Ecommerce Is Crazy Right Now

When demand is high, every mistake gets covered up. Sales come in anyway. Ads perform anyway. It is only when demand cools that a brand finds out what was actually working and what was just riding a wave. That is the reality Rachel Jacobs, Founder of eCommerce Partnerships, lays out for host Michael Maher in this conversation about the strange, whiplash years ecommerce has just been through.

Jacobs has spent the past several years advising ecommerce agencies through the pandemic surge, the slowdown that followed, and everything in between. Her read on the current moment is blunt: the businesses that pushed through uncertainty came out ahead, and the ones that froze are still catching up.

The Freeze, Then the Explosion

Jacobs walked through what actually happened inside agencies in early 2020. Budgets got pulled overnight. One agency she worked with lost a quarter million dollars of signed pipeline in a matter of days as clients panicked and paused spending. Then, almost as fast, demand exploded as consumers shifted their entire shopping behavior online.

"Everybody sort of panicked... people do stupid shit when they panic. And then everybody, especially on my end of stuff, because at the agencies I was working with, the agencies that were coming my way, it's like everything is frozen."

— Rachel Jacobs, Founder of eCommerce Partnerships

Maher saw the same pattern on the Amazon side. Ecommerce jumped from roughly 12 to 16 percent of total US retail sales in a single quarter, compressing years of expected growth into a few months. Brands that kept advertising, even branded campaigns just to protect their space, came out of the freeze stronger than the ones who pulled every dollar.

Why Standing Still Means Falling Behind

The most important call Jacobs made during the pandemic was refusing to pause. When she suggested putting her workshops on hold for a month while she relocated her business, every one of her agency clients said no. They wanted to use the quiet period to get their own operations in shape instead of waiting it out.

"In business, you never stay stationary, no matter what it is that you're doing. If you're staying stationary, you're moving backwards."

— Rachel Jacobs, Founder of eCommerce Partnerships

All five of those agencies are still clients today. Jacobs credits that outcome directly to their refusal to freeze. Maher echoed this from his own early resistance to Amazon's push toward Prime fulfillment, a change he initially fought because it looked like Amazon just wanted a bigger cut. Prime members spend roughly two and a half times what non-Prime members do, and fighting that shift instead of adapting to it cost his business real growth.

Know Where You Are Actually Strong

A recurring theme in the conversation is that founders waste time and money trying to be good at everything. Jacobs has worked with roughly sixty ecommerce agencies as a fractional interim CEO, and the pattern she sees in the strongest leaders is self-awareness about their own limits.

"The best leaders are the ones that know where their strength is... The details, the nuts and bolts of it, should be of no interest to you after you scale past a certain size."

— Rachel Jacobs, Founder of eCommerce Partnerships

That means hiring or partnering for the gaps, whether that is an Amazon specialist, an SEO team, or someone to simply send invoices on time. Trying to personally cover every function of the business is not efficient, it is a bottleneck disguised as thrift.

What This Means for Brands

• Do not pause spending entirely during uncertainty. Protect at minimum your branded presence so competitors cannot take your space while you wait.
• Treat sudden demand spikes as a stress test, not a strategy. What works during a surge may not reveal your real weaknesses until demand normalizes.
• Resist the urge to fight platform changes just because they benefit the platform. Evaluate them on customer behavior, not on principle.
• Get honest about where you personally add value, and hire out the rest instead of trying to hold every function together.
• Momentum compounds. Small consistent forward moves beat long pauses spent waiting for certainty that never fully arrives.

Watch the full episode for more of Michael Maher and Rachel Jacobs's conversation on what the last two years of ecommerce chaos actually taught the agencies and brands who lived through it.