Most ecommerce brands think community means followers, engagement, or a discount popup. It doesn’t. Real community is when customers choose to stay connected to your brand between purchases. It’s what turns retention into revenue, referrals into organic growth, and customers into advocates. And as acquisition costs continue to rise, that shift is becoming commercially critical.

We spent two days at Pulse eCommerce Summit 2026 hearing from some of the biggest names in retail and ecommerce and one theme came up again and again: The brands winning right now aren’t chasing complexity. From Hoodrich’s huge checkout consent growth, to Dr. Martens’ take on omnichannel, to the growing move away from discount-led ecommerce, here are our biggest takeaways.

Modern ecommerce brands are drowning in dashboards. We’ve never had more ecommerce data available to us and yet many founders have never felt less certain. Dashboards promise clarity, but too often they create noise. In this Open Tabs series article, we explore why the best ecommerce brands don’t just follow the numbers blindly, they know when to step back, trust their instinct and focus on the signals that actually matter.

Retail worked - until margins didn’t. Little Lies pivoted from boutique reseller to manufacturer, gaining control of pricing, product, and growth. Here’s what actually changed and what it takes to make it work.

Still guessing what will convert on your Shopify store? You’re leaving money on the table.

A/B testing turns gut instinct into real data, helping you understand what actually drives sales. And with AI now speeding up the process, it’s never been easier to test smarter and optimise faster.

Most annual plans don’t fail because the ideas are bad. They fail because day-to-day chaos wins. Here are a few practical ways to plan better, deliver smoother, and protect profitability.

Customer inquiries scale with revenue. That's just how it works. The traditional answer is hiring more support staff. More tickets means more people. Linear scaling. It's expensive and it creates its own management overhead. Little Lies solved this differently.

After Taylor Swift wore one of their dresses, Little Lies went through exponential growth almost overnight. From the outside, it looked like every founder's dream. From the inside? Little Lies founder, Jade Robertson, was drowning.

If you do a quick competitor sweep in your category, you’ll probably see the same patterns repeating. Same layouts. Same offers. Same “trust” blocks stacked on top of each other.

The site you launch today is a snapshot of your business right now: your range, your pricing, your tech stack, your priorities. Six months later, any of those might have shifted. That’s just the nature of ecommerce. The challenge is when the store gets treated like a static brochure. It can end up a bit fragile.