eCom Unity #24 - State of eCom

Deep Dive | The State of eCom Report

I recently contributed to KnoCommerce’s new State of eCom Report.

Based on 110M+ post-purchase survey answers and dozens of expert takes, the report covers:

• What’s actually driving conversions in a post-cookie world

• The retention strategies keeping brands profitable as CAC rises

• Pricing, promo, and profit trends shaping the next phase of growth

• The tech stack powering the smartest brands in 2025

My part? A quick guide on how brands can still grow when CACs won’t play nice:

Three guidelines for adapting to rising CACs and new tracking realities

There are some things in life you can’t change.

And one of these things is that marketing costs only know one way.

And that’s up.

As eCom brands grow, they have to start branching out into more and more cold audiences that naturally take more investment to convert.

Plus, ad platforms need to show growth to investors every single year, and the easiest way to do that is to simply increase the CPM they charge to brands.

In H1 2025, our Klar customer base of more than 1,000 eCommerce brands increased their marketing spend by 22% on average.

Now this increase came with a 29% increase in revenue, outpacing the increase in marketing.

That’s great news. Well, partially at least.

Most eCom brands leverage marketing to acquire new customers. And when just looking at new customer efficiency, we see a 6.5% increase in customer acquisition costs YoY.

To combat this issue, here are some things we see the most successful brands focus on:

#1 Optimise for long-term profitability

Instead of just optimising their marketing spend based on short-term revenue (ROAS) or profit (POAS), brands look at the total lifetime value of newly acquired customers a channel generates. In Klar, lifetime value is fully integrated in attribution data, allowing you to see which channels and what messaging are driving long-term profits.

That’s one of the reasons why our customers' revenue growth is outpacing marketing costs growth. They focus their marketing spend on acquiring higher-quality customers.

#2 Approach measurement with a testing mindset

Many people will tell you differently, but when it comes to attribution, there is no such thing as truth.

Multi-touch attribution (MTA), marketing mix modelling (MMM), post-purchase survey attribution, incrementality testing. They will all give you different versions of reality. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

The best brands use all of them to validate hypotheses and then combine the generated learnings in their attribution in Klar to get an attribution they can use on a daily basis that gets as close to ground truth as possible.

#3 Let your product speak for itself

If you have a repeat product that actually solves your customers' problems, there is really only one question you need to ask yourself.

How can it get as many target customers to try my product for the lowest costs possible?

That’s why we see more and more brands giving away samples offline at places where their target customers can be found. It’s the most cost-efficient way to get people to experience your product.

If the product is convincing, customers will start to buy. This strategy is especially powerful when the brand also has distribution across retail stores.

Let me show you what all of this can look like in real life. Maniko, the nail beauty brand from Berlin, got these points quite right. 

They achieved +744% revenue growth in just 2 years, being more profitable and efficient in customer acquisition than ever.

How?

They are masters when it comes to testing, measuring and iterating, using the Klar multi-touch attribution model with marketing mix modelling and PPS integration. Which revealed dramatic differences between perceived and actual performance when getting started.

This allows Maniko to scale the right channels at the right time and ensure they acquire the best customers for long-term, profitable growth (more about this here).

👉🏽 Check out the full report here: The State of Ecommerce Report: Clearer Signals in a Noisier Market.

Deep Dive | How Discounts Make You Grow

This time of year, everyone’s talking about discounts.

But the real power of discounting isn’t just for Black Friday. It’s in how you use it strategically to unlock long-term value.

Most eCom brands destroy their margins with discounts. But the best brands use them to grow lifetime value.

Let me explain how.

Most products have a natural limit as to how much a customer is willing to buy at one time.

Once that point is reached, your AOV has hit a local maximum that can’t really be pushed up.

Unless you can get a customer to start buying a second product category that you offer.

And here is where discounting, compared with the right data, can be extremely effective.

To keep things simple, let’s say you sell two different product categories.

By analysing your data in Klar, you see that if the customer has not purchased the second product category in the first or second order, he is not likely to do so in the future.

In that case, you can get very aggressive with discounting your product from the second product category once the customer has made his second purchase.

Why?

Well, what do you have to lose? He will not order the second product anyway based on your data, so by offering a great discount, you will maximise your chances.

As long as your contribution margin post-discount is still positive, you are not losing anything.

There are two great places to promote this offer:

1. Post-Checkout Upsells

2. Printed Card in the Order

In both cases, you have to have data available to accurately target the right customers.

Since the discount is high, the short-term effect on CLV will likely be limited.

But if your product is good, you increase your chances of turning these customers into multi-category buyers.

Which increases the maximum AOV possible and the CLV in the process.

Content Corner | BFCM Models & Workshop Collection

A few tools and recent sessions you might want to revisit right now:

• 🧮 BFCM CAC Targets Model - How to scale up your budget in a controlled manner before Black Week and measure its incremental impact.

• 🧮 MPR Scenario Forecasting Model - Why the MPR is crucial as a control variable for your additional BFCM profit.

• 🎥 eCom Unity x HUECCO Workshop - How to slash acquisition costs with AI creative strategy in BFCM

• 🎥 Q4 prep Workshop with Xentral (German only) - Scaling with margin in Q4

Community Events | Hamburg & Berlin

2026 event season will be wrapped up with two more contrary events: one energising you before Black Friday madness, the other slowing you down and embracing the holiday spirit right after.

• 💪🏼 Meet the Brand: ESN | 16 November 2025, Hamburg
  We meet at the ESN Gym in Hamburg with 50 handpicked D2C brands, a lot of (sporty) specials, and Philipp Markmann, General Manager of ESN, sharing exclusive insights into one of the most successful sports nutrition brands out there. Join us & ESN here.

• 🎅🏽 Christmas Cookies & Commerce | 03 December 2025, Berlin
  The best way to wrap up the year with a cookie baking session, cozy eCom vibes, and fireside chats from Peter Liebig (VP Technology at Just Spices) and Dani Sichting (Founder Super Streusel). Join the Christmas warmup here.

Thank you for reading :)

I am on a mission to help eCom brands build better, more profitable businesses. If you missed any past issues, you can catch up on all of them here.

I have built one 8-figure and one 9-figure eCom brand in the past, and with Klar, I work with over 1,000 eCom brands today.

If you have specific questions you would like me to cover next, just reply to this email.

Have a great week.

Max ✌️

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