May Pan’s career sounds, in her own telling, a little like the order of a long night out.
She started at PepsiCo, fresh out of university and looking after Tropicana in Canada at 18. Then came Pizza Hut, where she moved properly into ecommerce. After that, Diageo. Now, after orange juice, Gatorade, crisps, pizza and alcohol, she is ecommerce director at Haypp UK, one of the most prominent online retailers in nicotine pouches.
“My career has mirrored my lifestyle a little bit,” she laughs. “Growing up, fresh out of uni, drinking energy drinks and having crisps for lunch, to fried food and pizza, to alcohol.”
The obvious joke is that a kebab chain should be next. The more serious point is that Pan has spent her working life in categories where habit, taste and brand loyalty matter an awful lot, and where the consumer relationship is rarely as simple as a transaction.
It’s all been useful experience for her current role at Haypp, where she’s helping to build a business in a market that’s growing quickly, attracting new entrants almost weekly, and still being explained to many of the people it hopes to serve.
Nicotine pouches remain a low-penetration category in the UK. Pan says they are used by around two per cent of the adult population, compared with much higher levels of smoking and vaping. For Haypp, that means there’s plenty of room to grow. It also means the company is selling into a market where many potential customers are still learning what the product is, how it differs from vaping or smoking, and how to choose between brands, flavours and strengths.
“The UK alone has so much promise,” Pan says. “There’s definitely a lot of runway for growth, especially as our company focuses on tapping into consumers that are looking for a less harmful alternative to smoking and vaping.”
Pan joined Haypp inMay 2024. Her title is ecommerce director, but the role sounds much broader than that. She looks after the UK market, sits across commercial and marketing, and still finds herself doing the scrappy jobs that come with a fast-growing operation. Over one weekend, Haypp was sampling at Sheffield Station. Pan was there filming social media footage.
“I feel like I’m kind of a jack of all trades,” she says. “I’ve been called a business unit manager. I’m also the commercial and marketing director. It’s definitely a jack of all trades, hopefully a master of a few.
There’s a looseness to that description, but beneath it is a disciplined view of what ecommerce now demands. Pan came to the field through Pizza Hut, which she points out was the first food that could be ordered online in the US in 1994. At Diageo, she moved deeper into the product and technology side of ecommerce, looking at the platforms that sat beneath global websites.
That changed how she thought about online retail. Ecommerce wasn’t only marketing, or only trading, or only technology. It was design, service, operations, data, psychology and logistics all running at the same time.
“You became a design expert in trying to understand how to convert people on the site,” she says. “What motivated people to buy, whether it was the colour of a button or the placement of a button.”
At Haypp, the psychology is especially important because Pan is not a nicotine pouch user herself. She has never smoked, never vaped and doesn’t use the products she now sells. In some categories, that might be a problem. Pan doesn’t see it that way.
“I’m a testament that you don’t have to use the products to actually know how to sell it,” she says.
Her starting point isn’t the product, but the customer’s hesitation. Online shoppers, she argues, are often looking for reassurance long before they are ready to buy. The retailer’s job is to reduce the fear of making the wrong decision. “Nobody loves buyer’s remorse,” she says. “As a company, you need to figure out how to help eliminate that.”
For Haypp, that means education as much as conversion. The company produces articles, videos and social content explaining what nicotine pouches are, how they work and how they differ from snus, smoking and vaping. It also works with manufacturers on sampling, giving people a physical route into a category that can otherwise feel abstract online.
Preference in nicotine pouches, as with any similar habit, is deeply personal. A shopper may care about flavour, strength, format or brand. Haypp sells more than 900 products, which gives customers choice, but also creates the risk of overwhelming them. The site has to make range feel like a benefit rather than a wall of options.
“When you want to pick a specific flavour or pick a specific brand, having a large assortment available to people is important,” Pan says. “But then also when you come to the site, we do try to guide people into figuring out which one is best for them.”
Her shorthand for the business is “assortment, price and education”. It’s not glamorous, but it is pointed.
Pan is also careful about the ecommerce industry’s obsession with removing friction. She has heard the phrase so often she jokes she would be a millionaire if she had been paid every time. Customers want ease, they want speed and they want fewer barriers, but Haypp operates in a category where some friction has a purpose.
The first kind is discovery. A good shop assistant can help a customer think through what they want, even if that experience can be uneven. Online, Pan says, that role still has not been properly recreated. Haypp’s version is self-discovery through content, comparison and product guidance.
The second kind is youth access prevention.
“I would definitely categorise that as positive friction,” she says. “We want to make sure that as much as we are making it easier and anticipating our consumer’s needs, that we are very much only making it easier for the people that are of age.”
That responsibility matters in a market Pan describes as “the Wild West”. She says every competitive review seems to reveal another five new players. In a category growing by an estimated 60 to 90 per cent year on year, opportunism is inevitable.
Haypp’s answer is to focus on price, quality and convenience. The convenience piece includes next-day delivery across the UK and same-day delivery in London through its logistics partner Hived. Around half of Haypp’s London orders use same-day delivery, according to Pan.
Quality is where the company is trying to make a more distinctive claim. Haypp tests every product it sells, including nicotine strength and pH levels, and publishes the results through NicoLeaks, its lab-testing platform. Products can be checked, challenged and compared. Failed products are visible too.
“We make sure that if we’re putting a product onto our site, what they’re claiming in terms of efficacy and strength levels is accurate,” Pan says. For a category still earning mainstream trust, that transparency is a huge commercial benefit, and a key differentiator.
“When you’ve got whack-a-mole competitors coming in trying to earn a quick buck because the category is growing tremendously, that’s fine,” she says. “But we know that we’re in it for the long term.”
Pan is already thinking about how that long term may change ecommerce itself. Agentic commerce, where AI assistants search, compare and buy on behalf of consumers, could alter the role of the website entirely.
“There could come a time where a website itself is not even needed anymore,” she says. “As a customer, you may not even look at a website anymore, but still be able to buy.”
Yet her response is that AI does, and will, still need information. It needs product data, scientific evidence, reviews, content and credibility. The future may look shiny at the front end, but much of the work is buried in data structures, modular systems and content that can be used wherever the customer turns up.
“I would love to say we’re building a little robot,” she says. “But to be honest, a lot of the work is in the unsexy.”
That may be Pan’s most useful lesson for retailers watching the next wave of ecommerce arrive. She says that the companies best placed for this wave will know what customers need, can test rather than guess, and have the information architecture to move when the market does.
For Pan, that still comes back to a simple principle.
“We shouldn’t be settling debates internally as a company,” she says. “If you’re not sure what the right answer is, then let the consumer decide.”
In a market moving as quickly as nicotine pouches, that’s a sensible place to land. Haypp is selling a new habit to a cautious customer, in a category crowded with noise. Pan’s job is to make the experience faster where it should be fast, slower where it should be careful, and credible enough that people come back.
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