community where the collective knowledge compounds every week. The ecommerce founders in there aren't figuring this out alone, they get to move faster because someone else already paid for that lesson. So if you want to get clear on your numbers, your margins, and where the real bottlenecks are, you can apply to work with their team here.

Alright, that’s all for this week. 

I will see you back here on Sunday for another send!

Nik

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