More advertising spend will not fix a product listing that fails to convert, according to Gehad Mohamed, founder of the London-based marketplace agency Marketplace Minds. In his view, advertising only pays off once the listing underneath it can already turn a click into a sale.

“It’s a wheel, and it’s all connected,” he says. “Advertising is just one wheel of the ecommerce wheel.”

Gehad built that view over more than a decade managing ecommerce accounts on Amazon, eBay and, more recently, TikTok Shop, including stretches managing ecommerce for the skincare labels Dr. Botanicals and skinChemists and the home goods retailer a2z Rug. He founded Marketplace Minds in August 2022.

Today, Marketplace Minds works mostly with beauty, fashion, and home and garden brands selling on Amazon and TikTok Shop. Gehad says the agency is built to stay small and choosy rather than to add headcount, and it has also been recognized as one of TikTok Shop’s official partner agencies in the UK, a status he traces to weekly sessions at the platform’s London HQ as its shopping tools rolled out. That combination, long-standing ecommerce accounts paired with an early foothold in TikTok Shop, is what he argues makes his advice to brands credible rather than theoretical.

Advertising Is the Last Step, Not the First

“If any agency tells you it’s only about advertising, they just want to work with you for a few months until you fire them,” Gehad says.

His alternative is sequential. A good product comes first. Only then, he argues, can an agency build a listing worth advertising, since ads sent to a weak listing simply generate clicks that do not convert. Reviews follow sales, and good reviews in turn lower the cost of the next sale.

Gehad frames a converting listing around three qualities: clarity, value, and trust. “You don’t need to chase traffic,” he says. “The traffic will chase you, without paying money. It’s organic.”

That framework shapes how he pushes back on clients. He describes brand owners who default to the cheapest possible product spec, a choice he says often backfires once advertising costs are factored in. “You’re spending money on a better product, but you’re saving money on other wasted spend,” he says.

Marketplace Minds Turns Away More Clients Than It Signs

Gehad is deliberate about who he takes on. “I actually choose my clients,” he says. “I try to have one or two clients in the same category, so I don’t compete with myself,” he adds.

Rather than operating as an outside vendor, his agency positions itself as embedded within each client’s team. “We work with the brands as part of their own team,” Gehad says. “We’re available for them all the time.”

Gehad says that structure produces higher client retention than he sees elsewhere in the industry. “Other agencies probably accept everybody,” he says, arguing that broader intake without the same fit ends in more churn.

Pricing follows a hybrid model. “We have a minimum fee to sign with us,” Gehad says. “After that, we’re partners.” Beyond that baseline, compensation shifts toward performance as clients hit agreed KPIs, with the exact structure varying by each client’s own profitability model.

A Home and Garden Client Case Study

An unnamed home and garden brand has worked with Marketplace Minds since the agency’s founding and now sells across both Amazon and TikTok Shop. “When I joined, they were doing around half a million a year,” Gehad says. “In four or five years, I think now they are 25 million.”

He attributes the growth partly to the client’s willingness to act on ideas the agency surfaces, whether a new product concept or an adjacent category, whenever those ideas fit the brand’s own strategy.

The account also illustrates his broader point about sequencing. The relationship began with the product and listing work described above, well before TikTok Shop existed as a sales channel, and advertising was layered on only as the fundamentals held up.

TikTok Shop Sells Attention Before It Sells Product

On Amazon, a shopper searching for a product is already close to a purchase decision. On TikTok Shop, Gehad says, viewers are watching a piece of content first, and a sale often follows only if that content performs. 

“TikTok works a little differently than Amazon because it works on virality,” Gehad says. “You actually need traffic on TikTok.” That makes creator collaborations and appealing video work closer to a requirement than an option.

The upside extends past direct sales. “Some of my clients start getting approached by retailers, big offline retailers, because they saw the product on TikTok,” Gehad says, describing the channel as functioning as much like public relations as like a storefront.

That reach comes at a cost most small brands cannot absorb. “Not everybody can afford that,” he says. “Only big clients can afford the cost of generating all this content and sending out samples.” His advice for brands doing under a million a year is to hold off. “Once they’re ready, they can launch TikTok,” he says, “because they’ll be able to afford it.”

The audience has also surprised him. Before he started tracking the data, Gehad expected TikTok’s shopper base to skew teenage. The livestreams Marketplace Minds runs for clients tell a different story. “Most of the viewers are between 29 and 45,” he says. “There’s nobody from Gen Z.”

Gehad Expects Search Itself to Disappear

Gehad’s next prediction is less about tactics than about where shopping happens at all. “In two years, there’s going to be a big change,” he says. “What we’re doing now is going to be an old way of buying.”

His premise is that the search bar itself is being replaced. “There’s no Google search anymore. There is no Amazon search, there’s no search anymore,” he says, pointing to early moves by AI platforms into commerce as a signal. “ChatGPT started to introduce advertising within ChatGPT,” he notes. In his telling, Amazon’s own advertising business eventually routes through those AI answers rather than its search results, with sponsored listings surfacing whenever a shopper asks an AI assistant what to buy.

That shift, he argues, favors agencies that build AI capability now rather than later. “The agencies that stay will be the ones with strong AI teams who understand every tool in the market,” Gehad says.

He sees the underlying behavior change already underway outside ecommerce, in how people turn to AI for advice generally. “Some people trust AI more than they trust their own feelings now,” Gehad says.

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