- The Retention Edge by MobiLoud
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- The hidden cost of "more"
There’s so much advice online, so many shiny new toys, it’s natural to want it all.
You could spend thirty minutes on LinkedIn or X and come away with at least four posts that convince you that they have the missing piece your business needs to scale.
So you try them - because you’re a type A person, you do them all. You’ve unlocked the secret to growth; launching seven new sales channels and eight new product lines.
But the whole thing fails. What you’re probably going to do is blame the channel, or the product ideas. “This doesn’t work for us.” “Our customers don’t want this product.”
I got thinking about this because of a couple of ecommerce stories that were in the headlines recently.
One was the Honest Company shutting down its DTC website and mobile app in December, to focus solely on retail.
The other was Allbirds closing most of its physical stores, leaving just four stores globally, down from 60 a couple of years ago.
The headlines you’re going to read:
DTC is dead
Physical stores are dead
[Channel] doesn’t work
That’s the lazy, clickbait story.
The real story is about focus, and how a business - even those doing mid-9 figures in annual sales - needs to be smart about how it distributes this.
Is DTC dead?
The Honest Company story made for some juicy headlines - and LinkedIn hooks.
I didn’t read them all, but I’m sure there were one or two using this as proof of DTC’s demise. Perhaps the takeaway being that the branded ecommerce site/app is dead.
Same thing with Allbirds. It’s proof that DTC brands shouldn’t open their own stores, that this business model doesn’t work.
Both sides are missing the real takeaway.
It’s that both companies have chosen to narrow their focus on different areas.
Honest Company isn't abandoning its customers. It's refocusing on wholesale, through Walmart, Target, Amazon, Kroger. The brand is projecting 4-6% organic revenue growth in 2026 after making the cut.
Allbirds isn't giving up on selling shoes. It's shifting resources to ecommerce and wholesale partnerships, channels that offer "greater reach, flexibility and operating leverage" in their words.
It’s not an indictment on the channel. It’s an indictment on spreading yourself too thin.
The real cost of a channel
When you think about running a new channel or project; a new acquisition channel, a retention channel, selling on a new platform; you look at the dollars and cents.
Ad spend, platform fees, rent on the retail space.
That’s easy, because it’s out there. Numbers on a spreadsheet.
What you don’t see is the cost on your team’s focus.
Taking your team’s time away from other projects. The hiring. The meetings. The tooling. The context-switching. The mental bandwidth your leadership team spends thinking about, worrying about, and troubleshooting that channel instead of doing something else.
When you just try to fit this channel into everything else you’re doing, it usually doesn’t get the attention it needs.
Or it takes focus from other areas of your business. Or - here’s the worst case - none of your channels get enough attention, and everything suffers, because you’re trying to do too much.
Sometimes less is more.
My experience
This is not a new or novel idea. It’s just something that we tend to forget.
I see it myself - internally and externally.
In our business, we’re constantly tempted by the shiny new thing, an unproven channel that could be a game changer. Yet what happens too often is just like I said up top - it doesn’t get the attention it needs, and it draws away from channels that we know work for us, like organic content marketing.
I also see it from brands we talk to.
It’s a common thing with mobile apps.
A brand decides they need a mobile app. They hire a developer or an agency to build it. They get the app, it looks great, it has all the native bells and whistles.
It cost a decent amount, but once it’s done it’s done - and they’ll recoup the money, they figure.
But they don’t budget for the focus cost (and the work it takes to manage a new platform).
Maintaining and updating this new platform takes too much time and effort. Thus, it ends up getting ignored, it falls out of date and out of sync, and ends up in the graveyard of failed projects.
The takeaway ends up being that mobile apps don’t work.
They do - the dollars and cents prove it. I just read that Simple Modern do roughly $10M in GMV through their app (as much as they do from SMS), and they’re not even the ideal fit for apps.
The monetary equation works for apps. The biggest downside (and why so many brands still don’t have one) is taking focus away from the rest of your business.
That’s why we do what we do at MobiLoud - helping brands launch mobile apps that stay automatically in sync with their site, managed for them - so the focus cost is cut to near-zero. It removes the biggest downside/risk of launching your own mobile app.
But it’s not just apps. TikTok Shop, Applovin, content marketing, retail, influencers, affiliates, international expansion…
A new channel = more potential revenue.
But you need to stop and think about whether you have the bandwidth to take it on.
The focus equation
Before you add any channel or start a new project, I think there are three questions worth sitting with.
1. Do I have the bandwidth to sustain this?
Not "can we launch it?" Launching is the easy part.
The question is: can you run this channel at the level it needs, six months from now, twelve months from now, without other parts of your business suffering?
If the honest answer is "we'll figure it out as we go," that's a red flag. "Figuring it out" means someone on your team absorbs the work, and whatever they were doing before gets less attention.
2. What am I pulling focus from?
This is the question nobody asks. Every hour your team spends on the new channel is an hour they're not spending on an existing one.
What's getting less attention? Is it your email program? Your website experience? Your core product?
If you're a 10-person team and you add a channel that takes 15% of your team's time, you didn't just add something. You reduced everything else by 15%. That's the tax.
3. Is there a lower-overhead path in?
This is the big one. Sometimes the right answer isn't "don't do this channel." It's "do this channel differently."
Hire an agency to run your TikTok Shop instead of building an internal team.
Use a managed service for your mobile app instead of building custom.
Bring on a consultant to launch your retail presence instead of hiring a full-time head of retail from day one.
Market on a channel where you’re re-purposing content you already have, instead of creating brand new content.
The goal is to get the channel's benefits without paying the full focus tax.
If you can enter a channel at 10% of the management overhead, the math changes completely. Even if the results are slightly lower than doing it fully in-house, the net impact on your business is often better because you didn't sacrifice everything else to get there.
Less can be more
The most underrated growth strategy is doing fewer things better.
It's not exciting. Nobody writes LinkedIn posts about the channel they chose not to launch.
But the brands that are successful, in terms of what really matters - profitability after opex - go deep on the channels they know they can devote their time and energy to.
They’re not the ones dipping their toes in everything.
With AI, you might now have the ability to spread yourself further, enter new channels and launch new projects, without doubling your headcount or halving the attention you’re giving to other channels.
But just take an honest look at the situation and make sure you’re not robbing Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes (translated: taking resources from one area and spending them somewhere else).
The brands that grow sustainably are the ones that know when to say no, or at least "not yet."
The most underrated revenue channel in ecommerce
Too many brands are ignoring one of the most powerful, highest-ROI channels in ecommerce.
70% of ecommerce traffic is mobile, and your best customers are shopping their favorite brands on mobile apps.
A mobile app isn’t for everyone. It’s for your best customers. Those who buy when you tell them to buy, who hang on for every new product launch, restock, seasonal drop or promo.
MobiLoud helps you launch a mobile app that could add 20-30% to your revenue - without the stress and cost of rebuilding and managing a separate storefront.
On the Pod
On the latest episode of the Retention Edge Podcast we hosted Slava Sabirov, who dropped the most unique take on pricing I’ve heard in a while.
Are you doing it wrong by telling your customers how much they should be paying? What if you asked them what they wanted to pay, instead?
It’s a fascinating listen. Check it out below 👇
Quick Hits
Retail Dive's deep look at where the US consumer stands right now. The short version: functional but fragile. The K-shaped economy narrative is real but also an overgeneralization. Lower-income households are getting squeezed by prices and a slowing job market, but spending patterns don't split neatly along income lines. Consumers are hypervigilant about where their money goes while still willing to spend. For brands, the takeaway is that blanket assumptions about "the consumer" are increasingly useless. You need to know your consumer.
Shopify is positioning itself as the transaction layer beneath AI commerce. Products from Shopify merchants will get discovered and bought inside ChatGPT and Claude conversations, but the actual checkout still runs through Shopify. Harley Finkelstein's line: "LLMs do not bypass Shopify's checkout." Smart move. Let AI own the discovery, own the infrastructure behind the purchase.
Interesting data on ChatGPT-referred ecommerce traffic. Conversion rate: 1.81% vs. 1.39% for non-branded organic. Traffic grew 1,079% over 2025. But before you get too excited, it generated $474K vs. $32.1M from organic. Still a rounding error in terms of volume. The thesis is "intent compression" - people refine what they want inside ChatGPT before clicking, so they arrive closer to purchase. Worth watching, not worth restructuring your strategy around. Yet.
Returns already cost ecommerce brands an expected $379 billion in 2026. Now fraudsters are using AI to generate fake damage photos, fake receipts, and convincing claim narratives to get refunds on products they never return. Boll & Branch's CEO caught AI-watermarked fake photos showing cotton fraying patterns that don't exist in real life. 14% of all retail returns are considered fraudulent. Another operational headache that gets worse as AI tools get better.
Whatnot, the livestream shopping platform, is now selling fresh seafood and meat alongside candy and snacks. The food category grew 30% month-over-month from July 2025 to January 2026. Users average 105 minutes daily on the app. A Jolly Rancher drop sold ~900 units in under five seconds. This is live commerce continuing to find its footing in the US, category by category.
Meta's testing an AI shopping tool inside its chatbot that shows product carousels with brand, retailer, and price. No in-app checkout yet though - users click through to merchant sites. Joins OpenAI (Instant Checkout in ChatGPT), Google (agentic checkout), and Perplexity in the AI commerce race. The sobering stat: only 2% of US digital buyers have actually started a product search with an AI assistant. The infrastructure is being built fast, but consumer behavior hasn't caught up.
That’s all for now.
I’ll be back in touch next week, with more on how successful brands are doing CX and retention right.
If there’s any topic you’d like to see us dive into, for either the newsletter or the podcast, just shoot me a message here.
Until next time,
Pietro and The Retention Edge Team
PS: want to boost retention, revenue and profitability? If so, launching your own app could be the best move you make this year.
See how: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.