Happy Tuesday.

We’re live on X and YouTube — let’s ride!

Nike is Running Out of USMNT Jerseys - Nike underestimated USMNT jersey demand and left major retailers nearly cleared out heading into the knockout round, with US Soccer's online store already moving twice what it did at the same point in 2022.

JCPenney Keeps Closing Stores as Its Anchor-Tenant Era Ends - JCPenney is set to shutter more locations in 2026 as the mall-anchor model keeps unwinding under low foot traffic, high vacancy, and aging properties, with its last Chicago store lost after Ford City Mall closed early over safety concerns.

Meta Bug During Prime Day - After his Amazon ads on Meta started sending clicks to the wrong destination, David Herrmann (@herrmandigital) watched Meta confirm the bug and then go quiet for almost a week while a timed sale slipped away.

By Colin Dougherty

You could double your conversion rate tomorrow by dropping every price to zero. Obviously you won't, which is the whole problem with optimizing for conversion.

Alex McEachern (Head of Marketing, Intelligems) puts it bluntly: CRO is dead. Conversion rate optimization, the endless testing of button colors, headlines, and layout tweaks, is too narrow a goal for a business that wants to be healthy and around for the long term. He'd rather you optimize for profit per visitor, and think in terms of what he calls a growth experimentation mindset.

The foundational tests still matter.

Headlines and UX changes compound, and you shouldn't be leaking conversions anywhere. But the foundation isn't where the leverage is. You don't get to a billion adding by ones. Picking off a 2% bump here and a 2% bump there is simply too slow to get you where you're going.

The shift is to start asking the bigger questions, the ones that can actually change the business. 

What happens if I raise prices 15%? What if I bundle these products together? What if I add a subscription, or stop offering one-time purchases at all? Those are multiplication questions. And you don't need the full answer immediately.

The trap is that these questions feel too big, so nobody chases them, and everyone stays busy tweaking the page instead. Keep the foundation tight, but spend your real energy on the bets that multiply. The button color was never going to 10x anything.

The AI-powered testing platform for your next big idea.

What's the one change that could move your business — a price test, a subscription offer, a new bundle? That's exactly what Intelligems is built for. Its AI-powered audit reads your store and surfaces the high-growth opportunities actually worth testing — in just a few minutes.

The audit is completely free.

A few minutes in, you'll walk away with three ideas you can test today.

→ Get your free audit at intelligems.io/audit

/////////

/////////

See you live,
Ecomm Cowboy Team