By: Amal Patir
Deyvi Mardelli didn’t “enter” e-commerce—he built it piece by piece. In Venezuela, while studying, he sold in brick-and-mortar stores and online and, without naming it, learned inventory, customers, and marketing. After emigrating to the United States, he started from scratch, working as a waiter and spending nights in front of a laptop. From that rhythm came American Point, his first truly successful venture and the turning point that left him with a certainty: his craft is building brands that solve real needs and connect with people. While pursuing a Master’s in International Business Management, he launched Alphagear. He confirmed something that has guided him ever since: study, execute, and measure—the combination that turns ideas into businesses.
His specialization didn’t come in the form of a diploma, but in results. He took courses, sought mentors, tested tactics in his own shops, and translated every lesson into systems. That’s his differentiator. Mardelli doesn’t see e-commerce as “selling a product,” but as a whole mechanism in which the message, content, ads, data, and post-sale align to build relationships, not just transactions. He obsesses over the “why” behind a purchase—what motivates the customer, what holds them back, and what must happen for them to return. Reading data with intent, closing the loop between creativity and performance, and making decisions informed by surveys, reviews, and behavior is, to him, the actual work of an operator.
From that trench, the first significant challenge in e-commerce today is to stand out truly. Anyone can open a store; very few manage to build a brand with identity and concrete proof. The fight isn’t to upload another SKU, but to build an experience that makes sense and that the customer recognizes as their own. It starts with a crisp message that explains the problem you solve, the promise you keep, and the evidence that supports it. It continues on the product page, where benefits live alongside real cases and user-generated content, and it’s reinforced with a consistent narrative at every touchpoint.
The second challenge is economic and operational: advertising is more expensive, and algorithms change without asking permission. Spending more is not a strategy. The discipline lies in optimizing every dollar with clear hypotheses, simple tests, and quick decisions. Mardelli works with short validation windows, measures conversion and CAC by audience and by message—not just by channel—and documents the concepts that work so he can iterate without losing coherence. Creativity stops being a lucky strike and becomes a process that combines authentic content, constant testing, and a library of learnings that guide investment.
The third point is a delicate balance: automating without losing humanity. Technology enables personalization, segmentation, and flow triggering at scale, but if the brand voice becomes robotic, trust breaks. Winning brands, he argues, automate the back end and care for the front with empathy: messages that sound human, support that actually solves, brief surveys that feed product and copy, and a post-purchase experience that accompanies rather than vanishes after payment. AI is a valuable accelerator—to produce text, images, and video, or to prioritize segments—as long as there’s human review and an explicit criterion for what gets published and why.
Looking to 2025, Mardelli sees two forces intersecting. On the one hand, AI will help continue to lower production costs and accelerate creative testing. On the other hand, the market will demand authenticity; real user content will carry more weight as social proof and as raw material for ads. In that context, micro-influencers become powerful levers: small, close, and trustworthy audiences, from whose profiles you can also run paid campaigns that feel organic and convert better than distant mega-accounts.
His day-to-day is a condensation of three passions that explain how he operates. The first is content creation: shaping the idea, translating it into assets, and watching how it performs in the feed and in ads. The second is media buying, where every hypothesis is tested against real data and each iteration seeks efficiency without sacrificing brand story. The third, his favorite, is performance analysis: surveys, comments, metrics, and cohorts that reveal which products are worth launching, which sales angles resonate, and which experience tweaks move the needle. His method resembles a wheel that never stops turning: clear message, intentional testing, data reading, improvement, and back to the start.
Behind that wheel is character. Mardelli describes himself as stubborn and passionate—“a little crazy,” but focused. He acknowledges down days, but doesn’t stop. He moves, learns, tries again. That consistency— that “controlled madness”—sustains progress when the environment tightens. In a sector where novelty shouts, he insists on what few pursue with discipline: building on fundamentals and letting performance speak for itself.
That holistic view can be summed up in a simple idea: a brand that scales is living.
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