Welcome to Frankly eCommerce, a weekly DTC newsletter from Austin, TX. Martech, culture, & economy for brand builders by Patrick Scott Pitman.

Greetings and gratitude to those who participated in our 15 year tradition of Austin Shopify Meetups and the NEW & ongoing season of Workshops.

In this issue:

  • 📊 How to decide on your offers for BFCM with Dan Hansfield

  • 🛒 Preview of an Oct 16 Conversion Workshop with Brian Massey

  • 🏷️ Understanding “brand gravity” and a “brand galaxy” with Ana

  • 📆 Events and links worth sharing, and more…

Though there’s been a placeholder optin at franklyecommerce.com for years, this list is now live and growing. Reply to let me know what you find valuable — and whether this message is delivered to your inbox?

Subscribe here if you were forwarded this by a friend.

If you like something, forward it, too?

~ Patrick

P.S. Friday Oct. 16 in Austin: #BFCM Conversion Workshop

Randall & Lisa Pawlik ‘whiteboarded’ Vochill with Robb Green & Hal Smith at the Oct 2 Acquisition workshop.

Go big or go home? A BFCM discounting planner

What will I make in profit during the Black Friday sales season compared to if I just sat this thing out?

In other words, what if I offered no discounts or special offers?

That’s the first questions asked by Dan Hansfield Oct 9 at the BFCM Profit Calculation workshop for DTC brands in Austin.

The question, in order to be answered, needs a baseline for comparison. Dan, a fractional head of analytics at Datasmith, recommends you calculate ‘normal’ sales for the period Sep 1 through Oct 15.

Calculate the profit, or loss

With the baseline set, then project sales per day for the week of Black Friday through Cyber Monday. Assume a small seasonal lift even without a discount. Then we’re ready to forecast the consequences of making a special offer:

Participants downloaded a planning spreadsheet and then modified the numbers from an example company’s figures. (You can also do this using Dan’s Planning Spreadsheet. Reply to request link.)

The consequences that cascade from choosing to offer a 15% versus a 20% discount are BIG. The impact is disproportional to expectations!

Choose your discount intentionally

If there’s a loss for the period, choose this outcome for reasons grounded in an understanding of Lifetime Customer Value. Plan to recover profit later, knowing you’ve got a retention program ready to bring them back.

Is your retention program weak? Be cautious in what you giveaway! (And come to the Retention workshop Oct 23!)

Brand operators joked during the Profit workshop that ‘sitting out the season’ may be the better path, despite the pressure to discount.

But the pressure to go along with the season is builds as it gets closer. So another conclusion among brand operators after working through spreadsheet scenarios together: offer a BIG discount on a BIG quantity.

The resulting profit might be months or years worth of accumulated contribution margin if the person had ordered at normal quantities over a normal timeframe. And the discount makes sense to the customer because it acknowledges the quantity.

If you’re interested in a follow-up online group session so YOU can work through the spreadsheet with help, reply to [email protected].

REQUEST PLANNER DOWNLOAD

Customer service that runs on the same data as marketing

What if every shopper support experience—whether self-serve, handled by AI, or resolved by your team— informed your marketing stack?

So every interaction starts by knowing your customer, and learns more with each interaction.

Most service tools are built to deflect tickets. Klaviyo Service promises to help every conversation do more: recommend products, recover carts, and keep customers coming back.

Austin local James Pidgeon can help you explore this evolution of an email service provider into agentic customer service roles.

EXPLORE KLAVIYO SERVICE

Events near Austin

Mostly business things to do, plus some whimsy. Send us your event!

Workshop Oct 16:
Shopper Types + Intent Signals = Better CRO

Making your ecommerce store better at converting visitors to buyers gets more fun and actionable when you group shoppers by their motivation. People bring unique motivations, doubts, and priorities. Safety, for example, or status!

CRO expert Brian Massey, famous for his white lab coat, recommends grouping people into behavioral and psychological types of shoppers. Doing so helps you understand what each type needs to build confidence enough to buy. Your CRO priorities begin to order themselves.

Arvind Krishnan has taken the approach of listening carefully for signals of shopper intent. He's built Swym into a platform that invites shoppers to 'save' or 'heart' products as they browse. These and other signals become actionable when connected to your email marketing system, for example.

Level up your ecom storefront UX

What if you could combine intent signals with shopper types, and wrap it in a CRO framework that's been refined over decades?

That’s where we’ll go in the Oct 16 Conversion Workshop in Austin.

Listen to a conversation recorded as a LinkedIn Live if you want a sampling.

Patrick Scott Pitman will host while Brian Massey will teach.

Brian’s Conversion Sciences has been making websites perform better for decades. Based upon thousands of tests on the websites of companies of all types and sizes, he’s developed a proven, repeatable way to build high-performing digital campaigns, from click to purchase.

Score your store

The workshop includes live site reviews so bring yours!  We’ll make use of Swym’s Shopper Intent Yield scoring assessment. Run yours whether you can make the workshop or not.

See the special offer from Swym for Frankly eCommerce readers.

After the Oct 16 workshop, you’ll be able to:

  • Design a website landing page with higher conversion rates

  • Effectively use data to manage design teams

  • Determine what to test and what not to test

  • Answer design questions before launch

  • Leave with a todo list from live reviews of websites

Request to Join Workshop

Ideas worth sharing

Visualizing brand gravity by Ana Andjelic.

  1. Brand Gravity: what makes a brand culturally attractive? Ana Andjelic is followed by Gabrielle Pitman, so I hear her ideas in the ebusiness pros office.

    Here’s a throwback from 2025 that sparks my imagination:

    “The most important thing about brand gravity is the how: how a brand exerts its pull on culture. E.g. No one exerted more freedom to mess up with the established luxury norms and silhouettes than Balenciaga.

    “This “how” is then executed through cultural products, like content, fandom management, curation, merch, collaborations, entertainment, brand codes, experiences, events, etc.”

    See the chart above: in what colored box would YOUR brand fit? Read the whole article here.

  2. The early planning advantage for BFCM gets bigger: Tapcart, the ecom app maker that bolts onto your Shopify store, researched how shoppers plan to shop.

    “The biggest takeaway is that BFCM is no longer a weekend strategy. If most shoppers are starting before Thanksgiving, brands need the offer, inventory, creative, retention, and acquisition plan working well before the rush hits.

    “The early-planning advantage is getting bigger every year,” said Imroz Khan in this LI thread started by Nate Rosen of Express Checkout.

  3. Distance as measured in Texases: We already know Texas is big. Now you know how big is the rest of the world, relatively! I’ll be reflecting on this driving to see Derek Ramos at Rooted next week!

  4. Refine your messaging with customers own words: Copywriter Joanna Wiebe, friend to our friends Lianna Patch and Val Geisler, gives direction to brands built on the back of a founder’s personality:

    “It worked because readers were already asking "should I?" And that line finished their thought.

    “Find the thing your audience has thought 100 times but never heard anyone say out loud. THAT is your message.”

  5. Shopify’s Sidekick remakes the ecom CRO process: Canva changes who can make improvements on a site, sort of. I second Rick Watson’s take on the consequences:

    “Ben Sehl, Shopify's Director of Product and a Kotn co-founder, says it took him two weeks to get a rough store working twelve years ago, and he knew how to code. He says a merchant can now build a better one in twenty minutes.

    “I'd want to see conversion rates on those twenty-minute stores before giving that much weight, since the claim is Shopify's own.” From Rick’s Watson Weekly.

Resources & tools (sponsored)

This season of Frankly eCommerce is made possible by support from:

  • Alia for AI powered popups to boost your optin rate.

  • Wunderkind to maximize revenue with AI decisioning

  • Swym to engage shoppers, improve conversions.

  • Klaviyo for customer relationships built autonomously.

Before you go…

That’s all for this week!

Your feedback is welcome! Got an event to share? Email me here.

Onward,

~ Patrick Scott Pitman

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