Jay Neyer

Founder of Lantern Sol | SEO & E-commerce | Tech, Travel & Music
$113M+ in Shopify & DTC Sales

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

Beethoven is a lot harder to play when she wants to participate.

This was a few days ago. I sat down to play and got a duet partner who didn't even audition.

With Father's Day this weekend, it felt like the right thing to share. She probably won't remember this, but I will, and that's enough to change how I spend my Friday.

Happy weekend everyone!

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

What makes me good at business is the same thing I love about music and languages: finding the pattern in the chaos.

A new language sounds like noise until the structure surfaces. Music is random keys until the patterns appear. Business is raw data and team dynamics until you pull the signal out.

The hobbies aren't a productivity hack. A mind that needs the signal under the noise does it everywhere.

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

People ask what a working week looks like running a team across time zones.

When I was in Japan, the honest answer was: upside down.

I'd stay up to midnight, sometimes 3 a.m., just to overlap with the US.

Wake between 7 and 10. Grab a window of calls, explore the city in the afternoon, take a quiet block from 5 to 9, then back online from 9 until the early morning.

The unscheduled gaps were the surprise.

Some of my best ideas came from that empty thinking space, not from the calls.

Walking a city with nothing on the calendar did more for the business than another packed day ever would.

I don't have work-life balance in the usual sense. I'm always tapped into to some degree.

But “always on” and “always grinding” aren't the same thing, and the difference is mostly the thinking space.

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

500+ Shopify stores and $150M+ in client sales later, the job stops being about individual stores and becomes about the pattern behind them.

A single-store founder sees their own 2.1% conversion rate and has nothing to compare it against. Is that good? Bad?

You genuinely can't tell from inside one business.

I'm looking at hundreds of stores at once.

So when I open a new account, I'm not guessing. I know roughly where the leak is before the audit's finished, because I've watched the same three or four problems repeat across years of stores.

That's the real value of volume.

It’s not harder work... It's faster diagnosis. Y

ou've already seen this exact problem a hundred times.

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

Three things break in almost every audit I run.

One. Social proof disappears past the homepage. Reviews and logos vanish the moment someone clicks into a collection or product page, right when doubt peaks.

Two. The channel mix is lopsided. Overbuilt on paid, underbuilt on email and organic. That eats into your margins. Paid-only acquisition is a tax you pay on every order, forever.

Three. Nobody knows their real numbers. Break-even, contribution margin, true COGS and fulfillment cost. You can't fix performance you've never properly measured.

They're hiding in plain sight in stores doing real revenue.

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

Shopify Scripts stop running on June 30.

That's two weeks out, and a lot of Plus stores still haven't moved.

If your store runs custom checkout logic through the Script Editor, custom discounts, shipping rules, payment rules, all of it stops executing on July 1.

No grace period. Your “buy 3 get 1 free” silently stops applying. Your wholesale customers start seeing retail prices and you might not notice until someone complains.

The replacement is Shopify Functions.

It covers the same use cases, but it's not a simple settings change.  Your logic has to be rebuilt as code and deployed, which is exactly why "wait and see" is the expensive move here.

If you're on Plus and haven't pulled your Scripts customizations report yet, make that the most urgent thing on your list this week. Not the redesign. This.

If you want a second set of eyes on your migration before the deadline, that's the kind of thing we'll look at on a call: https://t.co/kQIPDbjYnK.

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

@thats_a_moret @Shopify @tobi Check out bustem from @oliverbrocato, it’s exactly for this purpose

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

We just closed a month where email drove 40% of a client's revenue. The number most stores settle for is closer to 10-15%.

One client this May did $77.9K in revenue. Email drove $31.5K of it. That's 40% of the store, up from the ~30% we'd averaged all year.

We got there through intent. We retargeted people already raising their hand, customers who clicked, viewed a product, or abandoned the site, and tightened the automated flows running underneath the campaigns. Sending more emails wasn't part of it. That just annoys your list.

I keep telling founders email should sit around 30% of total store revenue, and they look at me like the number's invented. It isn't. The revenue is sitting on the floor because “send more” feels like the only lever, so nobody pulls any of them.

A third of your revenue from a channel you already own is the most underrated growth in ecommerce.

If yours is nowhere near that, it's usually the fastest fix on the board: https://t.co/kQIPDbkwdi

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

@jspujji Ugc

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

A wise man once said, a company's culture isn’t your values. It’s what happens when you’re not in the room. How does the team behave, make decisions, and show up? In order to create a culture of high autonomy and ownership, what has helped us a lot is distributing ownership.

We collaborate a lot internally... everyone's input is welcome. But on any given project, one person carries the final decision instead of a decision by committee.
The logic is simple. The moment a decision needs three people to agree before it moves, it stops moving. Work rots in a waiting period while everyone politely defers.

Clear ownership isn't about control. It's the thing that keeps projects in motion instead of stalling. One person deciding and owning the outcome beats a committee protecting itself with delay, every time.

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

I'll be honest, entrepreneurship isn't for everyone.

And I get it. The pace is 24/7, I'm always in someone else's time zone, and I'm tapped in most of the time.

That burns some people out.

But running a team across continents has shown me how much I value the human side of it.

We're almost never in the same city as our clients.

Rarely the same city as each other. Different countries, religions, ages, backgrounds. And what's been cool to see is that we still share common things underneath all of that.

It also humbles you. You watch capable people operate completely differently than you would and you get less sure that your way is the only way.

The 24/7 thing isn't for everyone. But the human side of a global team is the part I'd never trade.

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

One change to a single campaign turned $342K into $1.2M.

We ran the same campaign two ways: once from the brand page, once from an influencer's page. The only difference was the name on the ad.

ROAS went from 4.13 to 5.32. Click-through more than doubled. That gap was the entire profitability of the campaign.

The full breakdown is in the video below.

Want this run on your account? https://t.co/kQIPDbjYnK

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

There's always something new to chase. Something new to try. The next thing is always right there.

Shiny object syndrome runs the whole industry right now, and AI is the brightest object in the room. There's a quiet FOMO that says if you're not chasing the newest thing, you're falling behind.

The businesses I've been part of grew the most when I resisted that pull. We stayed consistent, kept confidence in what was already working, and put more behind it.

New tools are worth exploring, AI included. They just shouldn't pull focus from the channel that's already printing. Most of the time the bigger gains are still in going deeper on what works.

What did you stop chasing this year that you don't regret?

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

Twelve years in ecommerce, and the most expensive marketing lesson I've learned was hesitating on the things that already worked.

When you hit a new revenue level, the instinct is to go hunt for the next channel instead of pouring more into the one that got you there.

I did that for years. We still grew, but slower than we should have.

The channel already printing money could have carried us further if I'd just committed to it sooner.

Doubling down on what's working usually beats chasing something new. Took me a while to learn that.

What's the most expensive marketing lesson you've learned?

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

@levelsio This + allow users to upload actual photos. So many listings have doctored and polished up photos compared to what you actually see after arriving. Always wondered why they don’t let users upload photos with their reviews.

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

“How long until SEO actually pays off?”

We get this question on most first calls.  So here's the honest distribution, not the pitch version.

Roughly 20% of brands see movement inside the first month, usually the ones already making sales with real product-market fit, where we're building on a foundation instead of pouring one.

About 50% land in the 90-day window.  That's the realistic expectation for most stores.

Another 20-25% take three to twelve months, often a budget or offer issue more than an SEO one.  And a small slice never really moves, almost always because the offer isn't compelling or there's no budget to compete.  We'll tell that brand the truth on the call rather than take the money.

If anyone guarantees you page one in 30 days, they're selling, not diagnosing.

Want the honest version for your store?  Send me a message.

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

@Seozilla_ai Email's the right call when the audience already exists. Demand's warm, you're not paying to create it, and you get a revenue signal in days instead of weeks. The one caveat is it burns out faster than the others, so it validates quickly but won't carry you alone.

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

One channel question every founder eventually asks: which one do I actually prioritize?

One distinction decides it.

Is your product searched for, or does it need to be discovered?

Search intent already exists → Google.

Needs to be seen first → Meta or TikTok.

Have any existing audience → Email, fastest path to early revenue.

The most expensive mistake: $500 into Google, $500 into Meta, $500 into TikTok. 30 days later, “ads don't work.”

None of those channels had enough data. You ran three inconclusive experiments at the same time.

Pick one and actually learn something.

Which would you go all-in on first?

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

@mehak_karma Right. The channel becomes the scapegoat for a strategy that was never given enough data to prove or disprove. 'Ads don't work' usually means 'I split too thin to learn anything.' The channel rarely failed. The test design did.

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

The math holds, ~$26k/month from that AOV move alone. And it stacks with the conversion lever rather than competing with it. Fix the conversion leak and lift AOV and you're compounding two multipliers against the same traffic. The reason I lead with conversion in the post is that it's usually the more neglected of the two, but bundle structure, upsells, and post-purchase offers are right there next to it. Same principle, no extra ad dollar.

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

Most Shopify founders respond to a revenue plateau by increasing their ad spend or modifying the creative.

It's the biggest leverage, right?

And more traffic means more sales, right?

The problem is that it's also the most expensive lever you can pull, and it only works if the underlying store is actually converting.

Let me show you what I mean with a real example.
I audited a brand not long ago.

They had 154,000 monthly sessions, $465 average order value, 0.37% conversion rate. Run the math and that's roughly $264,000 in monthly revenue.

Solid numbers. But the store had real conversion issues: page structure was off, the product pages were cluttered, navigation was making customers work too hard.

Now watch what happens when you change just one number. Keep the traffic exactly the same. Move the conversion rate from 0.37% to 0.5%, that's an increase of less than two tenths of a percent.

That single change takes monthly revenue from $264,000 to $348,000. That's $84,000 more per month from the same number of visitors.

Annualized, that's over a million dollars in additional revenue without spending an extra dollar on acquisition.

The reason I walk through this math with almost every brand I audit is because the numbers make something visceral that would otherwise feel abstract. A 0.13% improvement in conversion rate sounds meaningless.

But when you multiply it across 154,000 sessions at a $465 AOV, it stops sounding like a rounding error.

Most of the conversion leaks I find in audits aren't technically hard fixes. They're just easy to ignore when traffic is the metric everyone's watching.

The stores that compound their growth are the ones that fix the foundation first, then pour more traffic into a system that's actually built to convert it.

If you want to know where your conversion leaks are, that's exactly what we look at. https://t.co/kQIPDbjYnK

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

Right, the funnel collapses. Old model, you rank an educational post, nurture, push toward the product page over a few visits. AI just hands the buyer the page it thinks closes the job, on the first touch. So the product page has to carry the trust the upstream content used to build. If it's thin, you lose someone who showed up pre-sold, which is the most expensive version of that miss.

[Jay Neyer @jay_neyer]

One of the biggest things on my mind right now: ranking higher inside AI.

Shopify just put real numbers behind why this matters.

In Q1 2026, shoppers arriving from AI tools converted at nearly 50% higher rates than organic search visitors, and spent about 14% more per order.

More than half of them landed straight on a product page, versus only about 20% of organic search visitors.

And the volume isn't small anymore. AI referral sessions on Shopify stores grew more than 8x year over year.

Orders from them grew nearly 13x.

Here's why those conversion numbers make sense to me. People trust AI.

When the smartest, most trusted advisor someone has tells them to buy your product, they're not arriving skeptical. They're arriving pre-sold.

That's an enormous advantage, and it goes to whichever brands the AI decides to recommend.

So the question stops being “how do I rank on Google” and becomes “how do I become the brand AI cites.”

It’s a different game, and most brands haven't started playing it.