Facebook ads work fine for the right products. If you're selling $100-$150 gadgets with low production costs, you can spend that entire amount acquiring customers and still profit. Real growth needs repeat purchases: consumable brands often lose money on the first sale, betting on future orders to break even.
The guys that are crushing it in e-commerce now, are they running profitable front-end Facebook traffic? I think it depends on what kind of products you're selling. If you're selling a gadget, $100, $150, so you can spend $100 to acquire a customer, like you have your COGS, shipping and stuff like that, and still be profitable in the first transaction. But then overall, like for the longevity of business, I think everyone needs to have some kind of like consumable products so the customers come back and buy again. And then for those consumable products, people that strictly sell those, I see that they're losing money on the front end.
How to track independant creators' performance for the products you're selling
