Scaling an ecommerce brand is painful. For every breakout success, there are countless brands with great products that never make it beyond a loyal early customer base.
Omer Kaplan, CEO and co-founder of ZyG, explains how he’s taking on one of the industry’s biggest challenges
It has never been easier to launch an online brand. Why is scaling still so difficult?
It has never been easier to launch an online brand. Why is scaling still so difficult?Scaling an e-commerce brand depends on getting dozens of things right at the same time: acquisition, creative, conversion, retention, customer support, inventory, forecasting… the list goes on.
It may be easier than ever to get an online brand started, but growing it beyond a certain point takes a massive marketing machine, a solid data infrastructure, and financing. That’s a lot to ask of e-commerce entrepreneurs starting out with a great product and a small team.
As a result, many great products end up listed on Amazon or with their own storefront on Shopify, but never actually break through the noise.
ZyG describes itself as an Operating System for e-commerce scale. What does that actually mean?
The typical e-commerce scale machine is inefficient and expensive, and usually takes the form of an inflated headcount, multiple agencies, and endless specialist tools. We are replacing it all with a single end-to-end platform.
First, we identify and partner with brands where we have validated the potential to scale in a real-world test to understand whether the economics work before significant capital is invested in scaling their product.
If the results are good, we execute the entire digital layer needed to scale, from generating creatives to optimised storefronts, UA, SEO/GEO, influencers, customer support, email/SMS marketing and retention to logistics optimisation and fulfilment. Under the hood is a unified data layer, predictive models, and connected AI agents.. The fact that the tech is interconnected allows signals from any part of the customer journey to inform and improve other areas, constantly improving decisions across the board.
Importantly, the brands maintain full control of their physical product and IP, as we take responsibility for everything needed to grow the business digitally.
What’s changed in e-commerce over the last five years?
Customer acquisition has become more expensive, consumers have more choice, and they expect better experiences than ever before. At the same time, AI has accelerated the pace of execution, making it harder for businesses to sustain a competitive advantage.
In this context, the old e-commerce playbook just isn’t enough anymore.
AI is everywhere in retail. What’s the biggest misconception about it?
That AI is the outcome. It’s not – it’s a powerful means to an end.
Writing an advert or generating a product image in seconds is impressive, but that’s only one task. Scaling a business means making thousands of connected decisions every day. AI becomes genuinely valuable when it can execute across the whole company to deliver measurable outcomes, not just automate isolated jobs.
In our case, we didn’t design ZyG to be another tool in the stack with a long list of flashy features. Instead, we built it to own a single business outcome: helping e-commerce brands scale.
What will separate the winners from everyone else over the next five years?
The businesses that succeed will be the ones that consistently turn technology into outcomes, rather than simply adopting more of it.
Ultimately, e-commerce founders should be spending their time creating products and building brands, not managing software, agencies and dashboards.
That’s where we think the industry is heading: fewer disconnected tools and much more intelligent execution.
