If you want to survive in ecommerce, you need to own your channels.

The game of selling things online has never been more turbulent. There are many brands out there living in constant fear of Meta CPMs spiking, an algorithm change tanking revenue, and channels that they once relied on falling away.

Some brands are different. They have mature, reliable revenue channels that don’t depend on an algorithm or some company dictating whether they can reach their customers.

These channels make business more predictable, more sustainable, and often deliver outsized margins vs other channels.

For this week’s newsletter, we’re breaking down the core channels used by ecommerce brands like yours, and ranking them from least to most control.

All are viable revenue channels. But if you’re only getting sales from the top half of the list, your business might not be as stable as you think.

LLMs as the next big frontier for ecommerce. They might not be a huge driver of direct revenue yet, but they soon will be.

It’s also the channel where you have the least control.

They’re a black box, and show personalized results to each user. You can’t even get a reliable read on how often your products are showing up.

And worse, they get a lot of things wrong. I’ve seen LLMs constantly deliver out of date info and recommendations that just don’t fit the question.

So if you’re ranking channels on “control”, you’ve got to rank a channel near the bottom when you don’t even have full control over your product information.

Who knows if this will change. Hopefully, they’ll get better to the point where they hallucinate less, and pull correct product details with more predictable results.

With paid ads, at least you own and control the content.

But it’s a purely rented channel.

You pay for every impression. The moment you stop paying, the tap gets turned off. A spike in CPMs or landed costs can flip your unit economics on their head, all of a sudden your business model may be no longer viable.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t run paid ads. It’s the most scalable acquisition channel you have. It’s just a risky place to be if you’re relying on ad spend for the majority of your sales.

With marketplaces, you don’t really “own” anything. The marketplace technically owns your listing, your traffic, your customer.

But you do have some kind of control. And though they’ve been largely “pay to play” for a while now, there is the potential to get organic sales here - it doesn’t automatically switch off once you stop paying, like an ad campaign.

You could argue paid ads over marketplaces. With paid ads, you at least own the post-purchase experience. I give marketplaces the edge because they’re channels that can compound, unlike the hamster wheel nature of paid ads.

Now we’re starting to get a little more control.

Here, you control your content. You control your messaging. You can build an audience, and you can reach your followers for free.

But you’re still limited by the algorithm. Organic reach, for some time, has been spotty. For some brands it works great, for others, no one sees their posts (even with huge follower counts).

Your channels can get banned from the platform too, and you can lose your audience overnight.

So you’re less beholden to cost on these channels, but they’re still not super reliable as “owned” channels.

Organic SEO is another step up in the ownership/control ladder.

SEO has, for a long time, been the most dependable organic traffic channel for any business selling things online.

It’s generally more reliable than organic social - easier to reverse-engineer what works and specifically target buyer queries.

But it’s becoming more and more turbulent.

There are AI overviews eating up space on the SERP. LLMs taking away some searches. And Google updates have been wild, sinking a lot of legitimate sites while average sites still show up.

It’s a powerful channel, as long as it’s going well. But being fully reliant on SEO is always a dangerous thing, for any kind of business.

This is where the scale starts to tip in terms of ownership.

An email list is something you own. You’re not reliant on ad spend, a social feed, or Google’s search algorithm to be kind to you.

You don’t “own” it in the sense that it’s yours forever. The customer can unsubscribe, they could change their email. (But what is forever, anyway?)

But it’s where you start to have direct contact with your customers.

The one problem? Deliverability.

You can reach your customer whenever you want. But getting your email seen is not a given. ISPs decide whether your messages land somewhere they’re going to be seen, or whether they disappear into the promotions tab or spam folder.

You own the list, but you don’t own the customer’s inbox.

SMS is similar to email. A direct line to your customers, not going through a random algorithm.

The downside: You pay per send, and TCPA compliance keeps tightening. The customer can opt out in one tap and never come back.

The upside: less filtering (though this is starting to happen on iOS now), and much more reliable visibility. You send an SMS, you can be fairly confident it’s going to be seen.

Your site is one of the few channels you really own.

The domain, the code, the design, the messaging - all under your control.

You control the data from when people interact with your website. And it’s increasingly becoming a conversational surface, too, which is another element you have control over.

The only knock - you might own the surface, but you need another channel to get traffic there. A website on its own is nothing, without traffic.

Mobile apps are the #1 “owned” channel for ecommerce brands.

It’s a direct line to your customer. It lives on their device, and you own the user experience, the content, the messaging.

The difference with an app vs your website: an app has a built-in delivery layer too, with push notifications.

It’s not 100% control (nothing is). Your customer can still remove the app, unsubscribe from push.

But your app is always going to be the most reliable channel you have, the one where you have the most control. And it also happens to be the channel where your audience is naturally the most engaged and most loyal.

They’re your best customers, on the channel you own the most. That’s why a mobile app is worth having.

The lesson isn’t that you should ditch any channel you don’t completely control.

Control and ownership are just a part of the picture. Paid ads are so powerful because you can scale them essentially forever. Selling on Amazon is great because half of the world only ever goes to Amazon when they want to buy something.

The takeaway is that there are many viable channels (including some we didn’t mention here, like communities or direct mail).

Your goal should be to work towards getting people up (or down?) the ladder - meaning closer to the end of the list, to channels where you have more control

It’s a pretty simple formula. And it’s one that’s going to help you build a brand that scales, and lasts, much better than your competition.

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Amazon replaces Rufus with "Alexa for Shopping," now in the main search bar

Amazon rolled out Alexa for Shopping on May 14, replacing the Rufus chatbot that had 300 million users in 2025. The new assistant lives inside the main search bar, not as a sidebar widget. 54% of US consumers now use Amazon for product research, ahead of Google's 51%: whatever you think of LLMs as a discovery channel, it’s already making a major impact within platforms like Amazon and Google.

YouTube wants your CTV remote to be a checkout button

At Brandcast on May 13, YouTube announced "Buy with Google Pay" for connected TV. Two-click checkout using stored Google credentials, no second-screen handoff, no QR code. Costco and Dollar General joined as first-party data partners for Display & Video 360 targeting. AI tools (Gemini, Nano Banana, Veo) generate the creative; algorithms place it; Google Pay closes the loop. Six features announced in one day, all designed to keep the entire purchase path inside Google.

Shopify adds an "Agentic Storefronts" page to the admin

On May 11, Shopify shipped a dedicated dashboard for tracking how your products show up across AI channels. Merchants can now monitor performance in ChatGPT and Copilot, see which queries their products rank for, and get recommendations on cleaning up product data, all from their Shopify backend.

Stripe and Google plug Gemini into the Stripe payments stack

Announced May 13. Merchants on Stripe can now sell products directly inside Google's Gemini app, with checkout completed in-conversation. Stripe also opened its Link consumer wallet to AI agents, letting them execute payments while the owner approves each one. Google joins Meta, Microsoft Copilot, and OpenAI's ChatGPT in Stripe's agentic-commerce stack.

ChatGPT ads expand beyond the US to UK, Japan, Korea, Brazil, and Mexico

OpenAI announced on May 7 that ChatGPT's ad pilot is rolling out to those five markets "in the coming weeks." Ads appear below conversations, only on free and Go subscriptions. The format: 16-character title, 32-character description, favicon, image. CPM starts at $25-$60; CPC starts at $3-$5. Target, Ford, Mrs. Meyer's, and Adobe are among 1,000+ early advertisers. The pilot reportedly crossed $100M in annualized revenue inside six weeks.

That’s all for this week.

If you have any thoughts on what we discussed here, or anything else you’d like to see covered in relation to retention, CX and growth, just hit reply and let me know.

Until next week,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.