359. The 4 Business Decisions That Will Make or Break Your eCommerce Store This Year

With the start of the new years comes a clean slate and a new opportunity to grow your business. And one of the most important steps, even though it’s not the sexiest, is to actually plan exactly how it is you’re going to hit those goals.  

I’ve done a ton of planning episodes here on the podcast before where I go deep into using your data to make business decisions, a lite version of the same planning process I take my Lounge members through, and even how to set your vision for the year ahead. I’ll stick links in the show notes to all those episodes for you. 

And I still fully believe in that level of analysis and planning.

But here’s what I also see happen all the time — especially with smart, motivated business owners.

You start planning…
Then you keep planning…
Then suddenly you’re knee-deep in numbers, dashboards, and ideas — and somehow less clear on what you should actually work on next.

So today, instead of getting into the nitty gritty, I wanted to bring you the MVP version of business planning.

These are the four things that, if you focused on nothing else, would still move you forward in 2026 — without overwhelm, without overthinking, and without needing a 30-tab spreadsheet.

A clarity reset, if you will. 

Prefer to listen to the episode? Click here.

1. Your Hero Product: What You Want to Be Known For

So before you think about channels, tactics, or what you should be doing more of this year, we have to start with the thing that everything else is built on.

Because if this first piece isn’t clear, every other decision you make is going to feel harder than it needs to be.

And that first thing is getting crystal clear on your hero product — what you’re actually building your business around, and what you want to be known for.

Most of the time you’ll hear advice like, what is your best seller, where are the majority of your sales coming from, and just double-down on that. And while this advice isn’t wrong, I want you to go one layer deeper than that. 

Why Your Current Best Seller Shouldn’t Always Be Your Hero Product

I started asking this question when I work one-on-one with clients setting up their email automations because I realized that sometimes their best selling product wasn’t actually a good thing. 

Instead of just looking at your numbers and identifying your best seller, I want you to ask yourself, if you could only sell ONE product for the rest of the year, what would it be?

Why the reframe?

What I’ve discovered working with so many small business owners, especially those who make the products that they sell is sometimes, the best selling product is the most labor intensive, the least profitable, it requires separate packaging, the hardest to get materials for, the hardest to ship, [insert thing that makes it terrible here], etc. 

Why would you want to build and scale your business on a product or product category that makes you miserable?

And so, just because something is your best seller right now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it always has to be. 

Do I recommend you just ditch that product and go in on something unproven? No. But I do think it’s important to recognize this issue so you can make a change moving forward. 

Why You Want to Pick a Hero Product

Picking a “hero” product can be difficult for some founders, especially when you have a wide assortment of product. You want to sell all the things, I totally understand. And it’s not that you won’t sell those things, it’s just that you might not market them as much. Those are the things you sell once you get someone to your website or to your repeat customers. 

You may have heard me say before “bring them in with the best and then sell them the rest”. 

That’s the idea of the hero product, or in some cases, the hero category. For example, if you sell jewelry, you’re probably not going to narrow it down to one specific piece of jewelry, but it’s likely there is a particular category that drives the majority of your sales. 

If you sell scented candles, your hero might be the type of scents you create. 

For example, I had a student, she started her candle business with really unique scents, including foodie scents. Scents that the average candle company didn’t offer. She was trying to get in the habit of creating seasonal launches, and one spring she did a collection of typical spring scents. Lavender, linen, etc. That launch didn’t perform nearly as well as anything else she’d released because that’s not what she was known for. Her customers could get that anywhere. They wanted the unique, unconventional, hard-to-find scents she usually created.

Being known for something is one of the keys to standing out. 

You see it in some of the biggest brands out there. Bombas sells underwear and t-shirts, but most people associate them with socks. 

Stanley sells lunch boxes, but most of us associate that brand with those giant water cups. 

Juicy was known for the tracksuit even though they sold other apparel and accessories. Actually, one of my favorite pairs of jeans that sadly no longer fit were a pair of Juicy jeans. They were the perfect high-waisted flare jeans, tight to the knees and then flared out. Loved them in the spring and summer with a great pair of platform wedges… but I digress. 

Hero Products & Categories Make Your Marketing Easier and Your Business More Efficient

No matter what you ultimately sell once someone lands on your website, having a hero product or category makes everything in your business easier. From your marketing to your operations. 

Take my student who runs a clothing boutique. When we first met she was selling all the things. Graphic tees, jeans, seasonal pieces like jackets and sweaters. 

She regularly got stuck with left over inventory and was struggling to grow. 

Eventually she decided to put more emphasis on her graphic tees, the category that sold the best for her. Since she’s gone all in, her business just continues to grow. Sure, she still sells some of those other items, but she’s got a lot less money tied up in that inventory, and she can capture more attention in her niche graphic tee category, and put more effort into developing new designs. 

So this is really what I want you to hear.

Picking a hero product or category isn’t about boxing yourself in or killing your creativity. It’s about making your business easier to run.

When you don’t decide what you’re known for, your business ends up being led by whatever feels loudest or most urgent at the time. And that’s how you wind up promoting random things, overbuying inventory, and constantly feeling behind.

But when you do decide, everything starts to line up.

You’re not asking yourself, “What should I talk about this week?”
You already know.

You’re not guessing what deserves your attention.
You already know.

You’re not spreading your energy across twenty different things and hoping something sticks.
You’re reinforcing the same idea over and over, just in different ways.

And that repetition is what actually builds momentum. For you, and your customer. 

Once you identify what products are going to drive your business in the new year, then you need to identify your most profitable sales and marketing channels.

2. Your Most Profitable Marketing & Sales Channels

Once you’re clear on what you’re actually building your business around, the next thing you need to look at is where you’re going to sell and market that thing.

As we’ve talked about ad nauseum on this podcast, you want to get really specific about where you spend your time in terms of the marketing and sales channels you focus on. We even talked about this on last week’s episode where we covered the pulse check survey results. 

If you try to be in all the places, you won’t be able to do any of them well. 

The sweet spot seems to be 2-3 marketing channels and activities. The trick is to figure out which ones make the most sense for you. 

So it’s time to go look at your data and see where the majority of your sales are coming from so you can double-down on those and rinse, repeat and improve your strategy there. And notice I said sales. It’s not necessarily just traffic, but which ones are actually contributing to your business. 

For example, you might be getting a ton of traffic from Pinterest, but if it doesn’t convert, there are probably more profitable channels you can focus on.

Email marketing should be a non-negotiable, since it’s the catch-all for everything else, but otherwise it’s likely what you choose to focus on is going to be different than the business owner next to you. 

You also want this to line up with what you actually enjoy and want your business to look like. Just like we talked about when identifying your hero product, it’s possible you have a channel right now that’s at the top, but it’s the most taxing, draining, most complicated, etc. Maybe you don’t want it to keep being your top channel. In-person markets usually fall into this category for people. 

The idea isn’t to abandon that channel altogether right off the bat, but to be super intentional about building up the others to replace whatever you want to get rid of. 

So if your goal is to get rid of your in-person markets, that means you’ll want to optimize the process for growing your email list from those markets, and turning in-person customers into website customers instead.

Another example from last week’s episode was someone who committed to growing wholesale in 2025. She set a goal of reaching out to 5 new potential wholesale customers each quarter, along with publishing a quarterly newsletter for her wholesale customers and she grew wholesale by 400%. 

For others it’s going to be a specific marketing strategy. Maybe you got into a holiday gift guide last year and saw a huge bump in visibility and sales, so you’re going to double your efforts and aim to get in more gift guides throughout the entire year like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, or just product round-ups like seasonal product guides. 

Or maybe you had a kick-ass influencer campaign and you want to find more people to work with, assuming you like having those rush of sales followed likely by a slow-down period. 

Or maybe you finally gave Meta Ads a shot in 2025 and you want to scale your efforts there. This has definitely made a huge difference for Lounge members.

Your ultimate goal here is to identify what’s been driving your business so you can do more of it. 

Alright, so you’ve got your hero product and your hero marketing channels. These are great for getting new eyeballs, and nurturing your existing customers. But there’s one more really important lever you have in your business.

3. Increase Your Average Order Value

When we do business planning in the Lounge, we look at all the KPIs in an eCommerce business, aka the levers you have to grow your sales and profit. Traffic, conversion, return customer rate, gross margin, and yes, average order value. 

But since the point of today’s episode is to strip down the planning process to the MVPs, I want to focus on your average order value. This is just the average amount of money a customer spends in one transaction. 

AOV is also a great metric to focus on if you have a brick-and-mortar presence with your sales staff. Let’s say you have a sales goal of $4,000 for the day and you end up only generating $3,000. Missing your sales goal by $1,000 sounds like a lot and everyone thinks, oh there’s no way we would have made that amount of money, right?

But when you break it down, it becomes a lot more manageable. So let’s say you had 60 sales, for $50 each. If you added just $16 to each of those sales, you would have hit your sales goal. Sounds a lot more doable, right?

The same is true for your eCommerce business. If you can add a few more dollars to every sale you make, that can add up to big money.  

The easiest way to do this? Increasing your free shipping threshold, bundles, and cross-sells. 

Think of this as the eCommerce version of do you want fries with that, the impulse fixture at the grocery store or your favorite retailer, or the less obnoxious, but wait, there’s more.

We’re not gonna go into the strategy of this today, I’ll stick links in the show notes for other episodes where I talk more about this, but for now I want you to go identify your average order value for last year. 

Play around with the numbers a little bit to see what would happen if you added an additional 5, 10, or even 15 dollars to every sale you made. 

4. Identify What You Want to Stop Doing

Last but certainly not least, and arguably most important is to identify what you want to STOP doing. 

As you’ve gone through the first few steps of this process, you likely already identified things that you want to ditch this year. 

This could be anything from social media, to in-person markets, creating specific products, working with specific vendors, even specific customers. Yes, I’ve had students that have fired customers because the endless customer service they require doesn’t justify the amount of money they spend. I call these people energy vampires. 

Then, you need to remove all the outside noise. Ignore all the marketing gurus that have told you OMG you have to do this thing, remove all the unnecessary expectations you have put on yourself and you’re not even sure why. 

Then of course you have to decide if it’s something that can be stopped right away, for example a marketing channel that doesn’t contribute to your business, or something that has to be phased out over time such as in-person markets. 

For those things that need to be phased out. Make it your number one priority to replace that channel, activity, whatever it is that needs to be replaced. Be relentless. 

Final Thoughts

So, to recap. The most important part of the planning process is really clarity. Getting clear on what product or products are driving your business, where to show up to get the biggest bang for your buck, how to optimize your existing customers for maximum revenue and profitability, and identifying what no longer deserves your time, energy, or attention. 

Once you have these 4 things locked in for the year, everything else gets easier. You can filter every opportunity through this lens. 

Will this help me sell my hero product, does it integrate with the sales and marketing channels I’m already showing up on, will this contribute to a higher average order value, and does this fit the business model I want to have or is it pulling me back into things I’m trying to get away from?

And here’s the thing about this process and this filter. It’s not always going to be set in stone. You might drop things today that you end up going back to later on because you miss them, because you’re in a different season in your business, because you’ve got everything running like a well oiled machine and you’re ready to branch out again. 

As you’re going through this process you might feel like you’re giving up opportunities. It can feel really hard to say no to things. But it just means no, for now. 

You’re not giving up anything. You’re just moving your energy to something that will serve you and your business better. 

A business mentor once said to me, sometimes we have to pull back so we can propel forward – like a slingshot. That has stuck with me. Remember: focus is your friend.

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