Horse racing produces excitement and adrenaline in two remarkably intense minutes. In the 2025 Breeders’ Cup qualifying races, fans witnessed not only one hundred and twenty seconds of raw athleticism and power, but the culmination of months of training and strategy.

E-commerce business owners benefit from a similar mindset. Until you’ve stepped into the arena—be that one of business, or racing—you just don’t understand how much work goes into things that look simple from the outside.

Let’s examine the grit and determination required to find success as a Shopify store owner.

The Value of Strategy

One of the best things about e-commerce is that it’s accessible. With a laptop, $200, and a few days of work designing graphics and writing product descriptions, you can launch an entire business. Unfortunately, many people leave it at that.

To be effective in the e-commerce space, you can’t just load up a website with dropshipping products, hit a generic Facebook ad, and wait for the money to pile in. Might you find some success with this approach? Maybe. Intermittently. And without any promise of sustained progress.

Just because it’s easy to get started with e-commerce doesn’t mean it’s easy to be successful. Strategy makes the difference.

Are you constantly studying and optimizing your acquisition costs? Are you upselling with bundling offers? Are you capturing email addresses and using them effectively in your marketing efforts? It’s these details that make or break a business.

Similarly, horse racing teams focus not just on speed and power, but on positioning, effort cadences, track layouts, diet, and nutrition. Ability just opens the door. Preparation is what helps you step through.

Understanding Your Market

Good horse teams prepare not just for racing in a general way, but for the specific venues and opponents they will be up against. Shopify store owners should be similarly concerned with both the trends that are specific to their niche and the competition.

In terms of trends, who is the most likely buyer for this product? A store selling puzzles is probably going to make its appeal very differently than a store selling golf equipment might.

The more specifically you understand your customers, the more effectively you can appeal to them.

The better you get at understanding who’s buying your products, when they’re doing it, and where they’re finding you, the better you can optimize your marketing. Not only will this generate more revenue in the long run, but it will also make your ad campaigns more efficient—which is to say, more affordable for you.

The Underdog Advantage

It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from—the best racing stories always involve an underdog element.

Seabiscuit, probably the most famous horse to ever live, was of common stock and had little in the way of obvious championship prospects.

Noted for his poor temperament and perceived lazy behavior, the wonky-looking horse was never an obvious superstar.

That’s exactly why a Depression-era audience was so eager to receive him. He found unlikely success in a time when the country sorely needed to believe things like that were possible.

Business owners almost always have a chip-on-their-shoulder kind of mindset. E-commerce might be the ultimate underdog venture for precisely the reason we mentioned earlier: everyone can get in. It’s what you do once you’ve established yourself that matters.

Dropshipping is on track to become a $2.5 trillion industry by 2034. Despite that massive potential, the average success rate can be fairly low. Still, real people find success every day by identifying strong products and leaning hard into specific niches.

You grab your slice of the pie through a combination of being smart and working hard. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you started out with. Underdogs win every day in the world of e-commerce.

Pushing to the Finish Line

It’s so often the ability to give it all they have at the moment they feel the most exhausted that makes a horse a champion. It’s coming down the stretch where races are won and lost.

In business, the situation is similar. When you’re designing a website, developing a product catalog, writing product descriptions, you’ll likely start to feel exhausted pretty quickly.

The work has only begun at this point. Success hinges on your ability to develop a robust CX system. A tight sales funnel. An activation strategy for previous customers.

How much endurance do you have? At the end of the day, this is often the biggest success differentiator in the world of business. You don’t need to be the best or the smartest. You just need staying power. Can you drive to the finish line like a champion horse?