Why Amazon Wants You to Overspend on Ads, The Hidden Truth No One Talks About with John LeBaron

Feb 23, 2026

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John LeBaron is the CRO at Pattern, the leading e-commerce accelerator that helps brands scale profitably across marketplaces worldwide.

John runs the SaaS and Services business units for Pattern and oversees all global go-to-market activities for the company and its partners. Prior to joining Pattern, John ran marketing for the Google Cloud business at Rackspace and has held a variety of global marketing roles with leading tech companies including Apple, Cisco, and Ciena. He holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, an MSW from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Communications from Brigham Young University.

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> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

Challenges faced by e-commerce brands, particularly on Amazon, including competition and pricing pressures.
The importance of inventory management and maintaining stock levels to avoid losing market share.
Strategies for optimizing conversion rates, focusing on product imagery and continuous testing.
The role of data-driven approaches in improving traffic, conversion, price, and availability.
The significance of strategic pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and its relationship with organic rankings.
Insights on leveraging AI and technology for product listing optimization and advertising efficiency.
The impact of overseas competitors on the e-commerce landscape and brand profitability.
The concept of the "e-commerce equation" and its components: traffic, conversion, price, and availability.
Best practices for managing logistics and shipping to enhance operational efficiency.
The importance of continuous improvement and adapting to changes in the e-commerce environment.

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews John LeBaron, CRO at Pattern. They discuss how e-commerce brands can profitably scale on Amazon amid rising competition, pricing pressures, and operational challenges. John shares Pattern’s data-driven strategies—optimizing inventory, pricing, traffic, and conversion—using advanced AI tools and logistics solutions. Key takeaways include the importance of inventory availability, rigorous conversion rate optimization, and strategic PPC management to build organic rankings. The episode offers actionable advice for brands seeking sustainable growth and highlights Pattern’s role as a partner in navigating today’s complex e-commerce landscape.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Protect Your Availability or Lose the Game
Forecast demand aggressively, fix your inbound bottlenecks, and partner with fast-moving 3PLs—because every stockout destroys ranking, momentum, and profit.
Obsess Over Conversion, Starting With the Main Image
Run continuous A/B tests on your hero image, audit your live content weekly, and optimize every element (titles, bullets, A+, coupons, bundles) to lift conversion without increasing ad spend.
Use PPC to Own Keywords, Not Rent Them Forever
Shift ad spend toward keywords that improve organic rank, monitor Buy Box and conversion signals, and prioritize long-tail opportunities to build profitable, compounding visibility.

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Episode Sponsor

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

Transcript Area

John Lebaron 00:00:00 We're absolute zealots around something we call the e-commerce equation, which is revenue as a function of traffic times, conversion times, price times, availability. And I think that's very much the way that we think about accelerating brands is just isolating those specific variables of the equation and really going to work on okay for traffic, for example, there's paid traffic. There's, you know, organic traffic, there's off platform traffic. And what are all the hundreds of different kind of atomic levers that we want to pull and automate increasingly via AI for the brands that we represent. And and then helping them set an expectation, helping them forecast appropriately, helping them understand what is their ops upside.

Speaker 2 00:00:47 Welcome to the E-comm Breakthrough Podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You've already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level.

Josh Hadley 00:01:00 Are you tired of getting squeezed by Amazon, watching your sales fall? Watching more overseas competitors come in to overtake your market share? Watching the race to the bottom pricing.

Josh Hadley 00:01:12 Well, today's guest has the answer for you of how to di...