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Food truck founder, novelist, SCUBA diver, medievalist, opera singer - Belinda Anderton is
None of These
Google Renders JavaScript Just Fine (And That's the Problem)
Google's new JavaScript SEO documentation confirms what ecommerce sites have been learning the hard way: JavaScript rendering takes 9x longer than HTML, happens in a separate queue with no timing guarantees, and Shopify's default configuration creates thousands of duplicate URLs that waste your crawl budget.
Dec 16, 20259 min read
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (But Your CRO and SEO Strategy Shouldn't Be)
So here I am: re-reading Stoppard, debating impossible design specifications, and suddenly I'm seeing tautological pairs everywhere I look in ecommerce and I keep watching teams fight battles that Stoppard already explained were unwinnable.
Dec 6, 20259 min read
Code Freeze is a State of Mind in eCommerce
Every November, ecommerce companies solemnly announce their code freeze periods. No deployments until January. Protect the revenue. Guard the infrastructure. And then, inevitably, code gets deployed anyway because the market doesn't care about your internal policies.
Nov 26, 20256 min read
The Invisible Transaction: What Zero-Click Commerce Means for Your Data
There was a time when a click meant something. It was intent made visible, a measurable signal that someone had chosen to move closer to you. Marketers built careers on optimizing that moment. Analysts built dashboards around it. The entire apparatus of ecommerce measurement treated the click as the fundamental unit of customer behavior. The click is dying. And most ecommerce data teams haven't noticed yet. The Shift Nobody Measured Commerce is being absorbed into the surface
Nov 20, 20256 min read
The BFCM Trap: Why We're All Prisoners in a Game We Know We'll Lose
BFCM is a Nash equilibrium. It's stable. It's collectively irrational. And we're all trapped in it.
The mathematics are clear. The incentives are clear. The outcome is predictable. And yet every November, we wake up, look at our margins, and do it again.*
*Written by someone who reads too much game theory and has to explain to the C-Suite every year why BFCM margins are terrible despite everyone knowing in advance that BFCM margins will be terrible.
Nov 9, 20258 min read
The Head Tag Arms Race: Why Your Ecommerce Site Loads Like It's 1999
There's a special circle of hell reserved for ecommerce sites, and it's located in the <head> tag. Every vendor wants to be there. We're sacrificing site performance on the altar of attribution accuracy that doesn't actually exist. The head tag is valuable real estate. Stop letting every vendor set up camp there just because they asked nicely.
Your site performance is not a tragedy of the commons. It's your competitive advantage, if you're willing to defend it.
Nov 5, 20255 min read
What Dead Economists Can Teach Us About the Madness of Modern Ecommerce
I've been thinking about Adam Smith lately, which is either a sign of encroaching middle age or evidence that ecommerce has finally broken my brain. Probably both.
Nov 3, 20255 min read
GitHub Is a Library Pretending to Be a Deployment System (And I Love It Anyway)
A hammer is an excellent tool. That doesn't mean every problem is a fucking nail. GitHub is exceptional at what it was designed for. The problem isn't GitHub. The problem is the assumption that version control infrastructure should also be your deployment infrastructure for a business that needs to move at ecommerce speed.
Nov 1, 20256 min read
Your Customer Isn't Rational About Interest Rates (Neither Are You)
The Federal Reserve cut rates by 0.25% this week. The federal funds rate is now 3.75-4%, down from 4-4.25%. Markets wobbled. Financial media went into overdrive. Jerome Powell gave a characteristically vague press conference about "driving in the fog." And somewhere, right now, someone is panicking about what this means for their finances while simultaneously financing a $1,400 espresso machine at 29.99% APR. Let me show you the math on what yesterday's rate cut actually mean
Oct 30, 20254 min read
The Gambler’s Fallacy and Every Ecommerce A/B Test Ever
Pattern recognition isn't the same as statistical proof, and your conversion data knows it
Oct 3, 20254 min read
Why Great Developers Keep Getting Fired for Doing What You Asked
You fire the agency. You hire a new one. You tell them about all the mistakes the last agency made. They nod sympathetically and promise they're different. And they are different: they'll ask better questions, use different frameworks, have different opinions about architecture. But they'll run into the exact same coordination problems, because you're going to brief them the same way.
Sep 17, 20259 min read
Attribution Is Astrology for People Who Like Spreadsheets
Stop measuring. Start testing. The only way to know if something works is to turn it off and see what happens.
Jul 8, 20254 min read
Search Is Falling. Agencies Are Scrambling. AI’s Already Moved On.
The advertising industry is being gutted. What we’re seeing isn’t just another wave of disruption. We're seeing the future and it's fucking fantastic. This is foundational. In the past few months alone, Amazon, Google, Meta, TikTok and Reddit have all released generative content tools designed to help eCommerce merchants create ads with minimal effort and zero creative teams. These aren’t gimmicks. These are functioning production tools capable of turning a product brief into
Jun 11, 20253 min read
You Can't Tailor Network Effects
On network effects, aggregation theatre, and why everyone's lying about platforms
Mar 5, 20257 min read
The Attribution Crisis is Actually a Coordination Problem
Everyone in ecommerce is having a collective panic attack about attribution. Meta’s telling you one number, Google’s telling you another, your Shopify dashboard has a third opinion, and your CFO is wondering why you can’t just “figure it out” like it’s a simple arithmetic problem. The prevailing wisdom is that this is a data problem. iOS 14 broke everything. Cookie deprecation is making it worse. If we could just get better tracking, better pixels, better first-party data, we
Feb 4, 20257 min read
Maybe "Demure & Mindful" Isn't Something to Laugh About...
Could something as simple as a viral catchphrase be the economic 'canary in the coal mine'?
Sep 24, 20244 min read
The Death of the Click: Go With The Flow
There was a time when a click meant something. It was intent made visible, a small but measurable signal that someone, somewhere, had chosen to move closer to you. Now the click has become background noise. Half accidental, half automated.
Jan 19, 20245 min read
The Dressmaker’s Rule for Ecommerce
On my dressmaker, bespoke tailors and the nexus at which fit and function live.
Jan 13, 20247 min read
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