Chances are your company has been running promotional programs for a while. From the very beginning there were probably "Two-for-One" or bundling schemes. Cart threshold promotions based on an aggregate analysis—"Free shipping on orders over $X" where $X is a general price point that's good for your business—can happen much earlier, too. All are great early ideas to drive early growth.

At some point, greater growth is found through per-user frontend customizations.

For shipping, that means taking the same $X free shipping threshold, but making it dynamic to the individual user based on an understanding of where the user is. For Customer A, it might be $42 but Customer B might be $77. Granular customizations like that will drive greater conversion, but to do so, operations must have tighter backend integration with the frontend store.

Other ideas here fall under recommendations instead of promotions. Nothing too novel here, with some of the ideas likely already implemented by the marketing team and powered by your frontend store—"Customer who bought X also bought Y, Z" recommendation blocks. But think of the marketing team as exclusively a growth driver, which is a problem because profit and margins matter as the business gets into the $50M-$100M per year sales range, as greater savings will finance better cash flow and stronger promotional programs. If marketing is focused on the top line, who is focused on the bottom line?

When thinking this way, the area operations can help is understanding which recommendations provide superior margins over other recommendations. For example, maybe a customer is looking at a shirt, and there are 10 products other customers bought with that shirt. It turns out that 3 of those 10 products have dimweights that, when bundled with the shirt, come in at under 2 pounds and fit into a box size that uses a cheap shipping rate. If a customer buys one of those 3 SKUs with the shirt instead of the other 7, the cost of shipping will be much better. Tight integration between backend and frontend systems for a recommendation engine that also provides optimized operating costs is a major secret behind some of the biggest sites in the world. Saving 10% on margin over millions (and in Amazon's case, billions) of orders starts to add up!