Amazon software engineer explains how he automates ecommerce
I'll find the highest-leverage automation in your business. You'll leave with a plan even if we never work together.
Ad costs and fees creep up each quarter while your price stays still, so each order earns less. Nike and Costco rerun price tests whenever freight or demand shifts because guessing costs them millions, and they do it with simple scenarios instead of heroic spreadsheets. Most smaller teams never see those signals, so they freeze prices for years and margin melts away one percentage point at a time. I built Marmon Holdings' pricing model for heavy equipment and it added $12 million a year by always pointing to the best number and explaining why. That model looked at shipping lanes, tariffs, promo calendars, and the real drop-off in demand before telling an operator to nudge price by $2 or $5. Run this free pricing check and you'll see how far you can raise each SKU without losing customers, plus the math you can hand your finance lead.
Get the price your competitors charge, the price customers will pay, and the price that maximizes your profit. With the math to back it up.
A one-time price analysis tells you where to start. But prices should change with demand, seasons, and competitor moves. I build systems that watch all of this and adjust automatically, so every sale happens at the right price.
Discover the audience segment that values what you sell at 30-50% higher prices. Get their pain points, where they hang out, and the exact words they use.
Talking to bargain hunters makes you discount even when a richer crowd would gladly pay more. Liquid Death and Away took the same products and rewrote the story around what high-spend buyers cared about, and sales jumped because the message finally matched the buyer. Most founders mean to research those better buyers but end up stuck in Slack threads and repeat whatever their agency pitched last year. I built a research tool that pulls posts and reviews from Reddit, Quora, and niche forums so teams see the exact words those buyers use, saving the weeks of manual digging my clients used to pay for. It also clusters the pains that show up again and again so you know which promise should lead your ads, landing pages, and email flows. Use the free positioning report and you'll get the audience that pays more plus the copy to reach them today.
Markets shift. Competitors copy you. New pain points emerge. I build systems that scan Reddit, Quora, and reviews weekly and alert you when something changes, so you always know what your customers care about.
Buying influencer posts that only collect likes is a quick way to burn cash. Brands like Gymshark and Feastables insist on real engagement, matching audiences, and clear fees before they book a creator, so every post has a shot at profit instead of vanity metrics. When you skip that homework, you end up wiring a fee, getting a pretty feed post, and watching Shopify sales stay flat. I set up creator tracking that lifted engagement 45%, worth about $2,000 a month in free reach, and learned which signals mean a post will sell because we compared traffic, codes, and payouts side by side. The same system flagged fake spikes, empty comment pods, and CPMs that never earn back their cost. Grab the free creator list and you'll see vetted handles, honest stats, and messages you can send today to line up paid or gifting tests.
Real engagement rates, actual past results, what they charge, and whether they will be profitable at your margins. No more guessing.
Finding good creators is step one. Managing dozens of relationships, tracking what actually worked, and catching rising stars before they get expensive is where the real leverage is. I build systems that run this for you.
Get 3PL providers ranked by what they will actually cost you, based on your products, volumes, and where your customers are. Apples-to-apples comparison.
Choosing the wrong 3PL tacks 20-30% onto each shipment and slows every delivery, which is why customers bounce to the competitor who ships in two days. Amazon, Chewy, and Feastables keep testing warehouses, running routing drills, and negotiating with per-order math so they stay fast and cheap, even when volumes spike. Smaller brands usually rely on one referral and end up locked into fees they do not understand until the first invoice lands. I helped build Amazon's routing brain that chooses the cheapest warehouse/carrier combo across millions of orders and delivered $175 million in annual value, and I apply that same apples-to-apples rigor when evaluating 3PLs for DTC brands. Tap the free 3PL finder and you'll get the shortlist, routing logic, and cost math before you sign another contract.
Picking a good 3PL is the beginning. Routing each order to the optimal warehouse and carrier based on real-time rates and inventory, that is where the real savings are. I build systems that do this automatically.
Letting a factory slip from one percent defects to six percent means refunds, delays, and angry customers—and it usually creeps up so slowly you only notice when returns pile up. Allbirds and Target's in-house teams often compare factories, check certifications, and run small test runs so quality never drifts, even when a vendor has been with them for years. Most DTC teams lack that routine, so they accept higher defect credits and longer lead times because switching feels risky. I audited 240 vendor datasets for CME Group and saved $1.2 million per year by showing exactly who to cut, consolidate, or renegotiate—and that same process is how I vet consumer product manufacturers. Run the free manufacturer finder and you'll leave with vetted factories, cost comparisons, and a switching plan you can execute now.
Get suppliers matched to your volume, quality requirements, and payment terms. Verified reviews, real lead times, and what to watch out for.
A new supplier solves today's problem. But quality drifts and prices creep. I build dashboards that track defect rates, benchmark costs, and tell you exactly when it is time to renegotiate or switch.
Get exact reorder quantities based on your sales velocity, seasonality, and lead times. Month-by-month plan with the math behind it.
Over-ordering half your catalog while best sellers run dry traps cash and hands sales to rivals, and it happens because reorder math gets buried under urgent launches. Target and Patagonia use simple demand math for each product plus real lead times so they buy the right amount at the right moment, and they update that math each time a supplier slips. I built a ten-year demand model for Clarkson Grain that uncovered $2.5 million in yearly upside and stopped a $10 million bad bet because we laid out every SKU, season, and cash risk in plain English. That work also gave the team a calendar of when to place POs so finance, ops, and marketing were never guessing. Use the free inventory planner and you'll get the same reorder math, month-by-month PO schedule, and cash-risk view tuned to your store.
Calculating stock levels once is a start. But velocity changes. Seasons shift. I build systems that watch your sales in real-time, generate POs automatically at the right moment, and alert you before problems happen.
Answering "where's my order?" all day means something upstream is broken, whether it's tracking emails, warehouse scans, or an out-of-date FAQ. Chewy and IKEA treat repeat tickets like defects on an assembly line and fix the step that caused them, so queues shrink on their own instead of hiring more agents. Most teams never connect the dots, so they keep apologizing while the same failure fires off another dozen tickets. I built McDonald's email checker that caught 50 outbound mistakes a day and saved $220,000 a year, so I know how to trace a ticket back to its source and prove the fix worked. Run the free ticket analyzer and you'll learn which few issues to fix, the exact change to make, and how to keep those tickets from coming back.
Find the 3-5 root causes generating most of your tickets. Get specific fixes that eliminate them at the source, not band-aids that treat symptoms.
Root cause analysis tells you what to fix. I build systems that catch errors before customers see them, auto-respond to the predictable stuff, and only ping you when something actually needs your brain.
Describe the process that is draining your time and get a Zapier/Make-friendly playbook with triggers, actions, filters, and field mappings ready to implement.
Spending twelve hours a week exporting sheets, tagging orders, and chasing vendors steals the time you need for launches—and it usually happens late at night when you should be done working. Shopify and Stripe teams write those steps down once, hand them to automation, and get back to building because they refuse to let copy-paste work block growth. I built AutoDocs for 13 tech companies and it saved about $52,000 per company plus 20 hours per employee because nothing lived in one person's head anymore, so new hires could plug in on day one. Those playbooks also made it easy to move the work into Zapier or Make without breaking anything. Grab the free automation blueprint and you'll get a Zapier or Make plan that hands those hours back and shows you which workflow to tackle first.
Zapier works great when you want to get started. But once the system gets complex, or you need security, or you need to make sure it works at scale, that's where custom automation comes in. I build systems that run reliably and grow with you (with the same quality as Amazon systems), freeing you up from debugging Zapier at 2am and instead working on what you love about your business.
Every e-commerce business has dozens of time sinks hiding in plain sight. Here is how I approach the most common ones.
You didn't start a business to debug Zapier at 11pm
I learned how to build this stuff at Amazon, where "it broke when we got busy" isn't an excuse. Seven years of doing this, and I've seen what happens when brands outgrow their systems. The tool that worked at $50K becomes a nightmare at $200K. I build things that grow with you, so you're not ripping everything out and starting over in two years.
I'll give you $50 if I waste your time as long as you make $50K+/month