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Industry Field Guide · No. 04 Volume 04 · Industry Series 2026 Edition · Seapoint Digital
A field guide for the 2026 ecommerce stack

The 2026
Ecommerce Playbook.

Stack, Attention, and Lifetime Customers

Fourteen pages on how modern brands choose their stack, win attention, and turn first-time buyers into lifetime customers — the 2026 working model behind Seapoint Digital's ecommerce practice.

Read the guide → Schedule a discovery call
Format
14-page PDF
Length
~13 min read
Edition
2026
Cost
Free
What's inside

Eight chapters. Three pillars.

Not a sales deck. The same platform shortlist, AI playbook, channel mix, and retention architecture our team uses with DTC brands, B2B catalogs, and hybrid merchants — written up so you can take them to your own.

01
The Platform Decision
Shopify, BigCommerce, Adobe, Salesforce, Woo, composable, marketplaces
p. 04
02
AI & Automation
Storefront, operations, marketing — and where to start
p. 06
03
HubSpot as Operating System
One platform where customer record and lifecycle finally share a source of truth
p. 07
04
Channel Strategy
Paid, AI search, owned, retail media, creator — and the mix that holds
p. 08
05
Customer Data & Privacy
Winning without cookies — first-party, server-side, consent-aware
p. 09
06
The Retention Playbook
The first 90 days, the loyalty architecture, and the weekly cadence that holds
p. 10
07
Metrics That Matter
Contribution margin, cohort LTV, MER — the dashboard worth running
p. 12
08
Putting It All Together
Three moves, in order, for the next five years
p. 13
From the guide · The 2026 channel mix

The channel mix that worked in 2022 doesn't work in 2026.

40–55%
Paid social & search. Necessary, no longer sufficient — CPMs up, attribution murkier. Winning means creative volume plus clean first-party signal via the Conversions API.
Seapoint · 2026 engagements
15–25%
Retail media & other paid. Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, and the growing retail-media constellation now rival Meta in scale.
Seapoint · 2026 engagements
10–15%
Creator & influencer. Long-term partnerships over one-off deals; UGC has effectively replaced traditional ad creative as the primary unit of paid social.
Seapoint · 2026 engagements
5–10%
SEO & content. Compounding asset that punches above its weight on ROI — and feeds every other channel, including the new AI search layer.
Seapoint · 2026 engagements
Pulled from Chapter 02 · AI & automation
“
AI amplifies whatever you point it at. If your customer data is fragmented, AI personalization will be confidently wrong at scale. If your brand voice is undefined, AI-generated content will be generically off-brand at speed. The fundamentals haven't gotten less important — they've gotten more important.
The 2026 Ecommerce Playbook · p. 06
Two ways to begin

Read it, or talk through it.

Engagements start with a discovery call and a written diagnostic of your current ecommerce stack — including a connector audit. No obligation, no pitch deck.

01 · Read

The full 14-page guide.

All eight chapters, with the platform shortlist, the AI playbook, the 2026 channel mix, the retention architecture, and the metrics that actually matter. Drop your details and we'll send the PDF straight to your inbox.

No spam · One email, one PDF
02 · Talk

A 30-min discovery call.

Walk through your current ecommerce stack with a Seapoint partner — including a quick connector audit. You leave with a written diagnostic, regardless of fit.