Kyle Hamar, CEO of OmniRocket, explains why the smartest ecommerce brands segment from day one, plan inventory from data, and are willing to pay more for a customer than their competitors.
Most ecommerce brands are sitting on more customer data than they know what to do with. It’s spread across Shopify, Klaviyo, Meta, Google Analytics, and a post-purchase survey nobody reads. The data exists. It just never gets put together.
That was the starting point for my conversation with Kyle Hamar, CEO of OmniRocket, a Shopify growth agency. Kyle came up through IT, moved into digital marketing for higher ed, started Amazon brands on the side (he still owns them), and has been building on Shopify since 2017. He has seen this problem from the brand side and the agency side. And he had one line that I keep thinking about.
“Relevance drives revenue.”
— Kyle Hamar, CEO, OmniRocket
Three words. They explain most of what follows.
How should a Shopify brand start with customer segmentation?
Kyle’s view is that segmentation gets overlooked early because founders are just trying to find product market fit. That’s fine for a while. Then it isn’t.
“Segmentation prevents that one-size-fits-all campaign mentality, which is fine at the beginning when you’re getting started, but will fail you as you try to scale.”
— Kyle Hamar, CEO, OmniRocket
He pointed to a McKinsey finding that personalization can drive a 10 to 15% revenue lift for ecommerce brands, and then gave real examples. Kendra Scott split first-time gift buyers from repeat self-buyers and saw a 22% conversion lift on gift campaigns. Allbirds built a segment around eco-conscious buyers and saw a 40% higher click-through rate than generic emails.
What I liked is that Kyle doesn’t start with expensive tools. He starts with layers of data:
- Zero-party data. What customers tell you directly. Think of a style or skin-type quiz built with Octane AI or Zigpoll, saved to Shopify metafields and synced to Klaviyo for segmented flows.
- First-party data. Behavior on your own site. High average order value customers, repeat buyers, cart abandoners.
- Third-party enrichment. Filling in what you don’t know about a customer once you have their name, email, and address.
He also made a point that a lot of brands miss. “Abandoned cart” and “abandoned checkout” are not the same trigger. Kyle recently looked at a client’s setup and found their whole abandoned cart program was actually firing at checkout. Nobody was reaching shoppers who added to cart and walked away. His target is closing 50% of add-to-carts, when 30% is closer to the Shopify average.
And don’t lead with a discount.
“I would say 80% of the time it’s just a matter that they still want to check out and buy from you, but the timing is not right.”
— Kyle Hamar, CEO, OmniRocket
Send a reminder or two first. Discounts come later in the flow, if at all. Otherwise you’re giving away money for nothing.
Why does demand forecasting matter so much for ecommerce profitability?
Here’s where the conversation shifted from marketing to the stuff that actually keeps an ecommerce business alive. Kyle calls bad inventory planning a capital drain. Stock out and you lose sales and annoy customers. Overstock and your cash is sitting in a warehouse.
He quoted an old line he loves: revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is reality. For physical product brands, smart forecasting is how you protect the cash part.
The examples were strong. Nike cut supply chain lead times by 30% with AI demand forecasting. H&M used machine learning on weather, seasonality, and social trends to reduce overstock by 21%. One Shopify brand Kyle mentioned fixed chronic stockouts on its top SKUs and saw reorder rates jump 18% with no extra ad spend.
For Amazon sellers it gets worse. Kyle explained that the algorithm starts pulling back your organic ranking as your inventory gets low, not just once you’re out. Then you have to rebuild sales velocity from scratch.
So what should a brand actually do? His quick wins:
- Export 12 to 24 months of SKU-level sales and look for seasonality spikes
- Know the production lead time on your top 10 SKUs and set reorder points ahead of time
- Line up Q4 ad spend with inventory plans
- Keep a 10 to 15% safety stock cushion
“If I had to pick, are you going to be stocked out or are you going to be over inventoried? I would take over inventoried. If I’m overstocked, I can run a promotion. If I’m stocked out, I’m not selling.”
— Kyle Hamar, CEO, OmniRocket
For multichannel sellers on Shopify, Amazon, Walmart, and wholesale, he said spreadsheets stop working fast. That’s where tools like Cogsy come in.
Is a low customer acquisition cost actually the right goal?
This was my favorite part, and at first I wasn’t sure where he was going with it. Kyle argued that chasing the lowest possible CAC is often the wrong goal.
He leans on an old digital marketing rule: the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins. If you can only afford $20 to get a customer because you can only sell them one product, and your competitor has a bigger catalog and a real retention plan, they can spend $100 because they know what that customer is worth over time. Ad platforms are auctions. They win the eyeballs and the market.
“Optimizing for the lowest customer acquisition cost is not necessarily the smartest long-term investment in your business, but you can only unlock that if you have good customer lifetime value data.”
— Kyle Hamar, CEO, OmniRocket
And not every customer is equal. Some are worth 10 times more than others. If you’re not working to attract those people, you’re wasting ad dollars.
“Customer acquisition cost is blind without lifetime value.”
— Kyle Hamar, CEO, OmniRocket
That’s a big deal. Plenty of brands report CAC every week and have a fuzzy LTV number at best.
What tools does OmniRocket recommend for Shopify data?
Kyle’s philosophy is to keep the tech stack as small as possible. More tools means more complexity and cost, usually for small gains. His picks:
- Lifetimely for predictive customer lifetime value and the drivers behind it
- Triple Whale for LTV by channel and campaign attribution
- Cogsy (or Stocky) for inventory forecasting
- Klaviyo + Shopify for first-party segmentation
- Octane AI and Zigpoll for zero-party quizzes
- Enquire Labs (now Fairing) for post-purchase surveys that tell you why people bought
That last one deserves a second look. Post-purchase surveys tell you why someone chose you and what else they considered. You also pick up the exact words customers use, which you can put right back into your marketing.
The missing layer: consumer data enrichment
Here’s where it got interesting for me personally. Kyle said the final step in the data journey is third-party enrichment, and he sees a real gap there on the consumer side. Most of the big data providers are built for B2B, or they’re priced out of reach for a growing Shopify brand.
I agree with him, and it’s honestly a nudge for us at BDEX. We have consumer enrichment data and an API to go with it, and the ecommerce world doesn’t know that well enough yet. That’s on us to fix.
The bigger picture from this conversation is simple. The brands that win aren’t the ones with the most data. They’re the ones that connect what customers tell them, what customers do, and what they can learn from outside sources, and then act on it. Segment earlier. Forecast with real numbers. Know your LTV well enough to outbid the competition. Relevance drives revenue, and you can’t be relevant to someone you don’t understand.
Connect with Kyle Hamar: Visit OmniRocket, email kyle@omnirocket.com, connect with Kyle on LinkedIn, and check out his podcast, Beyond the Cart.
Need consumer data to enrich your customer records? Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert.”
Watch the full episode: Inside the Stacks: How Shopify Brands Enrich Data for Bigger Profits
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
