Beardbrand’s Top Ecommerce Tools in 2026

Occasionally on the podcast I depart from interviewing guests and share my own experiences running Beardbrand, the D2C company I founded in 2012.

In this episode, I address my favorite ecommerce tools in 2026, the platforms and apps essential to our business.

My entire audio narration is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.

Website

Shopify is an incredible platform for Beardbrand. It gives us the flexibility to quickly test and implement major site changes, such as restructuring our product pages. For example, we replaced multiple fragrance variants on a single product page with individual pages for each fragrance, supported by a collection page.

We can now tell the story of each scent, showcase fragrance-specific reviews, and recommend matching products. The result? A faster site and improved conversions (about 4.6%). For performance, storytelling, and scalability, Shopify dominates.

Judge.me. Another foundational tool is Judge.me, a customer review widget. I’m now a brand ambassador for that company after using it for years. The app is economical; we pay just $15 per month. We’ve customized it to blend into our website, and it looks beautiful.

Recharge. I’ve experienced ups and downs over the years with Recharge, the subscription management platform. Sometimes I feel it’s too expensive, but lately the features have improved. I’ve received compliments from customers on how we run our subscriptions and how easy the process is. Recharge has been a good partner. We have no intentions or plans to look elsewhere.

Marketing

Klaviyo. We’ve long used Klaivyo for all email and text campaigns and automated flows. The decision to include text messaging with Klaviyo was not easy. Postscript is the best in that category for us. But we wanted to consolidate our data. Klaviyo’s text platform is serviceable and a good option. Email is critical to Beardbrand’s success. Our subscriber database functions like a customer management platform.

PostPilot. We have been utilizing PostPilot for our physical postcard campaigns. It’s a nice service, especially to reach folks who have unsubscribed from email and text. They still buy from us, however, and PostPilot is a great way to stay in front of them.

Opensend helps us identify and reach anonymous site visitors who show interest in purchasing our products. The service has improved our conversions. We sync it with PostPilot flows and let it run automatically.

Grapevine Surveys is an essential post-purchase survey tool for customer insights. Grapevine is more affordable than platforms such as Triple Whale or Northbeam, both of which are great, precise options for larger brands. For us, Grapevine provides a simple three-question post-purchase survey: How long is your beard? How did you find us? Why did you choose us?

Meta Ads is our primary channel for customer acquisition. We create a ton of ads — some in-house and some with an agency.

Creative

CapCut is an AI-driven video-editing software. We don’t use it directly, but our agency does. CapCut streamlines and expedites the production process and lessens the burden of our in-house video editor.

Grok Imagine from X generates 6-second videos from prompts. If you’re not using AI video for some of your ads, you’re missing out. I love Grok Imagine. We can create an amazing number of videos quickly. The best use for us is video clips based on prompts of still images of real people, as testimonials. We never use AI to generate fake people and referrals, which is illegal.

Arcads. Mike, our growth marketer, uses Arcads, which is similar to Grok Imagine but more limiting. Sometimes he’ll have me generate videos in Grok Imagine, with its speed and capacity, and then send to him.

Google Nano Banana does a great job for our static images. Our product labels have a lot of text that’s challenging for AI to reproduce. Nano Banana is not perfect, but its errors and hallucinations in the text on our bottles are noticeable only if you stop and study it for a few seconds. Overall, Nono Banana is impressive. For example, I used it to generate an image with black hardened lava next to a knockout photo of our beard oil, to place on a bottle. It did a great job. If you are not experimenting with AI image and video generation, get in there, learn, and start cranking out stuff.

Recommended

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Operations

Settle is an accounts payable and vendor management platform. We signed up late last year. It syncs with our newly adopted accrual accounting system (we had long been on a cash basis) and helps us allocate resources and see where our money is going. Our bookkeeper enters all vendor invoices into Settle. I can verify the accuracy of the invoices and the timing of our payment.

Mercury. We switched to Mercury, a bank-like platform, about six months ago. It’s been a game-changer. It’s entirely different from our previous (traditional) bank. We’ve automated cash transfers between our operational checking and savings accounts to maintain the minimum checking balance while preventing overdrafts. We also use Mercury for our employee credit cards. Mercury pays off the balances immediately once they hit a threshold. It eliminates fees and saves a ton of time.

ShipStation and OpenBorder. We still use ShipStation’s software for fulfillment and shipping, integrating with our third-party fulfillment provider. We signed up with OpenBorder, another software platform, to expedite logistics into Europe. We haven’t officially returned to Europe, but it’s coming. OpenBorder’s assistance is helping.

Slack. Everybody uses Slack. We once used Asana, Trello, and Basecamp, among other collaboration platforms. We dropped them all in favor of Slack, which is also our project management tool. We’re saving money for equivalent productivity.

Google Docs. I’m not a fan of giant corporations such as Google. They retain my data, and I lose privacy. But still, Google Docs is an amazing tool with Sheets and sharing with my colleagues. So, yes, from Nano Banana to Docs, Google is crucial and beneficial.