In an ever-changing economic, consumer, and industry landscape, it’s critical to stay ahead of what’s to come. You never want to be asleep at the wheel and miss an opportunity that leaves you behind the 8-ball.

I’m the Founder & President of a Shopify Plus performance marketing agency, The Snow Agency (an Avenue Z company), and have a vantage point that allows me to identify emerging trends before they go mainstream.

Here’s my Top 5 eCommerce Predictions for 2024:

1. TikTok Shop Emerges as a Mainstream Sales Channel

TikTok Shop is THE biggest blue ocean for ecommerce brands this year. It’s not even close. There are brands generating millions in incremental revenue from TikTok organic posts alone. Scaling a TikTok Shop leverages 3 main pillars: organic (brand) posts, affiliate/influencer posts, and TikTok ads. First find success on the organic and influencer disciplines, then amplify what’s working with TikTok Ads.

Some extra context: 5 million+ NEW customers purchased on TikTok Shop during Black Friday-Cyber Monday season in November 2023.

To put this in perspective, only 149k creators and sellers published shoppable content. For reference, there are more than 10 million sellers on Meta. Everyone loves talking “arbitrage.” There’s no bigger arbitrage opportunity in present day than TikTok Shops. It’s rare you see a 30x+ consumer : seller ratio in high intent waters. Can you tell I’m excited yet?

If you need support on your TikTok Shop strategy or execution, don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

2. Emergence of Affiliate/Fixed Acquisition Cost Marketing

Like never before, brands have a thirst for desirable, stable acquisition costs. Volatile acquisition costs on social media platforms has been a thorn in the side of ecommerce brands of all sizes.

As the late Albert Einstein once said: In the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity.

This customer acquisition crisis of the past 2 years will lead to a rise in affiliate marketing, affiliate influencers, and marketplace focus (Shop app, ChaChing, Flip, etc).

3. The Return of Influencers as Affiliates (“Affiliate Influencers”)

Affiliate influencers have been dead since ~2016 when Instagram changed the feed algorithm. Now with TikTok Shop bursting onto the scene, affiliate influencers will now return as a viable, scalable acquisition channel. TikTok’s Affiliate platform makes attribution reliable and streamlined.

4. Redefining “Data-Driven”

Data-driven becomes redefined as “if you don’t have modeled data, you aren’t data-driven.”

I’ve always said that no data is better than bad data.

Brands today are likely making decisions on inaccurate data. This is dangerous. Off-the-shelf data provided by Shopify, Google Analytics, and other 3rd parties is generally raw. Data needs to be cleaned to actually be actionable.

Brands & Marketers:

• are you modeling out $0 orders (influencers, friends & family, reshipments, etc) when calculating AOV & LTV?

• are you modeling out retention ad spend when calculating acquisition-MER (aMER)?

• do you know what your LTV and customer retention rate is per acquisition channel after 3,6,9, and 12-months?

• do you have proper naming conventions in your ad accounts that enable you to slice and dice the data in any way you please?

• the list goes on

This year we put forth a huge effort to have readily-accessible, flexible and accurate data available to the ecommerce community. If you’re interested in standing up your own analytics platform with flexible, accurate data, reach out to me to get your data infrastructure to an advanced level in the matter of days.

In the Year 2024, you should have one centralized place where you can access:

• Business performance & profitability

• Paid media performance & contribution margin

• Sales channel performance, including Amazon

• Creative performance

• Media mix across channels & funnel stages (prospecting, retargeting, retention)

• Website & landing page performance

• Cohort analyses

• Robust subscription analytics

• Product mix/merchandising data

Let me know if you need help in achieving this.

5. Forecasting/Media Buying SaaS become Mainstream

How much time is wasted on forecasting revenue and advertising budgets, only to be way off? It almost seems like a wasteful endeavor at this point.

Well, what if this could be automated through Artificial Intelligence? What if AI could analyze all historical data & audit your paid media platforms and provide a revenue forecast that was 90% accurate? What if it could also give you intra-platform media mix recommendations based on actual statistics with confidence scores?

AdTech that can accomplish this will become a media buyer’s copilot in the Year 2024. I have my eye on one company that is still early but showing signs of significant traction. This will become a Head of Growth’s best friend.

I’ll be sharing my insights routinely.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter and Linked In to stay up-to-date!

Yours Truly,

Jonathan Snow