Guides

Plain guides on keeping the customers you already paid to win. Written for people who are also writing the emails and handling the support.

• Start here

  Ecommerce Discount Strategy, Done Properly

  What a discount actually costs in profit, what it trains your customers to expect, who it brings in, and the four situations where one is genuinely justified.

• Start here

  Customer Lifetime Value, Explained Properly

  What LTV actually is, how to calculate it for repeat purchase and subscription businesses, what a good one looks like, and why it changes every decision you make.

• What to Run Instead of a Discount

  Seven things that lift revenue in a soft month without giving away margin, what each one costs, and how to tell which one your numbers are asking for.

• Should You Run a Black Friday Sale?

  How to measure a promotion against what you would have sold anyway, why most Black Friday reports flatter the result, and how to design one that pays.

• How to Calculate a Discount Break-Even

  The two lines of arithmetic that tell you what a promotion costs in profit and how many extra units it has to sell to pay for itself, with worked examples.

• How Discount Codes Train Customers to Wait

  Why regular promotions teach customers to delay, abandon and threaten to cancel, how to tell whether yours already have, and how to get out of the pattern.

• AOV vs LTV, and Which One to Chase

  Average order value is the number most stores optimise. Lifetime value is the number that decides whether the business works. Here is how they relate.

• What Is a Good LTV for a Shopify Store?

  Benchmarks are mostly unhelpful because LTV varies enormously by category and price point. Here is the ratio that actually tells you whether your number is healthy.

• Subscription LTV vs Ecommerce LTV

  The two are calculated differently and one generic formula misleads both. Which applies to your business, and why the subscription version is more trustworthy.