How Burning Daily Built Trust First in a Restricted Category
Manny Soto is the Director of Operations at Burning Daily, a hemp-derived cannabinoid brand built around compliance, chain-of-custody tracking, and a tightly run fulfillment operation. This interview is worth reading if you want a practical look at how operational discipline, not louder advertising, can become the main growth advantage.
In this edition of the Ecommerce Authority Playbooks series, we dive into how
Burning Daily grows, retains customers, and prepares for the future of search in 2026 and beyond.
The interview
1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?
Manny Soto: We built Burning Daily around one principle. If the operation is clean, the customer experience takes care of itself. Most brands in the hemp-derived cannabinoid space were racing to get products on shelves when we entered the market.
We took a different position. We focused on compliance systems, chain-of-custody tracking and fulfillment infrastructure that most distributors in this category skip entirely. That transparency is what separates us, not a flashier product or a bigger ad budget, but a cleaner operation that customers can trust.
2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?
Manny Soto: Two moments stand out, and both came from looking at data we already had but were not acting on fast enough. After reviewing our full buying history, I went back to our packaging supplier and proposed a long-term volume-based agreement. We landed an 18 percent reduction in packaging costs over the following year, plus a net-45 payment term that freed up thousands of dollars monthly.
The second turning point was SKU accuracy. In a regulated category, an inaccurate order is not just a customer service problem, it is a compliance problem. So we rebuilt the fulfillment process from the ground up, adding barcode verification, tighter receiving SOPs and real-time inventory reconciliation. Order accuracy improved measurably and our return rate dropped alongside it.
3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?
Manny Soto: Most major ad platforms restrict hemp-derived cannabinoid products, so paid social is not the reliable growth engine it is for most e-commerce brands. That constraint forced us to build differently. The three channels that drive our revenue are organic search, email and direct repeat purchase, and each one rewards trust over volume.
Organic search works because we invested early in education-first content that answers the questions our customers actually have. Email works because we segment based on purchase history, so the communication feels relevant rather than generic. The lesson across all three is straightforward. In a restricted category, you earn the channel. You do not buy it.
4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?
Manny Soto: AI search rewards authority over keywords, and it surfaces sources that answer questions completely, accurately and without ambiguity. Our content was already structured around education because our customers needed it, not because we were optimizing for an algorithm. The fact that it aligns with how AI assistants evaluate content is a byproduct of doing the right thing early.
The one adjustment we made in 2026 was tightening the structure of our product and educational pages. Shorter paragraphs, clearer headers and more direct answers at the top of each page. AI assistants pull from the first clear answer they find, so we made sure ours was actually clear.
5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?
Manny Soto: Repeat customers are not built by marketing. They are built by the experience between the order confirmation and the delivered package. We treated order accuracy as the foundation of retention before we invested in anything else.
From there, we built a VIP early access system for our most engaged customers. About 48 hours before any major launch, we send a private shopping link to our most consistent buyers, and around 38 percent of them used the early access window during our last event. Many forwarded the link to people they knew without us asking. That organic sharing drove traffic we did not pay for, and it came from simply making our best customers feel like they were first in line.
6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?
Manny Soto: Stop buying growth before you have earned it. Most founders drive traffic to a store with fulfillment gaps and no real retention system behind it, and then spend more on ads to replace the customers they just lost. That cycle is expensive and completely avoidable.
Double down on your fulfillment process until it is boring. Document every step, track your order accuracy rate weekly and get your return rate down before you scale your ad spend up. Stop treating retention as a marketing problem. Retention breaks at the warehouse, not at the inbox.
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