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Holiday sales are up. Is your margin? Get Levanta's 9 margin plays → |
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57,298 founders and marketers are getting this newsletter today!
Welcome to the 545 new operators who joined us this week. 🤯 |
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TOOL OF THE WEEK |
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Your SMS flows reach 30% of carts. Recover gets the other 70%. |
See what your other 70% is worth → |
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Hey Fastlane Insiders! 👋 |
A record Cyber Week can still leave a Shopify brand short on cash. Bain expects US shoppers to spend more than $85 billion over the five days, and every unit you buy to chase your share is cash you can't spend on ads, payroll, or the January reorder. |
That's why the Craft Club story in this week's episode stuck with me. Portless founder Izzy Rosenzweig explains how the brand tripled its business in 3 months once it freed up cash, and why more brands are buying 4 to 6 weeks of inventory instead of 4 to 6 months. |
The rest of this edition covers both ends of the sale. Before it: the November 20 deadline that decides whether your Black Friday offer gets a badge in Google AI Mode. After it: the small, human move that turns a Cyber Week buyer into a January reorder. If you're past $1M and importing from Asia, start with the episode. If you're earlier, start with the Google deadline. |
Here's what's inside this week's edition: |
🤝 This Week's Partner: Levanta, and nine ways to keep more of what Black Friday brings in.
🎧 This Week's Podcast: How Craft Club tripled its business by freeing up its cash, with Portless founder Izzy Rosenzweig.
💡 Knowledge Drops: the November 20 deadline for your Black Friday offer in Google AI Mode, and when a handwritten thank-you card earns the reorder.
🔥 Tool of the Week: Redo Recover, which texts the 70% of abandoned carts your SMS flows never reach.
📡 Industry Pulse: Google's Universal Cart, Shopify's AI conversion data, Stripe's agentic surge, and Bain's Cyber Week forecast. |
Let's dive in. 👇 |
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9 Holiday Margin Plays Worth Stealing |
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Shopify merchants generated nearly $14.6 billion during BFCM 2025, up 27% year over year. But how much profit did those brands actually keep? Ad costs, discounts, returns, and fulfillment fees all want their cut, too. So, Levanta asked nine ecommerce experts across the P&L what they'd do to protect their margins this holiday season. |
Here are three plays worth stealing now. |
1. Stop judging creator commissions by the first sale. |
Creators who bring in customers who buy again are worth paying more. Levanta recommends looking at contribution margin and customer lifetime value so you know where you can afford to invest more without eating into profit. |
2. Get more from the traffic you're already paying for. |
Before throwing more money at ads, take a look at your busiest mobile product page. Where are shoppers getting stuck? Absolute Web recommends finding those friction points and testing a few fixes. More conversions from the same traffic means more sales without a bigger acquisition bill. |
3. Make refunds the last option, not the first. |
Holiday returns are coming, but a return doesn't have to mean losing the sale. Redo advises making exchanges the easy choice and offering store credit before a refund. Across its merchants, roughly 42% of returned dollars stay in the business. |
That's the cliff notes on three plays, but the full playbook covers six more ways to protect holiday margin, from pricing and inventory to paid media, AI discovery, and marketplace decisions. |
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🎧 New Podcast Episode! 🎧 |
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Why Your Best Sales Month Might Be Draining Your Cash |
Most founders see a great sales month in the dashboard. They feel it in the bank account about 90 days later, when the inventory bill, the duties, and the reorder all land at once. For brands manufacturing overseas, a record month can leave you with less cash than a slow one. |
This week, I sat down with Izzy Rosenzweig, founder and CEO of Portless. His team keeps inventory close to factories in China and Vietnam and ships each order straight to customers in 75 countries, with most US orders arriving in about 5 days. MrBeast's merch runs through the network, along with brands like Craft Club and Memo Bottle. |
Here's what we unpacked: |
Cash was always the product. Portless's business more than doubled after the de minimis exemption ended, which surprised anyone who assumed the model was a tax play. Izzy explains what brands were really buying all along. The $400K duty bill before you sell a single unit. On $1M of inventory, a traditional import can mean roughly $400,000 in duties paid up front. Izzy explains the timing shift that brings that closer to $100,000 out the door. Buy 4 to 6 weeks of stock, not 4 to 6 months. Memo Bottle cut its cash conversion cycle from 3 to 4 months down to 4 to 6 weeks. Izzy walks through what changes in your purchasing when inventory isn't sitting on a boat. Stockouts are the revenue loss your P&L never shows. Portless's own studies found 20% to 35% revenue lifts in core markets once brands stopped running out. Izzy shares where that money hides. Why brands quietly moved back to China. Buying one roll of fabric in Vietnam meant ordering 400. Guangzhou offered a 10-day delay instead. His take on reshoring is blunt, and useful if you're weighing a factory move.
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The story I keep coming back to is Craft Club, which tripled its business in 3 months once its cash was freed up. Izzy explains what changed, then closes with a quick three-question fit test (there's a weight limit and a revenue band) so you can rule this model in or out in a minute. If you're placing holiday reorders right now, listen before you sign the next PO. |
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💡 Knowledge Drops of the Week 💡 |
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Your Black Friday Offer Has a Google Deadline: November 20 |
Since October 12, Google has shown Merchant Center promotions as offer badges on Shopping ads inside AI Mode. If your Black Friday deal isn't an approved promotion, it doesn't get the badge, and your competitor's does. With Black Friday on November 27 and reviews taking 24 to 72 hours, the safe submission date is about November 20. |
The deadline is the easy part. Google and Shopify have switched on at least seven defaults since mid-August, including one that lets Google Ads pull discounts off your landing pages and advertise them for you. We covered two Shopify switches last week. This one lives in your ad account. |
Here's what's working: |
Build offers as manual promotions. The brands getting badges set up their Black Friday offers in Merchant Center themselves rather than trusting automation. The full article covers eligibility and the disapproval traps that can cost you the window. Test every code with a real order first. The most common disapproval is a promotion that doesn't work at checkout the way it's described. One failed review this close to BFCM can cost you the window. Check whether Google is advertising codes you never meant to. Automated promotions can help a store whose codes are already public. The problem is VIP and win-back codes showing up in ads. The breakdown shows which campaigns are in scope and where the opt-out lives in both Google Ads and Merchant Center.
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Smaller stores can stop after the first three steps of the audit: about 30 minutes, plus a couple of hours to build and test promotions. Larger stores should document every default and give each one an owner. The same Merchant Center data now feeds Google's Universal Cart, which started rolling out in the US this week, so clean promotions pay off in more than one place. |
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The Handwritten Card That Earns a Reorder (and the One That Doesn't) |
After Cyber Week, most brands send another discount to win the second order. A randomized field study that tracked 2,000 online shoppers for six months found a cheaper lever: handwritten thank-you letters raised repeat purchases. Printed letters and photocopies didn't. |
The catch is in the study's own title, Sincerity Begets Business. Customers rewarded what looked like real effort, and rough, ordinary handwriting beat polished calligraphy. A card that reads like a template is a printed card with extra steps. |
Here's what's working: |
Send at four moments, not every order. First order and repeat order are the obvious two. The other two are less obvious, and one of them needs careful wording to stay on the right side of the FTC. The article maps what to write for each. Skip the discount code. In a study with an upscale restaurant group, thank-you notes lifted 12-month spending by 51%, and adding a coupon made no difference. Prove it with a holdout before you scale. Split an eligible segment, send cards to half, and compare repeat rates 60 to 90 days later. Run the break-even math first, so you know how many cards one extra reorder has to cover.
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The evidence is a handful of studies, each inside one business, and the retailer study's abstract doesn't publish the size of the lift. That's exactly why the holdout matters. Under $1M, founders can write cards by hand this holiday. Above that, pen-and-post services work if you check whose handwriting your customers are actually seeing. |
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🔥 Tool of the Week 🔥 |
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Your SMS flows reach 30% of carts. Recover gets the other 70%. |
Your abandoned cart flows only text shoppers who opted into SMS marketing. That's about 30% of your carts. The other 70% never subscribed, so your flows never reach them. |
Recover does. Trained agents text those shoppers one-to-one in real conversations. They answer sizing questions, handle shipping objections, send a code, and win the sale back. No automation, no templates, no blasts. |
It runs alongside the flows you already have. Nothing to rebuild, nothing to rewrite, five minutes to install on Shopify. |
You only pay for results, backed by a 10x ROI guarantee. |
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⚡ This Week's Industry Pulse ⚡ |
Every week, I come across strategies and insights that are just too good not to share. Here's what caught my attention this week. |
Google started rolling out Universal Cart in the US this week, a single cart that follows shoppers between Search, AI Mode, and the Gemini app, with price drop and restock alerts drawn from more than 60 billion Shopping Graph listings. Checkout runs on the Universal Commerce Protocol, through Google Pay or a handoff to your site. Shopify merchants matched to Merchant Center had native checkout switched on September 18, so confirm which option your store is on before Black Friday. |
Shopify's new Entrepreneur Effect data hub says AI-referred sessions converted 80% better than organic search from April to June 2026, with 14% higher average order values and nearly twice as many orders from new buyers. The surprise: 75% of AI-referred sales went to merchants outside Shopify's 100 most common product categories. Niche catalogs with clean product data are winning here, though Shopify hasn't said how the figures were measured. |
Stripe President John Collison says agentic commerce on Stripe went vertical last month, crediting AI computer use as the final unlock, though he shared no figures. Meta's Muse assistant already buys on command, and Amazon blocked it from shopping its site in September. Agents helping people shop is here. Agents paying on their own still wait on questions like chargeback liability. Make sure your catalog and checkout read cleanly to a machine as well as a person. |
Bain projects US shoppers will spend more than $85 billion from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, up about 8.75%, nearly double its 4.5% growth forecast for the full holiday season. Seven in ten consumers plan to shop Black Friday or Cyber Monday, up from 64% last year, and 13% of online shoppers plan to use a retailer's AI shopping agent. More than half say higher prices will change how they spend, so sharp offers should beat blanket discounts. |
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Protect the Cash, Then Chase the Sale |
Line up this week's stories and a pattern shows up. The demand is coming: $85 billion over five days, shoppers arriving from AI ready to buy, and Google building a cart that follows them around. What decides whether Cyber Week is actually a good week is everything around the sale: how much cash you tied up getting there, whether your offer shows up where people are shopping, and whether that buyer comes back in January. |
If you're under $1M, pick one thing this week and get your Black Friday promotion submitted, well before the 20th. If you're past $1M and importing, look hard at how many months of inventory you're carrying into November before you sign the next PO. And whatever stage you're at, write five thank-you cards by hand on a quiet evening this week. You'll learn more from those five than from any study. |
Hit reply and tell me the one number you're watching closest this Cyber Week. Your answers decide what I dig into through the holidays. |
A great sales month only counts if the cash shows up too. |
Cheers,
Steve |
Side note: if the cash squeeze sounds familiar, start with Izzy's episode before your next PO goes out. It's the one I'd send to a founder friend this week. |
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