Ten Years Ago, I Was Writing About Ecommerce Apps

A decade ago, I was folding t-shirts.

Not metaphorically. Literally folding t-shirts (hundreds of them) in the back office of Stupid Cancer, the organization I'd helped build from a scrappy nonprofit into the world's largest community for young adult cancer patients. As COO, my job description was essentially "everything that doesn't fit anywhere else," and that included running our online store from top to bottom.

It was the mid-2010s. Ecommerce was having a moment. Third-party apps were proliferating. The idea that a one-person team could run a fully-functional online retail operation with the right stack of integrations was genuinely exciting, and genuinely new. I was living it in real time, figuring it out as I went, and apparently talking about it enough that BigCommerce invited me to write for their blog.

I recently dug up those posts through the Wayback Machine. Reading them a decade later is a strange, warm kind of nostalgia. Here's what I wrote, and what I think about it now.

The Posts

7 Best Ecommerce Apps and Integrations to Increase Productivity

This was the most personal of the five posts, because it was essentially a tour of how I actually spent my days. Slack for team communication. Evernote for keeping track of product attributes and vendor specs. Trello for managing orders moving through the warehouse. Zapier to tie everything together. Kevy to sync customer data to our email platform. Zendesk for customer service. Inventory-Planner to make sense of what we had on the shelves.

Reading it now, I'm struck by how much of the underlying logic still holds. The tools have changed (some dramatically, some gone entirely), but the discipline of building a connected, automated stack so a small team can do more with less? That's more true now than it was then. I just didn't have the vocabulary for it yet.

Top 5 Ecommerce Apps and Integrations to Fully Customize Your Store and Stand Out Online

This one opened with a line that still sounds like me: I've never really been happy with things as they come out of the box.

The post was built around customization tools, ways to make a BigCommerce store feel less generic and more like a real brand. But the story I remember most from this era isn't about customization. It's about InStockNotify, one of the five apps I highlighted.

A celebrity posted a photo wearing a Stupid Cancer shirt. Within hours, we'd sold through our inventory, hundreds of units, with no sign of slowing down. InStockNotify replaced the "out of stock" dead end with an email capture field, so customers could be notified when we restocked. That one app turned a potential customer service nightmare into a list-building moment. I didn't engineer that. I just happened to have the right tool in place when the moment arrived.

That's a lot of what early ecommerce felt like: setting things up, not knowing exactly when they'd matter, and being glad you had them when they did.

6 Top Ecommerce Apps and Integrations to Increase Brand Awareness via Marketing

The screenshots in this one are my favorite part. Real Stupid Cancer products (the t-shirts, the wristbands, the zip hoodies) displayed in the BigCommerce SocialShop integration we'd set up to sell directly on Facebook.

The post made a case for word-of-mouth as the highest-leverage marketing channel for an online store, and recommended apps to systematize it: ReferralCandy for referral programs, S Loyalty for a points system, Lumiary for customer intelligence, Google AdWords and Pinterest rounding out the mix.

Looking back, the Facebook commerce section feels the most dated. The platform's role in ecommerce has shifted so dramatically in ten years that it's almost a different conversation. But the core argument about making your happiest customers into your best salespeople? That one ages well.

5 Ecommerce Apps to Streamline Your Holiday Selling Operations

Written as a Q4 prep guide, this post was the most tactical of the bunch. The BigCommerce mobile app for managing the store on the go. Zapier for sale notifications via text so I didn't have to be at my desk. Yahoo Live Web Insights for keeping an eye on traffic from anywhere.

Yahoo Live Web Insights. That's a sentence I didn't expect to type in 2026.

The specifics are artifacts of their time, but the intent was real: I was trying to figure out how to stay connected to the business without being chained to a desk, especially during the holidays when I actually wanted to be present with my family. That tension between running a store and having a life outside of it drove a lot of the thinking in these posts.

5 Ecommerce Apps to Cater Your Marketing to the Price-Comparing Millennial

This was the most research-heavy of the five, leaning on data about search behavior, mobile shopping trends, and the emerging reality that customers were checking prices on their phones while standing in physical stores.

The apps I covered (WisePricer, DataFeedWatch, SmartFeed, Discount Manager, and Braintree) were built around the idea that transparency and frictionless checkout were becoming table stakes, not differentiators.

Braintree was introduced as "the company that powers Uber's checkout." I love that framing as a time stamp. The payments landscape looks completely different now, but the insight that checkout friction kills conversions? Still the same conversation.

What I Take Away from All of This

I didn't set out to become an ecommerce person. I set out to serve a community of young adults navigating cancer, and somewhere in there, I ended up running a store that helped fund that mission. The writing was a natural extension of the thinking I was already doing, trying to figure out how to run something real, with real constraints, and share what I was learning along the way.

Those five posts were some of my earliest public writing about business and operations. Reading them now, I can see the seeds of everything that came after: the books, the broader thinking about mission-driven organizations, the deep belief that small teams can build serious things if they're thoughtful about their tools and their time.

Not bad for someone who was also folding t-shirts.