Play KA-CHING! this October and win big! 🕹️
Step away from the holiday grind to play our retro-style arcade game KA-CHING! for a chance to win $1K in design-dev credit from top Shopify agencies, plus a brand new Nintendo Switch 2!
Enter the KA‑CHING! giveaway for a chance to upgrade your store with $1K design-dev credit from Ben Stiller-approved Shopify agency, Barrel.
Want to work with Ben Stiller’s Shopify design agency? This could be your chance.
Rebuy’s retro-style arcade game KA-CHING! is your ticket to winning real-world prizes that can seriously level up your Shopify store.
By entering the giveaway, you could score $1,000 in design and development credits from one of our award-winning agency partners like Barrel, the team behind celebrity brand Stiller's Soda (yes, that Ben Stiller) and top Shopify sites for Cholula, Scarlet Johansen-founded The Outset, Grazly, and more.
I caught up with Lucas Ballasy, CEO at Barrel, to talk BFCM prep, how high-impact agencies think about ecommerce, and why now’s the perfect time to upgrade your site.
Ballasy and Express Checkout's Nate Rosen celebrate Barrel's launch of the Stiller Soda design project.
Tell us a little about Barrel. What makes your approach to ecommerce design/dev/strategy stand out?
Ballasy: We’ve been doing this for nearly two decades now, so we’ve seen how CPG brands evolve and how different digital looks today than it did even five years ago.
What makes us different is our specialization. We understand that for most of our clients, DTC isn’t their only channel. They’re in retail, on Amazon, and aiming for Target or Whole Foods. So we help them treat their site like a digital flagship, with a cohesive journey that speaks to all kinds of customers, not just shoppers ready to buy, but also those looking for education, retail info, or deeper brand connection.
“The website is the only channel a brand can fully control.”
What trends or challenges are top of mind for your ecommerce clients heading into BFCM 2025?
Ballasy: We’re seeing brands think beyond discounts and short-term promos. With the tariff situation and all sorts of economic impact, it can hurt brands to offer those discounts and promotions.
And so we're really helping our clients think about long-term trust building, you know, storytelling, education, loyalty, but also things like, who are the top customers and is there something that you can give them to say thanks and show your value?
That might mean loyalty programs, referral programs, or rolling out exclusive SKUs or flavors for the holidays.
These brand-building efforts are just as important and more sustainable than discounting, especially when the goal is to build real customer relationships.
What made you want to sponsor the KA-CHING! Giveaway?
Ballasy: Rebuy has been an amazing partner for years. Watching it evolve from a simple tool to a robust personalization platform has been exciting.
KA-CHING! felt like a great opportunity to deepen that partnership and show brands that BFCM doesn’t have to be chaotic. It can be fun, rewarding, and strategic. We loved what the campaign stood for and wanted to be a part of it.
“Customers come to your site from email, Instagram, TikTok, all mobile-first platforms. So your site has to be easy to navigate, fast, and frictionless.”
What kind of results are you hoping to see from the partnership for Barrel or your clients?
Ballasy: We’d love to connect with new merchants who need our help, but more than that, we see this as a way to bring value to the broader ecosystem alongside Rebuy.
Whether it leads to work or not, we just want to help brands feel supported and maybe have a little fun, too.
Got any quick tips for Shopify brands looking to optimize their store before Black Friday hits?
Ballasy: Focus on the basics, especially for mobile.
Customers come to your site from email, Instagram, TikTok, all mobile-first platforms. So your site has to be easy to navigate, fast, frictionless, and able to get a customer through the process of finding a product or exploring new products.
That can be as simple as smart PDP spacing, intuitive filters, clear navigation, and a smooth mobile experience.
Instead of hiding your product categories under a generic “Shop” menu, display all categories up front to remove an extra click and make it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for. On your product listing pages, be sure to offer filters that are intuitive and relevant, helping shoppers efficiently navigate your catalog.
Before you get into upsells or bundles, make sure the foundations are strong. We created a prep series to walk brands through it:
barrelny.com/black-friday-cyber-monday-2025
“Now more than ever is the time to invest in what [your website] experience looks like, feels like, but also what it says, and what content is on it. If you don’t own your storytelling there, you lose visibility elsewhere.”
Barrel has partnered with Rebuy to power personalized experiences for fast-growing brands. Can you share a specific example?
Ballasy: Through our partnership with Rebuy, we helped Grazly create a smarter, more personalized shopping experience that turned curiosity into conversion.
By integrating data-driven upsells and tailored bundling moments across the customer journey, the brand saw a 15% increase in AOV and a nearly 10% PPO conversion rate over a 30-day period.
How is Barrel using AI in your own workflows?
Ballasy: A few ways:
- Synthesizing transcripts and new business convos into actionable proposals
- Helping designers create placeholder content that feels real
- Assisting developers in turning designs into production-ready code
- And building an AI-powered internal knowledge tool that indexes all client conversations and documents, so anyone onboarding a new project can ask, ‘What are the top 5 things I should know?’
It’s already helping us onboard faster and stay aligned across teams.
How do you see the role of design + development work (like the top prizes in KA-CHING!) influencing brand growth strategies over the next few years?
Ballasy: The way that we have been thinking about this is: the website is the only channel a brand can fully control. In retail, your packaging might be turned around. End caps don't get set up properly. On Amazon or TikTok, you’re at the mercy of the algorithm.
So, how do you make sure that your website is something you feel most represents who you are as a brand, what you offer, what value you bring to customers, and how you want to be seen in the world?
Even if customers never see your website, it's now becoming the brain of the brand, if you will, in the way that we're interacting with AI search and all of these other discovery platforms that are starting to crawl and bring your website's information to other places for customers to access it.
We've been doing a lot of AI search work with our clients for months now. And consistently, we find that brands often lack the type of content that allows them to own their storytelling in channels like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
And so, we think now more than ever is a time to invest in what that experience looks like, feels like, but also what it says, and what content is on it. If you don’t own your storytelling there, you lose visibility elsewhere.
Bonus Question: What are you watching, reading, and/or listening to lately?
Ballasy: Every quarter our leadership team reads a book together. We just finished Multipliers by Liz Wiseman. I also just read The Science of Scaling by Ben Hardy. It’s been super helpful as we make tough decisions and plan for growth.
I’m always listening to audiobooks on runs, usually with a few titles going at once.
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