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Good morning!
In today’s newsletter,
You’re leaking margin every time someone uses a discount code
Google just changed how your ad budget gets spent
Is there a way to do bulk SEO in my Shopify store?
Why effort beats polished on social
Why your CX stack is losing loyal customers
AI Launch Codes: Most DTC brands have $20k+ tied up in dead stock. This finds it in 5 minutes.
This issue takes 2 minutes to read.
Check out our DTC tool stack here
Let’s dive into it👇
Promotional Strategy
You’re leaking margin every time someone uses a discount code
Your discount codes are working. Just not how you think. A lot of the shoppers who were given a discount would have purchased at full price. That's margin you're giving away for nothing.
RevLifter fixes this. We show offers only to visitors people hesitating at checkout, comparing prices, or about to leave. High-intent shoppers never see a discount. You protect margin where it matters and convert more visitors where it doesn't.
The result? Brands typically see 20% more conversions, 30% higher AOV, 5% more revenue, and 10% saved on promotion costs. We run it as a managed service (you don't lift a finger) and prove results through proper incrementality testing.
Pssst…by upgrading to AI Launch Codes, you can unlock $195 worth of Magicals for free
Paid Acquisition
Google just changed how your ad budget gets spent
If you run Google Ads on a limited schedule, your monthly spend is about to go up.
Starting March 1, 2026, Google will attempt to spend up to your full monthly limit (30.4x your daily budget) regardless of your ad schedule.
Previously, days when your ads were off meant lower spend. Google now pushes to hit the monthly ceiling within whatever active windows you have.
The math
A $100 daily budget = $3,040 monthly cap.
Say you run Monday to Friday only. April has 22 active days.
You used to spend around $2,200. Now Google compresses the full $3,040 into those same 22 days.
The fix
Take your real monthly target and divide by 30.4. Set that as your daily budget.
If you want to hold a weekend-only campaign to $800/month, set the daily budget to $50. Google will push to the 2x daily cap on active days, and you'll land close to your target.
Check your inbox first though.
Only accounts that received a notification email are in this first wave.
Action Summary:
Check your inbox and Recommendations tab to confirm your account is affected
Divide your real monthly target by 30.4 and update your daily budget
Add a CPA (cost per acquisition) target if you're using Maximize Conversions
Check month-to-date spend weekly for the next 60 days
Credit: Ameet Khabra
Ask An Expert
Is there a way to do bulk SEO in my Shopify store?
Yes, there's a Shopify app called Plug In AI that handles bulk SEO.
It generates product descriptions, meta tags, and image alt text across your entire catalog at once.
It also runs audits to flag content issues and has a blog post generator for building out content around specific products or keywords.
Reply to this email with your biggest challenge, and we will try to answer that in the next edition!
Organic Social Content
Why effort beats polished on social
Every feed right now is full of content selling ease. AI tools, time-savers, shortcuts.
The brands posting AI-generated product clips forget that so much of what makes something worth watching is implied effort.
Why effort stops people cold
There's a studied cognitive shortcut called the effort heuristic.
People automatically assume that things requiring significant time, skill, or energy are higher quality than things that didn't.
On social, people are making a keep-or-scroll decision in about two seconds. Perceived effort creates buy-in fast.
What this looks like in practice
Show the thing most brands skip past.
How many attempts it took to get the formula right.
The founder hand-writing notes at 2am.
The batch that didn't make it. The one that did.
Action Summary:
Write down the three most labor-intensive steps in making your product
Film one of them this week, unpolished, from start to finish
Post it without narrating the effort, let the footage do it
Watch time and saves will tell you which angle to double down on
Credit: Rachel Karten
88% resolved. 22% loyal. Your stack has a problem.
Those numbers aren't a CX issue — they're a design issue. Gladly's 2026 Customer Expectations Report breaks down exactly where AI-powered service loses customers, and what the architecture of loyalty-driven CX actually looks like.
Most DTC brands have $20k+ tied up in dead stock. This finds it in 5 minutes.
Stockouts and dead stock are the two biggest cash flow problems DTC brands face.
Not ads. Not shipping. Inventory.
A stockout on your hero SKU while Meta ads are running means you're paying for clicks that can't convert. The algorithm loses its learning data. You pause. You restart. You lose two weeks of optimization just to get back to where you were.
Dead stock is quieter but just as bad. That $40k sitting in slow-moving units is $40k that can't fund your next PO, run your next campaign, or cover payroll.
Most founders manage inventory one of two ways. They either wait until Shopify sends a low stock alert (too late), or they look at last month's numbers, add a gut-feel buffer, and fire off a PO (not reliable).
Neither is a system. Both will fail you at the worst possible time.
The fix is knowing three numbers for every SKU: how many days of stock you have left, when to reorder based on your actual lead time, and how much safety stock to hold based on your sales variance. Not approximate numbers. Exact ones.
I built a Claude skill that calculates all three in under five minutes.
You open a new chat, type /dtc-inventory-analyst, and it walks you through everything.
It starts by asking you to download three reports from Shopify: your orders export for the last 90 days, your current inventory export, and your products export. Takes about five minutes to pull all three.
Once you upload the files, it cross-references them by SKU and calculates days of inventory for every product, sell-through rate, an ABC classification that tells you which SKUs are revenue drivers vs cash traps, and exact reorder points based on your actual daily sales velocity and supplier lead time.
Note: I’ve used dummy data for his presentation.
Then it tells you what to do. Which SKUs to reorder today. Which ones to order within two weeks. Which ones have too much stock and are tying up cash. And for every reorder, it shows the math: average daily sales, lead time used, safety stock calculation, and the suggested order quantity.
No formulas. No spreadsheet. Three CSVs and five minutes.
Download the Skill
This skill can be save in Claude as a skill or you can just upload this into a CHATGPT chat as well.
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