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Here's what most Shopify brands don't realize until they dig into the data: the defaults you're relying on, generic discount codes, Alibaba's search results, even your GA4 conversion tracking, are quietly bleeding margin, hiding your best opportunities, and making your analytics lie to you. Not because these tools are bad. Because the default settings were never designed for the way serious operators need to run.

This week's edition pulls apart two of the biggest blind spots I keep seeing brands stumble into, whether you're doing your first $10K month or running a Shopify Plus operation. We're digging into benchmark data from 162,000+ discount code sets that reveal how high-growth brands approach discounting completely differently than everyone else, and a sourcing breakdown from a third-generation manufacturing insider who explains why Alibaba's ad-driven business model means the best factories never even show up in your search results.

The insights come from Cara Marin of Seguno—whose team published one of the most granular discount benchmarks I've seen—and Ricky Ho of SourceReady, a Forbes 30 Under 30 founder whose family supplies Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. Plus, we're breaking down Reddit's quiet transformation into an AI shopping engine, Shopify's new SimGym tool that sends AI shoppers through your store, and four industry moves reshaping how customers discover and buy.

The through line this week is simple: question every default. The brands pulling ahead right now aren't working harder, they're replacing broken assumptions with better data.

Here's what made the cut this week:

🎧 This Week's Podcast – Strategic discounting from 162K code sets + why Alibaba shows you the wrong suppliers first

💡 Knowledge Drops – Reddit's pivot to AI shopping engine + Shopify SimGym's AI store testing

🔥 Tool of the Week – Littledata: server-side tracking that captures the revenue your pixels miss

📡 Industry Pulse – ChatGPT Instant Checkout, eBay acquires Depop, tariff upheaval, and TikTok's shipping reversal

Let's get into it. 👇

If you're still running blanket codes like "WELCOME10" across your store, you're leaving margin on the table—and training customers to never pay full price. This conversation will change how you think about every discount you run from here forward.

I chatted with Cara Marin, Product Owner of Bulk Discount Code Bot at Seguno, a platform trusted by over 20,000 brands including Vuori, SodaStream, and Allbirds—to unpack a benchmark report analyzing 162,000+ discount code sets. The patterns separating high-growth brands from everyone else are honestly hard to ignore.

Here's a taste of what we get into (and why you'll feel behind if you skip this one):

Whether you're on your first campaign or running sophisticated lifecycle flows, this conversation gives you a concrete playbook for discounting that builds profit instead of quietly destroying it.

Once you scale beyond a single hero product, the real bottleneck isn't demand—it's finding manufacturers you can actually trust without burning weeks and thousands on bad bets. Most founders don't realize that the default tools they rely on for sourcing are fundamentally stacked against them.

In this episode, I spoke with Ricky Ho, Founder and CEO of SourceReady and a third-generation manufacturing insider whose family supplies PVH (the company behind Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger). He built and sold a supply chain tech company in his early 20s, raised from Sequoia and GGV, and landed on Forbes 30 Under 30 in Asia—so he's seen how the sourcing game really works from the factory floor up.

Here's a preview of what we unpack (and why you'll feel behind if you skip this one):

If you're sourcing from China today—or looking to diversify into Vietnam, India, or Mexico—this conversation is the shortcut to getting out of the guessing game and into data-backed supplier selection.

Most Shopify brands are sitting on hundreds of hidden SEO issues, and in the new world of AI search, that gap is getting more expensive.

Fullcart runs a full site audit the second you create a free account. It scans your products, collections, metadata, internal links, and technical setup, then surfaces 1,000+ actionable fixes on average.

Not just a score. Not just a report.

You can approve automations that fix the basics for you, and keep your store optimized over time for both traditional SEO and AI search optimization.

If you care about organic growth, LLM visibility, and not wasting paid traffic, this is the fastest place to start.

Reddit has quietly become one of the most powerful product discovery engines on the internet—and most Shopify operators are still treating it like just another social platform. After a 1,328% surge in SEO visibility that vaulted Reddit from Google's 68th most visible domain to 5th in just 12 months, the platform is now testing AI-powered shopping carousels directly inside its search results—shoppable, linked to purchase pages, and driven by what communities actually recommend.

For DTC brands, this changes the equation entirely. Google already prefers Reddit for product research queries. Now Reddit's own AI is turning those threads into a front door for purchase decisions—and the products that surface are sourced from real community discussions first, not paid placements.

Here's what's shifting (and why you can't afford to ignore it):

The window to build authentic community presence before this feature scales is open right now—and the brands that start monitoring and participating in relevant subreddits this week will have a meaningful head start over those waiting until the channel is crowded and competitive.

Shopify's SimGym is one of the first tools that lets you send AI-powered "shoppers" through your actual storefront to find conversion killers before real customers hit them. These aren't generic bots—they're AI personas trained on billions of real Shopify purchase sessions, which means the behavioral data behind them is something no third-party CRO tool can replicate. Instead of waiting for customers to bounce and then guessing why from heatmaps, SimGym's agents try to shop your store and report back—in plain language—where the experience breaks.

It's still in AI Research Preview (Shopify's term for controlled beta), and early adopters have flagged stability issues worth knowing about. But the concept itself represents a genuine shift in how operators can approach CRO—and more importantly, how they prepare for agentic commerce.

Here's what makes this worth watching now:

Whether you're doing $5K or $500K a month, understanding how both humans and AI agents experience your store is becoming non-negotiable—and for the first time, the tools to do it are actually within reach.

That's not a hypothetical — the average DTC brand is missing 20–30% of transaction data in GA4 right now. Ad blockers, iOS privacy restrictions, Shop Pay redirects, and subscription renewals all silently break Shopify's default tracking. The result? Your ROAS looks worse than it actually is, Meta and Google's algorithms optimize against incomplete data, and you end up killing profitable campaigns you should be scaling.

Littledata is the server-side data layer that fixes this in about 10 minutes — no GTM, no code, no developer. It connects your Shopify store directly to Google Analytics, Google Ads, Meta Conversions API, Klaviyo, and more, capturing every conversion that browser-based tracking misses. Over 2,000 Shopify brands trust it as the foundation for their marketing decisions.

If you're spending on paid acquisition and making decisions from GA4 reports, you need to know whether your data is lying to you first.

Tariffs Just Changed Overnight — The Supreme Court struck down IEEPA tariffs on February 20th, and the White House responded within hours with a 15% global import surcharge that took effect February 24th. If you're importing goods, your landed cost math changed overnight.

eBay Buys Depop for $1.2B — eBay is acquiring the Gen Z resale marketplace from Etsy, which originally paid $1.625 billion in 2021 and is selling at a loss to refocus on its core marketplace. For brands in fashion or apparel, this is the signal that recommerce is becoming a primary channel and not a nice-to-have.

TikTok Shop Reverses Its Fulfillment Mandate — TikTok Shop told U.S. sellers on February 18th that the policy requiring all orders to route through TikTok controlled logistics is no longer going into effect, after widespread pushback from brands over inventory forecasting challenges and logistics growing pains. If you paused your TikTok Shop expansion over this, the constraint is temporarily lifted.

Here's what I keep coming back to as I put this edition together: the infrastructure of how customers discover, evaluate, and buy products is shifting under our feet, faster than most brands realize.

AI is becoming a shopping channel. Reddit is becoming a product recommendation engine. Discount strategy is becoming a data science discipline. Supplier discovery is becoming an intelligence operation. And every platform you sell on keeps rewriting the rules.

That's a lot of change hitting at once. But here's the thing—you just spent ten minutes getting ahead of all of it.

I don't say this lightly: each edition of this newsletter distills hours of conversations, research, and pattern-matching into something you can absorb over a cup of coffee. That's the leverage. But the leverage only works if you do something with it. You don't need to implement everything. Pick one thing from today's edition—one default to question, one assumption to test, one strategy to try—and act on it before next Thursday. That's how the compounding starts.

If something sparked an idea—or you're already testing one of these plays—hit reply. I read every response, and honestly, these conversations shape what we dig into next more than you'd think.

Keep building. Keep questioning the defaults.

Cheers,

— Steve

P.S. Missed a previous edition? Browse the Fastlane Insider Archive for past strategies and playbooks.