I've spent my career on both sides of the eCom equation. And the gap between them is bigger than most people realize.

From 2014 to 2017, I ran eCommerce at Wella (P&G) and then paid media at Coty. I was the operator. I owned the P&L. I managed the agencies, ran the promos, set the prices, and dealt with the fires.

From 2019 to 2025, I was at Google. I worked on the advertising platform side. I saw so many eCom brands from the outside - their campaigns, their spend, their performance data.

The view from each side is completely different. And I think that difference explains a lot about why eCom optimization is broken.

From inside the brand (Wella/Coty), here's what the world looks like:

You have more data than you know what to do with. Shopify analytics, Google Analytics, Klaviyo, your ad platforms, affiliate dashboards, reviews, customer service tickets. The problem isn't access to data. It's turning data into action when you have 12 other priorities screaming for attention.

You know what "good" looks like. You've read the case studies. You've been to the conferences. You can describe the ideal pricing strategy, the perfect email flow, the optimal free shipping threshold.

But knowing and doing are separated by a canyon called bandwidth.

Every tool promises to help. You have 15-20 apps on your Shopify store. Each one does one thing reasonably well. None of them talk to each other. And each one adds another dashboard to check, another login to remember, another Slack channel to monitor.

The wins that matter most are invisible. Nobody throws a party when you optimize your shipping threshold. Nobody tweets about a pricing test. The work that compounds over time is the work that gets the least recognition.

From the platform side (Google), here's what the world looks like:

Brands are spending millions acquiring traffic and then fumbling the conversion. I'd see a brand spending over $100K per month on Google Ads with a 2% conversion rate. Their landing page was fine. Their ads were fine. But their free shipping threshold was set below their AOV (giving away margin on every order), their welcome discount was the same for every visitor, and their pricing hadn't been touched in a year.

The ROI of fixing on-site economics is dramatically higher than optimizing ad spend. A 1% improvement in conversion rate doubles the value of every ad dollar. But brands were spending 90% of their optimization energy on the acquisition side and 10% on the monetization side. The math said it should be closer to 50/50.

The data exists to do this. I could see it from the platform side. The signals were all there - which products had elastic demand, which traffic sources converted differently, which promos drove incremental revenue vs subsidized existing demand. But the operator inside the brand didn't have time to look at it.

The thing that frustrated me most at Google was knowing what was possible and watching it not happen.

Not because brands were dumb. Because they were busy.

I'd be in a quarterly review with a brand doing tens of millions in sales. I'd point out that their email traffic converted at 4% but their social traffic converted at 0.8%, and they were giving both the same welcome offer. The eCom director would nod and say "yeah, we've been meaning to segment that." Then Q4 planning would start and it would never get done.

This happened dozens of times. Different brands, same story.

When I started thinking about what to build after leaving Google, I kept coming back to this gap.

Not a data gap. Not a knowledge gap. An execution gap.

The operator knows what to do. The platform can see the opportunity. But nothing connects the insight to the action.

That's what I'm trying to build now. Not another dashboard. Not another analytics tool. Something that actually does the work - scans the store, finds the opportunities, and executes the fixes.

Whether Revenue Agent ends up being the right answer, I don't know yet. We're still early. But I'm certain the problem is real because I've lived it from both sides.