Traffic is up and conversions are up!
It’s all well and good, but if profit in your e-commerce business has not moved, your efforts are being wasted.
You adjust the storefront, increase the advertising spend and automate more of the service, and still the profit and the repeat sales stay flat. Sadly, your store gets busier without ever getting stronger.
Many entrepreneurs fall into this trap, and treat e-commerce as a collection of website tactics rather than as a commercial system. When every subscriber receives the same message, when advertising is judged on revenue alone and when customers are kept at arm’s length, the opportunities quietly disappear.
At the July 2026 Business Blueprint conference, Pete Williams shared five practical strategies shaped by his experience with his business Simply Headsets. At the heart of his approach was a simple reminder: “This is a business that happens to be online.”
Growth in online businesses comes from understanding your customers, protecting your margin and adding human contact where it genuinely creates value. Not from another round of website tweaks.
Here are Pete’s tips for e-commerce success:
Separate Your Prospects from Your Customers
One newsletter sent out every few weeks cannot do every job.
Someone who has never purchased from you needs reasons to trust your business and take a first step with you.
An existing customer needs useful follow-up, relevant offers and reminders that strengthen the relationship they already have with you.
Pete advises separating these audiences and communicating with both regularly, at least monthly. Prospects might receive education, reassurance and proof. Customers can receive guidance, replenishment reminders, complementary offers and service-led content.
Doing this stops your most loyal buyers being spoken to like strangers, and it lets your marketing match where each person actually is in their journey.
Use RFM to Protect Valuable Relationships
‘RFM’ analysis scores your customers on three things:
- Recency. How recently they purchased.
- Frequency. How often they come back.
- Monetary value. How much they spend.
Together, those scores reveal your champions, your promising customers, your at-risk accounts and the people who are beginning to hibernate. Rather than waiting for a valuable customer to disappear entirely, you can trigger a timely call, email or text the moment their behaviour changes.
Bringing live RFM information into the sales process helped Pete’s team assign responsibility and act earlier. Turning a database from a static record into a retention tool built around long-term value.
Optimise Advertising for Profit, Not Revenue
Return on ad spend can be badly misleading, because it rewards sales value without considering product margin. An advertisement may generate impressive revenue while steering customers towards items that contribute very little gross profit.
At Simply Headsets, Pete’s team fed product profit data into its advertising decisions instead. The platform could then favour the products producing stronger profit after advertising costs, rather than the ones carrying the biggest price tags. Some products brought in less revenue, but overall profitability improved significantly.
The key is to compare your advertising costs with the margin you actually keep from each sale. Looking at performance through a profit lens can quickly reveal which products are worth promoting and stop you from scaling revenue that looks good on paper but delivers little to the bottom line.
Add Human Help and Learn from the Conversations
Automation can make a store efficient, but removing every human touch also creates mistakes and frustration. Having a visible phone number, a live answering service or a pre-dispatch check gives customers confidence, particularly when your products are technical, configurable or easy to order incorrectly.
At Simply Headsets, making calls before dispatch reduced returns and exchanges while also confirming what the customer needed or identifying a better option for them.
The business also reviewed its customer conversations. For example, call transcripts expose the recurring questions, the confusing information and the actual language customers use. When these resources are reviewed properly, those insights can improve:
- FAQs
- Product descriptions
- Search content
- Sales scripts
- Staff training
Artificial intelligence can accelerate that analysis considerably, but human judgement remains essential.
Go Offline to Strengthen Loyalty
An online business can stand out with a thoughtful offline gesture. Pete’s team sends handwritten-style notes to selected high-value customers, using customer value and account potential to decide when the cost is worthwhile.
The notes are personal and completely unexpected. Some recipients respond directly, and some share the experience online, which extends the impact well beyond the original gesture. Not every order needs a card. The lesson is to invest deliberately in the moments that make your best customers feel recognised.
Read more: How Smart Investors Turn Negative Gearing Into Positive Cash Flow
Turning Online Growth Into Profit
Profitable e-commerce growth doesn’t come from ‘getting more clicks’. The entire venture needs to be treated as a business.
To put this into practice, follow these five steps:
- Talk to prospects and customers as two different audiences, at least monthly.
- Score your database on recency, frequency and monetary value, then act when the scores move.
- Judge your advertising on retained margin rather than headline revenue.
- Put a human back into the parts of the journey where money is at stake.
- Spend deliberately on offline gestures for your most valuable customers.
These strategies will work together build an online retailer that earns more from each customer while giving people far better reasons to come back.
About Business Blueprint
The World’s #1 Business Program
Business Blueprint brings members the latest techniques and strategies to take control of their marketing, build better foundations and achieve the growth they are dreaming of.
If you’re tired of the business owner hamster wheel and sick of spending every day putting out spot fires, sign up for personal support, group accountability and access to the strategies that will maximise your profits and free you from the daily grind.
Membership includes:
- In-person conferences
- Weekly workshops (including AI news and training)
- Access to a library of over 1000 training videos (check out some samples here)
- Accountability groups
- One-on-one coaching calls
Want to know more? Book a call with a member of our team today.
