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Liam Gallagher
Yes, that's my real name, and no, I can't sing. I've been making this joke for 30 years and I'm not going to stop now.
I started in retail the old-fashioned way: working at my parents' hardware store in Cork, Ireland, from age 14. I learned inventory management before I learned algebra. The store went under in 2009, killed by a combination of the financial crisis and a B&Q that opened two miles away. That experience, watching a family business get crushed by structural forces it couldn't control, shaped everything I've done since.
I moved to the US for grad school and joined Walmart's e-commerce team in 2016, during the period when they were trying to compete with Amazon by acquiring brands (Jet.com, Bonobos, ModCloth). I worked on marketplace operations. The internal culture clash between Walmart's retail DNA and the Silicon Valley playbook they were trying to import was one of the most educational experiences of my career. Not because it worked, but because it taught me that technology alone doesn't transform retail. Culture does. Operations do. Unit economics do.
I left Walmart for Shopify in 2019, where I led product for the checkout experience. Shopify's checkout processes about $200B in GMV annually, which means every percentage point of conversion improvement is worth billions to merchants. I became obsessed with the micro-interactions that determine whether someone completes a purchase: page load time, payment method availability, trust signals, shipping cost transparency. I AB-tested my way through hundreds of these decisions.
The thing about e-commerce that outsiders don't understand is how thin the margins are. A typical DTC brand on Shopify spends 30-40% of revenue on customer acquisition, 25-35% on COGS, 10-15% on shipping and fulfillment, and 5-10% on platform and tool costs. That leaves maybe 5-15% contribution margin before fixed costs. The brands that survive are the ones that understand this math. The ones that die are the ones that raise a Series A and try to buy their way to scale.
I left Shopify in 2024 and started writing about the real economics of e-commerce. My first Signal piece was a teardown of Shein's logistics model that included cost-per-garment breakdowns I sourced from three different supply chain contacts. It did well because the numbers were real, not estimated.
I live in Toronto with my wife and two kids. I still help my mum with the books for the small garden center she started after the hardware store closed. She's on Shopify now. I set it up for her. She says the checkout is "grand."
Experience
- Product Lead, Shopify (Checkout)
- Marketplace Operations, Walmart E-commerce
- BSc, University College Cork; MBA, Kellogg