Operator talk for serious ecommerce builders.
Ecommerce Conversations is a practical business show about the daily mechanics of running and growing online stores. Eric Bandholz talks with operators about conversion rates, product pages, marketplaces, drops, scarcity, ads, tools, and the decisions that shape durable ecommerce companies.
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Ecommerce Conversations covers online retail from the inside of the operator’s chair. The show’s focus is not abstract entrepreneurship, but the practical pressure points that determine whether a store keeps growing. Eric Bandholz sets an informal tone, then uses that looseness to get into conversion, ads, product strategy, marketplaces, customer behavior, and founder decision-making. Short asides and jokes sit next to specific business questions. That mix gives the show its useful texture. A conversation with Dave, who runs Central Apps, centers on CRO without treating conversion testing as magic. The episode pushes into volatility, ad performance, product detail pages, homepage traffic leakage, Shopify cart familiarity, and the need to read testing software with caution. Another episode looks outward at industry trends, with Amazon’s rising fees, shipping costs, marketplace share, dropshipping skepticism, and benchmarking reports all shaping the discussion. The show can also turn inward. In a solo episode, Bandholz considers the case for a second business once the first one is steady enough to run without constant reinvention. It is a founder-brain episode: restless, speculative, and concerned with the danger of tinkering destructively inside a working company. Product-brand stories bring a different gear. Brandon Haraho’s Montana Knife Co conversation covers craft, transparency, limited production, customer sharpening, weekly behind-the-scenes content, and the complicated meaning of selling out. The show repeatedly returns to the tension between growth and durability. Fast tactics matter, but so do category dynamics, customer trust, operational constraints, and whether a business model can hold up. Guests are allowed to be plainspoken. Claims are questioned. Numbers get caveats. The appeal is the working-room feel: conversations among people who know that ecommerce success is usually a chain of small, testable decisions rather than one clean breakthrough.
Made for: Best suited for ecommerce founders, brand operators, marketers, CRO practitioners, and agency people who want candid discussions about running online stores. It also fits business listeners who prefer practical tradeoffs over startup mythology.
What sets it apart: The show pairs casual founder rapport with specific operating detail, so episodes move naturally from X debates and industry drama into PDP testing, Amazon economics, checkout behavior, scarcity, and benchmarking. It feels close to the daily conversations ecommerce operators already have, but with sharper context.
Ecommerce Conversations is the long-running weekly podcast from Practical Ecommerce, hosted by ecommerce entrepreneur Eric Bandholz. •• Listen in as Eric interviews in-the-trenches founders and executives who address the essentials of launching, growing, and sustaining an online business. Hear their successes, mistakes, and plans — addressing customer acquisition, web traffic, marketing tactics, on-site conversion, shipping, favorite tools, funding, obstacles, and much more. •• New episodes every Friday. Subscribe to the podcast here, and then read a condensed transcript at https://www.PracticalEcommerce.com/tag/podcasts.
One minute you're fixing product video; the next, Amazon is squeezing your margins.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A CRO operator puts testing discipline, ad quality, and realistic projections in the right order.
Ecommerce Conversations frames conversion work through a $15,000 website-conversion contest, using the setup to show where CRO really begins. Eric Bandholz talks with Dave of Central Apps about Jacob's contest, Dave's testing habits, and the order in which operators should think…
A knife-brand story about selling out, resharpening, and earning trust in public.
The episode presents a knife brand that has kept its edge while learning to scale. A guest walks through the first 200 knives, the credit cards that helped fund them, and the shift to a drop model after the early sellout, while the host keeps the focus on the weekly…
A blunt look at Amazon's squeeze on smaller brands and the math behind it.
The episode takes a blunt look at what happens when Amazon stops feeling like a growth channel and starts looking like a squeeze. Eric Bandholz and Andrew move from dropshipping hype to the tougher math behind rising fees, higher shipping rates, and a platform that seems to…
Rob Walling on bootstrapped SaaS growth, plateaus, and exits — with founders who lived them.
Abbey Ashley's playbook for turning your job skills into a virtual assistant business.
SaaS operators on scaling, pricing and AI, metrics included.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
Andrew from EcomFuel discusses key findings from a 2026 trends report based on a survey of 300 seven- to nine-figure e-commerce brands.
Eric Bandholz interviews Brandon Haraho, co-founder of Montana Knife Company, about blending craftsmanship with scale in the knife industry.
Brett Fish of Tag Hero explains why inaccurate advertising data can waste spend, including an audit that found systematic double counting for a large brand.
Sean Stone tells Eric Bandholz that ecommerce brands should pair a profitable Shopify store with Amazon rather than rely on Amazon alone.
Eric Bandholz interviews Paolo Vidale of Hidden Gears about building profitable ecommerce websites with Shopify, lean app stacks, and customer-focused product pages.
Eric Bandholz explains how Beardbrand is experiencing growth while Meta advertising, manufacturing, shipping, and fulfillment costs rise.
Eric Bandholz discusses the idea that entrepreneurs should have two businesses: one stable and one moonshot.
Dave Diterin of Central Apps tells Eric Bandholz that conversion-rate optimization should begin only after a store has roughly 500 orders per A/B test, with four tests requiring about 2,000 monthly orders.