Episode Number:

86

August 24, 2026

In this episode of The eCom Growth Show, Danan Coleman talks with Hai Mag, CEO of Eva Commerce, about what actually separates profitable eCommerce growth from simply spending more money.

With more than 20 years of experience building and scaling eCommerce businesses, Hai explains why brands need to strengthen their fundamentals before increasing ad spend, how TikTok and Amazon can work together when launching a new brand, and why AI is becoming a force multiplier for the people who know how to use it effectively.

The conversation also explores what success really means for entrepreneurs, why customer trust remains critical as the eCommerce ecosystem becomes more crowded, and what brands need to focus on if they want to remain competitive over the next five years.

Meet Hai: The Connected Commerce Strategist

Hai Mag is the CEO of Eva Commerce and an experienced entrepreneur who has spent more than two decades building and scaling businesses.

His approach to eCommerce growth centers around what Eva calls Connected Commerce, bringing marketplaces, advertising, operations, technology, and customer growth together instead of treating each one as a separate function.

Hai’s philosophy is straightforward: technology should solve real business problems, and sustainable growth comes from balancing strong fundamentals, smart spending, customer understanding, and continuous adaptation.

More Ad Spend Doesn’t Automatically Mean More Growth

One of the biggest misconceptions Hai sees among eCommerce brands is the belief that spending more on advertising is the primary path to growth.

Increasing ad spend may increase sales, but that doesn’t mean those sales will be profitable.

Before increasing advertising, Hai recommends evaluating the entire foundation of the offer:

  • Is the listing properly optimized?
  • Is the pricing competitive?
  • Are the creatives strong enough to convert?
  • Does the product make sense within its competitive landscape?
  • Are conversion rate and click-through rate performing well compared to the category?

Sending more paid traffic to an underperforming listing simply creates more wasted ad spend.

Big Idea: Fix the conversion experience before paying for more traffic.

A Small Conversion Rate Improvement Can Have a Major Impact

Hai highlights conversion rate as one of the most important metrics brands should examine before trying to optimize advertising.

He gives a simple example: if a product’s conversion rate improves from 10% to 11%, that one-percentage-point increase represents a 10% relative improvement in conversion performance and can significantly improve advertising efficiency.

Instead of immediately changing campaigns, brands should first determine whether their click-through rate and conversion rate are competitive within their category.

Danan reinforces the point: Amazon will happily spend an advertiser’s money sending traffic to a listing, regardless of whether that listing is capable of converting effectively.

Takeaway: Better advertising performance often starts outside the advertising dashboard.

Launching a Brand Today? Think Amazon + TikTok Together

If Hai were launching a new eCommerce brand today, his approach would look different from what many sellers have traditionally done.

Product discovery is changing.

Consumers are increasingly discovering products through:

  • TikTok
  • TikTok Shop
  • Amazon Rufus
  • ChatGPT
  • Perplexity
  • Google Gemini
  • Other AI-driven discovery platforms

For a brand launching with one to three products, Hai would prioritize Amazon and TikTok simultaneously rather than focusing entirely on Amazon advertising.

TikTok generates awareness and creator content, while Amazon provides a platform consumers already trust for purchasing, fulfillment, and delivery.

Smart Play: Don't think of Amazon and TikTok as competing channels. Use them to reinforce each other.

TikTok Is a Scale Game, Not a Five-Video Experiment

Brands often underestimate the amount of creator content required to gain meaningful traction on TikTok.

Hai says five, ten, or even fifteen creator videos are not enough to properly test the opportunity.

Instead, brands should think in terms of scale.

  • Send approximately 200–300 samples.
  • Work heavily with nano-influencers.
  • Generate hundreds of pieces of creator content.
  • Allow TikTok Shop and Amazon sales to support one another.
  • Expect some customers who discover the product on TikTok to ultimately purchase through Amazon.

For new brands especially, Amazon’s consumer trust and established delivery infrastructure can make it the final purchasing destination even when TikTok created the initial discovery.

Key Move: Build enough creator volume to give the channel a real opportunity to work.

AI Is Making Strong Operators Two to Three Times More Effective

For Hai, the biggest AI opportunity isn’t simply replacing employees or generating content.

It’s amplifying individual productivity.

Hai uses AI throughout his own workflow for coding, communication, organization, and company management. Compared with a year earlier, he estimates that AI has made him roughly three times more productive.

He sees a similar divide inside organizations.

People who have learned to integrate AI deeply into their workflows may become two or three times more effective, while people who avoid it can remain at roughly the same productivity level.

That changes how companies think about staffing.

A creative department that previously required ten people, for example, may eventually accomplish similar output with a smaller group of highly capable creatives who also know how to use AI.

Actionable Insight: AI's competitive advantage comes from pairing technology with existing expertise, not removing expertise altogether.

The Best Creatives Will Become AI-Powered Creatives

Danan points out an important distinction: someone with professional creative experience can often produce better AI-assisted work than someone who simply enters a basic prompt.

A skilled designer understands:

  • Brand positioning
  • Customer psychology
  • Visual communication
  • Design principles
  • Creative direction
  • How to iterate toward a stronger result

AI accelerates that expertise rather than making the expertise irrelevant.

The same principle applies across eCommerce. The people who already understand advertising, operations, customer service, product development, or branding can use AI to multiply what they are already capable of doing.

Insight: AI doesn't eliminate the value of experience. It increases the leverage of people who know what they're doing.

AI Is Also Lowering the Barrier to Building Businesses

AI isn’t only making established companies more efficient. It’s giving entrepreneurs access to capabilities that previously required development teams, specialists, or significant capital.

Danan shares how he has been using AI-assisted coding to build the customer-facing dashboard for Catalog Defender, something that had previously been limited by developer resources.

That represents a broader shift.

People can now:

  • Build software prototypes.
  • Automate internal workflows.
  • Create customer-facing tools.
  • Launch niche products and services.
  • Operate companies with smaller teams.

Hai notes that some people may even leave traditional employment to build smaller AI-powered businesses of their own.

Big Idea: AI may remove certain tasks, but it is simultaneously creating entirely new opportunities for entrepreneurs.

The Brands That Win in Five Years Will Still Master the Fundamentals

Despite rapid changes in AI, marketplaces, and advertising technology, Hai doesn’t believe the fundamentals of building a successful company are disappearing.

Businesses still fail for familiar reasons: they run out of money, or the founder eventually gives up.

Brands that survive will continue to require:

  • Passion and resilience
  • Disciplined spending
  • Strong pricing
  • Quality products
  • Effective advertising
  • Excellent customer support
  • Deep customer understanding

Technology will change how these things are executed, but it doesn’t eliminate their importance.

Takeaway: The tools will change. The principles behind building a durable business won't.

AI Won’t Only Transform White-Collar Businesses

One of the more interesting parts of the conversation moves beyond eCommerce.

Danan and Hai discuss how entrepreneurs in traditionally hands-on industries, such as plumbing, HVAC, and other service businesses, can also use AI to improve areas such as:

  • CRM
  • Marketing
  • Customer support
  • Lead generation
  • Scheduling
  • Internal operations

A skilled operator who combines a strong real-world service with AI-powered business systems may have a major competitive advantage.

Insight: AI adoption isn't just a technology-sector opportunity. It can improve almost any business.

More Tools Don’t Necessarily Make Growth Easier

The Amazon and eCommerce ecosystem continues to become more crowded.

Every year brings more:

  • Agencies
  • Software platforms
  • Data companies
  • Advertising tools
  • Service providers

Hai jokes that anyone who can log into Amazon Seller Central can call themselves an agency.

The barrier to entry may be low, but building a durable business is much harder.

For Eva Commerce, longevity comes down to two things: helping customers grow and earning their trust.

A company can continuously adapt its technology and services, but if those two elements disappear, customers have little reason to stay.

Prime Positioning: In an increasingly crowded market, trust and measurable customer growth become stronger differentiators, not weaker ones.

Connected Commerce: Stop Managing Every Channel in Isolation

Eva Commerce operates at the intersection of technology and services with a Connected Commerce approach.

Rather than treating Amazon, Shopify, TikTok, Google, Meta, operations, and advertising as unrelated pieces, Eva looks at how each part of the business affects the others.

The company builds technology based on the operational challenges it encounters while managing and growing brands, creating tools around real business problems rather than theoretical use cases.

For brands expanding across multiple platforms, that connected view can become increasingly important as commerce becomes more fragmented.

Key Takeaway: Growth becomes easier to understand when marketplaces, marketing, operations, and technology are viewed as one ecosystem.

Connect with Hai & Eva Commerce

When reaching out to Eva Commerce, mention The eCom Growth Show or Danan Coleman.

Final Thoughts

What’s really holding an eCommerce brand back usually isn’t a lack of tools, advertising platforms, or AI capabilities.

It’s often the fundamentals.

A brand can spend more money on advertising, add another marketplace, adopt another piece of software, or produce more content, but none of those automatically solve a weak conversion rate, poor positioning, inefficient operations, or a lack of customer trust.

Hai’s perspective is a reminder that sustainable growth comes from combining fundamentals with leverage. Build listings that convert. Spend intelligently. Understand the customer. Experiment with emerging discovery channels. And use AI to make talented people more effective.

The technology will continue changing quickly, but the brands that consistently solve real customer problems and adapt without abandoning the fundamentals will be the ones positioned to keep growing.

Stay tuned for more episodes of The eCom Growth Show, where strategy meets execution and smart sellers level up.