Your Pricing Strategy Is Costing You More Than Your Ads | Drew Marconi | IntelliGems | Profits on Purpose

Episode Description

Most eCommerce founders have tested hundreds of ad creatives but haven't touched their prices since launch. Drew Marconi co-founded Intelligems to fix that. His team has run over 80,000 AB tests across pricing, offers, and shipping thresholds for thousands of brands — and the data is consistent: when founders actually commit to testing, 70% find a better price on their hero product within six months, with a median 7% improvement in gross profit per visitor.

In this episode, Drew breaks down why pricing stays frozen at most brands — emotional baggage, no clear methodology, no clear owner. He maps out where to start testing if you've never done it (hint: the shipping threshold), and explains why conversion rate is the wrong metric to optimize your site around. He also covers how AI is dramatically reducing the effort cost of building a real experimentation program, making systematic price testing accessible to six-person teams that don't have a data function.

If you've been running cost-plus pricing and gut-feel shipping thresholds, this conversation is going to change how you think about both.

Key Takeaways

• 85% of eCommerce brands haven't tested their pricing. When Drew and his co-founder surveyed 100 brands in 2021, that's what they found. Most are still running on cost-plus pricing and gut feel. That was fine when things were ripping. It doesn't cut it in the current margin environment.
• Three things keep founders from touching pricing: emotional baggage, no clear methodology, and no clear owner. Pricing touches supply chain, inventory, ads, and checkout. If nobody is accountable for the change, nothing moves.
• The right metric is profit per visitor, not conversion rate. Conversion rate tells you nothing about the health of the transaction. Profit per visitor (conversion rate × AOV × gross margin %) is the number that tells you whether your site is actually working.
• Start with the shipping threshold. Almost every brand finds value here. It's underoptimized, lower-stakes than touching hero product prices, and a fast way to move gross profit without touching the brand.
• Price is downstream of strategy, not upstream. A supplement brand chasing LTV prices completely differently from a phone case brand maximizing first-order profit. Before you run a test, get aligned on what you're actually solving for.
• AI is collapsing the effort cost of running an experimentation program — and the results are there for those who commit. Intelligems has shipped an MCP server that lets brands query their test results via AI. Among brands that stick with testing for six months: 70% find a better hero product price, 90% find a better shipping threshold, and the median improvement in gross profit per visitor is 7%.

See More:

• Intelligems — eCommerce Price Testing Platform (use code CFO10 for a discount)
• Drew Marconi on LinkedIn
• Free Hidden Profit Audit Template (Future Ready CFO)