20 People to Follow on X for Ecommerce and Marketing
A useful X feed should improve the questions I ask about an ecommerce business, not just give me more tactics to try. I want different perspectives: someone thinking about inventory and profit, someone studying customers, someone questioning an advertising assumption, and someone explaining what changed in search.
Here are 20 people to follow on X, formerly Twitter, for ecommerce and marketing. This selection deliberately introduces a different set of names from my Instagram and YouTube lists. It mixes hands-on operators with specialists in acquisition, retention, SEO, positioning, and copywriting.
The numbering is for navigation, not a ranking. You do not need to follow all 20. Start with the area where your store needs better decisions.
Choose a topic
- DTC economics and brand operations
- Acquisition, creative, and growth decisions
- Email and customer retention
- SEO and search visibility
- Positioning, buyer psychology, and copy
How I selected this list
I looked for identifiable people whose public work contributes a distinct perspective on ecommerce or marketing. Profile identities and areas of expertise were checked against personal sites, company pages, published work, and podcast links in September 2026. X limits logged-out access to some profiles, so this is not a claim that every recent post or posting frequency has been audited. Check the latest activity before following; some people publish their most substantial work through newsletters or podcasts.
The recommendations and practical exercises below are my editorial assessment, not quotations from these people. Inclusion is not an endorsement of every opinion, paid course, or service. I have left out follower totals and revenue claims: neither tells you whether an idea fits your business.
DTC economics and brand operations
1. Taylor Holiday
Follow @TaylorHoliday on X
Focus: Profitable growth and planning
Taylor's work at Common Thread Collective connects acquisition with the financial constraints of an ecommerce business. I would include him for discussions about forecasting, contribution margin, and the relationship between demand and inventory. This is a useful counterweight to advice that treats a higher advertising budget as the answer to every growth problem. Explore Taylor Holiday’s work.
Put it to work: Put your next acquisition proposal beside your margin and inventory forecast before approving it.
2. Sean Frank
Follow @Seanfrank on X
Focus: The operator's view of a consumer brand
Sean brings the perspective of operating Ridge and discussing ecommerce through Operators. I would read his work for the connection between product, distribution, team decisions, and marketing. A large brand's constraints are not identical to those of a new store, but the questions behind those decisions are useful at either scale. Explore Sean Frank’s work.
Put it to work: Identify whether your current bottleneck is demand, stock, customer experience, or execution capacity before calling it a marketing problem.
3. Moiz Ali
Follow @moizali on X
Focus: Consumer products and founder judgment
Moiz founded Native and co-hosts Limited Supply with Nik Sharma. His consumer-brand perspective is a reason to include him alongside channel specialists. I would focus on the product, customer service, and business-model questions in his discussions, rather than treating a strong opinion or a successful founder's story as a universal operating rule. Explore Moiz Ali’s work.
Put it to work: Review one customer complaint for what it reveals about the product or promise, not just how quickly support closed the ticket.
4. Web Smith
Follow @web on X
Focus: The intersection of commerce, media, and brands
Web publishes 2PM, drawing together commerce, media, and broader business analysis. I would include him to keep a marketing reading list from becoming nothing but campaign settings. His work provides a wider lens on how brands reach people and build distribution. Some of the deeper material sits outside X and requires a paid membership. Explore Web Smith’s work.
Put it to work: Map the publishers, communities, and distribution partners that influence your buyers before adding another advertising channel.
Acquisition, creative, and growth decisions
5. Nik Sharma
Follow @mrsharma on X
Focus: DTC marketing and the buying journey
Nik's work through Sharma Brands and his educational publishing covers consumer-brand growth. I would use his material to connect the promise in an ad with the experience on a landing page. For an ecommerce team, that relationship is more useful than collecting isolated conversion tricks without considering the customer or offer. Explore Nik Sharma’s work.
Put it to work: Read an ad and its destination together. Check whether the product, offer, evidence, and next step remain consistent.
6. Andrew Faris
Follow @andrewjfaris on X
Focus: Paid media with a profitability lens
Andrew shares his ecommerce and advertising thinking through AJF Growth and his podcast. I would include him for the reasoning behind media-buying choices: what a campaign is supposed to accomplish, which constraints matter, and how to judge performance. An account screenshot becomes useful only when its economic context is understood. Explore Andrew Faris’s work.
Put it to work: Write the business objective and acceptable economics next to a campaign's platform-reported ROAS.
7. Cody Plofker
Follow @codyplof on X
Focus: Connecting creative, customers, and growth systems
Cody's background includes building Jones Road Beauty and publishing Growth Notes. I would include him for a perspective that connects customer understanding with creative and operational decisions. For a team producing many ads without learning much, the useful question is what each test changes about the next decision. Explore Cody Plofker’s work.
Put it to work: Give each creative test a customer hypothesis, not just a new visual treatment.
8. Alex Greifeld
Follow @heyitsalexP on X
Focus: Challenging context-free marketing rules
Alex writes about ecommerce strategy and has publicly revisited her own advertising assumptions. That willingness to add context is a reason I would include her. Her work is useful when a team has accumulated rules about what always works without asking which products, audiences, or business conditions those rules actually fit. Explore Alex Greifeld’s work.
Put it to work: Choose one rule your team treats as universal and document the conditions under which it might be wrong.
Email and customer retention
9. Chase Dimond
Follow @ecomchasedimond on X
Focus: Email copy and lifecycle opportunities
Chase's educational work centers on email marketing, including ecommerce. I would use his material as a source of copy and campaign ideas, then assess each idea against the customer relationship. A compelling subject line is only useful if the email delivers on it and reaches people who have agreed to receive it. Explore Chase Dimond’s work.
Put it to work: Review one email for a specific audience, one credible promise, and a relevant next step.
10. Samar Owais
Follow @samarowais on X
Focus: Email strategy grounded in the customer journey
Samar works on email strategy and copy for ecommerce and SaaS businesses. I would include her to shift attention from the number of emails sent to the sequence of questions a customer needs answered. Her broader work is particularly relevant when a store's lifecycle program consists mainly of repeated promotions. Explore Samar Owais’s work.
Put it to work: Outline the information a first-time buyer needs before ordering, after paying, and after receiving the product.
11. Val Geisler
Follow @lovevalgeisler on X
Focus: Customer experience across lifecycle messages
Val's work focuses on customer and lifecycle marketing. I would include her perspective for the moments between acquisition and repeat purchase, where a store can either build confidence or create confusion. Her educational material is a reminder to evaluate emails as part of a relationship, not as independent revenue-generating units. Explore Val Geisler’s work.
Put it to work: Place your welcome, order, delivery, and follow-up messages in order. Look for repeated requests and missing answers.
12. Jess Chan
Follow @jjesschan on X
Focus: Retention as a business system
Jess founded Longplay, whose work includes ecommerce retention and lifecycle marketing. I would include her for the relationship between customer behavior and the systems a team builds around it. Before adding another automation, it helps to decide whether the problem is messaging, product fit, replenishment timing, or the customer experience itself. Explore Jess Chan’s work.
Put it to work: Separate customers with a natural replenishment need from those buying an occasional-use product before planning repeat-purchase campaigns.
SEO and search visibility
13. Aleyda Solis
Follow @aleyda on X
Focus: Technical, international, and ecommerce SEO
Aleyda's consulting and educational work includes ecommerce and international SEO. I would include her for structured ways to investigate search problems rather than chasing isolated ranking tips. For a store with many collections, variants, or markets, understanding the site architecture is often more useful than writing another article first. Explore Aleyda Solis’s work.
Put it to work: Map one product family across collections, product URLs, and country versions. Identify which pages should serve distinct searches.
14. Lily Ray
Follow @lilyraynyc on X
Focus: Search quality and algorithm analysis
Lily's work covers search quality, E-E-A-T, algorithm updates, and AI search. I would include her when evaluating claims about why visibility has changed. Her analysis is a starting point for investigation, not proof that a specific update caused a specific store's traffic loss. The distinction matters before making expensive changes. Explore Lily Ray’s work.
Put it to work: Compare affected queries and page types before attributing a traffic decline to a single explanation.
15. Kevin Indig
Follow @Kevin_Indig on X
Focus: Organic growth and business strategy
Kevin writes Growth Memo and has led SEO and growth work at companies including Shopify. I would use his research and analysis to connect organic visibility with business choices. For an ecommerce team, the useful question is not only whether a topic can attract traffic, but which customers and decisions that traffic represents. Explore Kevin Indig’s work.
Put it to work: For one organic-growth opportunity, define the target customer, expected page type, and business outcome before estimating traffic.
16. Barry Schwartz
Follow @rustybrick on X
Focus: Search news and source discovery
Barry founded Search Engine Roundtable and reports on developments in search. I would include him as a discovery source for announcements, discussions, and changes worth investigating. News reporting and an implementation recommendation are different things: follow the original explanation before deciding that your store needs an immediate change. Explore Barry Schwartz’s work.
Put it to work: Keep a short search-change log with the original source, the affected feature, and whether your own data shows an impact.
Positioning, buyer psychology, and copy
17. Katelyn Bourgoin
Follow @KateBour on X
Focus: Understanding why people buy
Katelyn's Why We Buy work explores buyer psychology and messaging. I would include her for improving the questions a marketer asks about customer motivation. The aim is not to attach a psychology label to every button. It is to understand the situation that makes a product relevant and communicate that relevance clearly. Explore Katelyn Bourgoin’s work.
Put it to work: Ask a recent customer what happened immediately before they started looking for a product like yours.
18. April Dunford
Follow @aprildunford on X
Focus: Positioning and competitive alternatives
April specializes in positioning, particularly for B2B technology companies. This is not an ecommerce-tactics account, and I would not transfer every software example directly to physical products. The useful connection is how a customer understands an offer relative to alternatives, including doing nothing or choosing a different category entirely. Explore April Dunford’s work.
Put it to work: List what your customer would do if your product did not exist. Compare your message with those actual alternatives.
19. Peep Laja
Follow @peeplaja on X
Focus: Differentiation, messaging, and research
Peep built CXL, Speero, and Wynter, and his work spans conversion optimization and business strategy. I would include him for questions about differentiation and the evidence behind messaging. Much of his current focus is B2B, so an ecommerce reader should adapt the research principles rather than copy the sales process. Explore Peep Laja’s work.
Put it to work: Show a landing page to someone in the target audience and ask what makes the offer different, without explaining it first.
20. Harry Dry
Follow @harrydry on X
Focus: Specific, concrete copywriting
Harry created Marketing Examples and teaches through close attention to the words in a message. I would include him for merchants whose descriptions are full of abstractions such as quality and innovation. Studying how a sentence works can be more useful than collecting another headline formula. His personal account is linked here; Marketing Examples also has a separate branded account. Explore Harry Dry’s work.
Put it to work: Replace one vague product claim with a concrete detail a buyer can understand and you can substantiate.
Where I would start
- Growing revenue but struggling with profit: Taylor Holiday, Sean Frank, and Andrew Faris.
- Unclear positioning or repetitive copy: Katelyn Bourgoin, April Dunford, and Harry Dry.
- Too much reliance on acquisition: Samar Owais, Val Geisler, and Jess Chan.
- Investigating organic visibility: Aleyda Solis, Lily Ray, Kevin Indig, and Barry Schwartz.
Turn a better feed into better work
I would keep a small research note with four fields: the idea, its source, the assumptions behind it, and the decision it might change. A confident post is not enough evidence to rebuild a campaign. Look for the full explanation and ask whether the product, budget, audience, and timeframe resemble your own situation.
Separate observations from causal claims. A store reporting growth after a change does not establish that the change caused it. Record what you expect to learn before trying an idea, and evaluate business outcomes rather than how popular the original post became.
Use the feed to discover useful work, then leave the feed to do your own. For a structured approach to turning customer questions into useful assets, see my ecommerce content marketing strategy.
More people and ideas to explore
- 20 people to follow on Instagram for ecommerce and marketing.
- 20 people to follow on YouTube for ecommerce and marketing.
- What is marketing? A broader framework for putting individual tactics in context.
- Ecommerce marketing insights from Birkan Ulusoy.