Nadia Dubois
October 20, 2026
5 min read
Every week, another ecommerce brand launches with a good product, a polished website and an ad budget it’s sure will work. A few months later, many of them are staring at the same dashboard, asking the same question: why isn’t this growing?
The usual answer is more. More ads, more spend, more content, more channels. And the money keeps flowing in the same direction it was already going, while the real problem sits somewhere nobody thought to look.
One operator has spent more than a decade on both sides of that question, first helping other businesses grow and now running brands of his own.
Ask Waleed Najam where most ecommerce businesses go wrong and he doesn’t talk about ads, algorithms or the latest platform. He talks about diagnosis.
“Almost every brand I meet thinks it has a traffic problem,” he says. “Very few of them actually do.”
It’s a view shaped by where he sits. As current CEO of NEO Innovations, Waleed Najam leads a U.S.-based company that operates its own portfolio of content and ecommerce brands and, through Roplar, works with other companies trying to scale. He has worked in ecommerce and digital marketing since 2014 and is a member of the Forbes Business Council.
The market he plays in is enormous. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, American retail ecommerce sales reached about $1.19 trillion in 2024, up 8.1% year over year and accounting for 16.1% of all retail. It’s also more crowded than it has ever been.
Selling into that market starts with the storefront itself, and our comparison of Shopify and WooCommerce looks at how two of the most widely used ecommerce platforms differ for growing stores.
We asked Najam how a multi-brand company competes in it.
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Most growth firms sell services. NEO runs its own brands first. Why build it that way?
Because advice is cheap when it isn’t your inventory. When you operate a brand, every mistake comes with an invoice. Over-order and you pay for storage. Scale ads before the product page is ready and you pay for that too. You learn very quickly that growth isn’t a marketing problem or an operations problem. It’s one problem wearing different clothes.
What did running brands teach you that you couldn’t have learned any other way?
To distrust good news. Rising revenue feels great. But I’ve seen revenue climb while acquisition costs climbed faster, or while returns quietly piled up. A campaign can be the best one you’ve ever run and still hurt the business if fulfillment can’t keep up. Now when a number looks good, my first question is: what did it cost us somewhere else?
You run several brands at once. How do you stop them from blurring together?
We’re strict about it. Each brand has its own customer, its own voice and its own reason to exist. Nobody should feel like they’re buying from a factory. Behind the scenes, though, nothing we learn stays inside one brand. If we crack a checkout problem on one, every other brand gets the fix. The brands stay separate. The knowledge compounds. That’s the whole model.
“Growth isn’t a marketing problem or an operations problem. It’s one problem wearing different clothes.”
Back to diagnosis. What does a misdiagnosis look like?
The classic one is a brand that says, “We need more traffic.” So they spend more on ads, and sales barely move. It turns out the product page wasn’t convincing anyone, so more traffic just meant more people leaving. Other times it’s pricing. Or the post-purchase experience is so forgettable that nobody comes back, and the business ends up buying every customer from scratch, forever. That gets expensive fast.
So how do you find the real bottleneck?
We ask boring questions, the same ones every time. What can we actually afford to pay for a customer? Where do people drop off? Are the ads bringing in buyers or just cheap clicks? If demand doubled next week, could we ship it? What happens after the first order? Those questions came out of our own brands, answered with our own money, and over time they became a framework. It isn’t a formula. Every business has different products, margins and competitors. The framework just tells you where to look.
What would you tell a founder who wants to scale right now?
Know your numbers before you pour fuel on anything. If you don’t know what a customer is worth after fulfillment, returns and support, you’re not scaling. You’re just guessing faster.
The U.S. market is massive. Doesn’t that make it easier to win?
It makes it easier to start and harder to win. The size attracts everyone: more brands, more capital, more ad spend chasing the same customer. And that customer has seen it all. They expect a fast site, a checkout that just works, their preferred way to pay, honest shipping times, real reviews, and a human when something breaks. A few years ago some of that was a competitive edge. Today it’s the entry fee.
Which part of ecommerce do people underestimate most?
Everything behind the storefront. Inventory planning, data, logistics, support, creative production, cash flow. Customers never see any of it, but they feel it in every single order.
How do the two sides of NEO, your own brands and your work with other companies, feed each other?
Our brands keep us close to real risk. The outside work stops us from getting tunnel vision, because it puts categories and problems in front of us that we’d never meet on our own. Each side makes the other smarter. Every campaign, every support ticket, every late shipment teaches you something, if you’re disciplined enough to write it down.
Last question. Where does NEO go from here?
More brands, more partners and better systems. But honestly, I don’t measure the company by how many brands we own or how many businesses we work with. I measure it by how fast we learn. In a market this crowded, the winners won’t be the loudest companies. They’ll be the ones that understand their own business best.
