The Biggest E-Com Problem In 2025: How To Solve It Fast

I’m going to get straight into this one - the biggest problem (and therefore opportunity) in E-Com in 2025 is one thing: Attribution.

Attribution means the ability for you as the entrepreneur to understand WHERE your brand sales are coming from.

If you don’t know where your sales originate from, put simply, it’s impossible to scale your brand to 6-figures a month and above.

Think of e-com as a function machine.

1 unit in = 10 units out.

This is true asymmetry in action, and it’s why e-com as a business model works so well to free you from working a 9-5 and only working 4-hours per week.

Why? Because your income is no longer attached to your time.

You’re able to place one unit of resource (time, attention, energy or money) in and have (technically) unlimited output.

The problem arises when we start looking at where to place these seemingly finite resources.

If you don’t know where your sales are coming from, you can never scale.

It’s akin to winning the lottery: you take multiple punts with no control mechanisms and rely on sheer chance or luck.

This can’t work when you’re running a business. You must have a repeatable way to print cash on demand.

In a post-iOS14 world where 3rd party cookies no longer exist, we’re unable to collect data from or follow our website visitors around the internet. It’s down to you to develop a reliable data-driven way to track how customers first hear about your brand or product.

Once you understand where customers first hear about you, then it’s simply a case of doubling down to do more of what works.

The struggle arises because we’re no longer able to scrape emails from website visitors without their prior consent.

For example, if you’re paying Meta for traffic by running ads and someone visits your site, most times it’s difficult to know that they came from Meta and not from Google.

Each platform wants (and is incentivised) to try to claim the sale was from them. Even then, we have attribution windows of either 7 or 28 days with which each platform has time to link up the data and prove that the sale was from them.

Once you’re running a brand at scale, this can get messy because you essentially become reliant on trusting on platform metrics.

In my opinion, trusting Shopify analytics for paid traffic analysis isn’t the solution. Shopify analytics are best for on-site metrics such as website conversion rate, not for mapping external traffic sources.

All of your paid advertising sites end up being like a 5-year-old. Everything is ‘theirs’.

So, what’s the solution? A couple things:

The first is to become less reliant on on-site metrics and look to install and use apps such as Triplewhale.

These external apps have no allegiance to any particular advertising platform and so can offer a more balanced view of where your sales are originating from.

They have deeper tracking capabilities built into the code that can better map out traffic sources. The key part here is that they’re independent, and allow for greater transparency.

The second is to learn to look at E-Com as one big ‘conversion engine’.

For you to convert attention into dollars, you must have a well-refined system that persuades customers to buy from you.

Most times, it takes between 4-7 digital or physical touch points for anyone to buy anything from you.

This means you shouldn’t be so reliant on impulse purchases. For example, someone sees an ad one time from you and buys there and then. This happens very rarely unless you’re able to target the right customer at exactly the right time.

What happens most times is that customers see an ad, visit your site and then enter into your ecosystem.

By ecosystem, I mean they’ve been properly incentivised to enter into your email lead form pop-up. This gets them into your world.

You now have permission to educate and sell to them. I’ll cover how to design a well-designed email form pop-up in another newsletter.

So far, they’ve seen your ad, checked out your landing page and are now in your email flows. They’re then hit with properly designed retargeting ads which sends them back to your product page as warm traffic with high buying intent.

All the while your well-designed welcome email flows have been showing them how amazing your product is and how many customers’ lives it’s changed.

You’ve now gone from one point of origination (the Meta ad) as a single first point of contact to now a landing page visit (2nd touch point) to email flows (3-10+ touch points) to retargeting ads (11th touch point).

From this point on, it’s safe to say this customer now has high buying intent and will most likely purchase.

So, the question becomes: where did they first hear about you? Meta.

Great, now we know we need to run more Meta ads.

But: Where did the actual sale come from? Did they buy because of the email flows, or Meta?

Or was it more of a holistic approach linked to all of your stored energy locked into your digital infrastructure that worked together harmoniously to win the sale..

You see, knowing where to place our time, attention, energy and marketing budget becomes the biggest decision in an E-Com brand.

I think this post-iOS14 world where we have no access to third-party cookies have opened the doors for most advertising platforms to try to claim credit for the sale, and I think they’re more accurate now than ever, but all of this attribution modelling is pointless unless you control your controllables.

By controllables, I mean having a solid high converting conversion system that allows you to have multiple touchpoints with each potential customer to get the sale over the line.

Once you have all of your core infrastructure in place, you’re now allowed to pour gasoline on your ad budget because you have systems that allow for efficiently converting paid attention (traffic).

Once you have this dialled in, you’re able to sit back and double down on creative, the highest needle-moving task in 2025 (which incidentally can also be outsourced), allowing you to work 4 hours a week and make sales whilst you sleep.

Let the infrastructure do the heavy lifting for you.

TLDR: Use an external attribution modelling platform like TripleWhale and dial in your infrastructure to make sure you’re getting 4-7 digital touchpoints once you’ve successfully directed qualified traffic to your site.

Do NOT rely on impulse purchases to scale.

If you’d like to learn how to create digital infrastructure and ads that convert, then I’m doing a free one-hour site audit where we’ll break down what’s not working in your current store and map out solutions to allow you to scale to 100k/month.

This is free and I have limited spots, so book a call here today.

Happy scaling!

Lou Antonio