Eden

Best advice I got from an older founder when I was starting this. "In payments, you don't sell to the ones who want faster growth. You sell to the ones who already got hurt." Still the whole playbook.

Checkout CVR is 80% friction, 20% design. Every field you add kills ~2% of conversions. Full name + email + phone + address 1 + address 2 + city + state + zip + card + cvv + exp. You just asked a warm buyer to fill 11 fields on a phone screen. The winners? 3 fields. Apple Pay. Autofill. Gone in 6 seconds.

@alexabelonix Most 7-figure operators have a version of that story. They just learned early that VCs google you 😂

Too tied from all of those founders/enterpreneurs that post about their SaaS, MRR, ARR, burn rate, fundraising etc NOTHING UNIQUE can we have someone in the space like «in 16 I was a drug dealer, in 18 I had my own webcam studio… after that I tried to be normal and finished University, worked for Consalting firm… but that life was boring as fuck and I started to build startups… and yep just made $100k profit in a month from my SaaS» FEELS LIKE WE FORGOT WHAT ENTREPRENEURIAL BLOOD REALLY MEANS

@jurbed Most processors sell transaction data as a secondary revenue stream. Merchant GMV, SKU-level data, customer LTV. All packaged and monetized. The payment rail knowing your entire business model is a feature for them, not you.

Privacy isn't just for customers; it's for merchants too. Why should your payment processor know your turnover, your products, or your customer's identity? CashuPayServer uses Cashu mints for settlement of Lightning payments. This creates a "privacy buffer" between your shop and the network. The mint sees the Lightning payment; you see the credit. Nobody sees the link between the two except you. Why Cashu mint? The easiest way to accept Lightning and not run a Lightning node. And yes, it can immediately withdraw to a real non-custodial Lightning wallet. Accept Lightning with "Stealth Mode" enabled. cashupayserver.org

Stop hiring senior people to fix problems you've never personally solved. You'll either pay them too much for the wrong work or you won't know if they're doing the right work. Solve it ugly. Then hire to scale it.

Integrations are where most payment stacks silently die. You add Klaviyo. Then Gorgias. Then Recharge. Then a fraud tool. Each one needs webhooks, auth, mapping, retries. Six months later your dev team is mostly maintaining glue. We built native integrations with the 20 tools every ecom brand actually uses. One config. Same customer object everywhere. Your engineering leverage just tripled.

@vincenzo_micale The interesting question isn’t where they spend. It’s how they process. Psychic = MCC 7299, declined by Stripe, banned by PayPal. Whoever onboarded them solved the harder problem.

587 active ads for psychic readings. That's not a side hustle, that's a media buying operation. 132 days live, $7.3K tracked spend (Europe only). But 84% US traffic means the real budget is hidden. They're printing in America. 84% US, 81% UK, but barely scratching Europe. If psychic services convert this hard in English markets, France and Germany are wide open. Same anxiety, different language. See their full ad strategy here: searchthetrend.com/share/product/…

587 ads at this scale isn’t a media problem, it’s an ops problem. Behind every ad: a funnel, a CRM, a subscription engine, chargeback management, multi-acquirer routing. The real edge in psychic readings is a stack that doesn’t break at scale.

Average checkout load time across the top 500 ecom sites: 3.8 seconds. Ours: 420 milliseconds. Not a benchmark. Not a lab test. Production, measured at the edge. Every 100ms of checkout latency = ~1% CVR. Do the math on what that costs you at $1M/month.

@vincent_alonzi Ads

The beauty & fitness brands scaling right now aren't running better products. They're running better ads. And most of them are using angles you've never tested. Here's what winning beauty/fitness ads have in common right now: - They use native formats that blend into feed, not scream "ad". - Spend is climbing fast but CPAs are staying flat (sign of a creative that converts). - They rotate hooks weekly. We track every single ad in the Meta library at Trendtrack. This quarter we pulled the 100+ beauty & fitness creatives with the strongest scaling signals. Ads that are printing money right now. I broke them all down in a free resource. Drop "ADS" in the comments. I'll send it to your DMs. 👇

@XmDropshipping True

Many Shopify sellers constantly optimize their ads and repeatedly test creatives, yet conversion rates remain unstable. The problem often lies not in traffic, but in the "hidden breaks" in the fulfillment process. I've seen far too many similar situations: • Delayed order synchronization • Discontinuous or missing logistics tracking information • Frequent customer inquiries: "Where is my package?" • Customer service constantly overwhelmed by tracking issues The result: the more ads you run, the faster your losses amplify. Because traffic determines entry speed, while fulfillment determines final profit.

@FedotOff90 Most pet supplement brands hitting that revenue are running 35-45% reorder rates on auto-ship. The real number to watch is LTV month 6, not month 1 AOV.

Got introduced to a couple at an ecom mastermind who are doing something I've never seen before. They sell a dog joint supplement. For pets. $780K/month. Same direct response playbook that works for human supplements — VSL creative, advertorial landing page, bundle offer — but applied to the pet market. Their CAC is $19 on a $54 AOV product. In the US, their subscription rate is 58% with 74% retention at 6 months. Why so high? Because people don't cancel subscriptions for their dog. The emotional connection is completely different from buying supplements for yourself. "My dog needs this" hits different than "I should probably keep taking this." They started in the US and just launched into the UK last month. Same funnel translated to... nothing. It's English. They just changed the currency, shipping, and the offer structure — no subscription in the UK, just a 3-pack bundle as the default with a 6-pack upgrade option. The bundle-first approach actually pushed their UK AOV higher than the US. UK CAC: $12. Higher AOV than the US. Same product. Same page. The pet supplement market is projected to hit $3.5 billion by 2028 and growing at 8%+ annually. And the number of brands running proper DTC funnels with real direct response creative in the pet space is a fraction of the human supplement market. If you understand the DTC supplement playbook but you're tired of competing against 500 brands in the same human health niches — look at pet supplements. Same playbook, different audience, way less competition.

@thedennis Margin erosion usually hits around 3-4x spend increase before ROAS even flinches. The lag is what kills brands, they optimize for yesterday's numbers while today's unit economics are already underwater.

5 signs you're scaling the wrong ad: 1. ROAS looks good but AOV is dropping (attracting discount hunters) 2. CTR is high but CVR is low (hook doesn't match offer) 3. Cold is profitable but retargeting isn't (wrong audience entering funnel) 4. Spend is up but profit margin is flat (efficiency is fake) 5. One demo is converting, another isn't (ad speaks to wrong segment) ROAS isn't the whole story. Zoom out before you scale up.

Across 1k+ DTC merchants we process for, the pattern is brutal: Brands stuck at $5M sell products. Brands scaling to $50M sell subscriptions. Same CAC, same creative, same targeting. Completely different ceiling.

@kamal_razzak agree, but missing half the equation. the person who can spend most and recover it 3x over wins. one-shot brands plateau at $5M. subscription brands break $50M. same product, different math.

why do some brands scale to $50M while others plateau at $5M? it's not creative. it's not targeting. it's contribution margin. if you can spend $150 to acquire a customer when your competitor caps out at $80, you win. the person who can spend most always wins.

Your PSP doesn't make money on "processing fees". They make it on float, on FX, on chargeback line items, on reserve interest, and on the breakage of every feature they don't actually implement well. The 2.9% + 30¢ is marketing. When you compare processors on fee card alone, you are comparing the wrong number. Ask for the effective rate. And the reserve clause. That's where the real cost lives. My DMs are open. If you want help reading your processor contract, just ask.

Telehealth brands scaling GLP-1 are the most mispriced acquiring risk on the market right now. Acquirers lump them in with nutra. They are not nutra. Recurring prescription, pharmacy-fulfilled, real clinician review. The data profile is closer to SaaS than supplements. Chargebacks under 0.3%. If your PSP is pricing you like a nutraceutical, you are subsidizing every other merchant in their portfolio.

@saikurrra 100%. The ones flexing the loudest are usually 1 chargeback wave or 1 ad account ban from being humbled. Real operators stay quiet, stay diversified, stay paranoid.

I’ve seen this a bit As soon as you think you cracked ecom or mastered it You usually get humbled or you realize there’s much to learn

Speed > perfection. Every time. The top performers in our merchant base (1k+ brands) share one trait: they ship in days, not weeks. They test ugly, scale what works, then polish the winners. By the time the "branding-first" crowd launches, they're already at $50K days.

@Theeyuann In 2026, you can hire Claude

Who can I hire that builds listicles?