#dtcbrand

🚀 Shopify: The Platform Behind Modern Ecommerce

Shopify has transformed the way businesses sell online. Whether you're a solo entrepreneur launching your first product or an established brand scaling globally, Shopify provides the tools needed to build, manage, and grow an online store. With customizable themes, secure payment processing, inventory management, and marketing integrations, Shopify removes much of the complexity of ecommerce.

Quick Look at the Numbers

I just broke down a supplement ecommerce business listed at $1,525,912 with $33,172 average monthly profit and $153,883 average monthly revenue.

On paper, that gets attention fast.

What I like right away is that this is not some random content site pretending to be a brand. It has real product sales, subscription revenue around $40K per month, a 22% margin, and a business model that at least makes sense for repeat buying.

Here is the business listing if you want to check it out

What I Like

The best part here is the product logic.

When a supplement brand gets people into a repeat habit, the business can start compounding instead of constantly starting over. That matters because recurring revenue helps absorb ad volatility better than a one-and-done product.

I also like that the brand already has multiple sales channels in motion. Shopify is the core, but Amazon, retail, and TikTok Shop are also in the picture. That gives a buyer more than one lever to pull.

What I Don’t Love

This is where the listing gets more interesting.

The traffic mix shows heavy paid social dependence, and that means this brand is probably riding on creative testing, offer testing, and ad efficiency more than people might think. If performance slips, profit can get squeezed fast.

I also do not love seeing just 3 SKUs carrying this much of the business. Clean can be good. Too clean can also mean fragile.

Then you have the cross-border layer. There is VAT friction, inventory is not included in the list price, and the business relies on imported supplement products. That is not impossible to manage, but it is not passive either.

Growth Potential

The upside here is real if the buyer knows how to operate brands.

I would look at:

New flavors

Bundle offers

Subscription optimization

Content that builds ingredient-level trust

Market-specific landing pages

Amazon expansion

TikTok Shop creator seeding

UGC-driven paid creative

SEO content around product use cases and comparisons

This brand could grow nicely if someone turns it into more of a system and less of a paid social machine.

My Honest Verdict

Good business. Not a no-brainer price.

If the retention data is strong and the cohorts hold up, I get the appeal.

If the paid social engine is doing too much of the lifting, then I’d want a better deal or better structure.

You can start your own online business

I just dug through the Shapes Shopify theme listing and here’s the real takeaway.

Shapes is not trying to be “clean and quiet.” It’s trying to be memorable.

If your brand is bold, colorful, or snackable (food, drink, beauty, lifestyle), Shapes leans into that with visual interrupts like stickers, dividers, and chunky shape frames that keep people scrolling.

The key data (the stuff you actually need)

Price: $380 one-time

Presets: 5 (Shapes, Fizz, Candy, Aura, Scratch)

Reviews: 100% positive, 78 total (as shown on the listing)

Designer: Switch

Current version shown: 4.4.0 (dated Jan 30, 2026)

What Shapes is really “built for” (semantic why)

A theme is basically your store’s conversion architecture. Shapes uses design to control attention.

Here’s what that means in normal human terms:

Shapes create visual hierarchy so your best products get noticed faster

Dividers and stickers reduce “scroll fatigue” by making long pages feel shorter

The product experience is set up for merchandising clarity, not just pretty photos

Built-in features that matter (because apps add weight)

Slide-out cart + quick buy, this is speed-to-cart psychology

Mega menu + filtering/sorting, this is product discovery and findability

Product badges + promo banners, this is “why buy now” without extra apps

Age verifier, huge if you sell anything age-gated

EU translations (EN, FR, IT, DE, ES) baked in

Ingredients/nutritional info support, great for consumables

My quick “should you buy it” filter

Shapes is worth it when:

You want a brand-forward look without custom development

You sell products where visuals drive trust (food, skincare, lifestyle)

You want built-in conversion blocks so you can run fewer apps

Shapes is NOT the move when:

Your brand needs luxury-minimal, lots of whitespace, very quiet typography

You hate playful design elements, because Shapes leans into personality

You have 1 product and your whole store is basically a landing page (there are leaner themes for that)

The 10-minute test I’d run before committing

Open the demo on mobile

Check how fast you can get to a product and add to cart

Check menu depth (can your categories live in a mega menu cleanly?)

Look at product page, does it support your “decision info” (ingredients, sizing, comparisons)

David’s meteoric rise to prominence on Shopify was no fluke. He wanted to take a step back and establish an authentic e-commerce brand, rather than just focusing on the standard Amazon FBA rank and money thing, with this current initiative.

“When I think Amazon, I think cash cow, throw a product up there, get as many sales as possible, rake in the organic traffic and make money, right?” David asserts. “But this time around we were like, hey, let’s build an actual business online and that’s exactly what we did.”

Following the launch of their own Shopify website, David and his team generated a significant amount of paid traffic using Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube advertisements. “Our goal was, hey, let’s double down, let’s build a big list, right? Let’s build a list of five, ten thousand customers.

Let’s build that list, let’s acquire emails, phone numbers, first name, last name. Getting all that data was really important to us, and also being able to launch more products, have more SKUs, and just expand our portfolio.”

As part of their marketing strategy, they worked hard to increase the number of followers on their various social media accounts. Using influencer marketing, they ran a study. Everything and nothing. Self-sufficiency was an absolute necessity for them. They couldn’t compete in Amazon’s marketplace because the space they occupied was too crowded.

Products with thousands of reviews would be competing against them. To avoid wasting time and money, they decided to wait until they had a list of customers ready to buy before launching on Amazon. Waiting for it was worth it.

“One of the big things that kind of helped us too,” David continues, “is the fact that we really built out a solid funnel. We built out a ninety day nurture sequence in emails. So that means, literally ninety days worth of emails, going out every day or every other day.

So that’s a lot of people seeing our brand name in their inbox all the time. And then we also did a lot of upsells and downsells, which you can’t really do effectively on Amazon yet. But that’s where the benefit of having multiple products comes in.”

It was only an issue of ensuring that they remained in supply after that. Keeping the momentum from suffocating by cutting it too close. More of the same is likely to be seen in the coming years. In order to maintain a solid relationship with their followers, they are always adding new items, boosting the size of their following, investing in content creation, and hoping for favorable word of mouth.

It is important to note that if you’re just starting out and trying to earn your first thousand or two thousands dollars per month, you should avoid doing the things that David has described above. Keep things as simple as possible at initially. There is nothing wrong with relying solely on FBA-only to accomplish your monthly revenue goal of $5,000.

It’s all about baby steps. There are a bazillion buyers on Amazon’s site. Start with that. Increase the number of sales you make. Get to know the ins and outs of the game. Improve your skills and abilities. Then broaden your horizons. There are much more moving parts with Shopify than with other platforms. Most importantly, you must be an expert in media buying, which is something that the majority of people do not possess.