Vibe coding for CMOs in e-commerce.
An e-commerce CMO lives in the gap between Shopify and Klaviyo, building the quiz, the promo page and the landing page test the platform cannot. The tension is that the best of those tools collect a phone number and hand out a discount code, and both of those are things the law and the fraud rings care about more than the platform does.
What is true about software in e-commerce before you write a prompt.
E-commerce executives have a platform that does most things and a long list of things it does not. Vibe coding fills the list: the returns portal, the wholesale order form, the inventory view, the promotion tool. Every one of them touches orders, customers and money, and every one of them is visible to shoppers or connected to the systems that serve them.
Never store card data yourself
Payment details go through the payment provider and nowhere else. A tool that touches a card number, even briefly, brings PCI obligations the company does not want. The AI will happily build a card form. Do not let it.
Orders and inventory must agree
A tool that updates stock in one place and not the other oversells. A tool that changes an order without telling the platform breaks fulfilment. Integrations need to be two-way and idempotent, or read-only.
Traffic arrives all at once
A promotion tool or a returns page that worked in testing will be hit by thousands on launch day or Black Friday. Hosting, caching and rate limits are part of the build, not an afterthought.
Customer data is personal data
Names, addresses, order history and email. Privacy law applies, deletion requests must be honoured, and marketing consent is a record you have to keep.
What a CMO in e-commerce builds first.
01The product finder quiz
A quiz that recommends a product, tags the shopper in Klaviyo with their answers and sends them to a pre-filled cart. Built first because it captures emails at a rate no popup matches.
02The single-use promo code page
A campaign page that generates one code per visitor from the Shopify discount API, expires it after a day, and caps redemptions. The alternative is one shared code that ends up on a coupon extension by lunchtime.
03The paid social landing page test
Variant pages with add-to-cart through the Storefront API, so a test is judged on orders instead of clicks. Cached and rate-limited before the first ad runs.
CMOs in every industry tend to build the same four things. The CMO page has that list.
The quiz collects phones and texts them without consent
The quiz asks for a mobile number to send results, and the tool pushes every number into the SMS platform as a subscriber. There was no checkbox with the required consent language and no record of the timestamp. Under the TCPA each unsolicited text can cost hundreds of dollars, plaintiff firms search for exactly this, and one campaign to ten thousand numbers is a lawsuit worth more than the year's revenue.
The pattern underneath is the one every CMO hits: every email and phone number a visitor typed sits in a database the AI set up with default settings. The admin page has no login, or the export URL has no check. Marketing just became the source of a data breach.
What a safe build in e-commerce usually runs on.
Builds usually sit next to Shopify, BigCommerce or a similar platform, connected through the platform's API with a scoped key, hosted on Vercel or comparable, with Postgres for anything the platform does not store. Payments stay inside the platform or Stripe. Public pages get caching and rate limiting before launch.
What changes for a CMO in e-commerce.
A CTO in your corner reads every public page and every form before it ships. Where the data goes, who can read it, whether the keys are hidden, whether the page will survive the launch traffic. You still build at campaign speed. You just never have to explain to legal why the lead list was public.
What CMOs in e-commerce ask.
A CTO who has read e-commerce apps before yours.
Thirty minutes, free, no card. What you built, what is going on with it, whether we can help.
In your corner.