The eCommerce Growth Play Most Brands Are Missing

The majority of your customers are not in the market to buy from you right now. At any given moment, roughly 95% of your potential audience isn't ready to purchase. Most e-commerce teams spend their entire budget chasing the other five.

That was the opening provocation from our recent webinar with e-commerce advisor Andy Lark — and it set the tone for everything that followed. Andy has spent his career building e-commerce at scale, including helping grow Dell's online business to over $20 billion. He doesn't traffic in trends. He talks about what actually moves revenue.

Here's what we covered.

The Environment Is Harder Than Most Admit

Flat budgets. Declining email performance. Shifting consumer habits that don't map neatly to demographic assumptions. Andy put it plainly: the pressure on e-commerce teams right now is genuinely extreme, and most leaders are being asked to solve it with fewer resources.

AI is helping. Productivity gains of 10 to 30% are real for teams applying it well. But AI isn't replacing the judgment required to run a complex e-commerce operation — it's amplifying the people who already have it.

The other shift worth paying attention to: the move from system-of-record to system-of-engagement. CRM and marketing automation got brands this far. What comes next involves real-time data, direct customer interaction, and using behavioral signals to inform buying decisions — not just log them.

Buying Routines Are Harder to Change Than You Think

Most people buy infrequently. They buy on impulse, or against very ordered patterns built over years. The idea that a single campaign or clever email sequence reshapes those habits is largely a myth.

What does work is building a reason to return — before the customer is in a buying moment. Content, curation, social presence, complementary products. These are the tools that shift recency and frequency over time.

Andy's framing: awareness isn't enough. He loves Patagonia as a brand, owns one t-shirt. Brand love without purchase frequency is economically inert. The brands winning right now are the ones turning awareness into repeated engagement — and engagement into new buying occasions.

Complementary Categories Are the Fastest Lever

This is where the conversation got specific. If you want to shift recency, frequency, and average order value without rebuilding your core business, adding a high-affinity complementary category is the most direct path.

The logic is simple. A customer who bought a hoodie isn't ready to buy another hoodie. But they might buy wine. Or flowers. Or something they didn't come to your site looking for, but would gladly add if it felt natural.

Alcohol, Andy argued, is the highest-affinity complementary category across nearly every vertical — fashion, publishing, gifting, food, flowers. Over 65% of consumers say they'd happily buy alcohol from their favorite online retailers. In the prime 35–44 spending demographic, that number is higher still.

The problem has always been regulatory complexity. Licensing requirements, compliance risk, inventory burden — the three-tier system effectively locked most non-alcohol e-commerce brands out of the category entirely.

That problem is solved. DRINKS Anywhere lets brands offer curated alcohol selections without holding licenses, carrying inventory, or disrupting checkout. The category integrates natively. The brand maintains full control over curation and customer experience.

The RFM Math Is Compelling

Recency drives frequency. Frequency drives basket size. Basket size drives lifetime value.

If a customer's annual value to a fashion brand is $500 today, adding one complementary high-frequency category can double that figure. Not through a better promotion. Not through a new email sequence. Through giving a customer who already trusts the brand another reason to spend.

Andy's point on loyalty was equally direct: most loyalty programs reward transaction history. The more powerful approach is embedding complementary categories into the loyalty tier itself — giving a long-term customer access to a wine club as a function of their tenure, not just their last purchase. That changes the model.

The Q&A: Practical Questions, Direct Answers

Attendees asked good questions. A few worth sharing here.

On curation control: Brands can be as involved as they want. DRINKS' data engine recommends an initial assortment based on brand positioning and customer demographics. The brand makes the final call. Some launch with a full wine page. Others start small and expand. The curation is collaborative, not prescribed.

On lift: Brands like Quince — a $1B+ e-commerce operation — aren't adding wine for the novelty. They're doing it because the revenue compounds. Wine members become repeat buyers. Gifting occasions like Valentine's Day and anniversaries open new buying windows that core categories can't capture alone.

On implementation: For brands without a traditional e-commerce checkout, integration is straightforward. DRINKS works across platforms and has implementation experience across some of the largest alcohol e-commerce operations in the country.

The Bigger Picture

Over the next five years, alcohol will move from roughly 10% e-commerce penetration to somewhere between 20 and 30%, as regulatory barriers continue to fall. That's a new distribution tier opening up in real time. The brands that establish themselves in the category early will have a structural advantage over those that wait.

The broader principle applies beyond alcohol. Category expansion — done thoughtfully, with genuine brand affinity — is how e-commerce brands double the value of existing customers without doubling their acquisition spend.

That's the opportunity. It's available now.

Watch the full webinar recording for the complete RFM framework breakdown, detailed case studies from Quince, UrbanStems, and others, and the audience Q&A.