Everyone wants profitable ecommerce growth. But how can brands maximize it without torching their budget?
That’s what Gregory Murray, chief “So what?” officer at Digital Commerce Global (DCG), and Andrea Steele, VP of digital and ecommerce at The Kraft Heinz Company, set out to answer during their session at Salsify’s 2025 Digital Shelf Summit (DSS).
Drawing from a mountain of benchmarking data and their work with leading global manufacturers, the session focused on one thing: low-cost, high-leverage actions that make digital commerce teams more effective, fast.
Here are a few of the most actionable insights they shared.
If your ecommerce operation feels slow, chaotic, or confusing, you’re not alone. One of the biggest killers of digital momentum isn’t strategy, but structure.
According to Murray, the brands moving fastest are the ones that treat team coordination and roles like a Formula 1 pit stop.
“The difference between a great Formula 1 pit stop and a really dreadful one is 0.7 of a second,” Murray says. “In digital commerce, we need the same thing — everyone needs to know what they're meant to do.”
Creating a clearly defined ecommerce charter — one that lays out roles, responsibilities, and cross-functional handoffs — won’t cost you anything but time and effort. But it can dramatically reduce team friction and speed up execution, especially where it counts.
Most brands don’t have a data problem — they have a decision-making problem. You can have all the reports in the world, but if nobody’s using them to take action, they’re just expensive clutter.
Both Murray and Steele touched on this idea: Too many organizations are still chasing dashboards that look impressive, but don’t drive outcomes.
“No more dashboards for data’s sake,” Steel said. “We need alerts and workflows that help us take action.”
While it doesn’t mean going scorched earth, it does mean being brutally honest about what gets used, what’s ignored, and what actually moves the needle. Replace passive reports with workflows that create urgency, like automated alerts, triggers tied to revenue impact, or real-time views of issues that need to be solved now.
You can define roles all day long, but if your teams aren’t being rewarded for working toward shared goals, they aren’t likely to stick. Misaligned incentives are one of the biggest reasons cross-functional collaboration breaks down, especially in ecommerce, where so many teams have a stake in performance.
“If you’re not wired up to the same incentives, people aren’t going to be motivated to do the work,” Steele says.
It’s a simple fix, but often ignored. If marketing is chasing awareness, sales is focused on revenue, and operations is graded on efficiency, you’ll end up with three different teams solving three different problems. Instead, review how success is defined and make sure everyone’s pulling in the same direction.
Positive change is great. But if your leadership team isn’t on board — or, worse, doesn’t really understand the game plan — it could all be for nought.
Unfortunately, that’s not a problem you can easily fix with another 40-slide presentation or a one-size-fits-all training. Instead, Murray and Steele told attendees that what works well here is giving execs space to ask the so-called “dumb” questions without making them feel dumb.
“I’ve never seen two-day immersion training work,” Murray says. “What works is reverse mentoring, letting leaders ask the dumb questions like ‘What does TMI stand for?’”
Steele adds that it’s just as important to make the value of digital tangible: “Give leaders your percent of growth from digital. Show emerging competitors using search data. Help them understand why they should care.”
Basically, this translates to less formal training and more open conversation. Whether it’s a one-on-one walkthrough or a standing Q&A, the key is making digital feel relevant, not overwhelming.
Retail media, paid search, social — there’s no shortage of channels to target. But if your product feeds are broken or your product detail pages (PDPs) are full of low-rated reviews, you’re just pouring money into a leaky funnel.
“If you jump right to marketing against low-rated reviews but haven’t cleaned up your product feeds,” Steele says, “you’ve thrown away money.”
Foundational issues like bad content, inaccurate data, or unresolved review problems don’t get magically fixed by spending more. In fact, they usually get amplified.
Before launching anything new, run a quick health check:
Investing in awareness-driving campaigns only works if your potential customers see something worth buying.
Decision paralysis can be a significant issue. Especially when every idea feels like it needs sign-off from five departments.
But not every decision is irreversible. Some you can just try, learn from, and move on.
“Amazon talks about one-way doors and two-way doors,” Murray says. “For two-way doors, you just try something. If it doesn’t work, try something else.”
It’s a simple mental model, but it can unlock the potential for some real experimentation. One-way doors require caution and consensus, and they’re hard to undo. Two-way doors? You can walk through, and if it’s not working, walk right back out. Most decisions in digital commerce fall into that second category.
Next time a team is stuck debating a relatively low-risk move, ask the question: Is this a two-way door? If so, skip the meeting. Just test it.
Innovation is great, but there’s no prize for merely reinventing the wheel for its own sake.
Most of the problems your team is trying to solve, like content accuracy, search performance, and retail media return on investment (ROI), have already been tackled by someone else. The best brands aren’t just testing and learning. They’re borrowing smart plays from peers, partners, even competitors.
“The algorithm treats everyone the same,” Murray says. “If someone’s solved the same problem, steal their solution.”
It’s not lazy; it’s efficient. Whether you’re in a manufacturer peer group, attending summits like DSS, or just watching who’s winning in your category, there’s no shame in copying what clearly works. Look at PDP layouts, review response strategies, or product bundling tactics others are using, and adapt them to your own business.
It’s easy to stall out waiting for the perfect tool, the right moment, or a flawless plan. But often, the best path forward is to just keep doing what already works.
“The key is to start formalizing processes,” Murray says. “If your workaround is working, just make that the process.”
Plenty of ecommerce teams are held together by Slack threads alone. That’s not necessarily bad if it’s getting results; treat it like a legitimate solution.
These takeaways aren’t theoretical. They’re what top-performing manufacturers are already doing to grow faster, spend smarter, and sidestep the usual roadblocks.
The biggest lesson from this session? You don’t need a bigger team or a bigger budget. You just need better habits.