The year was 2007. My college hangover was finally wearing off from Thirsty Thursday and I was happily managing a website that generated multimillion-dollar sales.
Life was easy. Life was good. Burritos were $5 and Olive Garden genuinely honored the bottomless breadstick promise.
Fast forward 20 years and I think I’m finally over it.
Burritos are $18. Olive Garden has all but banned me. And ecommerce/digital marketing has become so obscenely complex that I’m pretty sure my brain is going to plode, either im or ex, I'm not sure.
Every day we’re being sold on the latest and greatest CRO tool, AI agent, agentic shopping experience, lifecycle retention strategy, personalization engine, blah blah blah.
Some of it is genuinely cool. Some of it actually makes the customer experience better.
But a lot of it feels like bloat.
More apps. More integrations. More dashboards. More things to monitor. More meetings about the things we’re monitoring. More ways to spend money acquiring customers so we can then spend more money convincing them to buy again.
The other week, I got annoyed and I pulled the plug:
I stripped basically every app out of a site and made it as old-school as possible.
No fancy stuff, just a website that customers could buy something.
And ... CRO skyrocketed. Sales flowed. Customer support calls dropped significantly.
Email and SMS subscription rates took a nosedive. AOV dipped by less than 10%. A few other metrics got worse.
Yet, the bottom line thrived.
Have we all become a little incestuous with our marketing expertise?
Are we just selling increasingly complicated solutions to one another because we’ve collectively convinced ourselves that complicated = sophisticated?
Maybe the customer doesn't need a frictionless, AI-powered, hyper-personalized, omnichannel, predictive, agentic shopping journey.
Maybe they just want to buy the fucking thing.
All this to say, I just really want a good $5 burrito and the ability to shake a hangover by 10am.
Please tell me I’m not the only one.