Agency Owner on New-Store Strategies

I asked Kenny Trusnik, founder of the agency Forest City Digital, how an ecommerce startup can attract customers amid today’s AI tumult.

“Focus on getting the product data as deep and clean as possible in a structured environment,” he replied while adding additional tactics for LLM citations and referrals.

In our recent conversation, Kenny shared those approaches, along with his agency’s focus and underlying principles. The full audio is embedded below; the transcript is edited for length and clarity.

Eric Bandholz: Give us the rundown.

Kenny Trusnik: I’m the founder of Forest City Digital, a marketing agency in Cleveland, Ohio. I started my career in corporate America, working for Toyota and Sherwin-Williams. I eventually moved to a small startup, helping content creators monetize their viewership through ecommerce.

I launched Forest City in 2020.

One thing I appreciated as a corporate employee was working toward real goals, regardless of the agencies involved. I brought that approach to my agency: How do we tie marketing to what our clients are trying to accomplish?

Bandholz: What channels do you focus on?

Trusnik: Primarily search, social, and retention. So search is Google and Bing organic, as well as AI visibility.

We’re seeing good traction from LLMs for many clients — upwards of 10% of online revenue. We do a lot of metadata backend work with clients on Shopify’s Agentic Storefronts and for aftermarket automotive or spec-intensive brands. Better data increases AI visibility. For merchants, a good first step is making sure their site’s robots.txt file does not block crawlers from top generative AI platforms.

On social, we manage influencer programs and paid channels.

And on the retention side, we use email platforms such as Klaviyo or Brevo to plug holes in clients’ sales funnels.

We also do some fractional ecommerce and marketing-strategy consulting.

Bandholz: Tell us more about Agentic Storefronts.

Trusnik: Shopify rolled out Agentic Storefronts earlier this year. The tool exposes a merchant’s catalog to prominent LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. It’s similar in concept to syncing products to Google Merchant Center or a Meta Commerce account.

Agentic Storefronts makes merchants’ data accessible and crawlable by these LLMs. All Shopify product fields are now visible to LLM crawlers. Examples include categories, colors, sizes, features, and materials.

The aim is for genAI platforms to recommend merchants’ products when shoppers search for those features or characteristics.

Structured data, such as Schema.org markup, is important too, because it helps crawlers and algorithms understand a site, its products, and its purpose.

Bandholz: Say you launched an ecommerce company in 2026. What would be your strategy to attract customers?

Trusnik: I would focus on getting the product data as deep and clean as possible in a structured environment. On Shopify, I would opt into Agentic Storefronts.

I would try to acquire links in prominent listicles or best-of articles. Those are strong signals for the LLMs. With limited resources, I’d focus on structured product data and listicle links.

If I had the money, I would invest in Meta ads to build top-of-funnel awareness.

Content — articles, videos, social posts — helps if it contains original info unavailable elsewhere, unlike AI-generated content, which is, by definition, repurposed.

Beyond that, think of blue oceans and red oceans. A product has to be novel and solve an unaddressed pain point.

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Bandholz: A more iterative novelty seems to fit most entrepreneurs. An example is Grüns gummies. Gummy vitamins were already widely available, but Grüns added dozens of ingredients and positioned theirs as a superfood, not just a vitamin.

Trusnik: Yes, don’t get too novel. We work a lot with hemp beverage companies. That space has exploded as an alternative to alcohol. It’s still hemp, but the novelty is that it replaces alcohol in social settings.

Bandholz: Where can listeners follow you, find you, reach out?

Trusnik: We’re at ForestCityDigital.com. Hit me on LinkedIn; I’m always happy to talk shop on anything ecommerce.