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?

David Caruso: I’d retired at 40 and lasted about two years before boredom got the better of me. I came back through speaking, but I missed actually building something. In 2019 I started BuyFactory.direct.

The name is the whole strategy. We buy factory direct and sell direct, so customers skip the layers of markup that sit between a factory floor and a shop shelf. Same product, often from the same factories the big brands use, without paying for someone else’s retail overhead.

What makes it different isn’t a clever gadget. It’s the model. We hold 400+ SKUs in our own warehouse and test new products constantly, so the range keeps evolving instead of going stale. Most of my niche competes on marketing spend and brand gloss. We compete on price and range, and we move fast on what’s selling. We run lean too: 60+ brands across 32 countries from a laptop in Thailand. Low overhead is deliberate. It’s what lets us pass the saving on.

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?

David Caruso: One turning point was getting ruthless about testing. We put around 50 new products through testing every month, and only about one in five survives. The bar is simple: a product has to hit a 2%+ conversion rate or it’s gone. No favourites, no second chances.

I learned that one the hard way. A couple of times I fell in love with a product, dead certain it would sell through the roof, and backed it on a feeling instead of a test. I’ve still got shelves in my warehouse loaded with those “sure things.” Expensive lesson.

So now the numbers decide. My gut is great for plenty of things, but picking winners isn’t one of them. Test small and watch the 2% line. The survivors get the budget.

The second was bringing fulfilment in-house. We built our own warehouse, stock everything ourselves, and ship direct to customers in 32+ countries through DHL. We’re now DHL Thailand’s number one customer by export volume.

Owning the warehouse changed the economics. We control the stock and the dispatch, so we’re not at the mercy of a third party’s timelines or markups. It also gave us the freight volume to negotiate shipping rates a smaller operator can’t get near, and that feeds straight back into the price the customer pays.

The lesson: in ecommerce, whoever controls the logistics controls the margin. Hand your warehouse to someone else and you hand them your margins too. We’d rather own 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?

David Caruso: Two channels carry us: Google and email. Google Search, SEO and Google Shopping bring the buyers in. Email is how we keep them coming back.

The biggest lesson is to build the website around the channel, not the other way round. Ours are built specifically for Google buyers. When someone searches for a product on Google, they’ve already decided they want it. We’re not there to convince them they need it. The demand is done. Our only job is to convince them we’re the right company to buy it from.

So every page is built for that one moment. The right product in front of them in seconds, a price with no nasty surprises, and every reason to pick us over the other tab they’ve got open. Match the site to the intent of the traffic and the conversion takes care of itself. Fight the channel and you’ll burn money all day.

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?

David Caruso: My customer is someone ready to buy, and AI assistants are still mostly used for research and discovery. So the high-intent purchase traffic still lands on Google for now. I’d be a fool to bet the whole business against that.

But “for now” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, so we’re getting ahead of it. We’ve added LLM summaries to every page and product, so when an AI reads our site it gets a clean answer to hand back. We run an LLMs.txt file on each of our 700+ websites to tell the models what matters. We’ve shifted keywords toward “best [product]” searches, added 30 FAQs to every product page, and built a proper buying guide for each product. It’s boring work, but it’s exactly the stuff an AI wants to quote.

We’ve also put serious time into presence off our own sites. Every brand has its own social accounts: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X, LinkedIn, even Trustpilot. And we work hard to earn brand mentions across as many channels and formats as we can. AI models build their answers from what the wider web says about you. Your own homepage is just one voice in that. The more places your brand shows up, and the more consistent it is, the more a model trusts you’re real and worth recommending.

The bigger move is under the hood. We’re migrating off WordPress and WooCommerce and building lightweight HTML sites with ecommerce built in. Faster, and far easier for a machine to read. The businesses that win the next round of search will be the ones whose sites are built for machines to understand, not just for people to scroll.

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?

David Caruso: Honestly, a lot of it is unglamorous. We just do the basics properly.

Email does the heavy lifting. Every buyer goes into post-purchase sequences, win-back flows when they go quiet, and alerts when something new lands in a range they’ve bought from. It’s not clever, it just works.

Delivery matters more than people give it credit for. Fast, reliable shipping through DHL quietly earns the trust. Get the parcel there when you said you would, and they come back without thinking twice.

After every sale we ask for a Trustpilot or Google review. Those reviews pull double duty: they bring the next customer in, and they tell the AI models we’re the real deal.

On service, we run AI for instant answers around the clock, backed by real people for same-day help on anything the bot can’t handle. Nobody waits days for a reply.

And for the deal-hunters, we run a separate flash-sale site, OnlineFlash.sale, that gives repeat buyers a reason to keep checking back.

It’s just the obvious stuff, done better than the next guy.

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?

David Caruso: Double down on testing. Build a system that kills your bad ideas fast and cheap, then put real money only behind what the data proves. Your taste will lie to you. The numbers won’t.

Right behind that, get AI-search ready this year, while it’s still optional. Make your site easy for a machine to read, earn brand mentions in as many places as you can, and write the content an AI would happily quote. The founders who wait will be invisible by the time they notice.

And own your customer relationship. Own your logistics where you can, and own your email list completely. Rented audiences and rented warehouses both get expensive the moment you lean on them.

What would I stop entirely? Two things. Stop trusting your gut on what will sell. I’ve got a warehouse full of “sure things” that prove the point. And stop pouring money into convincing people they need your product. Find the ones already searching to buy, and just be the obvious choice when they land.

Boring discipline beats clever instinct, every time.