What Running an E-Commerce Business Taught Me About Design

In 2025 I started JTL Hub, an e-commerce business based in Santa Clara — importing goods and selling them online. After a decade of designing products for other companies, I finally became my own client. It has been the most honest design education of my life.

Every pixel has a price tag now

As a designer at a company, you advocate for the user and someone else worries about margins. As an owner, both jobs are yours, and they argue with each other daily. A beautiful product photo shoot costs real money; so does the return that happens because the photo overpromised. Running the business collapsed the distance between "design decision" and "consequence" to zero.

The surprise: this made me a better designer, not a more cynical one. Constraints didn't kill the craft — they told me exactly where the craft matters.

Listings are interfaces

A marketplace listing is a UI you don't fully control. You get a title field, a handful of images, and bullet points — that's your whole canvas. Designing within it uses every skill I have: hierarchy (which image is first?), copywriting (what question does the buyer have at this exact scroll depth?), and testing (change one variable, watch conversion).

I A/B tested product titles the way I used to A/B test onboarding flows at SPODIO. The mechanics are identical. Only the stakes feel different, because the revenue lands in — or vanishes from — my own account.

Customer service is user research you can't skip

At bigger companies, research was something we scheduled. Now every customer message is an unscheduled usability session. When three buyers ask the same question, my listing has a design flaw — full stop. When a return note says "not what I expected," that's a failed expectation-setting flow. I've come to treat my inbox as the most truthful research panel I've ever had.

Sourcing is a design discipline too

Importing goods taught me that the product experience starts long before the website. Packaging that survives shipping, instructions a customer can actually follow, the unboxing moment — these are designed experiences, and choosing what to import is itself a form of curation. My fine art training shows up here more than anywhere: taste, it turns out, is a business asset.

The takeaway

If you're a designer and you have the chance to sell something — anything — that you're fully responsible for, take it. You'll never look at a checkout flow, a product page, or a "simple copy change" the same way again.