Brendan Gillen, Melbourne (2026)

15/09/2026

Two humans run my Shopify store. The rest is handled by Claude. It's simple enough to write in an email, so here it is. I use a framework called TEACH: Task, Explain, Actions, Connect, Hone.

Task. Pick one repeatable job with a clear right answer, not "fix my ads." "Reply to product reviews." "Write the weekly SEO blog." "Draft ad copy from a landing page." If you can't say it in one line, it's not the task. Pick something you do daily, small enough to train a new hire on.

Explain. Tell Claude when to do the task and what triggers it. "Do this when I say reply to reviews." Or set a weekly scheduled task, Monday 10am.

Actions. Write the exact steps, in order, the way you'd explain it to a new hire on day one. Log into Shopify. Check the reviews app. Split into positive and negative. Draft replies to the positive ones. Send me the negative ones.

Connect. What does it need access to? Shopify, reviews app, ad account. Say it plainly, then connect it in Claude.

Hone. Test it on something real. One product, five reviews. See what it gets wrong, fix that thing, keep going until you're happy. Then ask Claude to turn it into a skill file.

The first time you run a new skill, get it to draft for approval, not post live. Every skill I've built needed a tweak after the first run. That's not failure, that's hone at work. Once it's right, it stays right. You don't rebuild it, you just run it.

I built a "reply to reviews" skill this way in about fifteen minutes. It logs in, checks reviews, drafts replies, sends me the ones that need a human. Used to take fifteen minutes a day, an hour a week. Now it takes zero.

Find five or six tasks like this and you'll save a whole day. If there's one task you do the same way every week, that's your first skill. Write the steps down today and start building.

B

P.S. We build skills like this with Academy members, tailored to your store. Apply here for help installing your first one: https://lp.ecomacademy.co/apply

12/09/2026

Two humans run my entire Shopify brand now.

Not "two humans plus a big team plus some AI tools sprinkled on top."

Two humans. Full stop.

Everything else, SEO, blog posts, website optimisation, ad creative, email marketing — that's Claude.

When I tell people this, they ask me for my ‘prompt library’ or the ‘AI app’ I am using..

I don't have either.

A prompt is you doing the work with an extra step.

You open a chat, you explain your brand for the ninth time, you paste in a product, you get something back, you paste it somewhere else.

You've added a step to your job and called it automation.

Or you install the newest AI app, and train it up, spend time on it.. only to find that in 4 months time a better one has come along and you need to move everything across.

That's not what's happens on my store.

What's running my store is skills.

Think of a skill like a recipe. Ingredients, method, and a bit of taste-testing until it's right. Once it's written down properly, anyone in the kitchen can cook the same dish, the same way, forever.

Teach Claude the recipe once how you write a blog post, how you reply to a review, how you brief an ad and it doesn't forget it next Tuesday.

Then set a schedule, and let it do its thing.

It just runs it.

Same task. Every time.

Without you.

It's you finally writing the recipe down.

Go and count how many times this month you've typed almost the exact same instruction into a chat window, or had to repeat yourself because AI got it wrong.

That number is your skills list.

B

P.S. This is one of the things we build with members inside the Academy. Apply here if you want a hand installing it in your own store → https://lp.ecomacademy.co/apply

25/08/2026

So the post I sent earlier this week announcing I was holding an AI workshop went a little crazy.

We had 50+ registrations in the first 30 minutes… and they just keep coming..

Way more than I had anticipated.

So I have decided to increase the amount of seats we can host on zoom and leave the registrations open for another day.

However, once we are maxed out, I will need to close the page tonight.

So just to recap..

I'm running a free, live, 2-hour workshop called How to run your Shopify store on 80% AI and 20% you on Thu 27 August, 10:00am AEST (AU)/Wed 26 August, 8:00pm ET (US).

Here's why I'm running it.

Most store owners trying to buy back time fall into one of three camps.

- They hire a VA or a manager and wait weeks to get anything off their plate
- They DIY it with a pile of apps that don't talk to each other and end up doing more admin, not less
- They have used YouTube to teach them, but it never works the same as what’s shown in the video.
It's not a budget problem. It's not a skill problem. It's that nobody's shown you the AI system that replaces most of what you're doing by hand right now.

That's what I'll walk through, live, in four parts:

- Connecting AI to your Shopify store properly, no code, just your live product, order, customer and inventory data
- Mapping out what you can hand off first, in a breakdown built for your store specifically
- Building one real thing together, live so you can implement it in your store straight on the call
- The framework for then being able to do it for every job in your business.

Register now and the AI Skills & Prompt Swipe File is yours straight away, the actual Claude Skills I run in my own stores, plus prompt templates for product pages, ads, email, blogs, SEO and reporting. It's yours whether you make it live or not.

Join the workshop here: https://goec.ai/workshop

Two hours, live, free. You'll walk out with AI actually connected to your store, and the AI Skills & Prompt Swipe File is yours the moment you register, even if you can't make it live.

If the timing's wrong this time, no hard feelings.

21/08/2026

When I started my latest ecommerce business, I had one goal.

Build a business that gives me a life I love.

And the things I love are..

Spending time with my kids

Hanging out with my wife

Travelling the world

I didn’t want a business that tied me to a desk or a schedule.

So I went on a mission to build the most simple, human-free business possible.

Lucky for me.. this happened around the same time AI actually got good.

And I asked myself, what would happen if I tried to use AI to run the majority of my business for me.

That’s when the concept 80% AI, 20% Human stores was born.

I began testing it on my store.

Every repetitive job. From scratch.

Here's what happened:

Marketing Emails Designed, written and sent.

Ads checked daily, managed weekly.

Customer replies for the repeat questions are drafted before I've opened the inbox

Website conversions monitored, reported and optimsed

Blogs written for search engines and posted every week.

And more..

Total cost: my time and a Claude subscription.

Total time to set up: about a week of evenings.

The hours back alone have paid for themselves many times over.

But the bigger thing is what it unlocked.

I was not the bottleneck in my buiness.

I didn’t have to be ‘on 24/7’ to keep the business growing.

I didn’t have to miss out on time with my family.

And I could work from pretty much anywhere.

That's the actual unlock. Not the hours.

The evenings.

I am not your guru. I'm a guy with a real store who figured out something useful and now wants to show you how it works.

So you can build a business you love.

If you want to implement AI to run your store, comment below.

B

20/08/2026

Steal my brand visibility prompt..

20/08/2026

When I started my latest ecommerce business, I had one goal.

Build a business that gives me a life I love.

And the things I love are..

Spending time with my kids

Hanging out with my wife

Travelling the world

I didn’t want a business that tied me to a desk or a schedule.

So I went on a mission to build the most simple, human-free business possible.
Lucky for me.. this happened around the same time AI actually got good.

And I asked myself, what would happen if I tried to use AI to run the majority of my business for me.

That’s when the concept 80% AI, 20% Human stores was born.

I began testing it on my store.

Every repetitive job. From scratch.

Here's what happened:

Marketing Emails Designed, written and sent.

Ads checked daily, managed weekly.

Customer replies for the repeat questions are drafted before I've opened the inbox

Website conversions monitored, reported and optimsed

Blogs written for search engines and posted every week.

And more..

Total cost: my time and a Claude subscription.
Total time to set up: about a week of evenings.
The hours back alone have paid for themselves many times over.

But the bigger thing is what it unlocked.
I was not the bottleneck in my buiness.

I didn’t have to be ‘on 24/7’ to keep the business growing.
I didn’t have to miss out on time with my family.

And I could work from pretty much anywhere.

That's the actual unlock. Not the hours.
The evenings.

I am not your guru. I'm a guy with a real store who figured out something useful and now wants to show you how it works.

So you can build a business you love.

If you want to implement AI to run your store, comment on this post.

19/08/2026

AI will break your business.

Lately I've been talking about running a store on 80% AI, 20% human.

Easy to say, not so easy to do.

The reason for that is most humans try and use AI to do things for them that they have no idea how to do themselves.

That’s why when we hand something over to AI, we know what the results should look like.

We know whether what its telling us is good or bad.

We get it to do the 80%, then as humans, we validate the 20%.

Too many people trust AI 100%.

So, today, if you want to use AI like a pro, this is what you need to do:

1. Find a task that you do every day that is costing you time. It doesn’t have to be huge.. something that maybe takes you 20-30mins a day.
2. Open Claude, explain it the task you do every day, and ask it if you can teach it to do it for you.
3. Get it to do a test run of the task.
4. Check that the results are what you expect, and if they aren’t, then keep teaching Claude what good looks like until its right (this is the 20% human bit)
5. Once it’s working as expected, schedule it as a daily task.

This is the process I use, and the one I teach inside the Ecommerce Academy.

It works, it gives me time back, and at least I know how to check whether AI is doing a good job or not.

If you want help implementing this in your business, drop a comment below.

18/08/2026

Use these tools to come up in AI chats for related questions!

17/08/2026

Hustling sucks.

For years I told store owners the same thing.

"You want to scale? Work harder than everyone else, do more than everyone, learn everything, chase the latest strategy & hustle harder."

Do that, and success is guaranteed.

That’s what we used to have to do.. ‘Outwork everyone’

I was wrong.

Not "kind of" wrong. Properly wrong.

Because the game changed in the last few months and most store owners haven't caught up yet.

Here's what I mean.

Last month I went on a trip to Thailand.

Our marketing specialist (Gab) was on holiday in Eurpore.

And our operations manager only works 2-3 hours per day.

6 months ago, we would have had to pause the store for a few weeks.

But this time, my store Dosed, kept running without any input from us.

In fact, Catherine (my wife) sent me a message while I was away asking what I did differently.

Because we had our best week in sales ever.

And no one was even working on the business.

Well, no human was working on the business.

Our AI systems took care of it.

AI looked after our ads

AI did our marketing

AI managed the customer service

AI kept on top of things for is.

And it did a better job than us at it.

We set it up as humans, and let it do its thing.

I enjoyed Pina Colada’s in Phuket

Gab was sipping Aperol Spritz in the Greek Islands.

I don't need to sit at the laptop for that 80% anymore. That's the whole shift.

And once I clocked that, I started looking at every "I don't have time" problem differently. It isn't a hiring problem or an hours problem anymore. It's a "you didn't know you could hand this off" problem.

I've been running my stores this way for a while now. The time I've got back has been silly.

Start using AI to run your store now.. Or you'll still be doing this the hard way in a year.

16/08/2026

People don't use search engines anymore.. they do this instead

Brendan Gillen

15/09/2026

12/09/2026

25/08/2026

21/08/2026

20/08/2026

20/08/2026

19/08/2026

18/08/2026

17/08/2026

16/08/2026

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Featured

Share

Listing takedown request