Ecommerce operator and performance agency founder
Eddie Cheng founded Penang Media and co-owns VIBAe. He writes from the agency and brand sides of ecommerce growth, connecting paid acquisition with stock, margins, cash flow and contribution profit.
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Paid acquisition systems
There is no universal percentage for splitting about $50,000 a month on Meta. Ad sets on different bid strategies cannot share one Advantage+ campaign budget, the control buyers still call CBO. Where they can share it, size a fair test from the week's purchases. Meta, as Adwize reports, also points to an ad set budget when audience sizes differ a lot.
Brand operations
A positive gross-margin percentage does not say whether a product can take paid acquisition. A margin of zero or below leaves no cash for ads, so there is no break-even ROAS to aim at. Where cash remains after the order's variable costs, that cash limits ad spend per order.
Brand operations
For a growing D2C brand, distribution management is a spreadsheet problem: fixed cost against marginal cost, and how long your cash sits in stock while you decide which model to run.
AI in ecommerce operations
A store needs more than a definition of AI agents. Use the workflow test and a job-based taxonomy to assess support, catalogue and fulfilment tools, then separate those tools from agents shopping on a customer's behalf.
Paid acquisition systems
CVR, CTR, CPA and ROAS only earn a spend decision once you fix the denominator, the attribution window behind them, and compare the result against a break-even threshold you calculated yourself.
AI in ecommerce operations
Before you decide whether to build a proprietary shopping agent or plug into ChatGPT and Google's protocols, you need to know what the agent can actually read on your product pages, because most of it is currently invisible.
Ecommerce data and measurement
There is no single agentic checkout to tag. In-chat completion has no merchant page for gtag to fire. A Shopify ChatGPT path still hits your store checkout in an in-app browser. The GA4 job follows that split, and any source you write is a merchant convention.
Ecommerce data and measurement
Google's PMax channel report, GA4's AI Assistant channel and Klaviyo delivery look like scorecards. They are mostly diagnostics. Here is what each can decide, what still needs an experiment, and what the public evidence cannot support yet.
Ecommerce data and measurement
GA4 now tags some assistant referrals, still hides others in Direct, and folds AI Overviews and AI Mode into Organic Search. Here is what changes, what does not backfill, and how to report the break.