Last week, GameStop, a retailer whose primary achievement in recent years has been converting retail investor sentiment into a temporary financial weapon, attempted to acquire eBay for several billion dollars it had accumulated by essentially existing near a meme.
eBay's response arrived with the emotional temperature of a Victorian headmaster reviewing a child's crayon self-portrait.
"Neither credible, nor attractive."
Six words. The comma doing load-bearing contempt work. No diplomatic softening. No "we appreciate the interest and wish the team well in their future endeavors." Simply: no, and also » pause « no to the shape of this.
It is, by the standards of corporate communication, a genre not historically associated with candor, personality, or the will to wound, a genuinely extraordinary sentence. The kind of sentence that gets framed.
Somewhere, a GameStop press officer is having a very specific Wednesday.
The rest of us, meanwhile, remain in the business of moving actual product, lifting actual margins, and improving actual checkout flows without the assistance of Reddit, retained meme energy, or the brief intoxication of being briefly worth more than anyone expected.
Onwards, with modest dignity.
Tweet of the Week
YouTube University:
How Spot & Tango Reinvented the Pet Food Space
Your 2.1% conversion rate is not a number. It is a noise. A contextually unmoored data point floating in the dashboard like a buoy that has forgotten what it is attached to.
A food and beverage brand at 2.1% is, commercially speaking, on fire. A luxury jeweller at 2.1% is fine, possibly even thriving, certainly unbothered. Most brands cannot identify which of these two realities they currently inhabit, which is the sort of thing one might describe as a problem.
Inside this piece, generously:
Actual benchmarks across 13 categories, so you may finally stop measuring yourself against an "industry average" assembled from brands that share only the vague characteristic of existing
The single checkout design failure cited by 39% of people who added something to a cart and then simply left, like a person who entered a building, remembered they had feelings, and quietly returned to the street
Why mobile converts 20–30% below desktop, and why this is entirely your fault, which the phone would like you to know
What every high-converting brand in every category has in common, which is not, as many have hoped, a more aggressive media budget
Ambiguity does not feel premium. It feels like 35% of your revenue filing a quiet and entirely avoidable resignation.
Read the full breakdown here - then go check your checkout on your phone. Today.
Sponsored by Omnisend
Omnisend has lowered its SMS pricing.
This is, by the standards of modern SaaS, essentially a cry for help. Platforms do not lower prices. They raise them, rename them, bundle them inside a tier called something like "Growth Plus Professional," and send a friendly email explaining that this represents significant value for your journey.
Omnisend has instead made SMS cheaper. $0.007 per message. A figure so reasonable it briefly destabilizes one's understanding of the industry.
This matters because SMS is not a decorative channel. It catches demand, recovers carts, and occasionally intercepts a customer mid-wander before the open internet dismantles their purchasing intention one comparison tab at a time.
Left unattended, per-message costs become line items. Line items become margin conversations. Margin conversations become someone with spreadsheet access asking whether you "really need all these sends," which is how revenue channels are gently strangled by people who have never met a customer.
So: cheaper SMS. We’ve concluded we are very much in favor.
Quick Shots
@landforce Has the guy who just replaced the $200k/yr finance executive with an agent ever hired a $200k/yr finance executive?
@IstvanicMarin 🌶️ Hot take: 🌶️ FB Ads consolidation is bullsh*t for scaling
Alexandra Greifeld Growth marketing agencies and their clients would BOTH be happier if there was greater transparency on both sides of the table.
@daviefogarty “I just need one brand to work to change my life.”
Marin Istvanic I don't get all this CPMr hype
Here for the Memes
Top Headlines this Week
Best from LinkedIn
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For years, I felt forced to run quasi brand degrading, feature/offer/urgency creative that pandered to short-term ROAS metrics, even though I knew content that was memorable, sharable, and left people with an emotion is what can't be copied or competed away.
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Stat Attack
The Outro
And that, more or less, is the week in eCommerce.
Conversion rates that may or may not be fine. SMS pricing that has, against all reasonable expectation, decreased. A corporate rejection so precise it will outlive the acquisition attempt by several years and at least one LinkedIn retrospective.
The industry remains, as ever, a place where enormous effort is expended on problems that should not exist, by people who are very good at solving them, in exchange for margins that are smaller than anyone initially discussed.
You are still here. This is either admirable or diagnostic.
We will return next week with further developments, arranged in descending order of commercial urgency and ascending order of quiet absurdity.
Until then, the checkout remains broken on mobile.
👆👆👆
They’re reaching 7, 8 and 9 figure merchants.
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