As many of you know, this week we lost Adam Robinson, the founder of Retention.com and RB2B, along with his wife, Helen, and their two children.
A lot of you will know Adam from your feed, where he built his companies in public and gave away almost everything he learned along the way: the numbers, the mistakes and the wins.
Our thoughts are with Adam and Helen's family, with the families of everyone on board, and with the teams at Retention.com, RB2B and MoltSets. The rest of this issue is below.
Tweet of the Week
The Ad Creative Strategy That Takes Brands to $100M in Record Time
Shopify released its Fall ’26 Edition, which it has named Exponential, on 28 and 29 October: more than 150 updates across store design, checkout, inventory, analytics and AI commerce, most of them already live and none of them requiring you to sit through a keynote.
Common Thread Collective has gone through the lot and pulled out the handful worth touching before Black Friday, starting with the one that lets shoppers pay you without ever seeing your storefront. Inside:
Shop Pay now works inside third-party AI shopping agents, on by default if you already offer Shop Pay, with checkout happening in the chat
A new Agentic channel under Sales Channels controls which products and collections the agents can actually see
GTIN autocomplete checks your barcodes against the GS1 registry, which matters because missing GTINs can suppress you in Merchant Center
Variant editing has moved onto the main product page, subscriptions can go into invoiced draft orders, and app events from tools like Klaviyo now show up in Shopify Analytics
A five-step pre-BFCM checklist, starting with your Agentic channel settings and a barcode audit of your top 50 SKUs
(The robots, it seems, will be paying by Shop Pay. Whether they will also be returning the jumper in January is not yet covered by the release notes.)
In partnership with Levanta
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Good influencers. Great products. Underwhelming results.
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Quick Shots
Taylor Holiday One of the most overplayed tropes in ecom is about raising your AOV.
Northbeam New customer acquisition on Meta is getting cheaper, contrary to popular opinion.
Chase Dimond While we’re talking about popups, here are 4 other quick things I’d also do:
Sarah Levinger Lie to yourself about your customer… Then try and prove yourself wrong.
Fraser Cottrell Huge unlock if you’re prepping Black Friday ads: Don’t make a new ad, just film your laptop playing one that already won.
Here for the Memes
Top Headlines this Week
Best from LinkedIn
Barry Hott: This is pretty alarming.
Ok, been hearing a lot of Meta advertisers complaining about performance issues this month.
Tbh, I kinda ignored it because I wasn't seeing it clearly.
I was actually seeing some good performance on the back of some CRO wins.
Recommended SaaS & Services
BFCM is close enough that nobody needs another 47-point prep checklist. You need to know where the holes are. Connect Omnisend to ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to audit your campaigns, automations, segments and deliverability. Run your BFCM readiness check now, then fix the three things that actually matter.
BoxFort Commerce helps clothing & high-sku brands scale with efficient Shopify fulfillment. Unlike the Bobs & Monks of logistics, we ship hundreds of thousands of orders for 3 of our own clothing and jewelry brands, so it’s imperative that our processes are built around saving money & consistency. Learn more here.
Stuck between an overpaid $80K/Year US hire and an inexperienced $5/Hour VA? Tidal helps you hire experienced, execution talent globally that outperforms US hires, at a fraction of the cost. Built by operators focused on hiring better talent, not just cheaper talent. Get started with a free payroll audit today --> www.hiretidal.com
Ask your email guy which flow tests won last week. He stares at you blankly, there’s your answer. Zee.Media runs Email Flow CRO for $5M to $20M Shopify brands. Every week your flows get tested on revenue per recipient, and every winner stays in the account permanently. Get a free Revenue Leak Audit. Worst case, you find out your flows are fine --> zee.media
Stat Attack
That's the week. If Adam ever taught you something, through a post, a podcast or a conversation, the best tribute is probably to pass it on to someone else. Look after your people this week.
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They’re reaching 7, 8 and 9 figure merchants.
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