627: The Old Ecommerce Playbook Is DEAD (What’s Working In 2026)

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Now in this episode, I’m going to show you why many e-commerce stores are dying right now, and most owners have absolutely no idea that this is happening. Because in the last two years, three big shifts completely changed how customers find products, how they decide what to buy, and whether you actually get to keep any of the money that you make.

00:24
Everything I’m walking you through today is pulled straight from the playbook that I’m teaching live at Seller Summit 2026. So stay with me because this is genuinely important stuff. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most events that are filled with high level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about tactical step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away.

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Every speaker I invite is in the trenches, people who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs and no consultants. Also, I hate large events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate. We cap attendance at around 200 people, so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We’ve sold out every single year for the past nine years, and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

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And if you’re doing over 250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for high level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever going to be. So if you want in, go over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now on to the show.

01:44
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today we’re going to talk about all the cool things that are happening in e-commerce and the skills that you need to have in order to survive this year. Yeah. Why does it already feel like it’s been 15 years? I know it’s only February, but I feel like I’ve aged a couple of years in just the past month. That’s just what it’s felt like for me. I feel the same exact way. Is there like an age in Shopify years that we?

02:14
like agent dog years, but agent Shopify years. don’t know, but there’s some, let’s just start with the good news. Shall we? Yes. The tariffs have been marked as unconstitutional. This was just announced today as of this recording and I’m like, how do I get a refund? Uh, it’s going to make life so much better. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know how, I don’t know the procedure. Like I literally saw the announcement this morning, so I’m not sure what’s going to happen.

02:41
Yeah, I got an alert on my phone, actually. don’t even like I didn’t sign up for tariff alerts, but it was like such big news that it hit the Apple News, I think, cycle. And so I got an alert. It’s going to be really interesting because I know last year at Seller Summit, there were people, multiple people who had containers sitting in China that they could not afford to ship over, um you know, full product. And so and obviously it’s been, you know, 10 months, nine months since that.

03:11
that time, but I mean, it really impacted people in a very negative way for several months last year. So this should be interesting this year to see how it all works out. it’s funny. One of our vendors in the US actually gets their stuff from India and she hasn’t she’s been out of stock for months because the India tariff was 50 percent and she refused to ship that container over. So we’ve been like out of stock on a small subsection of our of our products that we get from the US. Wow.

03:40
OK, yeah, so we actually know who our vendor is. Yeah. So good news. That’s good news for everybody. I think I don’t think you’ll be getting a refund. Let’s just be honest about that. you have to wait for the class action lawsuit to happen, which will take 15 years, and then you’ll get a check for four dollars and 22 cents at the end of it. Exactly, exactly. But future tariffs, that’s a good thing. Yeah. The other thing that’s

04:08
is one of the sponsors for Seller Summit is offering three full months of managed PPC, Amazon PPC, but only if you’re an attendee of Seller Summit. And this is a killer deal. It is. Now I haven’t sold on Amazon in quite a bit of time. What is the value of that, honestly? What are people… Feels like it’s expensive. I did a trial with another company in the past.

04:38
because, and I think they charged, I wanna say it was something like two to $3,000 a month for fully managed. And of course you still have to pay for ads, obviously. But this company is trying to establish themselves in this space right now. And this is just a killer offer. Fully managed services for three months.

05:06
Again, worst case, if it doesn’t work out for you, you just go on with your day. I mean, that’s a crazy deal. That’s basically paying for your ticket five times over. Absolutely. Yeah. 10 times over probably. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s exciting. Now I want to sell on Amazon again. I just want the deal. I love a good deal. So any of you, guys listening to this, have already signed up for Seller Summit. Send me an email. Of course, we’re going to announce it at the event, obviously. But if you’ve already…

05:34
If you want to get a jump on this, you’ve already bought a ticket, just go ahead and send me an email. Just hit reply to any email that I’ve ever sent you. Get first in line for that one. The other thing that I’m excited to present, I’m going to start with myself. One of the talks that I’m giving at Seller Summit is how to vibe code your own Shopify apps. I think in a prior episode, we had talked about the death of the Shopify app store. Yeah.

06:02
I really think, you know, just for context, I went through and I vibe coded an app in about an hour for an app that costs $50 a month in perpetuity. Yeah. And I know nothing about Shopify app development. And I actually didn’t even look at the code that it generated. Really? I vibe coded the whole thing. I did not even look at it. OK. So because I was going to ask you, our friend Chris Cody will be at Seller Summit and he’s going to ask.

06:30
Can a regular person do this? Yes. And in this case, I was a regular person because I had no clue what the hell was going on. OK. Yeah. I that’s pretty exciting. Do I need to get a bigger room for you for that one? Because I think that will be very popular. So what I’m going to basically do is provide the frameworks. I’m going to provide like three real apps that I have VibeCoded. Yeah. And then I’m going to walk through how to VibeCode one of them. Yeah.

06:58
Well, and just a good example of this is you and this was like a year ago, you and I were talking about the loyalty app and how much I was seeing on my end, like revenue was being driven by the loyalty app. And you said you asked me bunch of questions about it. And then you asked me how much a month it was. And I said, I think we are paying it was like two or three hundred dollars a month. And we had the like not a great plan. We didn’t have a lot of the features. And you were like, you’re paying what?

07:28
And I was like, yeah, super expensive. And you ended up coding that up for your own shop pretty quickly. I don’t think that was an hour code, but it was definitely something that was reasonable. Yeah, that one took a weekend. OK, so you know what? I vibe coded that from scratch from my own platform. Yeah. I think you could probably do this in an afternoon using this vibe coded app. Because something like a loyalty program actually isn’t all that complicated. Yeah. Also.

07:57
You’re not going to be able to do this just to be clear with like a Clavio or a PostScript or something like that. That’s a little bit more involved. But there’s a lot of apps in the app store that are super popular that do very simple things. You can easily vibe code those. Yeah. So what I’m also hearing you say is there won’t be any app sponsors at Seller Summit. There are not going to be any app sponsors at Seller Summit. Certainly not Shopify apps. Yes. I actually don’t think we’ve really had many app sponsors at Seller Summit over the years. So that’s OK. uh

08:25
So let’s switch gears a little bit because I do want to, this is something that I’ve been actually kind of thrown into on accident. I think our friend Jeff Oxford is going to be there, who’s uh one of our favorite Seller Summit speakers. And I’ve been having to do a lot of SEO work lately on category or collection pages. And every time I get tasked with this, I’m like, does this even matter anymore? Like, should I even care?

08:53
about SEO, can I cancel my Ahrefs membership? I hope he’s going to be talking about all that. Yes. I asked him to talk about it. I actually did an experiment over the holidays where my traffic went up 25 % because of these SEO and AEO tactics uh ranking uh in the AI LLMs.

09:16
And Jeff is going to cover all of that. asked him to cover. He’s actually gone the extra mile and he’s actually gathered a whole bunch of statistics, whereas I’m only one store. He actually has a variety of clients that he can talk about, too. Yeah, I’m excited about that because I sometimes I’m working on these these little tasks and I’m like, this which am I even doing this right? Should I be changing my strategy? And I’m sure I should. I’m excited to hear what he has to say about it. I think ranking in the LLMs is the most important thing that

09:45
you could be working on right now. Because people aren’t using the traditional Google search anymore and they’re not clicking on the blue links. They’re doing their research in ChatGPT just as an example. And when they’re ready to buy, they buy what ChatGPT tells them to buy. So it’s really key to get mentioned. Yeah. I mean, know I am just uh as a user. So yeah, absolutely. That’s actually how I shop now. Yeah.

10:14
Have you ever wondered what your business is actually worth? Well, I’ve worked with Quiet Light Brokerage for over a decade, and one thing that I learned over the years is that most sellers wait way too long to find out the answer to that question. When I sold one of my businesses through them, I was surprised by how little I knew about what it actually takes to prepare a business for sale. And Quiet Light doesn’t just list businesses and hope for the best, they prepare them properly, and the difference in the outcome is huge. Buyers are looking for very specific things.

10:43
If your financials aren’t clean or if your documentation is a mess, you’re leaving serious money on the table. And most sellers have no idea what those things are until it’s too late to fix them. And I’ve watched this play out across multiple deals. Now getting a valuation isn’t really about the number. It’s about understanding what makes your business valuable to someone else and what’s currently killing that value. And that information is worth having whether you’re selling next month or in five years. Now I’ve trusted Quiet Light with my own businesses and if you’re building something you might want to exit someday,

11:13
talk to them right now. Find out what needs fixing while you still have time to fix it and go over to quietlight.com for a free valuation. So speaking of AI, I saw this on the Seller Summit website and I’m actually intrigued because I didn’t I don’t know anything about this talk, but it’s a

11:32
Practical AI strategies to grow your revenue by 4x and AOV by 22%. What sort of bold promise are we making here with this That’s everything that I’ve done with my store. It’s going to be piggybacked on the Shopify live coding. I’m going to show people exactly what I have done with my store, and then I’m going to show them how to implement it. Awesome. I actually presented this at DTC, whatever number it is, 8x, 10x.

12:02
But people were asking like, how do I do this with my store? Like, is there a Shopify app that does this? And I was like, well, the problem with Shopify apps today, like if you look in the app store, they all say AI powered and you really have no idea what the heck does what. But you can easily vibe code the things that I’m gonna teach you in that lecture. Awesome. And then, you know, we talked a little bit about AI. You know, one of the top popular sessions people wanted.

12:31
all the sessions, we talked about the free PPC, are just ads in general. So, ah you know, we’re talking about YouTube ads again. ah I feel like every year, I’m assuming this is Brett Curry. It’s Brett Curry. uh So TikTok Shop has been killing it. And of course, YouTube wants to do the same thing. Yeah. And YouTube shopping has evolved a lot since the last year.

12:59
And so Brett’s going to give us an update and how to sell on video and develop affiliate relationships just like TikTok, Sean. So one thing I love about Brett’s talks is that since he has an agency, he’s like a little bit like Jeff Oxford in that he can bring multiple case studies. oh it’s not just and obviously I like hearing single case studies too, for sure. But like I love that he always has lots of examples.

13:26
um It’s funny. I still think about his examples from last year um two of the big ones that he had were the Navage or whatever the nasal I can’t get that one out of my head the nasal and then they also do like a really bright hair color brand um But it’s funny because I was talking to another ads agency a couple weeks ago And one of their clients is a different nose nose clean your system

13:51
And I was like, oh, it’s the competitor to Brett’s nose cleaner system, you know. So anyway, I was like, it’s funny because like he has such great examples that like they they I still think about those ads that he was showing us a year ago uh from the stage. So it’s pretty cool, like all the examples that he brings. And it really makes it easy to understand, like what’s happening because he shows you like this is exactly what it is. This is why it works. This is the breakdown of how how it’s set up. And so I feel like anyone can walk, watch his talk and implement it like.

14:21
you know, the next day or the next week. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, lives not not just live selling, but social selling is still huge and will continue to be huge. And YouTube’s playing catch up. Yeah. Which brings me to TikTok shop, actually. I invited Ian Page to come talk about TikTok shop. It’s actually changed dramatically in just the last six months. I don’t I just published a YouTube video about this, actually some of the changes, but.

14:49
they had announced that they’re not allowing people to do merchant fulfilled anymore. Like they’re not allowed to ship stuff themselves and they’re trying to push everyone over to fulfilled by TikTok. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out.

15:18
It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. And that’s one of the major changes and there’s all these like hidden

15:47
gotchas actually. So Ian is a, I can’t remember, certified TikTok shop partner. And he actually shared with me some of their internal documents about, you know, how they, how they tier their different sellers. So Ian’s going to go through all the fine print on how to become a successful TikTok shop seller. And I think this is very important because discovery has pretty much gone the way of social, right?

16:15
Which is why I’m really excited that Tiffany’s coming back. I think if we had to vote on, her some of it’s favorite speaker of all time, Tiffany Wynn’s hands down. I think so. uh Always, she could talk about anything and people would go to that session. But she’s actually doing something that I think is really important. She’s going to talk about the importance of storytelling on video. And just, you know, we.

16:37
You and I have been pushing this for so long, couple years now in the course, on the podcast. I feel like we’re always talking about you need to make video, you need to make video. But still, the number one question we get is, can I make a faceless video channel? Right? Like people do not want to be on video. And for you and I who’ve been doing this a really long time, it doesn’t seem as overwhelming. But I know if you’re just getting started, in fact, we’re doing a challenge in the course next, know, this coming month about making videos.

17:06
It’s tough, it’s a big hurdle, but it’s a hurdle that if especially as a brand you can get over and make that video content. mean Tiffany’s grown her entire business on video content and she’s been doing it for, I think she got started in e-commerce in 2016, 2017 timeframe. So she’s gonna give you guys some tips on basically how to be comfortable on camera and how to push record. What do you have to do?

17:35
as well as she’s gonna show you guys the halo effect of that video content creation, right? Which leads into the storytelling, the brand storytelling. um And she’s like, it’s amazing when you make videos how, um like she was talking about how people will search, right? Like they’ll go into chat or whatever they’re using and they’ll start searching. But at some point, they usually type in your brand name, right? And they wanna learn more about the brand. um

18:03
And she’s like, and if what’s coming up is video content for people and like it’s the founder, right? Talking to people or the rep, right? Doesn’t have to be the founder, right? If you want to have like a brand spokesperson, whoever that would be. um She’s like the amount of sales that they get from people like searching for not, not searching for Emmalou’s, sorry. um Emmalou’s or searching for Tiffany, right? Or Paul um and getting uh just that halo effect of.

18:31
the search and the video and then basically connecting with Paul and Tiffany and their story and the brand. And she’s actually launching a brand new brand right before Seller Summit. So it’ll be really, you guys will get to hear all about that as well. So super excited to have her, obviously one of the favorite Seller Summit speakers and always entertaining. And hopefully we’ll help you guys get over your fear of video. Well, I think one thing that’s important about what she’s teaching is

18:57
Your face doesn’t have to be on there. You can do a really good story tell with just your voice and maybe different scenes maybe around your office or whatnot. I forgot what it’s called, a voiceover, that’s what it’s called. Voiceover videos. So even if you are squeamish, the storytelling aspect is way more important than anything else. And you know who’s been creating really great video content is one of our Solar Summit alums is Meg. And this is where I feel like you…

19:27
Because the other question we get is, well, I sell dirt, right? I sell cement or some really obscure product. you’re like, remember that we had a guy one year that sold cement stones like years ago. um So there’s people like, this is not a video product, right? Like Andy Humphrey sells sprinklers, you know? But Meg sells hermit crab food. And like crickets and like really weird dirt, like basic stuff. And she has been making TikTok videos.

19:56
at least for the last year. And when I started seeing them, she didn’t have a ton of engagement, she doesn’t have a ton of followers. Now when she posts video content, you can see how much it’s grown, right? And while she is on the video talking, a lot of the content is geared towards like, we just got this huge shipment of grubs, let’s repack it to ship and sell, right? And let’s see what we’re, this is the Christmas bonus bug. You know, all these things where you’re just like,

20:23
It’s not about her, she’s talking about the product, she’s talking, and it’s all about the product getting to you, right? So I think people are like, I don’t wanna just stand in front of the camera, totally get it. But there’s ways you can do this, even with bugs, to uh grow your brand. Actually, while we’re on the topic of storytelling, there’s a session that is gonna be all about storytelling for meta ads. uh

20:52
I first met Scott at one of Kevin King’s events and we got to talking. He runs Merchant Mastery. And he was like, hey, why don’t you just give this a try with your meta ads? And it involved telling your entire story in text on the meta ads itself. And when I adopted that, it actually is now one of my higher performing ads. Interesting. So he sent over one of his presentations for us to look through.

21:22
Yeah, a couple of weeks ago, I was shocked at how much he gives people away, like gives away that he should probably charge for it. I mean, I know he does have a program and stuff, but like the amount of stuff that he’s giving away for free is pretty nutty. Yeah, and it works. What he’s teaching work. So if your meta ads have not been performing that well lately, his storytelling framework that he’s going to be teaching at Sellers Summit works because I have actually tried it for myself.

21:51
And I will say the bar is high for him only because we know multiple people who have come to Sellers Summit over the past five years who have said the meta ads talk alone was worth the ticket price. um I think of our most recent is Kelly, who has Kelly Dream, which is a crochet kit. I mean, she went to the ads. She jokes that she went to the ad session and did every single thing that you said to do. I think it was your session um and basically blew her business up and.

22:19
matter of a couple of months to the point where every time I would talk to her, she would be in her her townhouse garage shipping products, right? She was not prepared for the level of growth that she had. So I would say these the meta ads talks typically at seller summit are what people view as the best investment of the entire event. Yep. And what’s funny about this is we have a couple of talks on sourcing and this all obviously happened before this this terror.

22:47
real got ruled unconstitutional, but all these tactics still apply. And all the factors over there are willing to do some of these things. So one of our talks given by our very own JK Beaton, who’s long time sell-a-some attendee, he’s actually a student in my class. He’s going to give a talk about how to cut costs. just imagine now that the tariffs hopefully will be gone, and you can cut costs, things could get like cheaper than they were.

23:17
like a couple years ago when all this stuff was happening. And there’s a variety, I actually, I’ve seen his entire talk. There’s some tactics in there that I was not employing with sourcing also. Yeah, because he does this for a living. Yeah. Yeah. What’s the other tariff talk? The other one is how to source from Vietnam. Vietnam, so I just started sourcing from Vietnam. It’s Jim Kenamers giving that talk and

23:45
I found that the prices in Vietnam are lower and at the time the tariffs were lower as well. So it’s a win-win. uh The hard part actually is finding the factories in Vietnam to work with. And that’s what he’s going to teach us, like how to source in Vietnam, all the gotchas and the differences. Well, know, it happened to one of my clients where she’d been sourcing from China for six, seven years, probably longer than that. And then last year,

24:13
She sent some she does curriculum and Bible studies and she sent something to her factory that she’s used for a really long time And they were like we can’t print this it’s religious materials They’ve always printed this stuff right and it’s never been an issue, but something was triggered right? And they were left absolutely scrambling so kind of regardless of you know your situation. It’s always good to have another you know tentacle right to

24:40
be able to at least, if you’re not gonna source from Vietnam tomorrow, to understand how it works and to be able to just be exploring things because I feel like last year was so volatile and most people had all their eggs in one basket. And just sort of being prepared for whatever comes next and having options, really important for folks. I mean, here’s what’s great about Vietnam. They’re getting their stuff from China, like the raw materials and they’re making it. So you can pretty much get everything.

25:09
A lot of the stuff from Vietnam that you can from China. It’s just where it’s like assembled and created. Which speaking of getting products, let’s talk about product research. Yes. You know, I feel like most of the people at Seller Summit already have a product, um you know, and are already selling. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t need new products to sell to, you know, expand their product line or even, you know, we still always have some new folks.

25:38
who are still in the process of trying to figure out, they know they wanna do this, but they don’t know exactly what they wanna do yet. Yeah, so Isabella’s given this talk. uh She has this framework that is very comprehensive that allows you to come up with a product, make changes and validate that it’s gonna sell before you invest a lot of money into it. uh What’s funny about this is I’m trying to actually, so one of the tools she uses, I’m actually trying to get,

26:07
some free free love because I’ve been in contact with this company. We actually had lunch. I had lunch with the CEO and he wants to sponsor. He just doesn’t have the resources to spend send people out. So I’m trying to finagle some free free membership love of this tool so that when she gives that talk, people can do it right there. That’d be very exciting on the floor. Yeah. But yes, even if you are not new and you already have products, I feel like Isabella’s uh

26:37
talk on research and validation is top notch. In fact, I believe right after that talk, Charles hired her on the spot. Yes. Yeah. We have a lot of talks this year on AI, which I think is fantastic because I feel like that’s all anybody’s talking about right now. um And it’s something that I will say people are either using very successfully or people are failing wildly.

27:06
And I’ve seen both examples this past week of that happening. So let’s talk about some of our AI talks. Yeah, so I think for me, like the AI talks that I curated are ones that can actually make you money. Not like the fun ones like, oh, create your own music video. There’s a bunch of cool stuff you can do with AI, but we’re focusing specifically on what can make you money.

27:31
And one thing that I wanted Bernie to talk about since he’s like the AI, he’s one of the people who’s played around with this the most. Is this ability to let agents handle all your busy work. And the idea here is you’re treating these agents, and I know that term is being thrown around a lot, but you’re treating these agents as like individuals who you assign tasks. And then they, so it’s more like,

28:01
people management almost. And so he’s going to be talking about what agents he uses. He’s actually going to focus on one just to not overwhelm everyone. Right. The main one that he uses, the main frameworks and how he deploys these agents to do those tasks for him so that when he kind of just wakes up in the morning, he already has a whole bunch of stuff done. I haven’t seen his talk yet, but because I actually don’t know that much about how, what he’s doing. Yeah.

28:28
But I do know that he’s really good at simplifying things and making sure that you can leave with something. You’ll be able to deploy these agents by the end of this talk. And if not, you can see them during the round tables and even get some hands on help. Yeah. And I feel like we don’t see Bernie without seeing Ritu. That’s correct. I love every talk that Ritu gives. She’s like Tiffany to me. They have very different personalities, but like.

28:55
whatever she’s talking about, I like rushed to that session because it’s always so informational. We I saw I don’t know if you were in that room with me. I saw her give a talk last year at another event about creatives and just like blown away at how she was doing things. And basically, I felt like what makes her talk so strong is that.

29:18
A lot of times you’ll still see people give an AI talk, right? But they don’t tell you exactly how they got to the final product, right? And so it’s like there’s always this gap between like, okay, do these three things and then boom, you have this, right? But when you do it, it’s like, boom, you have not that. And I love how like one of the things she really hit on when I saw her talk last was basically like all the important prompting ah components that she has basically created.

29:47
And basically how even if you’re not like a graphic designer or a video editor or all the, you know, like a professional in that area, you can get really, really close to a perfect final product using the right words, right? Which I think most of us just don’t know how to do. So this year for Ritu and it’s where I haven’t like completely squared away exactly what I want to talk about yet. But right now she’s going to be talking about vibe coding.

30:16
for e-commerce, I’m covering the Shopify part, she’s covering vibe coding for pretty much everything else, mainly focused on what you can do on Amazon and with your website as well. Very interesting. And then I see AI generated UGC. Yes, so Leo Segovio is giving that talk and I saw what he was doing and I was fascinated by it. So what he’s gonna teach the audience how to do is create

30:45
creatives for your meta ads on mass using AI. And so one thing that really caught my eye when he was talking to me about this was you can take like a winning ad. Let’s say I sell moisturizer. Okay. And I see this ad and I want to just kind of replicate it. Well, he has this automated flow setup where you could take an existing ad, insert your product, change the model around and the script, and it automatically follows that format.

31:15
Oh, wow. That already works and it looks really good. And then you run ads with it. So it’s all automated. He uses this tool called N8N, which is, uh I don’t even know what you call it. I guess an automation platform or workflow pattern where you just click a button and it generates a bunch of these creatives. So one of the problems of running meta ads is that you constantly need to refresh your creatives. But with this automated flow that he has, you can do this at the push of a button.

31:44
I don’t think I’m doing it justice actually, or I’m describing it very well. I don’t know, it sounds fascinating to me. It’s pretty darn amazing using all the AI video tools at your disposal. Yeah, and I feel like, I mean, we’ve been talking about this for a couple years now, but this is the first year I think at Seller Summit that we have a lot of AI components in the talks because I feel like it’s how you are going to stand out from your competitors, is being able to scale quickly.

32:14
being able to implement things quickly using AI, saving money, saving costs, right? Whether it’s like Bernie talking about, you know, having these agents or, you you talking about vibe coding, right? Like it’s just gives you a leg up in so many different areas of your business and the people who are quick to adapt it. Because I will tell you, there are a lot of businesses that do not want to adapt uh with AI at all. They view it as plagiarism. They view it as all these kind of like, I feel like it’s old school, but it’s not even that old. ah

32:44
So I feel like if you can get on the bandwagon and start, know, even if you can take one of the things that we talked about at Seller Summit and start implementing in your business, you’re going to have advantage over your competition. Since we’re on the topic of AI, we’re going to be talking about how to be like a one man content machine. We already talked about the importance of creating video, creating creatives and whatnot. So I mean, these are all forms of content that you need to be churning out.

33:12
Problem is, and this has been a big hurdle with students in my class, they’re like, how do I stay consistent? How do I create this content without just driving myself nuts and having this consume my entire life? So Chris Schaeffer is gonna be giving this talk. How to use AI to not only magnify the content that you create, but also how to create a really good routine with AI augmenting what you’re doing to be very consistent with your content creation.

33:41
Chris Schaeffer, Seller Summit OG. OG. He always gives a fantastic talk. I actually think if you remove you and I from the equation, he is the only speaker who’s given a talk every single year at Seller Summit. Is that right? Yeah. Even the first year? Yeah, he gave a talk the first year. I’m pretty sure he did. He came the I know he came the first year, but I think he gave a talk the first year too. um So yeah, true OG and Chris Schaeffer.

34:08
Also, we had a conversation last night about Lars. Lars is not speaking, but our good friend Lars will be there. Another one of our OGs. My daughter told me that he was her favorite Seller Summit attendee last night. Is that right? Yes. She thinks he is. I mean, no matter what Lars is up to, is like always has so much good feedback for whatever you’re doing. Very honest, does not pull any punches, which is great. So anyway, he refuses to speak for us anymore.

34:38
but that’s okay, because he still attends and that’s good. And speaking of like feedback, let’s talk about Reddit. We’ve never done a Reddit talk before. Everyone can talk feedback uh about your This is one actually I was kind of hesitant to have, but I think it’s necessary. These days when you do a search in AI, it mentions a whole bunch of Reddit posts. So if you were to go to ChatGBT,

35:06
and you were to ask it best standing desks, and then you would click on the sources button. I would be willing to get guess that 30 % of the citations, the sources for the citations for the answer is from Reddit. And there’s this like whole community of people who are gaming Reddit to get mentioned in the LLMs, which is the name of the game right now. I believe Reddit is mentioned or cited 40 % of the time for

35:35
e-commerce searches now, which is pretty nuts. And basically this talk is going to teach you how to get mentioned in Reddit without getting banned by Reddit. Yeah. Well, yeah. And it also reminds me of the fact that one one time one of my clients said, hey, there’s a whole subreddit about my business. Is that good or bad? And I was like, depends.

36:01
Yeah, and we are we are having someone come who knows a little bit about bad press in their business um Yeah, this would be like a really fun talk uh Dave Bryant of ecom crew. We’re trying to get Mike to come out too. Yes, but uh He’s learned a lot of lessons from this failed launch I don’t want to give too much away. It’s just a very interesting story I don’t know. How do you put it?

36:31
So I think it’s, what because uh I like to joke with people that like all press is good press, but that’s not true. Bad press, bad press can really hurt your business. um And there’s definitely the right way to handle it and the wrong way to handle it and what you can learn from, you know, the whole experience. And so I think I I actually love the talks that are like this is everything that went wrong.

36:57
Because I feel like so often people get up and are like, my business is amazing. I sold for two billion dollars. I’m living my best life. And it’s like if you’re, you know, in the first three or four years of e-commerce, you’ve probably experienced, especially right now, you’ve experienced all sorts of you’ve had the ups and downs of a pandemic and then tariffs and, you know, elections. And so it’s sometimes it’s like, oh, hey, let’s have a realistic talk about like, hey, when things don’t go exactly your way.

37:26
If something bad happens, like this is what happened and this is how we handled it and this is what we would do differently, right? Next time around or maybe they do everything the same. Yeah, actually, the talk is really about how to launch a brand. Yeah. But he’s framing it in such a way like all the mistakes that he made, what not to do and what to do. So it should be really good. Yeah, I’m excited. Although I’ve I’ve heard it a million times. I still well, I don’t think you know all the little details. I probably don’t.

37:54
It depends. Then I will be giving the closing keynote this year. I know. You’re ruining my whole event. um I’ll have to be thinking about it for three days. I usually give myself the first talk of the event so I get it over with. Oh, yes, that’s right. You’re to be last. Yes, I’m going to be last. Saving the best for last.

38:22
I do know what I’m talking about, but I don’t think I’m gonna share it. You’re not gonna share it, okay. I think it’s gonna be, I mean it’s not like a surprise, you know, someone jumping out of a birthday cake level surprise, but I think it’ll be a good closing wrap-up of this year for sure. Okay, well I can’t wait. Yeah, well we’ll see. do a little bit every day on it. That’s kind of my, has been my goal. Oh, that’s, yeah. I don’t operate that way, I just like,

38:52
pump out the whole thing. I don’t operate that way either, but I was like, can’t be pumping this out the week before the event. I have too much other event stuff going on. If I did that, it would be me getting up there and telling you everything that went right and wrong with the event. You know, what’s funny is I was debating whether to give like three talks this year because there’s like so much stuff that I’ve been working on this year. But I don’t want to kill myself either and make myself a nervous wreck the entire time.

39:19
No, and the one thing we didn’t get to talk about, which I wanted, we’re like close on time here, but we didn’t really talk about the masterminds. Oh yes. And I’m excited because this year for uh the content masterminds, so we have a couple masterminds at Seller Summit, and one of the masterminds that we introduced a few years ago was the content mastermind, and this is for people who really want to focus on content creation to help grow their brand. So while it is still e-commerce focused, it’s not like, you know, completely outside of that.

39:48
It is definitely we talk a lot about YouTube and TikTok and social media and you know all the different channels you can use to put content out there. And last year our friend Danan was in my mastermind in the content mastermind. And after the content mastermind he pulled me aside and he was like hey that was really great I loved it you know this and that. He’s like I have some ideas for next year. I was like perfect I love I love feedback. And he

40:17
He is one of those people who, he reminds me of a lot like Chris Schaefer and that they’re always testing like 10 things at once. Like, I’m starting five YouTube channels and this channel I’m doing four videos a day and this channel I’m doing four videos a week and this channel I’m doing four videos a month and this channel, know, he’s always got like all these things going on. And so he said, you know, I’m doing all this stuff and he’s like, and I have these spreadsheets and I’m tracking things and can I give those away to people in your content mastermind next year?

40:43
Can I give my whole process of how I was like, no, no, we definitely hate when people get free stuff at seller summit. ah So anyway, he’s actually going to be leading the content mastermind this year. Awesome. And going through all of this testing he’s been running for the past couple of years, he has multiple e-commerce brands as well as content brands. So I’m excited for that because I feel like it’s going to be especially and he’s doing almost all video focused stuff. So uh ton of experience and uh

41:13
He was even nice enough to share his first video he ever made, which if you are someone like us who’s been making video a long time, you never share the first video you made, because it’s so bad. And so he’s like, yeah, this is where I started and this is where I am today. And like huge, phenomenal improvement. so he knows this stuff and he’s really been very generous with what he’s gonna do in that content group this year. So I’m super excited. And that’s actually almost full.

41:40
So if you are on the fence about that one, I think we only have two seats left in that. So, oh, Okay. Yeah. And then we’re also running the e-commerce masterminds. Uh, we have two tiers, one, if you’re making over a million bucks and one, if you’re doing over 250 K and, uh, it’s gonna be the same style a year, sorry, a year. Yeah. Uh, breaking up into groups of 10 or 12. And what we do is we just sit in a room and help each other with our businesses, hot seat style.

42:10
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s always been good. It’s it’s the highlight of the event for a lot of people. It’s also a great chance if you’re a little uh shy to get to know a group of people really well, because you’re literally in a room for eight hours. Yeah. You get to know each other well. And then when the event starts, you guys are already like really good friends. Yeah. And I I’ll quote Chris Cody one more time. He texts me. Well, we text.

42:37
frequently, but he texts me about once every six months. So he came to Seller Summit several years ago, was in a mastermind with Dana Jean-Zemes, and he texts me about every six months thanking me for putting him in that group and letting me know that she has changed his life so dramatically in a positive way. And he’s not the only person I hear that from, but he’s the best at giving me like every six months a little text thank you.

43:01
And it is true a lot of people’s lives have been changed dramatically just from that one day mastermind Because they changed the direction of their business. They decided to sell they decided to buy, you know, it’s a variety of things right everyone comes out with a different takeaway from those but uh Definitely business or life-changing in those groups. I mean there’s been Groups that have formed during those masterminds that have been meeting for years. Yeah. Well think about our friend Natalie who

43:30
came to, I think her first seller summit was 2017. She was- to all of them, I thought. She was an OG, wasn’t she? She did not come to the first one. Oh, she didn’t go to the first one. So she came to the second one, and we didn’t have masterminds in the first year. So second year, she came to a mastermind. She was in the 250,000 mastermind, and she told me in that mastermind, my goal is to get to the million dollar mastermind. She hit that goal a couple years later, was in the million dollar mastermind, and then actually was a speaker.

43:56
at Seller Summit talking about influencer marketing and then just recently exited her business, which was kind of her goal, I think, for a long time and got to the point where that was a smart decision for her. So and kind of watching her through all the Seller Summits ah and all the phases is just very rewarding and exciting. She’s not the only one, but she’s probably the one that most of you guys know, because she’s very outgoing. So if you’ve been to a Seller Summit, you definitely know Natalie. And then we actually have a Discord community for Seller Summit this year also.

44:26
In the past we didn’t have that because Discord was, thanks to vibe coding, like I’m a master of Discord now and there’s a lot of cool things you can do with it. So you’ll get a chance to keep in touch with everyone that you’ve met outside, form your own groups and just keep in touch. Hope you enjoyed this episode. What’s happening right now is probably the biggest shift in e-commerce that I’ve experienced in a very long time.

44:53
More information and resources go over to mywifecoderjob.com slash episode 627. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you wanna hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com.