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Jason & Scot Show Episode EP337 – Agentic Commerce at Citi’s Global Consumer & Retail Conference

Retailgeek — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 23:56:02 +0000

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 337 is a panel discusion on the Future of Agentic Commerce from Citi’s Global Consumer & Retail Conference.

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Chapters

0:30 Welcome to the Jason and Scot Show
1:53 Defining Agentic Commerce
5:56 Panel Introductions
8:46 E-Commerce Growth Insights
11:15 E-Commerce vs. Brick and Mortar
13:26 The Rise of Retail Media Networks
18:41 ChatGPT and AI in Retail
25:38 The Role of LLM in Shopping
31:25 Comparing Sparky and Rufus
36:14 Advertising Landscape Changes
41:47 Protocol Wars in Agentic Commerce
48:46 Future of Retail Competitors

Episode 337 of the Jason & Scot Show was recorded on Tuesday, March 10th, 2026

Recorded on Tuesday, March 10th, 2026, this episode features an insightful and in-depth discussion about the transformative nature of agentic commerce, a topic that has captured the attention of the retail world. Jason Retail Geek Goldberg and Scott Wingo were honored to participate in a panel at Citi’s 2026 Global Consumer and Retail Conference in Miami, where they engaged with industry heavyweights Ron Josie and Paul LeJoux. Together, they unpacked the remarkable shifts occurring in traditional retail due to the rise of AI technologies and new consumer behaviors.

The conversation commenced with Ron Josie, Managing Director of Citi’s Internet Equities Research, framing the discussion by highlighting the growing impact of agentic commerce on e-commerce. During the last few quarters, countless companies, including eBay and Airbnb, have reported an uptick in traffic influenced by AI technologies like ChatGPT and Gemini, leading to higher conversion rates and overall sales growth. With Target recording a staggering 40% month-over-month traffic growth attributed to these AI tools and Amazon boasting an impressive 300 million users engaging with its new digital assistant Rufus, the narrative around AI in retail is one of rapid expansion and opportunity.

After setting the stage, the panelists introduced themselves. Jason explained his extensive background as a fourth-generation retailer and lead of commerce strategy for Publicis Group, while Scott shared his entrepreneurial journey, including his experience founding ChannelAdvisor and his new venture, ReFiBuy, which focuses on leveraging agentic technology for retail optimization. They emphasized the disruptive nature of agentic commerce, projecting that future consumer shopping journeys will increasingly begin with AI-driven discovery rather than traditional search engines.

As the dialogue progressed, the two explored the current e-commerce landscape, discussing how it had historically grown at a robust rate compared to brick-and-mortar retail. Jason shared that, although e-commerce growth is projected to slow, companies like Amazon and Walmart are outperforming the industry average, signifying a clear divide between the winners and losers of the e-commerce market. They shared their personal insights and data on how digital sales are integral to the growth strategy of major retailers, highlighting the importance of retaining customer loyalty amidst a changing landscape.

A significant portion of the conversation revolved around pivotal shifts in consumer behavior. Scott pointed out that many companies see e-commerce as their primary growth avenue, while others argue for the resurgence of physical retail spaces. Both agreed on the necessity of maintaining an integrated strategy that values both digital and in-store experiences. They noted that advertising and new revenue streams from retail media networks have become indispensable for major retailers, fundamentally transforming their growth models.

The discussions also delved into the implications of AI in commerce, specifically addressing the recent partnership between OpenAI and Walmart. Jason and Scott debated the potential ramifications of AI-driven shopping engines on traditional retail methodologies. They addressed the huge leaps forward in consumer trust and reliance on these technologies, even as retail giants face the challenge of adapting and overcoming the skeptics around them.

For audience members interested in specifics, the panel offered nuanced insights into various players in the market and how unique strategies are emerging. While incumbents like Amazon and Walmart appear cemented in their positions, innovative startups are rapidly venturing into vertical spaces, especially in categories like beauty and fashion, where generational adoption of AI technology is notably strong. They highlighted the importance of understanding these dynamics as retailers reassess their own market strategies, responding to shifts in traffic and consumer engagement likely driven by emerging technologies.

On a technical note, the conversation examined the newly established protocols for agentic commerce spearheaded by Google and OpenAI, clarifying their roles in improving product data interactions and streamlining the checkout process. The need for structured data to successfully inform AI systems about consumer products was seen as a key component for improving the user experience in retail.

As the panel wrapped up, they expressed gratitude for the opportunity to engage with such a timely and relevant topic. They invited the audience to consider the implications of agentic commerce and what it means for the future of retail.

Don’t miss out on this engaging dialogue filled with critical industry insights and predictions about the digital commerce landscape and the evolving relationship between consumers and technology. If you found this discussion valuable, like our Facebook page, and please consider leaving us a review on iTunes.

Join your hosts Jason “Retailgeek” Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of ReFiBuy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Jason & Scot Show Episode EP336 – Amazon Q4 2025 Earnings

Retailgeek — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 19:12:10 +0000

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 336 is a recap of Amazon’s Q4 earnings.

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Chapters

0:31 Welcome to the Jason and Scott Show

3:28 NRF Highlights and Personal Updates

5:54 Upcoming Conferences and Events

9:15 Anthropic’s Super Bowl Ads

16:11 Claude Bot and Agentic Technology

16:42 Amazon Earnings Overview

23:32 Meta’s Advertising Strategies

27:32 Google’s AI Developments

35:45 Amazon’s Earnings Call Insights

44:29 Retail Growth and Essentials

48:20 Marketplace Dynamics

49:42 AWS Performance and Challenges

54:26 Amazon’s Advertising Business

1:00:31 Agentic Commerce and Future Predictions

1:13:43 Walmart Leadership Changes and Implication

Welcome to a new installment of the Jason and Scot Show! In this special episode recorded on February 6th, 2026, hosts Jason Goldberg and Scot Wingo reconnect for an enlightening discussion following their experiences at the NRF and share key industry insights. This episode is packed with updates on Amazon’s recent earnings call, the advertising landscape, and the emerging role of agentic commerce in the retail world.

Join Jason and Scot as they kick off the episode by reflecting on their time at NRF, where Jason delivered an impactful keynote that had listeners buzzing. In a light-hearted banter, they dive into personal stories, including the often-asked question about Jason’s son’s sunburn during their recent Hawaiian vacation. From there, the conversation takes a deep dive into the evolving nature of retail, where both hosts express their excitement over how businesses are embracing the latest innovations in technology and AI.

The duo then brings their focus to Amazon’s latest earnings report, which revealed a robust growth in retail despite an ominous forecast for capital expenditures. While they discuss the implications of Amazon’s projected $200 billion in investments—including expansion into AI infrastructure, fulfillment centers, and essential goods—Jason and Scot analyze whether Wall Street’s reaction of an 8% drop was justifiable considering Amazon’s overall performance in retail and advertising.

Listeners will gain valuable insights on how Amazon’s grocery strategies and its dominance in everyday essentials have created a competitive landscape that mirrors historic retail expansions, like Walmart’s grocery initiative. The hosts also emphasize the relevance of the Amazon Marketplace, where third-party sellers are taking up 62% of total units sold, highlighting the synergistic effect between advertising and retail performance.

The podcast also delves into the broader context of the e-commerce space, touching on AWS growth dynamics, the challenges posed by capacity constraints, and how they contribute to the narratives surrounding AI integration. With mentions of Anthropic’s recent ad campaigns and competitor movements, listeners will appreciate the comprehensive look at the competitive dynamics shaping the industry.

Throughout the episode, Jason and Scot maintain an engaging dialogue on the potential of agentic commerce, discussing the opportunities for businesses to adapt and innovate in a rapidly changing environment. Their analysis of the demand for AI-driven tools and the importance of maintaining consumer experiences culminates in a call to reflect on the value of assortment and the implications of shifting consumer behaviors.

In conclusion, Episode 336 serves as both a detailed recap of Amazon’s recent performance and a broader commentary on the evolution within the e-commerce sector. With thought-provoking insights and a playful rapport, Jason and Scot ensure that listeners walk away with both the latest news and a deeper understanding of where the retail industry is headed.

Remember to subscribe, leave a review, and share your thoughts on this episode with friends and colleagues! Until next time, happy comercing, and may your businesses thrive in this dynamic landscape!he first TowerRecords.com site, and his current role advising various businesses, including helping the Minnesota Timberwolves with their ticketing operations. As he unveils his book, listeners learn about the core theme: effective execution is the linchpin of successful strategy.

Episode 336 of the Jason & Scot Show was recorded on Friday, February 6th, 2026

Jason & Scot Show Episode EP335 – The Strategy Trap with Kevin Ertell

Retailgeek — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:47:38 +0000

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 335 is an interview with Kevin Ertell about his new book, “The Strategy Trap.”

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Chapters

0:29 Welcome to the Jason and Scott Show

1:24 Introducing Kevin Ertell

2:07 Kevin’s E-Commerce Journey

4:27 Insights on Execution

7:14 The Strategy Trap Explained

10:42 Structure of the Book

11:51 The Importance of Clarity

12:56 The Six C’s of Execution

17:12 Co-Creation in Strategy

19:49 The Role of Communication

23:55 Pre-Mortems vs. Post-Mortems

26:05 Leveraging Constraints in Strategy

47:00 Culture and Communication

53:19 Future of Strategy Execution

In this electrifying episode of the Jason & Scot Show, recorded on Friday, October 10th, 2025, hosts Jason “Retailgeek” Goldberg and Scot\t Wingo welcome a very special guest and longtime friend, Kevin Ertell. With over 30 years of combined history, the duo dives into Kevin’s impressive career trajectory, his extensive experiences in retail and strategy execution, and the valuable insights behind his newly released book, “The Strategy Trap: Why Companies Fail at Execution and How to Get It Right.“

Kevin’s impressive background spans from starting at Tower Records to holding senior positions at iconic companies like Borders, Nike, and Sur La Table. He discusses his evolution in the retail space, the intricacies of establishing the first TowerRecords.com site, and his current role advising various businesses, including helping the Minnesota Timberwolves with their ticketing operations. As he unveils his book, listeners learn about the core theme: effective execution is the linchpin of successful strategy.

Kevin breaks down the key concepts of his book, structured around the “six C’s” that are critical for avoiding common pitfalls in strategic execution—co-creation, clarity, capacity, communication, coordination, and coaching. He emphasizes the importance of bringing teams together in the co-creation phase to ensure buy-in and alignment on the strategy, a central pillar in fostering commitment across the organization. The conversation touches on the significance of clarity in communication and the necessity of creating a space for people to provide feedback and understand their roles.

Throughout the episode, Scot and Jason explore Kevin’s practical strategies and actionable advice for leaders looking to strengthen their execution capabilities. Kevin offers insights on leveraging constraints creatively, encouraging listeners to view limitations as opportunities for innovation, much like how companies like Costco manage to maintain low prices while driving efficiency.

As the discussion unfolds, the trio delves into the nuanced nature of workplace culture, highlighting the benefits of psychological safety, the impact of social incentives, and the importance of regular communication channels to keep everyone aligned within the execution framework.

Moreover, they touch on fascinating concepts such as pre-mortems, a proactive method of anticipating potential failures before launching a project, differentiating it from the traditional post-mortem analysis. This mindset shift encourages teams to address concerns upfront, minimizing the likelihood of catastrophic missteps in execution.

As the episode wraps up, Kevin shares his hopes for the book’s impact, inviting listeners to access “The Strategy Trap” at their local bookstores or online. He emphasizes the vital interplay between strategy and execution, urging leaders to recognize that a well-crafted strategy is only as strong as its execution plan.

Join us for this enlightening discussion filled with practical lessons, captivating anecdotes, and a wealth of insights from an industry veteran. Tune in, and let’s embrace better execution practices for a thriving business landscape!

Episode 335 of the Jason & Scot Show was recorded on Friday, October 10th, 2025

Transcript

[0:23]Welcome to the Jason and Scott Show. This episode is being recorded on Friday, October 10th, 2025.

[0:29]

Welcome to the Jason and Scott Show

[0:30]I’m your host, Jason Retail Geek Goldberg. And as usual, I’m here with your co-host, Scott Wingo.

[0:37]Hey, Jason, and welcome back, Jason and Scott Show listeners. Well, Jason and listeners, we have a real treat for you on today’s episode. Jason and I have both known Kevin Ertel for about 15 years each. So that’s about 30 years by my calculations, Jason.

[0:56]Yeah, it probably fell longer to Kevin.

[0:58]It did. It probably felt like 60. We get a 2x multiple. The two of us together are a lot to handle. And we’ll get into his amazing career. But what’s really exciting is he has a book dropping, and we were able to get him, due to that 60-year relationship, on the show to tell our listeners about it. The book is called The Strategy Trap, Why Companies Fail at Execution and How to Get It Right. Kevin, welcome to the show.

[1:24]

Introducing Kevin Ertel

[1:25]Thanks, guys. Great to be here. It’s been a bit since I was last on and I’m excited to be here.

[1:30]Yeah, yeah. We had the interns looked and they couldn’t find it. It’s been that long ago.

[1:34]Yeah.

[1:34]It predates recorded history.

[1:36]Yeah. It was chiseled on a tablet somewhere. We’ll have to dig it up, literally.

[1:42]Yeah. So as you alluded to, Kevin, this is not your first time on the show. If memory serves, the first time you were on this show, you were with Sir LaTabla at the time. Is that correct?

[1:52]Yeah, that’s right. It was, yeah, back in 2015, I guess. But yeah, a few things have happened since then.

[1:58]Yeah. And weirdly, our careers like overlap and coincide for many years before

[2:07]

Kevin’s E-Commerce Journey

[2:05]that, which maybe we’ll explore another time. But as we always like to do on the show, kind of remind the listeners what your e-commerce journey was prior to writing the book.

[2:19]Yeah, I mean, I spent most of my career in retail. I started, you know, on the very ground floor as a clerk at Tower Records. And I really had all my formative years there. I spent 20 years at Tower Records, started as a clerk and left as a senior vice president and led the team that built the first TowerRecords.com, you know, when it was mostly people on dial-up modems coming in. And I remember, you know, kind of obsessing about the image sizes that, you know, would download quickly.

[2:47]And fun fact, Tower Records was, of course, like an icon, a public pop culture icon, but it was run by one guy that owned 100% of the company and it was wildly successful. And he, inside baseball fact, he did not like ties.

[3:06]No, he did not.

[3:07]And so if you were so silly as to show up in his office wearing a tie, he would cut it off and pin it to his wall. And I know this because one of my ties is on his wall.

[3:19]Oh, I don’t think you ever told me that. You got your tie cut off.

[3:22]Yeah, and I was totally punked. My co-workers who sent me like a lamb to slaughter at this meeting, like, I guarantee you were completely aware of what was going to happen and like, led me to believe that I should wear a tie to meet the billionaire owner of Tower Records.

[3:38]Hey, you know, I mean, a lot of people consider that a badge of honor to be in that case of ties. So congratulations to you on that for sure.

[3:46]I’m certain it was not the nicest time. So I distracted you, but of course, beloved, beloved music store featured prominently in a lot of America’s greatest movies.

[3:58]Yeah. And I mean, just it was the greatest company to work for. I absolutely loved my time there. But, you know, as you said, it came to an end. So then I went to Borders, you know, which was still doing really well at the time. And I first went there to lead the building of the loyalty program, Borders Rewards, and then also led Borders.com. Did that for a while, left there and moved on to the vendor side for a little

[4:27]

Insights on Execution

[4:22]bit as the VP of retail for 4C Results, a company that measured customer satisfaction. And so I worked with more than 100 retailers and helped them understand customer satisfaction and how to respond to what they learned about what their customer experience was and how to make it better. From there, I went to Online Shoes as a CMO, got me to Seattle and moved on to Sur La Taub from there when we talked. And at Sur La Taub, I ran digital, but also marketing and technology for a while. And then I moved to Nike and I spent seven years at Nike, three different jobs there. Initially as sort of the GM of the digital business for the running category globally. Then I led global online or global digital operations. And then the last job I had there was leading global retail operations. So stores, a little bit of a full circle all the way back to that.

[5:17]And Kevin, for all of our young listeners that only wear contemporary shoes, remind us what Nike does.

[5:22]Yeah, right. You know, a few shoes, a little apparel, sweatpants, that sort of thing.

[5:30]That’s a great idea.

[5:32]Yeah. You’ve heard of it?

[5:34]I have. You could probably have a mild success in that industry.

[5:38]Yeah. Seems like it did pretty well. They’ve done well for themselves.

[5:41]As long as you don’t hire any eBay people to run it.

[5:45]Oops.

[5:45]This is where I’m going to go no comment.

[5:48]Fair.

[5:49]Pleats the fifth pretty early. This may be a record. Yep. Okay. I have to get this.

[5:53]Yeah. I’m going to have to on that one. And then after I left there, I started Mystere Advisory, a consultancy where I focus on three things, helping people with strategic execution, which we’ll talk more about. I do executive coaching and also do some advisory work with a variety of different companies, software companies. And all that’s led me actually to what I’m doing right now also is working with the Minnesota Timberwolves and leading the ticketing business there.

[6:23]Oh, neat. I didn’t know that. That’s new information.

[6:26]Breaking news for.

[6:27]Me and all of this is a side hustle for your main gig which is a musician is that correct.

[6:33]That is correct yes all supporting that yeah still playing music all the time and working on getting a new band together here in cleveland and of course you guys i think have been there we play that gig every year in new york right after right as part of nrf and we’ll be doing that again this year at the cutting room in new york looking forward to that that.

[6:51]Is the The best event at NRF when I can stay up late enough for it.

[6:56]Yep. Drink your coffee. Have an extra one.

[6:59]That is a safe bet. And I believe you’ve even passed the music bug on to the next generation.

[7:08]Oh, it might. Yeah. Not so much in my house. They listen. They don’t play.

[7:14]

The Strategy Trap Explained

[7:15]Awesome. So we want to jump into the book, but before we get too deep, just please tell me it’s not a deep dive case study in all of my failures.

[7:26]Absolutely not. In fact, you do appear in the book as a kind of a hero, really.

[7:33]Yes. So, it’s a fiction book. Awesome.

[7:39]It’s entertaining reading.

[7:41]I was certainly entertained. So, before we jump into the content of the book, like, Like, you know, Scott, Scott kind of alluded to it in the intro. What, what inspired you to write a book? Is it the money?

[7:57]Yeah, right. I had thought about it for a long time. And, you know, I’ve been writing blogs for a while and sort of got a few people had said I should write a book. And I finally just decided, you know, to take that seriously. And then I really had to think about what was a topic I wanted to write about. And something that I’m really passionate about is the fact that, you know, most strategies fail. And there’s a lot of data about that. And the number one reason they fail is poor execution.

[8:25]So I really wanted to focus on that. And, you know, I mean, there’s a million books about strategy and how to write a strategy, but there’s not that many about execution, funny enough. And most of the ones that are out there are written by consultants and academics. And so I wanted to write this really from an operator’s perspective and really somebody who’s sort of been there and has the scars from it. But I also didn’t want to just make it, you know, my perspective. So I interviewed more than 60 operators, people who had been there and done that across a ton of different industries. I actually started in retail, but as I started to ask people who they knew who were successful executors, it just sort of passed me on. And before you knew it, I was talking to people in just about every industry you could imagine, you know, in content, media, tech, healthcare. I talked to a guy who does like public utilities in Australia, you know, so really kind of covered the gamut. And what I found in doing that is it just was a lot of commonality in the things that work. So that’s what got me really inspired to kind of make this a book to put it out there.

[9:33]Cool. One of the things I like about it is how you structured it. So you’ve got kind of two chunks, you know, phases, phase one, setting the stage and phase two, showtime. And then you go through basically, you have six C’s and each one is basically a C word and how you and then a trap that kind of goes along with it. So for example, I’ll just pick one. Part two, clarity, escaping the complexity trap. Part five, coordination, closing the silo trap. And the reason I like this is this, it’s kind of book, some books you read once you’re like, okay, I had some good takeaways. And then others, like one of my favorites is this Ben Horowitz book called Good to Great. And it’s, it’s kind of similar where it’s like a collection of case studies so you can read them linearly. But then you’re always like, what was that case study? Oh yeah, it was in that book. And then you can jump right to it. Cause I, cause I feel like people could read this and then be, they, a lot of times you don’t know you’re in the trap or it’s coming. So, so I think they’ll, they’ll get into the trap and they’ll be like, I think I’m in one of those things Kevin was talking about. And they’ll look it up and be like, oh crap, I’m in the ivory tower trap.

[10:42]

Structure of the Book

[10:40]And then, then you give them, you can like help them get out. So I think that’ll be handy when, when people actually get their hands on this. Was that intentional? You try to make it a reference and a read?

[10:52]Yeah, totally. I mean, I very much wanted it to be practical. So I wanted to make sure that there were lots of how-tos in there and lots of things that you could take away and go execute right away, you know, kind of make it happen. So very much wanted to make it easy to reference, different sections that you could go to quickly. At the end of every one of those parts, there is a checklist that you can use to kind of go through and kind of see how you’re doing and rate yourself. So yeah, I wanted to make it super usable.

[11:22]Yeah, I can even see, I’ve been in companies where we do little book clubs, and this would be kind of a good one for an executive team or even a team to kind of have as they felt like they weren’t being as effective on the execution as they wanted to be. You should do the reading club follow-up. That way you can sell another book.

[11:40]Yeah, I love it. Let’s do that.

[11:43]The workbook. so you kind of stated this but just so listeners can tie it together

[11:51]

The Importance of Clarity

[11:49]i’ll ask the question what is the strategy trap.

[11:52]Yeah i mean the strategy trap is when leaders get kind of obsessed with the idea and even the presentation the idea maybe the slide deck but they don’t spend nearly enough time focus on creating the conditions for the people on the team to actually bring that strategy to reality. And that is the fundamental problem that sort of leads to all the other traps.

[12:18]How do, so I’ve always had this trouble, this challenge. So I’ll, I’ll talk to them blue in the face about our vision and I’ll even tie it into, you know, the plan and everything. And then we’ll do these employee surveys and now everyone’s always like this division isn’t clear. I’m like every quarter I go through this, like, why is this not landing? What am I doing wrong, Kevin? Which trap am I in?

[12:41]Well, I mean, you know, this, the vision is only part of what you need to execute. So that in the end it’s you know this you want me to go through the six c’s would it help to kind of give the big picture yeah yeah.

[12:56]

The Six C’s of Execution

[12:55]Let’s let’s hit the c’s.

[12:56]You know you talked about the two phases setting the stage and then and then uh show time but in setting the stage the sick the first three c’s are co-creation clarity and capacity and those three are super super critical Co-creation is all about, you know, bringing the team at multiple levels within multiple functions in to help develop and create the strategy. And what you get out of that when you do it that way is, you know, alignment and buy-in. You get people really kind of owning it a little bit.

[13:29]You get validation to make sure that this plan that you’re putting together is going to be workable. And then you get commitment. And so partly people are sort of fully understanding the strategy then and then really buying into it and really saying, I’m ready to go. Clarity is about simplicity and it’s about meaning. So it’s about helping people understand it, but really understand and connect their personal meaning to it, which really helps retention right on it. And then capacity is super critical you can’t just drop any new strategy on top of people’s existing work and just expect it to get absorbed within and and so that becomes a real problem if you don’t do that so taking the time to create space for it really really matters those are all setting the stage that gets you set to kind of move into showtime and actually start to go on this thing and so the three c’s there are communication coordination and coaching, communication you know is an is a non-stop thing so to your comment a little bit.

[14:29]I actually heard this. I was at a Nike conference a few years ago, and Kara Lawson, who’s the head coach of the Duke women’s basketball team and a former WNBA player, she talked about her concept she tells her players of early, loud, and continuous. And she’s talking to them about that in the context of basketball you know hey like you got to tell people if a pick is coming get there early the arena is really loud so you’ve got to be loud and you got to continually talk about it because they didn’t hear it the first time, and i think that applies to when you’re communicating a strategy to get in there early talk about it even before that vision or the idea was was fully formed you know so people can understand the why, but then be loud, talk about it in every forum, in every way, and in every different method you can think of. And then continuous matters because you can’t stop. There’s like this thing called the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve that says people forget 90% of what they heard within 30 days if it’s not reinforced all the time. So you kind of have to do that. Coordination then is about having checkpoints and just ways along the path to make sure that you’re sort of organized and implementing this thing and people understand the why and what their component of it is at any given moment and how it fits in the big picture.

[15:47]And then the last but not least is coaching, which is a component of leadership, but not all of leadership. It’s a specific one about creating culture and how do you do motivation and incentivizing people to do the work. But all of that reinforces the vision that you’re talking about at the beginning. So I find having that structure across all those six C’s helps people understand the vision better, helps them understand their role in executing in that vision and reminds them and motivates them along the way.

[16:17]Yeah, I think I’m already stuck in the first one. So you can’t just tell people what to do and they just do it like the whole.

[16:24]Yeah, not so much.

[16:25]I was going to say, like, I didn’t want to pick on Scott’s incredibly successful managerial style. But when he did that survey and they said the vision isn’t clear, what they actually meant is they didn’t get a chance to co-create that vision. And so they weren’t committed to it.

[16:42]It is entirely possible. Exactly.

[16:45]Had you read Kevin’s book, we could only imagine how successful you could have been.

[16:51]I know. Maybe this time. We’ll see.

[16:53]Yeah. Let’s start over.

[16:55]I think you just did start over, didn’t you, Scott?

[16:58]Yep. Yeah. I will actually, well, we already have a vision, so I’ve already skipped.

[17:02]Yeah. And he’s not letting any of his coworkers share in the co-creation.

[17:12]

Co-Creation in Strategy

[17:09]They’re just desperately trying to hang on to the Scott rocket ship.

[17:12]I will as long as they come up with the same thing I did yeah yeah co-creation, is that how it works Kevin yep.

[17:19]That’s exactly how it.

[17:20]Works okay, let’s pick on Jason now I feel I feel attacked yeah.

[17:28]Yeah you guys are practitioners I just talk about this stuff I very explicitly.

[17:33]You just drop all you do is spit strategy and disappear must be nice.

[17:39]At my office I’m known as the pelican because I My main role is to fly over, drop something down, and then fly off.

[17:49]Nice.

[17:50]Okay. It’s better being known as a pigeon, I suppose.

[17:53]Yeah. You can see why no one’s reading my book.

[17:58]Pretty short.

[18:00]Yeah.

[18:00]Which one of these… A lot of times you kind of think about writing a book and you frame it up and then you write it and you’re like really good. Which one was kind of like your favorite? If you had to pick a favorite, what was your favorite part?

[18:12]Wow.

[18:13]Favorite C.

[18:14]I guess it probably is co-creation because I do think that’s foundational, you know?

[18:18]Yeah.

[18:18]And I think that without it, it’s really difficult to get to the other ones. And also, when you co-create in a good structured way, it really sets the foundation and superpowers all the other Cs. So I suppose co-creation, that’s a good one. It’s a fun one. But I love all my babies.

[18:39]So is this a, are we having a facilitated conversation? Are we, you’re like, you delegate to the team, come back to me with what you think. And then you basically veto it. Like how, what is the, uh, I know that’s not the right structure. What is the right structure?

[18:55]Yeah, I think it’s iterations and it’s, it’s working with people. It’s, it’s having, you know, you might start with a small group of people, although I really like to have that small group of people be representative of different teams and even different levels to some degree, because you’re getting a more well-rounded initial kind of take at your strategy when you do that. And you also start to build, you know, advocates and even find some detractors to bring into that. But there is multiple phases that you want to start with that group and then start to share it out and get more feedback and more ideas. There’s one person I interviewed in the book, Amber Taylor. I used to work with at Nike. She has this great concept I love called a proposal to hate. And so, she would take, you know, kind of the initial idea and she would take it out to people and say, this is a proposal to hate. I want you to tell me what’s wrong with it. You know, she would give them permission to do that.

[19:49]

The Role of Communication

[19:50]And I think that’s super valuable. You know, Jason, you and I talked when I interviewed you for this book about the six thinking hats.

[19:58]Yeah. That’s the black hat. Yeah.

[20:01]I mean, that’s one of the hats, the black hat, right? But the six… I am a huge fan of six thinking hats, too.

[20:07]Edward de Bono.

[20:08]Edward de Bono. Yep. That’s the guy. And you’ve had experience with it, as have I. And what’s great about that method is that you sort of… You can take some of these ideas, you know, the core of a strategy, the vision maybe, and you start to get a group of people together, but you structure their thinking. You know, you have a metaphorical hat or maybe you get real hats and you put, you know, have everybody in the group don a hat, you know, the one Jason just references the black hat. And if you say everybody’s got a black hat on now, when you’re wearing that hat, you only talk about negative things, only talk about the problems of this idea. So it’s not just people randomly throwing in ideas. It’s they’re all focused on that. Or you have the white hat, which is like, what are the facts we know about this? We’re only talking about facts, no opinions. And there’s a couple other different hats that you put on in this context, but the idea is that you’re getting everybody to be thinking about this idea, whatever strategy you have with the same perspective at the same time. Jason, you could probably talk about it.

[21:16]Yeah, I think you nailed it. I mean, traditionally when you have an unstructured conversation with a group of people and you say, hey, I want to talk about what success could look like in my new company, while you’re talking about that success, one of the people who’s not bought in is just thinking about all the ways that this idea is going to, or is likely to fail because there’s not a structure, right? But so when you, you ask everyone to put on the black hat and then everyone gets to, gets permission to be super negative without being a jerk because it’s, it’s the literal assignment. And then when you take off that black hat and said, now I want to talk about like what success looks like. Well, they just took the black hat off. And so you’ve kind of taken that ability for them to be sort of sabotaging the brainstorm about success or, you know, about expansions or about different things. So I really like that. I’m a fan of cognitive psychology and like I love that you pick co-creation.

[22:21]Because kind of going with retail metaphors, there’s a super fun cognitive bias that literally got named after a retailer. It’s called the Ikea effect. And essentially the principle is, if I take two identical tables and one of them I build for you and just hand to you, and the other is a kit of parts and you have to struggle and build the table yourself, guess which table you like more and value more?

[22:47]The table you helped co-create, even though, So even if at the end they’re identical tables, the table with your blood, sweat and tears in it, you, you have more love for, right? And so, you know, in that same way, like having, having these, these strategies or having these ideas and, and, you know, empowering people to feel like they, they were following the key instructions to get to that idea makes them more committed to it. Right. And then there’s kind of a related cognitive bias called the endowment effect, which is whether you built it or not, if I get you to think you built it, you’ll value it more. If you imagine owning something, if you imagine that you’re an owner of this company or this idea, then you will value it much more than if you don’t. Right. And so in retail, what we’re often trying to do is get customers to look at that product and imagine that they already own it.

[23:48]Yep. Yeah. And that, and they, they will value it much higher in that scenario. So yeah, it’s super important.

[23:55]

Pre-Mortems vs. Post-Mortems

[23:55]Scott, are you taking notes?

[23:57]I am. I’m still writing down the hats. So I’m, I’m kind of way behind you guys.

[24:01]Yeah. One other thing about that.

[24:02]Now in Scott’s version, all six colored hats are going to say refi, bye.

[24:07]One of them might be a South Carolina hat.

[24:10]Ooh, good.

[24:11]Yeah.

[24:12]Yeah.

[24:13]What on the hats, one other point about that, that I always think is interesting too, because you called out the one, the person who’s negative and you gave them permission to be negative and that gets you really good value. What I have found interesting when I’ve implemented that too is that you also have people who are super optimistic and they can never see anything wrong with it. So when you get them to put a black hat on, it forces them to see things differently. And then the same is true when you give the yellow hat, the optimism hat to the person who’s always negative. It starts to expand their minds and their way of thinking about it so not only are you getting better insight into your strategy and your ideas but you’re also really sort of changing the thinking of the team as you’re going about that which is which has been pretty valuable too yeah.

[25:02]The okay let’s is that a good time to wrap up co-creation or anything.

[25:08]Sure we should learn about.

[25:09]That okay Yeah. Cool. Jason, over to you.

[25:13]Yeah. So, Kevin, you kind of make this, I want to say, relatively easy to understand because it still is… It’s a dense book. There’s a lot of interesting thoughts in it, but you give this kind of framework which helps, at least in my mind, it helps kind of distill it down. But I’m kind of curious, how do you see the book being used in places that traditionally are launching traditional strategy and getting those bad results? Can I iterate here? Can Scott just learn that he’s making a mistake about not co-creating his strategy and that will move him one step closer to success?

[26:05]

Leveraging Constraints in Strategy

[26:01]Or does he sort of need to embrace all six C’s in order to be successful?

[26:05]I think definitely people can jump into any of these C’s and use those directly. You know, clarity is a good example, you know, and Scott, if you said people were maybe not understanding or not remembering, I think then some of the techniques in clarity might be a good place to just jump directly into and talk through some of the things that we have in there. You know, in the showtime section of thing around communication, coordination, there’s a lot of techniques in there that you could take from something that’s existing and just refine your capabilities and build on it and take some ideas definitely you know i think you don’t have to read the book from start to finish and exactly the way it is you could jump into the areas that you felt maybe you had the most opportunity to prove in for sure although i’d love you to read it from start to finish you.

[26:55]You you talked to was it 60 we you talked to 60-ish folks, what were some of the most, and you can’t say Jason, what were some of the most.

[27:04]Uh, I think it was a safe bet he wasn’t going to anyway.

[27:08]What were some of the most intelligent, no, uh, what were some of the, you know, sometimes you go into those things and you’re like, okay, I kind of know this person’s story. And then you hear a real, you know, zinger comes out of left field. What did you have? Tell us an experience, something like that, that, that really kind of came at you from the side.

[27:27]Yeah, let’s see. That’s a good question. You know, one person I talked to was Joe Megabo, who’s, you know, now the CEO of CPAP. He’s been kind of in a variety of sleep-related companies lately. But he actually told me a pretty good story about analytics and I didn’t actually realize that he started his career in analytics. And he talked about the framework he used to take on analytics projects. But I really liked kind of his approach to how he thought about that. It was very structured, which was good. But he really kind of got into some of those concepts I talked about, about, you know, you could do analytics about a million things, but how do you sort of sort through and say, what do we really need to focus on? What is actionable that we could be doing, not just interesting? And, you know, how does it fit within the capacity that we have. So, I thought his approaches on some of that stuff were not where I was expecting he would go that were really valuable.

[28:26]Where did that land into the book?

[28:28]That is in the capacity parts, I believe.

[28:33]Okay, cool.

[28:35]Shout out to Joe, who is another legend in the industry. I know he’s done a bunch of sweet gigs lately, but I think of him as an apparel guy, right? Wasn’t?

[28:44]Yeah, he was at American Eagle. American Eagle.

[28:46]Yeah.

[28:46]But he was like Expedia before that. So he’s kind of jumped around different industries as well.

[28:52]Very cool. what so there’s not a lot of pictures in the book kevin i if i have a criticism, yeah there there could be more images but there are some interesting visuals there’s some interesting charts and one that i’m remembering is it the derrick sievers chart derrick sievers yeah sievers oh gosh see i should have listened to the audiobook it.

[29:15]Hasn’t been created yet but.

[29:16]Yeah and i assume you’re you’re gonna narrate it yourself when it is yeah.

[29:21]I think so yeah.

[29:22]Yeah i I insist on it.

[29:23]Okay. Well, then it’s decided.

[29:26]Nice. Tell us about that.

[29:29]Yeah. I mean, Derek’s an interesting guy. I’ve known him for a long time, but he has been like an entrepreneur and an investor. He’s a TED Talk speaker. So, he gets a lot of people coming to him with their ideas and they want to, you know, kind of work with him to create an idea. And he has a story he talked about where this guy kind of came to him and was like, I got a billion dollar idea. And Derek’s like, okay, great. What is it? And the guy’s like, online dating with music.

[30:00]And Derek was like cool what else and the guy was like that’s it you know you’re the tech genius that’s the idea let’s just go and we’ll split a 50 50 kind of it so Derek kind of was he took out his notepad and he kind of wrote this chart out and he had on one column the idea quality and he wrote kind of you know weak so so good brilliant and then he wrote another column called execution quality. And he wrote like, you know, weak, so, so good and brilliant. And he kind of drew out a score for each of those with the idea. It was kind of, you know, weak ideas are worth one, so, so five, brilliant 20. But the dollars he put on the column next to the execution quality, where he wrote those one to 10 million. And he basically said to the guy, look, you know, if you want to make a business, you got to multiply these two. Ideas are just the multiplier. and they’re worth nothing without the execution. The guy kind of walked away a little defeated, but that was kind of the idea that he showed that the idea doesn’t have nearly the value as the execution does. The combination is where you get there, but a brilliant idea doesn’t take you very far. You have to have a real plan to execute it, not just let’s do online dating with music and you go just do your thing.

[31:20]Yeah, that’s amazing. I feel like that’s a weekly conversation I have with my in-laws when they come to me with their billion-dollar shark tank idea. And I’m like, yeah, yeah. The idea is the least difficult part.

[31:37]Yeah. I mean, you can have a middling idea and great execution. You’re going to be way better off than a great idea that doesn’t go anywhere.

[31:46]Yeah. And let me give you an example of the online dating. So, you can laugh at me for this, but as many people know, I started my digital career at a super successful company called Blockbuster Entertainment.

[31:59]Yeah.

[31:59]And I got a real opportunity to work for an amazing entrepreneur named Wayne Heisinger who built a billion-dollar business three separate times in three totally distinct industries. And amongst the cool things about Wayne, he used to keep score by how many millionaires he made. And so we sold, I know it’s a big joke, everyone likes to make fun of Blockbuster, but we sold Blockbuster for $8 billion and moved on like years before Netflix was ever invented.

[32:29]So we sell Blockbuster to Viacom, I moved from Florida back to the West Coast, and Wayne is like, hey, all this .com stuff is going on in the Bay Area right now, find some deals and we’ll make some investments. And I’m like, oh my God, I just got my Wayne Heisinger golden ticket, right? Like, like I thought like this, I thought like this was the greatest moment in my life. And so you moved to the Bay Area and I’m, I’m looking for a deal to bring to Wayne, right? And Wayne’s a guy that like saw the market for garbage trucks and bought and built waste management, right? He saw video stores and built Blockbuster, you know, used cars and built AutoNation later. So I get there, I’m looking at all these companies and I find the first company that I want to take to Wayne. And it’s this company called Electronic Classifieds. And their, like, in hindsight, totally correct idea was, hey, digital and the internet are going to totally disrupt this hugely lucrative business that newspapers have called classified ads. And our proof of concept is we’re launching an online business for the most popular category in classified ads, which is dating. And so this proof of concept is called Match.com.

[33:46]Oh.

[33:46]And so I, like, side note, signed up for Match.com and my free lifetime username, I’ve been married for over 10 years, But my free lifetime username on Match.com is Jason at Match.com, to put it in perspective. But I took Match.com to Wayne, and he’s like, don’t see it. And, you know, Wayne is no longer with us, I’m sorry to say. But let the record show that, like, their market cap has greatly dipped and is currently $8 billion.

[34:21]Wow.

[34:22]Yeah so it turns out like the idea is interesting but it it all comes down to that execution and how many companies like had that idea and you know, who it ultimately took our friends at Tinder to make it work.

[34:37]Yep. There you go. Yep. Execution’s everything.

[34:40]Yeah. So no one thought this strategy book was going to help you find a spouse, but now you know.

[34:45]Yeah. Well, you never know where these conversations are going to turn.

[34:53]Another, another story I liked was Linda Carlisle. Maybe share kind of the story there.

[35:00]Yeah. Well, Linda is a communication specialist. And we talked a lot about communication and how to, you know, best communicate strategy to be executable.

[35:13]And she basically talked a lot about the idea that you would start with a big bang, like a lot of companies do and, you know, have a, you know, town hall or what have you. But then you have to really start to break down your communication and make it much more meaningful to people at every level they’re at, you know, and empathy needs to be a big part of that. You got to understand where people are.

[35:38]When a new strategy is coming and is going to change things on them. Actually, in a side note from Linda, but a former colleague I had at Nike, Amina Warner, one time during change told me, you know, change is the death of the old. And I thought that was such a profound statement to think about when you’re going to put change and communicate it, is that actually what they call the change curve actually follows pretty much the exact same path as the grief cycle. And Linda kind of got on that idea too, that you’ve got to be empathetic for people. You’ve got to understand that they’re going to go through these different, you know, emotional stages as they’re encountering new change and build a plan to recognize that. But then have plans that you can pass along to different leaders and have them be able to do the communication as well at a more individual level or a smaller team level to make sure that that vision or that big picture strategy is broken down and meaningful to people at each team level within a company. So people are locking in on it in a way that makes sense to them in language that they understand.

[36:53]That seems like totally sound advice. One of the questions I wanted to ask you was from the execution section, Kevin, and you introduced this concept of pre-mortems. And I have to be honest, like when I first started reading it, I was concerned because I actually, there’s a super common thing that happens in my world where at the end of a project, you do a post-mortem. And I hate that idea. Right. Cause I mean, I mean, amongst other things, like the, the metaphor is just that like, whatever you do did died and now you’re, you’re evaluating why you accidentally killed the patient.

[37:30]Yes.

[37:30]And so, you know, and usually like sometimes those projects are successful and have good outcomes and other times they’re not successful, but you have good learnings. Like, like hopefully in most cases you didn’t kill anyone. Um, so, so I’m kind of, I think language matters. I don’t love the word postmortem. And so then I’m reading pre-mortem and I’m like, I’m not sure I’m going to like this, but you actually won me over. So maybe you could explain the concept.

[37:56]Yeah. So pre-mortem, I mean, you talked about what a postmortem is, but the idea of a pre-mortem is to say, look, before we launch this thing, let’s imagine the future and let’s imagine that it went horribly wrong. Why did it go horribly wrong? And I think the value of doing it that way versus contingency planning is that it sort of forces the mindset to go, oh my God, everything went wrong. And now we’re going to do the same type of analysis we would have done if everything went really wrong and be able to identify, you know, a number of different problems before they happen. And when I’ve done, I’ve done these things lots over the years and they always produce things that you hadn’t thought of. And then that allows you to start to, to kind of work through the plan and make sure that you’re not missing anything. So it’s just the mindset really that, that helps you get there, but super valuable. Just did one of these a couple of weeks ago, actually. And it, you know, stuff that came out of it was, was surprised a few people to be honest, because people just weren’t thinking of things. So super valuable.

[39:03]Yeah. And, you know, again, like part of my objection to postmortem is kind of you’re like objectively evaluating your finished project in a negative light. But like here, you’re kind of proactively thinking about what could go wrong. So I’m like the negative is kind of more in the context of the black hat thinking we were talking about earlier. But I also it kind of reminded me of another business tactic that’s near and dear to all of our hearts. It’s like, you know, Amazon’s methodology, right? Where, you know, when they’re selling in a major idea, of course, they famously want to write the one page press release. That’s the, the sort of sick premortem success story, if you will. And so I kind of took your thing as saying like, Hey, an even deeper dive is, yeah, let’s, let’s envision what that success is going to look like. And let’s make sure we understand that. But let’s also like, you know, think about like, if we don’t, if we don’t achieve that success, what are the likely reasons that we didn’t? Because if we can identify those upfront, we can remediate for them.

[40:08]Yes. Yep. That’s exactly it. And, and I, I think that Amazon press release thing is also a great thing. I don’t have that in the book when we should have, cause I really like it. And it helps with you with clarity and communication too, if you’re sort of imagining how you would tell the outside world about your strategy.

[40:25]Yeah. Uh, that whole begin with the end in mind, I think is the, the thing I really like it. And I’ll be honest, I’ve taken a lot of Amazon business approaches and use them in workshops with other clients because, you know, clients are always super interested in Amazon methodologies and there’s a bunch of novelties, but I would actually say like a bunch of them don’t work. Like when you just, you know, do it in a one hour exercise, right? Like, and so you take people they’re not used to quietly reading six page narratives and you make them read a six page narrative and it’s, it’s painful to watch. Uh, and so, so like, you know, unless the whole culture is all in on something like that, it’s really hard to make it work. But I do think that that, that notion of the begin with the end in mind, both the positive and negative end, like is super easy thing. You add that to any organization and you see they adopt it and they want to keep doing it because they like the the benefits come pretty easy and are pretty apparent yep.

[41:27]Love that yep and it definitely is a great mindset shift.

[41:30]Cool what one of the topics you raise is how to leverage constraints and as a startup guy this is the trick is we’re always trying to unlike you guys that work at nike and publicist these eight trillion dollar companies we’ve got like a couple million bucks and then we we hit the wall so we’ve got to be That is the ultimate constraint. And we know the end of the life is out there.

[41:56]Don’t you just keep going back to your investors and asking for more candy?

[42:00]Yeah, that works until it doesn’t. And then, yeah, they want to see, this is where execution matters. They actually want to see results and stuff. It’s kind of a bummer. And yeah, so talk a little bit about that in the context of the book.

[42:14]Yeah, I mean, I love constraints because I think constraints really force great thinking and they force great creativity and they actually create freedom, I think, ironically. Because once you know that you have limits, you can then maximize everywhere else, you know. So deadline is a great constraint. Budget is a great constraint. You know, in the book, I tell kind of a famous story about the Costco $1.50 hot dog and soda, you know, which the guy, Jim Senegal, the kind of founder of Costco, said that that price would never change. Someone asked him what it would mean.

[42:54]He actually used some more colorful language than that.

[42:56]Yeah, I think he said, if someone asked what would it mean if that changed, he said, I’m, So, but what did that do? It caused Costco to find all sorts of creative ways elsewhere to make up the difference or find ways to, you know, they initially outsourced a lot of the food, they ended up creating it on their own, but they, you know, they just did a number of things that they wouldn’t have done otherwise without those constraints to make them more effective. So I think that kind of thing is really valuable Rick Rubin talks and he’s got a book on creativity where he talks a lot about constraints and how it drives creative thinking when you tell people you know they have a limit to how much time they have on something or they can only use so many instruments on an album what have you but all of those start to force different kinds of thinking that ultimately leads to, more efficiencies or better creativity better more interesting results so I’m a big fan of them how do you like to use them scott.

[43:55]I don’t i just like to live live in them i don’t.

[44:00]Really like.

[44:00]Manufactured they kind of are manufactured for me already so how do you use it like have you used it in the corporate context like how do you constrain nike or.

[44:10]Well i mean it doesn’t have to be a nike.

[44:11]Case study but like one of these bigger companies i i can’t i’ve never really worked for a big company so i have a hard time imagining how you do you just like say this is the deadline kind of thing like there’s a time constraint.

[44:20]Yeah deadline is a good one but a budget is too. Just because a company is big and they have tons of money doesn’t mean you should spend it all or you should let things be open-ended because when you do that, you lose focus. So, you know, you still can put a budget limit on something, absolutely, to kind of force thinking and force people to be creative. I think being intentional about constraints, And like deadlines, like budgets, you know, try to think of something else. But anything like that helps galvanize thinking, I think.

[44:54]I see a lot of resource constraints. Like people will say like, hey, you greenlining this project, but you can only use this amount of people. Or you have to find a way to do it without disrupting this piece of our supply chain. And sometimes those are, I’ll call them environmentally imposed constraints. Like the constraint is coming up because we literally can’t afford to disrupt that supply chain, right? But other times they are somewhat like, arbitrary sounds too negative, but like they’re constraints that are introduced for the purposes of constraining the project, not because the resources aren’t available.

[45:33]Right. But those can be freeing if you think about it, you know, because once you know you have a limit that you can’t change, then you stop worrying about trying to change the limit and you start worrying about how can you be successful within that. And that’s where you get the value, I think.

[45:49]Yeah. No, I totally buy that. And it’s rare in the real world that you ever get the opportunity to do something that’s literally unconstrained. So, building muscles around working within those constraints seems pretty valuable.

[46:08]Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it’s a great point. It’s rare to be completely unconstrained and probably dangerous.

[46:15]Let the record show it only took me 48 minutes to make a great point. The the we talked about like a lot of the the stuff in the execution section in my mind the the next big section was kind of the the culture and communications um pillar if you will and to me this feels like the area like a lot of the other things that cause strategies to fail are, like not shocking like I mean they come up quite commonly but like it feels like the ones that are most underestimated to me and misunderstood are the culture

[47:00]

Culture and Communication

[46:59]and communication ones.

[47:00]Yep. Yeah, and culture, you know, how you set up the team to be successful, there’s a couple things in there that are so important, you know, giving people psychological safety so that they can speak freely and tell you when things are going off the rails is super important.

[47:19]Incentives are super important. You know, when we talk about incentives a lot of the time, most companies, it’s about financial incentives, you know, it’s about bonuses and those kind of things. The reality is there’s a lot of research that a lot of financial incentives don’t actually change behavior over a long time. But there are other kind of incentives that are more cultural that do. Social incentives, you know, is one that I like to talk about, which is, you know, rewarding people, calling them out, making them feel good, making them feel prideful in front of their peers or peers calling each other out and celebrating each other. Those are social incentives that do drive behavior. And they’re much more day to day. they get people, you know, kind of excited, the dopamine hits that they need. And then another one I think is a huge deal is convenience incentives. You know, we humans will go to the most convenient thing all the time. So how do you make things easy for people? You know, somewhat as part of culture, maybe part of some other processes you might put in, they’ll gravitate to those things. They’ll gravitate to the things that are more easy to do. So those are all things that can really drive behavior and galvanize team and focus that maybe aren’t always the things that we’re super intentional about.

[48:34]Yeah. And it’s funny, again, like as I was reading that section, you know, I’m picturing all these retail moments and there’s, you know, a almost universal thing that happens every morning in every big box retailer that has ever existed. Like there are these like morning team meetings. And whenever I bring new, new associates to, to their first retail account, and we go to a Best Buy morning meeting or a Walmart morning meeting.

[49:01]Everybody is shocked and uncomfortable because if you haven’t experienced it, it feels a lot like the, the pep talk right before high school football game. And there’s, there’s like a lot of cheering and there’s a lot of like peer pressure and there’s a lot of like acknowledgements and affirmations. Like there are all these things that like, it would be easy to look at them cynically and say like, this is all sort of corny and, and forced behavior. But the reality is like what I’ve learned through a pretty long career, like the, that, that those meetings like set the tone. They, uh, they, they create a culture in which all of the members of that culture want that team to succeed. Right. And they, they’re creating the, the circumstances for all those folks to work super hard for the next 12 hours for not a lot of pay and, you know, do their best to serve customers and make that, that retail environment successful. And it’s, it’s literally like the, the beating heart of most retail in America are these kind of like non-financial cultural motivators that, that, you know, kick off our, our retail day every day.

[50:16]Yeah. And I mean, I mean, I love going to those sessions, you know, I did Nike one of the last row with stores. I go around and do those all the time and they’re super fun and they super motivating. You know, those aren’t things maybe that you end up doing in a corporate environment, But there are opportunities within corporate environment to get similar on that and I think, Those regular team meetings are a great opportunity to use, for example, celebrations to reinforce the strategy, too. You know, so there you’re kind of calling out when things went really well. You’re getting peers to cheer each other on. But, you know, every time you have a celebration, you put it in context of the strategy. This was awesome. We did this because it moved us forward in the strategy. It’s an opportunity to reinforce it all the time while getting people pumped up about it.

[51:03]Yeah. And I will agree with you that it’s way less common at corporate headquarters than it is in the field. But I will tell you, if you work at Walmart for any period of time, you’re going to stand in a room and do the Walmart cheer. And everyone’s going to like, you know, emphatically clap and do the swiggly. And it’s like, it’s pretty funny. like it it it and it you know first people feel uncomfortable right but like pretty soon that becomes kind of part of like it it becomes uncomfortable not to get into the spirit of it.

[51:39]Well i mean i love that and that seems like walmart’s doing okay.

[51:43]Yeah yeah this is what i really wish we had.

[51:46]A video podcast.

[51:47]Yeah hey i will we’ll do a video podcast i will happily We’ve got some Walmart guests coming up, so I’ll happily do the Walmart.

[51:57]Oh, you guys can squiggle together.

[51:58]There’s a Sam’s version of the cheer.

[52:02]Too. Do you also have a spark? What is it called? A spark?

[52:05]The spark is the Walmart logo, but yeah, that doesn’t work into the cheer.

[52:09]Oh, okay.

[52:10]I’m curious about the squiggle for sure.

[52:12]Well, and the super inside baseball thing is, of course, Walmart was originally spelled with a hyphen, and the squiggly is the hyphen. So so it’s after the l um but like in a subsequent rebranding the the corporate name is no longer hyphenated so but you still squiggle yeah but so you still do the squiggle in the cheer and then in the sam’s club version you do the apostrophe which is also a funny physical gesture.

[52:43]This is good.

[52:43]Yeah i think you’re gonna have to demonstrate this for us at some point.

[52:47]Yeah, that’s darn it. That’s going to be on the extended version of the podcast. You have to be a paid member in order to download the paid subscription just went through the roof. The extended version of the Jason and Scott show.

[53:00]People are paying for the squiggle and the apostrophe.

[53:02]Yeah. But, you know, obviously, we could take 30 hours to talk about the book, but we are coming up on time. And I do want to make sure we land the plane, like somewhat in the spirit that you land the book.

[53:19]

Future of Strategy Execution

[53:20]You wrap things up by kind of talking about the future strategy. I don’t want to spoil the book, but how can we talk about this, Kevin?

[53:30]Well i think the key to me is that strategy should be part of execution you know i mean, it shouldn’t be sequential you shouldn’t have a strategy and then figure out how you’re going to go execute it the first step of execution should be actually writing the strategy and then as you’re doing as we talked about co-creation and building that strategy that’s actually how you’re starting setting the stages of how you’re going to execute it. Um, and you’re making sure that you have an executable strategy. That’s key to everything. I think that’s, that’s the mindset and that’s the process and structure that is critical, I think, to make it happen.

[54:13]Cool. Let’s wrap it up there. Kevin, if folks want the book, where can they go?

[54:18]The book will be available at bookstores near you. It’ll be available pretty widely, obviously, on Amazon and all those, but it will be out there everywhere. So I hope you’ll pick up a copy. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you do. And happy executing.

[54:35]Oh, nice.

[54:36]I see what you did there.

[54:38]Yeah. Yeah. Very good. Are you going to do like signings?

[54:41]Scott has embraced it too. I feel like I’m contagious.

[54:44]Yeah, yeah.

[54:45]What did you do the other day, Scott? Was it happy regenticking?

[54:48]Agentic converging.

[54:49]Yeah, agentic converging. Yes. Yes, amazing.

[54:52]I feel like I one-upped you.

[54:54]Well, as you have done for our entire history.

[54:58]Yeah.

[54:59]I’m okay with it. Kevin, I don’t want to derail us at the very last minute, but like, have you talked to the publisher about implementing instant checkout on ChatGPT?

[55:08]Oh, wow. Yeah, I have not, but maybe we’ll do that in the bonus material.

[55:13]Got you. If they need any help, I know a guy.

[55:15]Yeah. I don’t know, for sure.

[55:20]Yeah. And on that cliffhanger, I encourage all the listeners to go ask a question about the book to Chad Chibiti and then ask if you can buy the book directly there.

[55:29]There you go.

[55:30]And if you can, you should buy it. And if not, maybe you should, you know.

[55:33]Go the old way?

[55:35]Yeah. Yeah. Go get one of the dead trees. um but as always kevin it’s great to reconnect you know i’ve learned a lot from you over the years and i i’m i’m very appreciative that you’re you’re sharing some of that knowledge with the rest of listeners on the podcast and the the millions of people that will undoubtedly buy and and read the book as well so congratulations yeah.

[55:58]Thank you i hope that’s true but thank you guys always a pleasure to talk to you guys and i learned tons from you as well yeah.

[56:05]Congratulations Thanks for joining us.

[56:07]And until next time, happy commercing.

Jason & Scot Show Episode EP333 – Jason Del Rey The Aisle

Retailgeek — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:29:39 +0000

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 333 is an interview with Jason Del Rey about his new paid newsletter “The Aisle”.

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Chapters

0:39 Welcome to the Json and Scott Show

2:23 The Amazon Book Debate

7:43 Inside Jason’s Media Journey

10:50 Jason’s New Venture

11:14 Launching The Aisle

19:25The Name Game

21:53 Blocking Bots on The Aisle

24:53 Sneak Peek of Upcoming Interviews

32:05 Is It a Bubble?

39:00 Exploring Conversational Commerce

46:10 Upcoming Event Insights

49:31 How to Subscribe to The Aisle

50:12 Closing Thoughts and Thanks

50:24 Predictions for AI Integration

54:02 Closing Thoughts on Industry Standards

Welcome back to the Jason and Scot Show, where we celebrate episode 333 with a truly special guest. Recorded on Thursday, November 19th, this episode features Jason Del Rey, a prominent e-commerce journalist and the author of the acclaimed book, *Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets*. Jason is launching a new paid newsleter about AI era of commerce “The Aisle.” With a staggering combined history of over 30 years between Jason Goldberg, Scot Wingo, and Del Rey, this conversation dives deep into the evolving world of commerce and the exciting new venture that Del Rey is embarking upon.

Kicking off the episode, Jason G and Scot share their long history with Del Rey, discussing his illustrious career covering e-commerce for major publications like Inc. Magazine, Ad Age, and Fortune. They reminisce about Del Rey’s past appearances on their show (episodes 67 and 183) and set the stage for his latest project, an independent media company called “The Aisle.” Del Rey recounts his trajectory into the e-commerce world, starting from covering digital media companies at Ad Age to eventually becoming an Amazon expert while working under media icons Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at All Things D.

Del Rey reflects on his experiences as a journalist, highlighting his strong relationships with leading figures in the retail space, including interviews with Jeff Bezos, Doug McMillan, and Mark Lurie. He discusses the events he hosted—particularly the Code Commerce series—where he connected influential retail CEOs and tech leaders. As the conversation progresses, Jason G and Scot delve into Del Rey’s motives for launching The Aisle, underscoring both personal and professional motivations. Del Rey candidly shares his views on mortality and the urgency to pursue one’s passions, a perspective deepened by the early loss of family members and friends.

Transitioning into the specifics of his new venture, Del Rey reveals that The Aisle will cover the future of commerce through the lens of AI and technology. He outlines his plans for a paid subscription newsletter focusing on everything from product discovery and conversational commerce trends to disruptive changes in online advertising. With features like intimate dinner events designed to foster candid dialogue among industry leaders, Del Rey aims to create a community that engages deeply with the evolving landscape of commerce.

Listeners also learn about The Aisle’s structure, including tiers of membership which offer a variety of benefits, from exclusive newsletters to off-the-record consultations with Del Rey himself. As the discussion unfolds, Del Rey emphasizes his experience-based approach to journalism, believing that deeper connections with his audience will allow for richer reporting and analysis.

In a light-hearted exchange, the hosts discuss the nuances of conversational commerce and the evolving nature of how consumers interact with brands. Del Rey shares insights from his discussions with industry leaders, exploring the distinctions between textual and voice interactions in commerce. The guests speculate on the future of these trends, engaging in a spirited conversation about the balance between hype and genuine innovation in the AI commerce landscape.

Before closing the episode, Del Rey enthusiastically introduces listeners to his first interview for The Aisle, featuring John Collison, co-founder of Stripe, discussing the future of payments and commerce. The episode wraps up with Jason G and Scot reflecting on Del Rey’s journey and the exciting future that lies ahead for him and The Aisle, inviting their listeners to engage with the new publication that promises to deliver valuable insights into the world of commerce.

As always, if you enjoy the show, consider subscribing and leaving a five-star review on iTunes. Join us next time for more engaging discussions about the future of commerce and technology!

Episode 333 of the Jason and Scot Show was recorded on Thursday, November 19th.

Transcript

Jason G:
[0:23] Welcome to the Json and Scott show this is episode 333 and that is a lot of threes,

Jason G:
[0:30] being recorded on Thursday November 19th I’m your host Jason retail geek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scott Wingo.

Scot:
[0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Json and Scott show listeners, Jason today we have on the show a guest that I think between us we have known for a cumulative 30 years, which is way more than half his life he has been a reporter at pretty much every business publication that covers e-commerce including Inc magazine ad age all things the recode and most recently Fortune. Also wrote the most awesomest and amazeballs Amazon book winner sells all Amazon Walmart and the battle for our wallets, and now he is here on the show to tell us about a new media Empire he is launching that we’re excited to learn more about. But, what he’s most well known for is his previous 2 appearances on the Json and Scott show back on episode 67 and 183 who can forget, ladies and gentlemen welcome back for keeping with the theme of this show the third time Jason Del Rey.

Jason D:
[1:41] Well that is quite the intro and very happy to be adding to the 333 sequence that we have going on today.

Scot:
[1:53] I don’t know in what culture that’s a magic number but we’ll we’ll go.

Jason G:
[1:57] It would be even more cool if Scott would change his name we could be 3 Js.

Scot:
[2:04] Not today it’s going to be confusing enough as it is.

Jason G:
[2:07] Yeahhe would be weird though and spell Jason with like a y or something like anyone that spells Scott with 1 t.

Scot:
[2:14] Output 2 ends because I’m tired of saying 1 team my whole.

Jason G:
[2:17] Yeahso I feel like we already have to unpack the introduction a little bit.

Jason G:
[2:23] Number 1 1 problem with doing a podcast for more than 10 years is we’ve apparently used up all the guests so now we’re just, we’re just we’re just going back and I’m super excited to speak to Jason I’m I’m obviously happy to talk to any Json but particularly this Json but I’m also a little sad because I feel like we just lost 1 of our most loyal listeners right in the intro, I got a very angry text message during Scott’s intro from Brad Stone.

Scot:
[2:56] There’s room in the world for 2 Amazon books that are awesome.

Jason G:
[2:59] Yes there there are in fact 2 Awesome books of Amazon that’s my only point is I just wanted to to find the OG Amazon book.

Jason D:
[3:08] And he’s got 2 of his own I don’t know why I’m talking to him up we’re here to talk about me but no Brad’s Brad’s Brad’s great and I recommend both of his book.

Jason G:
[3:18] They are all required reading if you’re in this spaceI like it so Jason thrilled to have you back first question are you just gonna keep trying media Outlets until you finally get 1 right is that the.

Jason D:
[3:30] Woo pretty good.

Scot:
[3:32] Zinger.

Jason D:
[3:33] Like it like it.

Jason G:
[3:34] I’ve learned we share the same Mentor in Keras Wisher.

Jason D:
[3:37] I will say, car car is a big inspiration been been texting her a lot during this last few months as I’ve been thinking about building my own thing and the answer is my hope, is that what I’m building right nowwill will carry me through the rest of my career we’ll see.

Jason G:
[3:59] It is not podcast audio friendly but I’m not getting on wood for youit’sit’s a tree product.

Jason D:
[4:07] Okayall right that’ll do.

Scot:
[4:09] Gotta Have gotta start uh with the big hairy audacious goal so you get your B hack.

Jason G:
[4:16] Yeah so I feel like we’re we’re way too deep inside of baseball maybe for our listeners that are a little newer we could start Jason can you refresh listeners about how you got interested in Commerce and and why Scott and I know you today.

Jason D:
[4:31] Yeah sure can try to make it brief so you mentioned somewhere in my in my resume adage or advertising age and, I was there covering actually digital media companies this was back when companies like BuzzFeed and vice and Vox were just starting out and I was sort of covering that, I don’t know if you want to call Revolution but that sort of that point in timeand I was loving it, media personalities are a lot of fun to to write about some of my favorite stuff was about this is back in like Tim Armstrong running AOL days and Marissa Meyer running Yahoo so a lot of good a lot of good content there and, anyway I I met I was following along a publication called All Things digital or all things D yes that’s what the name of it was sounds funny today, and that’s Kara Swisher Walt Mossberg Peter Kafka and they had an opening and the 1 opening they had was covering this company called Amazon back in 2013 I had interest in it but sort of, took the job because I wanted to work with and for them that what they were doing was cool.

Jason G:
[5:46] Fair to say media Legends.

Jason D:
[5:49] I think so media Legends and soonce they expressed interest it was kind of no-brainer for me and so, happy coincidence that I walked into covering Amazon and that was now 12 years ago, I spend about 9 years there Rico took many forms, was owned by a couple different companies but yeah and and there I built a event series called code Commerce so I was interviewing a lot of retail CEOs Tech and Marketplace CEOs, and hosted a podcast myself though not nearly as cool as this 1 that was called the land of the Giants it was about Amazon it was a narrative podcast. And really became an e-commerce nerd along the way which is why when my journalist friends asked me today like why are you still covering the space I I say, you know I’d become a nerd I’ve I’ve I sort of caught the bug and and here we are.

Jason G:
[6:46] Yeah and a couple of fun notes there the the code Commerce events were awesome and I’m sort of sad that they they don’t exist you’ll correct me if I’m wrong but was the first 1 kind of a show within a show was that first 1 at shop talk.

Jason D:
[7:00] So the first 1 was at the first shop talk and yeah it was a 1 Night event. I think we had about 200 people separate ticket and it was we were we were sort of testing the model and I believe that night the interviews were, Julie wayneright who is running the real realTony hsiehum.

Jason G:
[7:25] Rest in peace.

Jason D:
[7:26] Preston piece of Zapposand I believe the third was Jason goldberger who was then the head of eCommerce at Target,

Jason D:
[7:39] and now I believe is the CEO of a company called Lamps Plus and has made a few stops between them.

Jason G:
[7:44] Third coolest Jason Goldberg in Commerce.

Jason G:
[8:02] Yeah and of course pre predating you Walt and Kara were famous for these huge gets and they would always have these interviews with these Tech luminaries and I I think of all these famous pictures of like, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, chatting together with Cara and then in the Commerce space I feel like you have sat in the room with correct me if I’m wrong I mean all those those people you just mentioned at your first code Commerce would be impressive enough but you’ve sat in the room, with Jeff Bezos Mark laurrie and Doug McMillan who just made news this week in fact.

Jason D:
[8:38] I have my my Bezos meetings were less planned I would say than the others but yes I I.

Jason G:
[8:47] And with security involved in removing you during the.

Jason D:
[8:50] Uh there was a backstage interaction with with Jeff no security this was probably about 9 years ago so he was maybe only like, that eighth richest person in the world at the time I don’t know he may have actually been number 1 already but, yeah that was a that was a quick but interesting conversation but the other is yes I’ve I’ve interviewed Mark laurrie a bunch for my book and for some of his other Ventures and then Doug McMillan, actually just posted about this on LinkedIn, after his the announcement of hishis retirement from Walmart I I spent spent about 90 minutes with him interviewing him and his CEO office for my book winner sales all.

Jason G:
[9:34] Yeah I was actually looking at that picture and I had Nostalgia that is no longer his office.

Jason D:
[9:40] No I have not been in his new office in the.

Jason G:
[9:43] You were in the old office which is much more historic because it was Mr Sam’s office. Yes uh somewhat humorously. He wasn’t allowed to change anything in it because it was it was Mr Sam’s office and so like if you ever needed a whiteboard when you’re meeting with Doug they had to wheel 1 in and then 1 day I’m like why don’t why don’t we put a whiteboard up here and he’s like. I’m not allowed to put anything on walls in here.

Jason D:
[10:14] I mean who who is who is the real Insider Jason here it sounds like it’s you Jason.

Jason G:
[10:18] Yeah well.

Scot:
[10:19] He’s got Walmart socks he’s got the whole thing.

Jason G:
[10:22] I’m like the best boy being paid to be there youso that’s a yeah slightly different different scenario uh someone’s got to take out the garbage in his in his, so and I’m thrilled to do that by the way I hope they let me keep doing it but yeah but I I will readily concede now that he’s he’s soon to not be my client that I’m a fan and and, sorry to see him go but hopefully he does something interesting and exciting in his retirement.

Jason D:
[10:48] We’ll see about politics.

Jason G:
[10:50] That is of course 1 room or 1 that he strongly and consistently denies I I have no I wouldn’t know personally but uh yeah it’ll it’s going to be he’s a young man to to to just sort of step away from everything and he certainly seemed like he was. Very capable and up for a high bandwidthlife so yeah we’ll have to see how it all goes.

Jason G:
[11:14] So Jason we had you on today because you you have some news of your own.

Jason D:
[11:20] I do so I announced this week that I was going to try to drum roll on my desk but I would not do that well, I’ve launched my own Independent Media Company it’s called the aisle and I’m going to be covering, sort of the aiic of Commerce so that’s kind of everything from product research moving from, search engines and perhaps product media properties to the AI apps, perhaps actual purchases moving to these apps, also the conversational Commerce Trend that is hitting both retailers own websites as well as as the startup ecosystem where you have, companies like Daydream wizard it’s probably dozens or maybe hundreds of others thinking that perhaps a conversational approach.

Jason D:
[12:21] Is best for this new world with llms behind them and then there’s you know there’s there’s so many other stories there’s, you know well a company like Walmart who says they’re leaning into shopping agents and agentic commerce, will that become a real differentiator and close the gap within Amazon and online Commerce will Amazon do business with these llm companies, I could keep going on and on what’s what’s the future of online advertising in a world where perhaps, more transactions become automated and then maybe this is all a bubble and at least for as a journalist, that would be a great story too and so I’m starting with a paid newsletter I think think my work is worth paying for we’re going to see if the world agrees early signs are yes 24 hours in. And I’d like to bring Live Events back into my remit I I’ll be hosting some for Fortune Magazine still like I do now, I’ve really enjoyed hosting some intimate dinners where I feel like the real tall happens and people can brainstorm and learn and also be really candid about what they’re facing and both the opportunities and the challenges.

Scot:
[13:38] Very cool so is this what form is the aisle going to take is it going to be long form written you can do a pod you can do some videos what what all you got in your bag of tricks.

Jason D:
[13:49] Yeah so I I started so I I launched this week with like I said newsletter you you can sign up for free but the vast majority of content that I write is going to be given in in in full to only paid subscribers, so that’s where I’m starting, that said I I do have some experience in audio I it’s it’s it’s a tough space as you guys know it’s in many ways a saturated space but I think there’s. I think there’s you know a a lot of opportunity there and so I’m trying to get my feet under me with the with writing with text, with my newsletter before I think about audio and video I guess I am thinking about it and having having conversations nothing to announce yet but I think that’s where I’d go next but in between, you I think you’ll see some live Gatherings that can mean dinners that can mean collabs with other event companies, where I would be partaking in what I what I think some of us like to call live journalism which is unscripted conversations in public.

Scot:
[14:57] And I’ll put in a a plug for the audience here so the best thing you know having you be a familiar with the retail and e-commerce space is super helpful because Jason and I both Jason Goldberg and I both take a lot of media calls, and a lot of times we’re kind of like at a surface level because just explaining like a lot of the underlying Concepts take a while if someone’s new to the beat, whereas when you have a question it’s like a eighth level kind of a question so you cut you cut right to the meat of it which is which and you kind of like understand all the foundational Parts which is, it’s helpful for us to talk to the press a lot but it makes your writing go deeper so for people in the industry it it it definitely, you know hits harder and deeper because you kind of understand a lot of the underlying pieces and motivations and whatnot.

Jason D:
[15:42] Listen that’s what that’s what I hope comes through and the great part about this and I mean this honestly is. When I get something wrong or maybe don’t go deep enough, I’m going to get direct feedback from people who are paying to read my reporting and Analysis that hey Jason you got this wrong and I mean that’s just, that that’s a big reason why I’m doing this to have sort of a deeper relationship and hopefully build an actual community of people who you know are are are really fascinated with the space. Make their careers off the space and want to get better at what they do and and have some fun along the way.

Scot:
[16:26] Yeah and so looking at the site you’ve got kind of the core offering which is your your basic subscription there’s a free which I imagine is just kind of a little couple samplings here and there and then you’ve got the core, which has 2 flavors you got the 15 a month or the year for 150 which is some form of discount I can’t do the math Goldberg as fast as calculator.

Jason D:
[16:44] It’s it’s about there it’s about 30 bucks off so about yeah 20% off.

Scot:
[16:49] Yeah okay there you go all right and then, so that includes a story every week or interview and then some breaking news and then access to the archive and then invites to future events so that probably is worth it right there if you’re going to, having been to many of your events you you put on a great event and then you got the annual and then you’ve got Insider which is 550 year which adds I’ll let you tell this part but and then you have team so tell us about Insider and team what are those what goodies are inside of those packages.

Jason D:
[17:17] Yeah so The Insider adds on top of what you described in the core. In annual off-the-record call with me I’ve gotten, you know over the years a lot of different teams inside retailers and consumer Brands sometimes it’s the comms team sometimes it’sa sea level executive, would like my to run something by me for my opinion and. I think there should be some value in that and so early signs from the membership uptake I’m seeing for that, tier been good the other things if you don’t want to call with me, that’s fine there’s more in that bucket another thing is you’ll get 24-hour advanced notice of events so sort of Priority Access to events that I host or collaborate with others on, and then maybe the most important thing you’ll get a handwritten thank you note from either me or my 9-year-old daughter who insists on helping me as I get this business off the ground.

Scot:
[18:20] Oh that’s very nice.

Jason G:
[18:21] And that’s Del Rey’s humble brag that his 9-year-old daughter has better penmanship than my 10 year old son just to be clear.

Jason D:
[18:28] I mean she has better penmanship than my 12-year-old son too so, they they don’t need to write anymore so I mean kind of kind of don’t blame them but and and then I I could quickly explain the 950 tier which that’s 950 a year that is a team tear, I I’ve been also pleasantly surprised at the initial update and and popularity of that tier and that is everything in the 550 tier Plus, total seats or subscriptions in 1 soI should know the math on that 1 but it’s a deal.

Jason G:
[19:06] And even better deal.

Scot:
[19:09] The 30% has a 30% on top of a 30% it’s basically free you’d be crazy not to do itit’s girl that’s girl math.

Jason D:
[19:14] I mean as in in the in the wise words of I can’t believe I’m going to say thisJeff Bezos I want it I want it to be irresponsible not to subscribe to the.

Scot:
[19:26] You’d be fiscally irresponsible not to subscribelet let’s talk about the name when you’re a Founder it’s always hard to pick a name and I I couldn’t help but notice obviously aisle has connotations of stores but, I had noticed the first 2 letters of aisle are AIwas that a factor or an happy.

Jason D:
[19:44] You know what I think it was it was a nice to have and. Still think there are some fun things that I could potentially do with the fact that aisle has an A and an i at the beginning of it, that said that has not come through in my initial branding and and may not I I like that I think it’s pretty memorable I think it has the you know it has the right connotation, pretty easy to say, I would also like the website is read the ile.com I like the play on read the roomand and my first choice was was you’re not supposed to admit this as an entrepreneur right that you had a you had a first choice that.

Scot:
[20:24] I would call that a pivot if you make a pivot it’s cool.

Jason D:
[20:27] I was told that my.

Jason G:
[20:28] There’s there’s zero chance that refi by was Scott’s first choice.

Scot:
[20:32] The way we say it and start playing is my first pivot’s already behind me.

Jason D:
[20:38] Well I’m going to get used I’m going to get used to many pivotsso, yeah my first choice I was told by the fine folks at beehive which is the email partner and newsletter platform I’m working with that I would be starting with 1 hand tied behind my back if I pick. My initial choice.

Scot:
[21:00] Are going to reveal exclusively to our listeners what it was or are you going to keep it dead and buried forever.

Jason D:
[21:05] Yeah it was it was it was the receipt as in as in proofas in all.

Jason G:
[21:13] Show me the receipts.

Jason D:
[21:15] Something like that anyway I didn’t go there so it’s the aisle.

Scot:
[21:18] I don’t understand why they they hated it so much what what was their rationale.

Jason D:
[21:23] I mean that it would almost certainly every newsletter would go into promotions Tab and or perhaps spam umand so here we are moving forward 1 pivot 1 pivot behind me.

Jason G:
[21:36] As funny as I feel like I have I have the opposite filters like like whenever I do a search I have to add the word like confirmation or receipt to the to the search so that I can find the actual transactional emails instead of all the spam.

Jason D:
[21:51] I should have talked to you first I guess Jason.

Jason G:
[21:53] Yeah but I I may be more focused on filing expense reports than I am.

Jason G:
[22:02] I am a value at twice the priceif my boss is listening in Paris. Bonjouryeah and so the the question on our listeners are most dying to know Jason is are you blocking the bots on the aisle.

Jason D:
[22:19] Oh that’s a good question.

Jason G:
[22:21] Did he just think of that.

Jason D:
[22:24] I mean they canwhatever what what whatever bee bee beehive will make that decision for me.

Jason G:
[22:32] Yeah but otherwise.

Scot:
[22:33] Pull in your free tier stuff but not your page is my guess because it’s behind a longer.

Jason D:
[22:38] That is that is how I believe it works.

Scot:
[22:41] That’s my expert refi my opinion on your searchability on your product catalogwhich is your articles. Well can you give us give us a sneak preview who who you got lined up for this puppy other than Jason I.

Jason D:
[22:56] Sure so. I’m really excited about my first interview whichwill probably have published by the time folks are listening to us and it is John Collison the co-founder and president of stripe, and openai’s partner on I should know what the formal name but essentially, pay their payments part well I knew that I was going to say the protocol name but. Agentic Commerce protocol um their payments partner on on instant checkout and just franklyyou know, I think 1 of 1 of the smartest people in sort of the payment online payments world but also future looking into where Commerce is headed and so we had a nice wide ranging 45-minute conversation. I asked him what he would do right now if he were Andy Jassie don’t think he loved that question but he did did did give me some answers. We talked about yeah the future of.

Jason G:
[24:03] Did they involve sunsetting Amazon pay and adopting.

Jason D:
[24:07] Oh that would have been great my my qu I should have left my question a little broader to Encompass that. We talked about which holiday season will be the holiday of agent in Commercehintsorry Scott it’s not 2025, and we talked about a bunch more so that that’s that’s sort of he he was a good sport to you know come on board to startups launch and I have some other fun stuff in there including, including a former Amazon executivesuse of AI to plan,

Jason D:
[24:44] a really really really cool vacation that never ever would have happened without chat GPT so that’s a little bonus.

Scot:
[24:54] All right little tease as we call In The Biz. Did you get to go and see this The Cheeky pipe pint bar I’m sure it has a name but he built a podcast set that’s basically an Irish pub and it’s in like the middle of some office somewhereand it’s very.

Jason D:
[25:10] It is yeah he’s he’s done a good job in those with those interviews I I didn’t I I did not unfortunately maybe when maybe when I sell a few more team editions of, the aisle I’ll I’ll fly out there and take a lookie.

Scot:
[25:27] Yeahcool did what so you could probably go to a bazillion places and do stuff what made you finally kind of pulled the trigger and start your own thing.

Jason D:
[25:39] Sure sothis could go in a couple different directions but I’ll I’ll give a personal backstory too I mean I, you know my dad was a small business owner he was an accountant and a lot of his clients were small business my brother’s an entrepreneur my sister has been a small business owner and so it’s kind of in the family honestly did not know if it was ever for me, that said working at Rico and sort of pitching and then building the code Commerce event series being part of the founding team of recode uh when we launched sort of gave me some of that, entrepreneurial Drivewhen I left my last job I actually thought about, sort of going the substack route at the time and launching my newsletter but I have my book coming out andfrankly I didn’t know, what my exact product would be what my coverage area would be could it be narrow enough.

Jason D:
[26:33] And and instead I ended up taking what what was a great job at fortune and I I’d say they’ll you know the last thing and I’ll get to actually the the the business reason but the last sort of personal reason is you know I’ve had, frankly a lot of people close to me you know, not live very long lives or lives that and so you know my mom and dad both you know passed respectively 50s and 60s I had a good friend passed away suddenly this past summer and is in his mid-40s and, and not to get too deep but I you know we don’t know how long we have and so that combined with feeling like this is really the beginning of major shift in, how the world buys and sells and yes part part of it may be hype but I I think there’s enough here that. I do believe this we’re going to be seeing over the next few years kind of like the biggest shift in in the last couple decades and in the Commerce world just felt like.

Jason D:
[27:35] Just felt like the right time and then and then lastly I’ll give up I’ll give a shout to my my my editor and chief at Fortune Allison Chantel she had a bunch of us pitch her our dream dream job this past spring I think or maybe it was summer, and I pitched her essentially this idea to do it at at Fortune. Fortune green lit the idea and then I realized that well I probably want to own this idea and so if I wanted to own it I’d have to make the leap and and risk it on my own and so here we are.

Scot:
[28:12] The so let’s talk a little bit of you you you know you this isn’t just your first for you into the AI stuff you’ve been writing about it some for fortunately whatnot so what, you’re obviously pretty excited or you wouldn’t have started a company and congrats on that by the way you so I’m I’m on company 5 and I think you’ll find it the most, hard and oddly satisfying thing you’ve ever done to and that you know I think you’ll be very successful so it would be fun to watch you on that side of things, the on the on the AI side what do you think about you know number 1 the big topic right now is this has caused we’re recording this the night Nvidia you know does their earnings stocks up 6% after hours so I think they said something good. But they started doing what are viewed as these roundtrip deals where you know they’ve invested in open Ai and open AI committed to buy a bunch of stuff, that got everyone thinking oh my God it’s a bubble because there’s all this vendor financing which is exactly what happened in the internet and and you you were there during most of that the what do you think about are we in a bubble what’s your what’s your take on it.

Jason D:
[29:16] WofII meanthe money being spent is. Silly I like the the number of digits you know just don’t in some of these deal announcements don’t really make sense to methat said I. I’m just I mean there there are people who I guess should be concerned aboutthe infrastructure spending and the like and yes we can debate environmental impact, I just think the consumer shiftis is real and not going away. Sort of no matter what happens famous last words, but I you know I I just think I mean I you see the you see the data on consumer behavior and you know just taking product research for example even if it’s whatever whatever the small percentages are as I think Jason has. Posted about and talked about and Scott I know you believe like.

Jason G:
[30:24] Scot thinks it’s 100%.

Jason D:
[30:34] That that he comes out with every day that’s that’s my 1 that’s my 1 Mission know but but Siri I was actually saying the opposite like this is the, my belief is this is you know the smallest any of these numbers I’m not talking about the infrastructure spending but. Is the smallest any of these consumer Behavior percentages and numbers will ever be in my opinion and this feels much different to me than, I don’t know what’s the name of a trend you know I talked with John Collison we we went back and talked about the buy button era of of the social media buy buttons and and differences we see now like this feels different much different than that, and and then lastly like beyond the dataand maybe this is a great reason to start a business it’s that by the only reason but like the personal life stuff like yes kind of an early adopter, my wife and family certainly aren’t and like just the uptake in usage andof the AI apps is, has been just astounding to me and and you know in this private dinners I’ve helped hopes for Fortune the conversations around you know early Behavior shifts that folks are seeing and and trying to react to, I don’t I don’t know if I answered your question but sort of that’s that’s how I’m thinking all this right now.

Jason G:
[31:48] Yeah so let me ask you this are what I’m kind of hearing isnot a bubble and I’m I’m with you I don’t like the infrastructure and investment piece like, kind of too complicated a question to for medium and get my brain around but like the.

Jason G:
[32:05] Agentic as a Commerce behavior that disrupts Commerce I’m kind of hearing you you believe that is going to happen that you kind of implied that you’re not confident it’s all gonna play out before this holiday period, so to me that puts you kind of in the middle you don’t think this whole thing is a crazy who is a nation but you also you know don’t think it’s the main reason that people are missing their Q3 and Q4 earnings calls.

Jason D:
[32:31] I I yeah I mean you you should be are are you AI because you just summarized me really well but um.

Jason G:
[32:39] About say I would I would have said that’s a great question the answer to whether it’s a bubble or not is yeah sorry.

Jason D:
[32:47] And then I’d push back and you change your answeryeah no I think that I think that’s right and I think, listen I don’t think I would I I would not be launching a publication if I if I didn’t believe mostly you know, that we are we are headed for man am I going to say paradigm shift I don’t know you know I I I think Scott and I are probably in on on the same side and sounds like you Jason that. All this feels much different than anything we’ve seen in the last couple of decades and and yeah again if it if it all goes to hell like, I guess that’s a great story for some journalists but I don’t know that I could build a business on that so I you know I’m not counting on that.

Jason G:
[33:34] Yeah I feel like that’s the 1 that’s 1 of the ways in which you’ve picked a good career is Comedians and journalists like when whether it turns out good or badcuz like it it’s either a huge win or you have a funny story and it’s a it’s an interesting read, either waybut I do you know Scott and I talk a lot like we we had this friend who I assume you also know Andrew whip-pin who 1 of the. Early Advocates of retail media and he famously wrote this article a couple weeks ago is this all a shared hallucination um.

Scot:
[34:07] No he didn’t he didn’t ask he said it is.

Jason G:
[34:08] Yes yes uh okay well yeah.

Scot:
[34:10] AI is a hallucination period.

Jason G:
[34:13] Yeah he was definitely taking the overhyped perspective and then a dear friend of mine and I someone I know both you know tsukareta muru kodai, wrote wrote an article today saying hey. The like it’s only like 2% of of prompts have anything to do with Commerce and it’s all overhypedand so I’m, I don’t know it’s it’s it’s interesting I now have to hear that every time I walk into a room is like is this a real thing I just did a webinar at work on a Janet Commerce yesterday and that was that was the first question I got at the end of this was, is is this a hype and I’m I’m kind of with you. Like I I don’t know how fast it’s going to happen I think the timing is hard and definitely you know there’s people that are overly whipped into a frenzy 1 of which may or may not be on this podcast at the moment, but the it’s it’s hard to believe, in the long run that this isn’t a a fundamental change in how people discover stuff and buy stuff.

Jason G:
[35:20] Scot why are we wrong on the timing.

Scot:
[35:23] Well I have rebuttals for sutura and Andrew but I won’t I won’t burn up our our valuable Delight time on that.

Jason D:
[35:30] I will I will just I will just I I I know I’m I’m kind of disagreeing with with what’s s sutareta laid out although, think she has some valid points that said like talk to her over the years for a couple of stories come to mind about like, trends that like she called gimmicks and. Kind of or companies and 1 of them um I’m pretty sure I quoted her on this early feature of the the wishshopping app. WIS which.

Scot:
[36:07] Is that so.

Jason D:
[36:10] They they had sold.

Jason G:
[36:11] Teemu 1.0.

Jason D:
[36:12] They sold for like 140 million or something like that after whatever andand she was right so anyway uh shout shout out Sutra.

Scot:
[36:23] She said social media would never be a Marketplace on Tik tok’s doing pretty good.

Jason D:
[36:29] The exception rather than the rule there though huh.

Scot:
[36:32] Yeah it took a it takes Cyclesthat’s a good.

Jason G:
[36:35] I think there’sno no go ahead Scott.

Scot:
[36:38] It’s a good segue into conversational Commerce I know you you interviewed Mark laurrie for your book and he was big on that.

Jason D:
[36:48] He was pre Walmart I think it was pre Walmart when he was still running jet.com, maybe it was at Walmart when they launched it they launched something called jet black which was essentially like text message-based concierge service but the vision was that it was not going to be humans on the other side of, the text it would be.

Jason D:
[37:11] Bots of some type and you know I think at Walmart internally think they got a lot of push back for the money they were spending and, I think I think it launched in New York City with like pretty it was geared toward like well off women, I think especially mothers busy mothers and you know they they burned a lot of money but I think the MPS scores were like, amazing but it’s 1 former employee told me I think they said you know it was a greatit’s a great service but not a business anyway, he had this Vision that like conversational Commerce you know not text not uh keyword-based search was would eventually become a hit he actually believed so much about it that, I think Walmart was thinking of shutting down jet black and he went out and raised I think I I don’t know if this was never public until my book I think I think he raised like dollars from companies like, Visa Microsoft maybe a few others to spin out jetblack into and and Walmart would would own 50% of it and as I reported in the book I think at the very last minute Doug McMillan, put.

Jason D:
[38:27] Put a stop to that and I think blindsided a few folks I I asked him about this for my book and I think he said they wanted to keep the technology which I’m still not exactly sure what it was but keep the technology and that and the idea inside of Walmart, even though they would haveowned about 50% of this, this JV anyway didn’t happen but but you know I’ve been thinking about that a lot as sort of conversational Commerce starts to take off again maybe that was actually, ahead of its time and I know some people associate with it definitely felt.

Jason G:
[39:01] Interesting and what about you personally Jason are you bullish on conversational Commerce do you think that’s the future interface.

Jason D:
[39:09] Well are are you talking voice or are you talking text or both.

Jason G:
[39:12] Haha so that’s my first trick question of that is I feel like conversational Commerce is a complicated word, so yeah that’s the first thing to unpack are we talking about like long-term sentences being a more important part of Commerce or are we talking about actual speech being, being part of Commerce I, kind of got the impression that like most people when they say conversational Commerce I think are talking about speech but I actually think the jet black service when it was talking about conversational commerce was more talking about text interpretation.

Jason D:
[39:49] It was it was yeah and and so I listen I. I think both will have their roles depending on the type of, the type of search or the type of product but I’m not I’m not going to make any predictions on, how much penetration we might see I just do I I do believe, you know we we talked about conversational voice search when Alexa first came out or early days of, Google Google Assistant you know Walmart actually had to deal with them and like all of that fell flat on its face for the most part, I I I do think we’ll see higher penetration numbers there now how big they get I don’t know what do you guys think.

Scot:
[40:36] Uh side step it and say I think the hidden the Hidden Gem is this chat gbt group chat that could be like really interesting. So so in China for the longest time they have the Chinese the Chinese flavor of conversational where you it has Commerce in the, in the whole thing where you’re you can just chat with a brand and stuff that never really took but but here with AI I think that we have another shot at it and I think, a lot of people aren’t tracking this group thing because they’re launching it in small countries to start because I think they’re out of server capacity but it’s going to be interesting to see I think that could be how it unlocked. So the 3 of us could have a you know a sports team we’re excited about or something and we could be like hey anyone know I actually need new shoes or cleats or something and, and it it could just like hop into the conversation and you could just like say hey at chat gbt can you know you recommend anything. That you guys can chime in on whatever it says it’s pretty neat if you, I can’t use it because I don’t live in you know the 3 countries like New Zealand Japan and I forget the third 1 Singapore I think so I don’t live in those countries so I can’t try it but it looks like it could be pretty.

Jason D:
[41:47] Well if you have any requests for someone to try it out for you my brother lives in New Zealand andactually he’s coming to stay with us this weekend umI don’t know what he’s.

Scot:
[42:00] I’ll send you I’ll send you.

Jason D:
[42:03] Sounds like I should be having him use it for me too.

Jason G:
[42:09] Yeah although it’d be really wants to be a good brother.

Scot:
[42:11] Dang I just gave you an idea.

Jason G:
[42:12] I feel like you’d be better off getting him to move to Singaporelike it’s kind of an outlier that New Zealand’s the test market for something but there’s a a lot of interesting digital experiences that that uh start out in Singapore.

Scot:
[42:25] Yeah I don’t know why they chose the countries it is very strangely.

Jason D:
[42:28] Sheep sheep love AI.

Jason G:
[42:32] Could be trying to recruit Greg fan to be there next CEO is my.

Jason D:
[42:37] Well I got some good stories there too but another time.

Jason G:
[42:39] Yeah I I’m kind of in between you I I thinkI’m with you I think, text interpretation is, going to become increasingly important I mean I think we’re already seeing it with like the very early versions of of as Scott likes to say a a gentic Commerce optimization today.

Jason G:
[43:01] Theyou know in Google you tend to to use, 3 or 4 4 word searches and you know Google taught all the whole world to think in terms of keywords um but now you know the the typical prompt might be 20 to 30 words and that additional context, opens the door for for wildly better experiences and outcomes and so I I do think that is super interesting and I think like my son’s never going to learn keywords like all the all the kids are, are you know very organically having these long form conversations with the llms and it seems Seems, Perfectly Natural to them and they get way better outcomes than than adults do in in aggregate, I’m less optimistic that the voice is super important there are absolutely use cases where where voice, works and is useful I I use voice in my house to to order an Uber and and that’s perfectly fine and I could imagine for some, some replenishment use cases that voices fine but like nobody’s, gonna order their next like replacement air conditioner or dishwasher or or or like you know some some super specific garment with a bunch of unique attributes like people people aren’t going to.

Jason G:
[44:17] Do that with voice voice just isn’t that efficientalthough you know I think the text thing is super interesting and, you know some listeners may not know Tik tok’s parent company in China is daune or bite dance but the the Chinese version is daun, which is much more like a a chat Commerce platform than the sort of, short form video social discovery platform we all think of as Tik Tok and, it’s it’s very different but the amount of Commerce that happens on it dwarfed Tik Tok shop has been enormously successful and Tik Tok shop is still a rounding error compared to all the Commerce that happens on Dow, so I do think there’s a argument for this like long form text and these these free form texts becoming an interface for Commerce, Dian in China.

Jason D:
[45:09] I I want to I want to disagree but I agree with that you know the interesting thing on the voice is that, you know part of the reason that and and I’ll be talking to the head of Alexa Plus at at Fortune’s AI event in December salt maybe I’ll ask him part of the reason they. They launched Alexa plus sort of at the same time as a bunch of these new Echo Show like devices with screens was that, I think they thought the combination of voice with the screen is what would need to be necessary, to start taking sort of actions some of that can be transactions not you know actions don’t have to be transactions but some are and so. Anyway just be interesting to see if that bet if that bet works out it’s it is still very early, agree with you on the text based stuff making more sense a lot of the time at least that would be my guess.

Jason G:
[46:10] Yeahso did you say you already have a a conversation booked with the Alexa.

Jason G:
[46:21] Sorry with the the with someone from Amazon about.

Jason D:
[46:24] Yo sorry um yeah so so, we’ll see I I I don’t know if it will be in in the aisle because but but I am co-hosting still events with Fortune as I said, and we have our brainstorm AI Event in San Francisco December 8th and 9th and I’m interviewing there on stage Panos Panay who, runs not only the all of the consumer gadgets at Amazon but also Alexa also, project hyper and I think also Zoosk the, autonomousvehicle unit that Amazon acquired some years back also rolls up to to Panos who’s longtime Microsoft executive who joined I want to say 2 years ago uh.

Scot:
[47:15] Big portfolio.

Jason D:
[47:16] Sounds I’m I’m not sure how that makes sense but maybe I’ll ask.

Jason G:
[47:22] That feels like the miscellaneous bucket and the revenue.

Scot:
[47:26] Other you run other.

Jason D:
[47:27] Is that a good place to that a good place to be under Andy Jassie that’s maybemaybe I’ll ask him that privately.

Jason G:
[47:36] Yeah although potentially like Amazon ads was was a miscellaneous Revenue bucket for a for a considerable period of time so it can. Well Jason the most consistent thing that has happened in the history of this podcast is we start every episode being this is going to be a short episode, um and we’ll we’ll give the listeners a gift and and finish in half our usual time and then the next thing we know we’ve used up the entire hour which, I would say surprisingly not surprisingly has has happened again.

Jason D:
[48:13] Glad to do my part.

Jason G:
[48:15] Yeah I think there’s a I I don’t think Mark Twain said it but I think paraphrasing if I had more time I’d make a shorter podcast. Um but so 2 recap how can listeners find And subscribe to the aisle if they are so inspired.

Jason D:
[48:33] Yeah they can go right to read the isle.com and back slash join where they can purchase a subscription, if I have not convinced them that they should which, can’t possibly be the case but you could also write on the homepage subscribe to as a free member again you’ll get, little breadcrumbs and Snippets here and there of my work but I think to to get sort of anything, worthy of your time I just ask that pay me a little bit for for the work and so again that’s read the isle.com, join and I’ll be on LinkedIn like all the cool kids I like sharing some backstory there and you know for all the sort of fun that some people make of of LinkedIn you know,

Jason D:
[49:26] I learned a lot there and have some fun along the way so you can reach me there too.

Jason G:
[49:31] Amen and I will put links to your profile and the uh read the aisle.com join page, in the show notes if you’re not driving feel free to click it otherwise wait till you get home and do it do it safely but Jason it’s been great to reach out we’re gonna look forward to following your success in the new venture, and learn some surprising breaking new news in our Commerce space that we love so.

Scot:
[49:56] Yeah congrats on starting a new gig and excited to see where you take it from here you’ll be in 10 years you’ll have immediate Empire it’ll be fun to watch you build.

Jason D:
[50:05] I was hoping I’d be retired but that’s only Doug McMillan I guess.

Jason G:
[50:09] Those 2 are not mutually exclusive to be.

Jason G:
[50:13] You could have a media Empire and be retired.

Jason D:
[50:16] I’m knocking on wood.

Jason G:
[50:18] Uh well well for listeners you do not need to subscribe to this podcast but you can jump on iTunes and give us a 5-star review if you found this episode, helpful and again we’re super grateful to everyone for tuning in and to Jason for giving us some of his valuable time, and until next time Happy Commercing!

Jason & Scot Show Episode EP332 – Kelly Goetsch Order Network eXchange (onX) Standard

Retailgeek — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:06:41 +0000

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 332 is an interview with Kelly Goestsch of Pipe17 and the new Order Network eXchange (onX) Standard.

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Chapters

0:37 Welcome Back, Kelly Goetsch

2:35 The AI Bubble: Past and Present

3:58 The Rise of Microservices

7:32 Transition to Pipe 17

9:43 The Order Management Dilemma

13:01 Network-Based Solutions

18:10 Industry Standards and Collaboration

25:48 Launching the Order Network Exchange

32:28 The Evolution of AI in Commerce

40:43 Future of E-Commerce and AI

50:24 Predictions for AI Integration

54:02 Closing Thoughts on Industry Standards

In this episode of the Jason & Scot Show, recorded on Thursday, November 6th, hosts Jason Goldberg and Scot Wingo welcome back Kelly Goetsch, now the President of Pipe17. They dive deep into the evolving landscape of e-commerce, order management, and the impact of AI on consumer experiences, taking us on a journey through the dynamic developments of the industry.

The conversation kicks off with a nostalgic nod to a previous episode, highlighting the rapid shifts in technology and market dynamics since Kelly last joined the show during the height of the microservices boom in July 2021. The discussion emphasizes the transformation of order management systems (OMS) and how current customer expectations have been reshaped by giants like Amazon, pushing brands to adapt to new fulfillment models. Kelly explains how Pipe17 positions itself uniquely in the OMS space, competing not just with traditional systems but also embracing a network-based approach, citing their aim to redefine order operations for the modern era.

Throughout the episode, listeners learn about the innovative concept of the Order Network Exchange (ONX) and the Commerce Operations Foundation, which aims to standardize communications between selling channels and fulfillment systems. Kelly describes the vision of a seamless, integrated environment where data flows between systems in real-time, vastly improving responsiveness to customer orders and effectively managing inventory across various platforms. The team delves into the significance of the Model Context Protocol (mCP), which allows AI to interface more effectively with various applications in real-time, exemplifying the transformative potential of AI within commerce settings.

The conversation takes an intriguing turn as the hosts discuss the current state of e-commerce, focusing on how emerging technologies and shifts in consumer behavior are influencing future sales trends. Kelly expresses a bold prediction that more than 50% of e-commerce transactions will be influenced by AI in the near future. The dialogue also spans the evolution of payment solutions, summarizing the landscape of competing systems and the potential for disruption.

Jason and Scot further probe the notion of the web’s declining dominance compared to new AI-driven shopping experiences. Kelly shares insights about the changing nature of discovery channels and how AI can reinvent customer interactions in meaningful ways, potentially replacing traditional web browsing models. Amidst these discussions, Kelly highlights the importance of fostering collaboration within the industry, illustrating how cooperation can lead to overall growth and improved customer experience.

As the episode wraps up, the conversation touches on the necessity for companies to become agile, moving away from prolonged evaluation processes towards a model that values continuous improvement. The discussion reinforces the idea that standards may provide the needed flexibility for businesses to adapt more readily to accelerating changes in technology.

Tune in for this captivating episode, filled with rich insights into the future of e-commerce, AI’s pivotal role in shaping customer experiences, and the transformative efforts underway at Pipe17!

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on your preferred podcast platform, and don’t forget to subscribe for more engaging discussions and industry insights!

Episode 332 of the Jason & Scot Show was recorded on Thursday, November 6th, 2023.

[10:04]Sure so historically order Management Systems have been applications sitting on top of databases, and back when the leading MSS were built there was basically 1 digital sales Channel which was your brand.com and then typically you were going to 1 ARP and 1 own, Warehouse right and it was a pretty straightforward linear progression there and the MS had to be the system of record it was kind of the center of the back office, and The Innovation that pipe 17 was to start with a network first and the founders of the company saw that there are many more selling channels than ever before.

[10:44]AI now among them you know typical customer of ourselves on 8 different selling channels and that’s a brand.com, it’s Amazon it’s Walmart it’s Tik Tok we want Tik Tok partner of the year last year we want Amazon mcf partner of the year but folks are selling inventory on so many more channels than ever before.

[11:03]And also Amazon has really screwed up customer expectations because historically, everybody was fine with 5 6 day delivery times you know I ordered a digital camera for my wife’s birthday back in 2008 lived in downtown Chicago at the time, and Best Buy gave me an 11-day delivery timeline and that was normal it wasn’t considered an exception things just took a lot longer and nobody seemed to, really care that much and now we have so many more you know I I’ll give you another example my first corporate job was at Foot Locker they used to ship everything out of 1 Warehouse in Wisconsin, and now they have 8 different warehouses and they have 2 different 3pl’s on top of that, Amazon is really reset the bar for customer expectations so you’ve got a lot more selling channels and you also have a lot more fulfillment channels, and that creates the need for Network level connectivity and the same way that stripe for example or twilio or project 44 those are all very network-based Solutions, and we are the first network-based OMS and then on top of that we have ai based order management like you’d expect, so we can Route Around hurricanes if hurricane is heading towards a a city will actually reroute around that for example and stop surfacing up inventory.

[12:17]From those locations we do the same thing for labor strikes we do least cost routing we do fastest routing so very traditional order management and that’s why we are in the order management space we are categorically different. We call ourselves order operations which is a combination of that Network and AI over the top of it. But we’re we’re just different and I think we’re very much suited for especially the digitally native era where folks want something quick and cheap and easy and with us you plug in your API Keys you configure your intents through Ai and you’re good to go.

[13:01]

Network-Based Solutions

[12:53]Nice nice and I’m kind of surprised that the world needs Solutions like yours because it seems like if you’re just going to sell on 8 different platforms that what you would do is just. Bifurcate all your inventory into 8 piles and put it in 8 separate fulfillment centers and just hardwire 1 to 1 isn’t that doesn’t isn’t that seems like that would be much easier.

[13:11]Logically yes but you know and that’s the real challenge if you’ve got you know 8 pairs of size 32 jeans and you’re selling across 8 different channels and you sell through in 1, right how quickly can you propagate that change up and if you’ve got a traditional style order management system it can take a long time, and again I think our core differentiator is that network-based approach where you plug in the API keys and then we maintain it as a network level connection, and we propagate those changes up in milliseconds so categorically different approach but we’re competing in the same category, you know similar kind of to headless Commerce right headless commerce was a categorically different approach. But we competed in that same category with the traditional you know monolithic Legacy Solutions.

[13:55]Yeah and I I I a few times I feel like I’ve heard uh folks refer to it as order orchestration and is that just, semantics or is there like in your mind is there a a difference between order management and order or orchestration is orchestration an attempt to differentiate it in some way.

[14:14]Yeah I think orchestration is a feature of order management it’s a subset and there is some Solutions on the market that only do the orchestration part but I think order management is is much bigger than that.

[14:27]You know I have a a deep technical question around the name pipe 17 pipe I get like it it kind of, says to me you know order management because it’s like the pipes the piping of e-commerce and and all these things what why 17 just because it’s a prime number or favorite football player or what’s the.

[14:47]Look at Scott flexing with his knowledge of prime numbers.

[14:50]Yeah yeah I can go up to a 19 on that 1.

[14:55]So it actually really interesting and that was a question I had early on as well is you know why the 17th areas and, the area 17 is called the broadman area and what it does is it takes input from your from your eyes that nerve that powers your eyes, and it distributes it to the rest of the brain so it takes whatever you’re seeing and distributes it through the rest of your brain, and actually that’s really really good analogy I still don’t know who who came up with the term pipe 17 but I think it makes a ton of sense.

[15:26]Wow I would not have guessed that’s I’m glad I asked I learned something new I can end the podcast now I now know it.

[15:31]You picked a name that’s super intuitive to all the neuroscientists buying uh buying orders.

[15:35]Yeah it’s all ton of them now I know what pipe 17 means.

[15:40]Cool well 1 thing you had reached out because there’s some pretty interesting news going on I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll just turn it over to you tell us tell us there’s something you’ve been working on and we want to hear about it fire away.

[15:54]Yeah today when folks are listening to this we will be live with the order Network exchange standard, and on top of that the Commerce operations Foundation and, what we’re doing is coming together as an industry to solve a problem that we’ve had now for decades there’s no standard that sits between selling channels and fulfillment channels.

[16:17]Again historically you’d go and weld each selling Channel back to each fulfillment Channel and a fulfillment Channel could be an order management system, it could be a warehouse management system it could be an Erp, it could be a third-party Logistics provider you know there’s a big world out there in fulfillment and it was you know I I guess I shouldn’t expect anything different but you know I had a pretty naive view of order management working on the order capture side, I just thought yeah you throw the order over the fence and it’s the os’s problem well suddenly it’s our problem um so I get it. But it actually takes a lot of work and a lot of innovation and a lot of point-to-point integration to make all of this work behind the scenes, so I’ve got together with a whole bunch of folks across the industry Manhattan and Sterling which are the 2 dominant ms’s. Lega ship hero Manhattan on the WMS side radial Rider civil Logistics on the 3pl side and, we’re at 52 right now at the time of recording I think we’ll be north of 65 companies that will have signed up to back the standard by the time you’re listening to this.

[17:27]But it’s solving that problem in the same way that we have agentic Commerce protocol in the selling Channel Side, and we have ap2 on the selling Channel side which is Google’s this is that but 1 layer down.

[17:39]Got it cool it always impresses me how you were able to get all these different vendors to work together what’s what’s this so you did that at the Mach Alliance what’s the secret sauce how do you make that work I can barely get myself together for lunch.

[17:54]You know industry cooperation is the default right we have AC and Swift in the payment space,

[18:10]

Industry Standards and Collaboration

[18:01]and I’m assuming at some point you know 1 Executive and 1 Bank said hey guys this is stupid why are we doing point-to-point Integrations with the Bank of Omaha or whatever right. Probably at some point somebody said let’s build the standard.

[18:14]You know we see the same thing with ethernet you know Bob metcalfei invented it back in the 60s at Xerox Parc and he printed it out the standard on manuals and handed it out to his competitors and they all rallied around that standard, again we have selling Channel standards now we have ACP and ap2 right and that’s more between an AI head and the payments vendors and the Commerce platforms, and that’s great but you know industry cooperation allows all of us to succeed and. A huge barrier to order management and fulfillment changes is all of the integration work that has to happen and if we can remove that as a barrier, and allow data to flow stream list seamlessly from your heads whether those heads are AI or Tik Tok or Amazon or any of those other heads, back to any back office system of record and collapse those layers a little bit there’s value for everyone there, and the other is everyone is doing mCP anyway and my pitch to them was hey this is kind of crazy that there’s no standard right now, mCP finally makes this possible let’s all get together in a line around this very straightforward pragmatic standard, and then you don’t have to build your own because obviously you’re going to do this on your own and every single person said yeah we either have just started this or we’re about to, so everyone needs to do this and this just makes sense to pull off the shelf and do.

[19:37]Awesome let’s pick on the do you call it onx or onx like what’s what how should I phrase this the ordered Network Exchange, how do you say it Onyx okay uh so let’s start it Onyx you set it to standard so does that does that mean that it’s kind of like. A file format or a you know or more of a, more of a network protocol like okay you’re going to come in with an order and it’s going to look like this and then we’re going to just kind of like the ACP is this sequence of of events that happen and the underlying data amongst those sequences is that kind of how it’s set up.

[20:14]Kind of so mCP I should probably Define what that is first um it stands for model context protocol and it’s hard to believe but it’s a year old at this point I think it’s exactly a year old by the time that this episode will Air, anthropic came up with it and they were brilliant in what they did what it is is basically a USBC port for AI. So it allows you to connect you know there have literally been trillions of dollars invested in openai and Google and you know across that whole AI ecosystem it allows you to connect those applications, back to other resources and a resource could be something like a SAS app it could be something like your Gmail. It could be something like a database but it it’s basically an API for AI, and if you pull up your Chachi PT today and you hit the connectors tab it’s going to give you a big list of things you can connect to including slack and Google Drive and, Gmail and your calendar and like we have 1 at pipe 17 we’re the first to come out with this um in our category, and once you connect up with these SAS apps you can then ask things like what is my schedule for today, and it’s going to pull data from your calendar it’s going to pull data from your email it’s going to pull data from slack and it’s going to then present you with your calendar.

[21:35]So mCP is really the Catalyst for all of this and all of the AI vendors have very quickly standardized around it as the way that you, surface up data and functionality to AI.

[21:47]And Onyx specifically is a set of tools and resources and mCP defines both so a tool in mCP terminology is a verb it’s something that you do, so capture order is a tool a return is a tool an exchange is a tool right they’re they’re verbs they’re things that you’re doing. And they also allow you to expose resources and a resource is something like an order a product inventory it’s a document right it’s a static thing that you’re retrieving. So

[22:18]Retrieved as a Json just out of curiosity.

[22:19]No it is not. We we Define the 12th mCP tools that you would expect and we Define 7 resources, and the unexpected is very clear about defining the interface what it does not do deliberately is go into how each vendor, does what it’s supposed to do so. Order capture mCP tool is going to be very different based on whether it’s an LMS or a 3pl or a WMS, and that’s fine but the input and getting that all documented, and surfacing that up to the LMS so that when you point to selling channel to an mCP server that runs the Onyx standard it knows exactly deterministically what to do and how to do it.

[23:07]I got it okay so that’s the onx side Onyx side how about the Commerce operations Foundation the CF the cough. I’m a branding genius.

[23:21]I very firmly believe that specifications require oversight and. This organization it’s the Commerce operations Foundation is basically the cloud native Computing Foundation equivalent for kubernetes right it just owns the specification only. It’s not like the Mach Alliance where it’s a community thing they’re not going to be conferences, it’s strictly phone organized around that and it owns the intellectual property so we’ve actually got a patent on capturing orders from an AI head in passing them back to mCP, so the foundation owns that trademarks copyrights we’ve got a lot of Ip and it’s all in the name of the foundation and ensures vendor neutrality, so I’m on the board alongside the CTO of Manhattan for example who is an early entro employee, you know same with Sterling you know with the rest of the vendors and the Consortium were on the board together. And then we have working groups to advance the standard both technically and commercially we want to evolve it and there might be an opportunity here to do things like. You know maybe standardized products data as well alright we’re this is very much orders down there might be an opportunity to do products up for example a lot of opportunities here to get involved for folks. Organization is very focused on the specification only.

[24:45]Yep so as it matures they’ll, you know somehow vote and approve of adding things and you know clarifications and those its kind of the body that that makes sure the standard is going the right way and getting adoption and those types of things.

[25:00]Yes entirely.

[25:02]Okay you talked about who was signed up let’s say someone’s listening and they’re like holy cow I really want to be part of this where what do they do.

[25:12]So you can go to the website it’s the Commerce Ops foundation.org and there you have information for sign up always free to contact me directly, I’m happy to get you connected and we have a couple different ways to participate 1 is the industry Advisory Board and that’s more for the brands of emergence um and they can network with peers they can pull the standard off the shelf and adopt it themselves. A lot of opportunities there the vendors can join the vendor Advisory Board I know good branding on that 1 right,

[25:48]

Launching the Order Network Exchange

[25:41]and then on the those who are actually interested in working on the specification itself uh we have a technical steering committee. And they’re able to join their we also have a friend of category and I think we have 3 maybe 4 members in that, and that’s just folks who want to stay closed they want to participate in the all members meeting they’re kind of sitting on the fence you know not quite sure about all this whole AI thing, and mCP and they want to watch from the sidelines and that’s fine too you know always happy I I’m a big believer in having a big tent.

[26:15]Yeah so I think I sort of get the the role of the standards I I am curious though like. We very often end up at a standard but it’s to me it’s less common that we start with a standard like in my experience, somebody who’s the incumbent almost always says man you know what would the best solution here would be if there was some proprietary solution that only we owned and we were wild garden and everyone had to send us money because we have the only good solution, and and usually that big incumbent does not agree to the industry standard because, they want you to have a financial incentive to be walked into them and generally what will happen is the people that aren’t that big incumbent will create some standard and wean into interoperability and extol all these benefits, and then they’ll fight it out in the marketplace and either the incumbent will be so powerful that they do win and then the standard never matters, or eventually the incumbent doesn’t win and they have to cave and support the standard like is. Am I am I right and why didn’t that happen here like it kind of seems like like like people I mean am I am I fabricating a problem that doesn’t really happen or.

[27:26]No I mean mCP is just so new I think we had first mover advantage on this and Consolidated a lot of support very early over the course of the summer when mCP and look this would not be possible without mCP.

[27:39]Physically cannot do it right the API standard if you were to do it with that would be so owner risk to adopt, it would be like Arts from NRF if you remember that initiative from. A decade ago great in concept but when you get to the point where you’re dictating database field names it becomes way too onerous to support and mCP makes this possible. The other thing you have to remember is there are yes commercial order Management systems on the market and that’s great, but Far and Away the biggest 1 out there the biggest incumbent is homegrown it’s do it yourself. I don’t know what the numbers are if I had to guess I would say the commercial order management Market is probably, 15 20% of the total market for order management out there if I had to guess.

[28:28]And the biggest barrier to adopting an MS is the integration it’s the implementation it’s a ton of work to implement a new Ms you know folks have described it as open heart surgery, and this standard makes this much much easier because for 2 levels for 2 Reasons first is the omss themselves don’t have to have fragile point-to-point Integrations with Downstream systems, so if you have a WMS and you have a 3pl that support this and you need to connect to that from the MS, you can use Onyx from the MS down you can also go from the selling channel to the MS through Onyx so it’s multiple layers, that both use the same standard if that makes sense.

[29:14]Yeah yeah I think it does and you know in my mind I imagine. There’s a bunch of solutions that are going to benefit from the the standards having emerged so early like Scott and I are older than dirt so we remember like some of the the first iterations of of e-commerce right and and Scott’s early days of Channel advisor. That was the first time people are trying to solve this problem of selling. On multiple platforms right and the the idea that you had to plumb order Management in at all was new right like like people are like oh I have this man to sell just send that number to both platforms and hope hope for the best um, and we we laugh but that’s how people did it right and. Like until relatively recently whenever some social media platform would launch Commerce like you could almost Bank on the fact that they, like, didn’t have robust you know Inventory management as part of their their solution but you know now they’re all these startups that are like inventing these new experiences and having this POV about how. The this these customer experiences should go and they they kind of have a blueprint of of a lot of the best practices to cook in so they don’t do these kind of. Stupid ill-considered first iteration Solutions.

[30:28]Well well yes and I think what’s really interesting is if you look at I think we’re going to see more selling channels continue to proliferate especially in the age of AI and I think that’s generally.

[30:39]Yeah I’m going to take the the under on that 1 yes I think we’re going to they’re going to go more.

[30:44]We’re they’re going to go more and they need access to inventory information and other fulfillment information, way up the purchase funnel so if somebody is searching for something you have to surface the the inventory and fulfillment options up all the way up at the top of the funnel.

[31:01]And right now it’s very challenging to get that data surface because you’re going from a warehouse management system to an order management system to a Commerce platform, and then finally to whatever social Channel you know the social channel of the day happens to be a lot of layers there and at each layer things get cached and what’s great about the Onyx standard is, that standard sits on top of all of these different systems and you can go directly from a Tik Tok head for example, and directly query the inventory in a 3pl that you might be selling through right and I’m I I every 1 of these 3pls there’s a you know there’s a guy named Bob I don’t mean a stereotype but there’s always a guy named Bob, you know who’s manually entering in all the inventory you know in a green screen computer somewhere that data from Bob is surfaced immediately up to these selling channels, through mCP so you’re going directly from the selling directly to a physical warehouse and that’s what’s novel about this approach you can also go directly to your order management system or whatever that happens to be, but we’ve never had that level of data before accessible to the selling channels and I think it’s really going to accelerate the adoption of order Management Systems the commercial ones.

[32:14]And the proliferation of selling channels.

[32:17]Yeah Emperor our younger listeners that didn’t get the green screen reference that’s just a that’s a terminal application that only has dark mode.

[32:28]

The Evolution of AI in Commerce

[32:25]Yes only has dark mode exactly it’s The Homebrew yes.

[32:28]Yeah so and 1 last thing on mCP that I just I chuckle about but it’s it’s it’s like. Obviously everything gets brand washed right so I get all these pitches from these, the solutions and the main differentiating thing about the solution is its it uses AI right and so somehow that’s supposed to magically make it better right so like do you want the regular hot dog or do you want the AI hot dog right or, janitorial services or landscaping services or whatever ridiculous thing and I feel like in the Tech Community I’m it feels like I’m starting to see like, people go and the the fundamental like reason our our technical solution is better is it’s based on mCP like I I feel like it’s already developed some brand cachet and that like people that are looking for, for partners or funds or you know investment are are like leaning into their mcpc support.

[33:22]Yes so first is think of mCP is just a fancy API. And it’s really hard to go around and brag that you have a fancy API there has to be something underneath that that provides value but what what mCP enables specifically that is not enabled elsewhere is. You can do actual agent level work and I I’ll give you an example right so if you hook up an LMS. And you hook up a Commerce platform and then you hook up CRM and you hook up payments right all of these have mCP connections, you could do um a text-based input to say Claude or chat gut and actually physically write out and say something to the effect of, there was a hurricane that just went through I’d like to find all orders that were impacted and delayed for more than 24 hours, then go create a voucher code in the Commerce platform then send them a text message offering this voucher code and log that transaction in my CRM and as long as all of those parties have mCP enabled.

[34:26]AI can do that right like literally trillion dollars worth of you know investment in this AI space, if you don’t have that you physically cannot surface up your data functionality to Ai and AI cannot work with it and a big, a gripe I have on the side is you know a lot of these big existing products have a little you know clippy agent that they call AI, it is AI for sure but I think the better form is mCP where you can do real AI agent level uh actions.

[34:55]Yeah yeah AI has unfortunately become such a broad vague term that it’s all almost meaningless because it could it could refer to so many things. But speaking of AI let’s pivot a little bit because we’re we’re talking about the back end which is super interesting and super important to those of us that actually want to make customers happy but of course, the sexy end of all this is where the customers are discovering products and deciding to buy them with the help of the robots or or potentially even, turning over the the shopping duties to the robot. Like sort of the the front end of of this whole experience I’m I’m guessing that those kind of experiences are. Big Driver of New Opportunities and new customers at pipe 17.

[35:38]Yeah absolutely we’re very well positioned for that because again we’re Network Centric. And being Network Centric we plug into all of these different selling channels including AI, back office systems like erps fulfillment channels so we’re very well set up for this AI era and just generally the bar of what we’ve called Commerce is moving down 1 layer. And folks are throwing captured orders to us from many many different channels at this point.

[36:08]Yeah and Scott seems like he’s exclusively willing to talk about instant checkout like in his mind that’s the only only thing that will ever happen is. Does that is that is instant checkout already the de facto winner is that what you guys hear about or get asked about most or like do you see other, other sort of experiences or front ends being that you know potentially part of the the long-term AI shopping ecosystem.

[36:36]I mean ACP was the first standard in this entire category and it was released what 6 weeks ago maybe I mean Scott would know I mean with retail gentic how how how long ago was that Scott.

[36:50]It was 9:30 so let’s see 30 days so 38 days ago 3.

[36:55]38 days ago.

[36:58]Sorry to cut along on the tooth.

[36:59]At the time of this recording I’ve heard Etsy there are a handful of Shopify customers that’s it right as as far as I’ve ever heard that’s it so we are early.

[37:11]Uh and they were in Camp ap2 so that was interesting to see them come over.

[37:15]Yeah but look we’re very very early with this and I think I always have to remind myself that we make the same mistake with every new technology we overestimate its impact in the short term and we underestimate it in the long term, I think the web will slowly die over the coming decades, you know is my 14 year olds gen Alpha daughter says websites are for old people and you know like that’s how I got my start was building websites and it makes me a little sad to hear that but I think she’s correct. And you know there are a lot of problems with the web today the the web is what brands want you to see not what you want to see necessarily you know I think of them as carefully curated digital Billboards not necessarily what I want specifically, Google’s the same problem right when you search for how to select a TV you get a whole page of ads that come up, retail media you know not going to name names here Jason but you know retail media has has caused challenges with the customer experience, you know customers are getting whoever paid most you know not whatever is most relevant. Europeans have blessed us with gdpr and those annoying banners that you can’t get rid of you get 15% you know if you join our mailing list banners like the web itself is a very very poor experience these days and it’s especially poor experience on a mobile device.

[38:28]And I really think that AI is for the moment at least and I’m sure it’ll be corrupted like the web was but for the moment at least AI is a dramatically better experience and I can imagine a future where the web is replaced by AI that just generates, things for you in real time based on what you want.

[38:47]Interesting yeah so couple controversial things in there uh. First of all like you you echoed Scott’s favorite platform that the web is dying right and. I I chuckle because to me every time there’s something new everyone’s like oh it’s gonna replace the old thing right like Marc Andre you know famously predicted software was gonna eat retail for example and the web was gonna put, brick and mortar out of business and now ai is going to put the web out of business and answer engines are going to put Google out of business and. I think all these new things are better and solve solve either Legacy problems better than the old Solutions or they solve new problems that the old solution couldn’t even solve. But to me it rarely do these things go out of business I mean there’s still a robust vinyl record business it’s much smaller than it once was but all those Billboards that you just made fun of, those all still exists and people charge more for them than they ever have before like if you want to if you want to buy a billboard on the side of the freeway in in San Francisco right now you have a 2 year wait list because there’s way more people that want to, want that Outdoor Advertising then there is Media available so I I agree there’s a lot of use cases where I would prefer to use AI to a website. But I’m going to be somewhat surprised in my lifetime if there aren’t still use cases that are well served by the kind of. I don’t know what the right Paradigm here is but pull pull solution of the web versus the push solution of AI if I have that.

[40:17]Yeah and look I still get catalogs over Christmas and they’re great it’s fine I think we’re.

[40:21]Yeah and by the way they work better now than they did 5 years ago.

[40:24]I’m sure so generally when we have new technology it doesn’t replace the existing,

[40:43]

Future of E-Commerce and AI

[40:32]at least in the short and medium term it’s it’s net new additive and and what what are we at in terms of e-commerce penetration of physical retail it’s like 17 18 the US.

[40:43]If you want to be generous and depending on how you want to divide it up you could say 22 but someplace in the 1822 would be the the ring.

[40:51]But look more developed markets are you know 40 50% and just generally kids sorry I sound the old least you know it’s not old now but I’m going to say you know kids these days they prefer their digital experiences right that’s what they want, more than going into physical stores so I think we’ll see you know as the economy continues to grow that compounds over time I think we’ll still see physical retail you know as always people still want that in store experience, but I think a lot of the gains are going to be digital and if I look at where folks are shopping you know it my my daughter you know she’s doing all of her discovery of things through Chachi PT, my 11-year-old does the same thing my 72 year old mother-in-law who’s not a very you know good with a tech person she does chat GPT constantly these days. I see it personally in my life it’s going to at least take, a lot of the discovery we’ll see about the you know the actual transactions but it’s going to be sizable over the the course of the the the coming years.

[41:50]I think we’ve already we’ve just uh hit the the thumbnail for this episode is going to be Kelly saying young kids today don’t want to touch grass.

[41:59]They don’t they really don’t I you know I’m sure people have been saying this for centuries but it the kids these days are just different.

[42:09]They are they have longer attention spans. Let’s jump into payments so you mentioned there’s these kind of competing things out there there’s ACP ap2 what’s your.

[42:24]And for westerners ap2 is Google’s version of instant check out yeah.

[42:28]There’s some flavor of mCP where they’ve added some stuff on there so it can kind of do payments and then there was a2a so that was a whole there’s like 6 of these out there now it’s I lost track of it, and then all the the traditional guys have some flavor of these things too like Visa has 1 MasterCard has 1 and so on. What do you what do you think about being a standards person what do you think do you think all that will settle down or we’re going to have a little bit of chaos there for quite a while.

[42:57]I think we’ll have selling Channel chaos for quite a while the world is kind of splitting into 2 camps you’ve got the open AI stripe camp with ACP. And then you’ve got more of the Google PayPal camp. With ap2 and that’s fine you know it’s you know VHS and betamax took a long time to figure out. I think AI is a winner is a winner take most type of ecosystem just like searches for example you know in the search business you’ve got Google and they have a near Monopoly. Although I know that they dispute that term but they do um and I think we’ll see the same thing with AI because again you want to use 1 Aiello, what you bought you wanted to know you know what your preferences are your likes and folks get really stuck they get very sticky with 1, and I think we’ll see that 1 rise and it might be jet GPT who knows right it’s still pretty early but 1 of them is going to rise. And as a result the standard that it is most closely associated with whether it’s ACP or ap2 is probably going to win out and be the standard.

[44:08]Well Scott’s looking at this going back to the the like oh the incumbents try to walk in a proprietary solution and then agree to an open standard only if they must. In payments of course the the incumbent is the credit cards and all their interchange fees right and every every Merchant I’ve ever talked to hate them. Uh and so I’m I’m kind of curious like there’s a lot of merchants that are secretly hoping like oh is is this Evolution to to AI Commerce and all these new standards is that going to. Open up the door to alternatives to the credit card conglomerates and their interchange fees. And I would say like the early indications are know that the incumbents are, first in and they’re locking in their their their interchange you know based credit card fees to to all these new payment platforms as the default Solutions like do you have a. POV about how that might play out.

[45:07]Yes yes and so I I mostly agree with you I think the Nuance is that actual core payments processing, they they don’t make a lot right the margin is racing to zero, and I’ve heard of a lot of big Brands and Merchants being given fees at Cost basically because it’s not just the PSP right it’s not just the interchange fee right there are 3 4 5 vendors, all taking a cut and when you stack those up that’s where you get the couple percent take rate, but core payments processing like brainery did brain tree which is owned by PayPal I heard that they did a trillion and a half dollars in payments processing, and it’s a very very low margin business for them right core payments processing is is not very profitable anymore even at scale even with volume, and that’s why you see PayPal and stripe and a lot of these other PSPs they’re adding value in the term in the the form of their own checkout right because obviously the take rate is much higher, and they can provide more services like advertising and you know cross-selling and all sorts of other value ads if they own that checkout button so that’s kind of why they’re doing it, but yeah I generally agree with you.

[46:22]Cool let’s let’s Zoom do you have another 5 minutes we’re at the top of the hour okay Jason do you. I do so let’s zoom out a little bit I saw the PayPal CEO say that by 20 by 2030 so 5 years from now 25% of e-commerce will be influenced by AI, do you agree with that do you think that’s aggressive or do you think that’s conservative.

[46:48]I I think more than 50% of transactions will be influenced um I I see AI much better for discovery. I think we’ll see 25% of e-commerce transacted by AI in 2030 25% of the non-amazon non Walmart category. But again I just look at my own family and people are hooked on their chat GPT and that is very much accelerating over time.

[47:18]Scot where are you on that.

[47:20]I like to look to to our earlier Point At You know I feel like e-commerce has slowed down so I get more excited about. I I think this is going to accelerate e-commerce in a way we can’t predict yet the only 1 I’ve seen is a Wall Street firm Bernstein came out and they said it’ll accelerate at 1 and a half to 2 and a half points and, Jason what are we like 8% 9% right now e-commerce the digital side.

[47:46]So it’s actually slowed down like the government shutdown so we no longer have data.

[47:50]Yeah the last time you had a data point.

[47:52]Yeah but the through the first so the last 10 years 15% growth a year for e-commerce the last year finished at like 8.7% growth for e-commerce for 6 months of this year 5.6% growth for e-commerce so it’s. Swelling down by those metrics um.

[48:08]Yeah and it doesn’t feel right to me because it’s, I think we’ve stagnated and what I what gets me excited is I think it’s going to really reignite the growth in e-commerce and, you know I would love to see us get back to 15 so I think by 2030 there’s a shot we get we really see a nice acceleration of e-commerce because it’s just going to be a much more delightful experience and today it is better at kind of the discovery or research phase but, jet is working very hard on what I would call the find a buy side and it’s pretty good and, you know I think the lack of ads which is controversial right now but right now not having ads makes it a much more streamlined trustworthy process as well. And I I think that’s going to be interesting and you know I think it’s more interesting to think about how much is this accelerate e-commerce and then also what’s that due to that we need to get that. That coverage or that penetration number moving towards 50% not 22% so because in many other regions there are you know. The APAC region they’re 90% you know digital Europe most most countries in Europe are at like 40 50 60%, so I think we’re oddly laggards on that and we have a lot to catch up so I’m hoping it it is this kind of new fuel to the fire to really accelerate the industry. More orders for you.

[49:33]Anyone still listening um I just I just want to go on record saying like I don’t I don’t agree with Scott’s Global e-commerce penetration. I’ll just weave it at that for now but yeah I’m sorry Scott go ahead.

[49:46]Okay no that’s it uh.

[49:47]And and speaking of AI like I think AI is so categorically different than other shopping because it has pictures of you like people use this for therapy you know every consumer preference, I mean and that is so valuable and people develop these these weird parasocial relationships with our AI right you’ve heard the trend of AI boyfriends and girlfriends right, like people love it and if you have your magical AI assistant that’s always upbeat and happy tell you to go buy that handbag that you know you’ve been wanting but probably shouldn’t buy like,

[50:24]

Predictions for AI Integration

[50:20]that’s I I see that as a huge driver of growth sorry I just had to interject there.

[50:25]Yeah but to be clear you absolutely should buy that handbag.

[50:31]Cool any other predictions we love predictions on the show I I found, the timeline we’re on now is like a whole different timeline than we’ve lived the last 20 30 years and it it’s, it’s just crazy like I thought chat GPT would have a Marketplace he kind of thing maybe next year probably by 2027 boy boy was I wrong on the timing on that 1.

[50:53]Yeah it’s crazy so you know if you look at where it’s heading right now over the past I mean it feels like a couple weeks, chpt specifically is released apps they have agents like an agent Builder tool they have social they have creative with yep they’ve got a browser now they’ve got creative. They’ve got Commerce of course. Third marching really really fast here really fast so I think they’re kind of going to be the next super app so that would be my prediction is we see a these AI apps turn into more Chinese style, super apps including payments and social and shopping and, business and I think longer term I think AI kind of becomes the head for business and SAS applications as well that’ll take a while.

[51:43]Conscience in any wrapping thoughts before.

[51:46]Uh just 1 1 follow up on the pace of change 1 of the things that’s I mean there’s a the great saying like you know things have never happened this fast but they’re never going to happen this low again. 1 of the things that increasingly is obvious to me when I go talk to clients and they’re talking about like how to adapt to this new reality. Is we’re still trying to fit all our old, approaches to this new world right and the 1 I feel like we’re underestimating the most is the speed of change right like there as like every corporate organization is based around, these annual planning processes an annual budgets and like you know frankly they’re even, months in a rears on that so you have to walk in next year’s Budget Inn, September of this year and and all of these things and you know in your world Kelly like, let’s have a shootout and pick a technology platform whether it be e-commerce or OMS or whatever and let’s do a 6-month evaluation and pick the best 1 and then sign a 3-year contract for that 1.

[52:49]In the new world it just feels like all of those cadences are fundamentally broken like if you walked yourself into any, technology stack for 3 years you’re you’re probably screwed in Doom not to have the best technology in 3 years and have you you know make all your investment criteria based on, on 18th month Horizon you’re probably not going to be making good Investments like. I I don’t know what the future looks like but I feel like companies are going to have to reinvent themselves around this kind of, new reality of reevaluating everything every every week or every day.

[53:26]Yeah and look I think that’s why I’m such a fan of Standards is because we implement the standard all of us as vendors and if you don’t like 1 of us you just toss us out right if we as pipe 17 aren’t delivering, do you dump us and go to another honest compliance and that’s fine that’s how the world should work we as vendors should have to earn the, the value in the trust of our of our customers and with standards in place it becomes very very easy to swap us out.

[54:02]

Closing Thoughts on Industry Standards

[53:56]Yeah uh kind of sucks that we’re in a world where we have to make that possible but like it did it does seem like best for the customer. And that’s that’s where it should should go and Kelly that’s probably going to be a good place to leave it because once again we have used up our allotted time, but it’s awesome to catch back up with you we’re going to be excited to to follow these these new standards and even though you said there might not be a conference I’m hoping to get an invite.

[54:29]Yes that I just I just wish I had more reasons to travel and eat rubber chicken.

[54:34]Well thanks for having me Jason I’m sure I’ll see you in a Starbucks line somewhere at some conference it seems to be where we meet up these days and Scott always appreciate all the work you’re doing with retail genic he really helped us as an industry keep on top of all this.

[54:51] And until next time… Happy Commercing!

Jason & Scot Show Episode EP331 – E.L.F. Beauty CDO, Ekta Chopra

Retailgeek — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 03:39:08 +0000

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 331 is an interview with Ekta Chopra the Chief Digital Officer of E.L.F Beauty.

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0:42 Welcome to the Jason and Scott Show

0:57 Live from Las Vegas

1:09 Guest Introduction: Ekta Chopra

1:51 The Best Panel Ever

3:06 Ekta’s Journey to Elf Beauty

4:26 Understanding Elf Beauty

6:28 From Cosmetics to Multi-Channel

8:02 AI in Retail: The Future

14:22 Maintaining Company Culture

22:30 The Impact of TikTok Shop

25:31 Attribution in a Multi-Channel World

29:19 Implementing AI at Elf

34:52 The Future of AI and Retail

40:53 Balancing AI with Humanity

46:21 The Importance of Loyalty Programs

48:04 Conclusion and Farewell

Welcome to a special live edition of the Jason & Scot Show!

In this episode, recorded live from Groceryshop in sunny Las Vegas on September 30, 2025, hosts Jason Goldberg and Scott Wingo celebrate the return of in-person podcasting after three years, reminiscing about their origins in the live podcasting scene and the upcoming 10-year anniversary of the show. Together, they welcome special guest Ekta Chopra, the Chief Digital and Innovation Officer of Elf Beauty, who shares insights into the fast-changing landscape of beauty and eCommerce.

Ekta discusses her journey to Elf Beauty, a brand that has consistently emerged as a bold disruptor in the cosmetics industry. She explains how Elf was innovative from the start, selling $1 cosmetics online at a time when digital platforms were still developing. She proudly notes how the brand has evolved from its original direct-to-consumer model to a successful omnichannel powerhouse with a portfolio that now includes elf Cosmetics, elf Skin, and collaborations with other beauty brands.

The discussion naturally transitions into the role of AI in eCommerce and how Elf is leveraging AI tools to revolutionize customer engagement and product development. Ekta emphasizes the importance of being where their community is by adopting new platforms such as TikTok, where Elf has successfully engaged consumers through authentic connections with content creators. The episode also dives into how the brand is navigating the evolving landscape shaped by AI, including enhancing search capabilities and content strategy to stay relevant and connected with younger consumers.

As the conversation progresses, the hosts discuss the importance of data and customer-centric strategies in the age of AI. Ekta shares the significance of the Elf loyalty program in creating a seamless customer experience and maintaining relationships with consumers. The commitment to “human-in-the-loop” processes ensures effective integration of AI technologies while addressing ethical concerns.

Listeners are encouraged to check out Ekta’s informative Substack, “AI Chef,” for insights into the intersection of AI and commerce, where she shares her ongoing learning journey and best practices for integrating AI into business operations.

This exciting episode wraps up with a nod to the future of commerce, the balance between technology and humanity, and the continuing evolution all brands must undergo as they adapt to the changing marketplace.

Join us for this engaging conversation filled with wit, humor, and a valuable glimpse into the future of beauty and eCommerce.

**Episode 330 of the Jason & Scot Show was recorded live from Groceryshop on September 30th, 2025.** Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review on iTunes, and follow us on social media for more exciting news and updates!

Transcript

[0:23]Welcome to the Json and Scott show this episode is being recorded live from grocery shop in Sunny Las Vegas on September 30th 2025,

[0:42]

Welcome to the Json and Scott Show

[0:34]I’m your host Jason retail gee Goldberg and as usual I’m here in person with my co-host Scott Wingo.

[0:57]

Live from Las Vegas

[0:42]Hey Jason welcome back Jason Scott show listeners and welcome to a live episode I checked and this is the first live episode we’ve done in 3 years believe it or not and I think we were at a shop talk together.

[1:09]

Guest Introduction: ECT Chopra

[0:57]Yeah time time flat you know we’re coming up on our 10 year anniversary and we used to do these live at these events all the time and then Scott got too busy and fancy to come to the events anymore so welcome back Scott.

[1:09]I’m back I’m back in e-commerce and we’re excited to have a live guests with us here on the show for the first time is ECT Chopra she is the cdio of Elf Beauty and I was telling her I have 2 dollars 26 and 18 and they were you have made me a rock star.

[1:27]No there you go.

[1:30]And they had very specific questions I I knew we will not be asking around various things so.

[1:34]Uh I’m happy to do a Q&A with them.

[1:36]You have huge fans out in my house.

[1:38]Thank you for having me.

[1:41]And Scott’s trying to pretend like it’s on behalf of his daughters but he’s really a fanboy.

[1:45]I’m sure I’m sure.

[1:47]I love new brands and love talking to them so excited to have you on the show.

[1:51]

The Best Panel Ever

[1:50]Yeah well thank you for having me.

[1:51]Yeah and fun fact ecta and I are going to do a a panel at grocery shop tomorrow.

[1:57]That’s right.

[1:58]And so so that will have already happened probably when listeners are listening to this so if you read that it was by far the best panel in the history of grocery shop you you are in on the origin story.

[2:10]There you go this is how how it all started.

[2:12]And the big big thing to watch for is Jason changes his socks based on the mood of the panel so earlier today he was wearing his uh yeah this is an odd.

[2:17]Oh my is whoa okay there you go and tomorrow.

[2:22]During his Sam’s Club socks so I don’t know if you had any elf socks on you he will wear those tomorrow so.

[2:27]Oh shhh I I couldn’t get it I’m so sorry.

[2:29]Dang it all right.

[2:30]Yeah I am I’m not above pandering and.

[2:32]Uh I I do have a lip gloss though a lemon.

[2:35]Oh yeah.

[2:36]11 lip gloss.

[2:38]I I may or may not be you know wearing uh an elf sunscreen right now that my wife.

[2:43]Ah that there you go.

[2:44]And if we hear Jason’s lips are particularly shiny and glossy then we know what it was.

[2:48]There you go.

[2:50]Yeah yeah uh so active before we jump into it I I have a feeling listeners have already stalked you on LinkedIn,

[3:06]

ECT’s Journey to Elf Beauty

[2:57]but you know you you have a senior role for 1 of the the coolest digital brands out there like how does 1 come to that sort of role can you tell us a little bit about how you you came to your path.

[3:07]Yeah I mean I think coming to elf was really sort of I would say very lucky because I was just in the middle of looking for a new job I had my career where I worked for women’s fashion accessories private equity and then you know I took a foundation job because I was going to start my family and boy oh boy it was so slow and then, I was like I’m screaming.

[3:31]Committee meetings.

[3:32]Oh my God I wanted to like go back to retail consumer goods somewhere where I it’s really chaotic and reached out to my investor community and they recommended somebody recommended else and, you know that was 10 years ago.

[3:47]Uh well you say lucky for you I would say lucky for Elf but did they sell you a bill of goods did they tell you it’s a oh beauty is a super simple thing it never changes it just you figure out an equation and you just run it for 10 years right.

[4:00]Yeah when I came it was like basically was the year 2016 January 4th is when I started and that was the year when they went public in September and it was brought in to like really sort of set them up from a technology perspective,

[4:26]

Understanding Elf Beauty

[4:15]and it was just I fell in love day 1 like crazy chaos everyone’s working just just an amazing brand and just the origin is just amazing so.

[4:26]Very cool now I have a feeling a lot of our listeners are very familiar with elf but for for a few of Scott’s fans who may not be um would can you kind of give us the the the bullet on on elf and and where you guys sit in the Echo System.

[4:41]So I would say we are a bold disruptor with a kind heart that’s sort of how we what our Persona is and if I think about elf started 2004 and that’s the year when Facebook actually you know launched so our origin story started with the shama brothers who started selling 1 dollar makeup online and digital was e-commerce at the at that time but to sell makeup for $1 online at that moment in time was very disruptive, so this that’s where sort of the disruption is in our DNA testing and learning is in our DNA we always like to say is Zips first, phase first because you know we always want to be the first to meet our community wherever they’re going our of course we are multi-generational as you said 18 years old and 27 years old, but we also have I met somebody in Barcelona on my vacation and she was in her 60s and she said oh my God I fell in love with elf because my daughter loved elf and I started using the same makeup so it truly is a multi-generational brand.

[5:47]That’s amazing and just to ground folks 2004 is 2 years before Mr jobs like went into his back pocket and goes oh and 1 more 1 more thing.

[5:55]1 more thing just just 1 little thing.

[5:57]Yeah and I’ve always read the forward facing camera which came 4 years later from the iPhone launched somewhere in there it like totally changed the makeup game.

[6:03]Oh yes of course yeah there you go.

[6:07]Would take selfies so yeah huge game changer so it’s great time to be in the makeup game it is.

[6:11]Perfect for Instagram and you know yeah there you go the filters.

[6:16]Yeah yeah um and so I’m assuming that day 1 the the $1 Cosmetics that was predominantly a direct to consumer.

[6:23]That is correct that is correct.

[6:28]

From Cosmetics to Multi-Channel

[6:24]Play but that’s not your situation today today you’re you’re really an omni Channel.

[6:28]We are we are 20 80% almost our business is still distribution and international and the rest 20 direct to Consumer what has changed is that in the past 5 years we’ve gone from Elf Cosmetics to now where of Cosmetics elf skin well people key soul care which is our Alicia Keys Brand natorium and now Road skin with Haley Weaver so our portfolio has just grown so the umbrella is off Beauty.

[7:00]Jason is Hailey Bieber’s biggest fan.

[7:02]I really there there you go and there you go.

[7:05]Whoa nice he’s all about the road.

[7:06]Rude.

[7:10]Is for listeners that can’t see aren’t watching the video version of, um uh ELCA has a super cool iPhone case uh that is actually holding.

[7:20]I thought it was a battery at first.

[7:21]No

[7:22]It is the lip gloss holder.

[7:25]That is right.

[7:27]Web bomb in in the case so it is always ready which I I have.

[7:30]Jason super jelly.

[7:31]There.

[7:33]Yeah yeah yeah yeah I’ve I’ve figured out when my wife’s birthday present now.

[7:36]There you go.

[7:38]Honey I hope you’re not I know you don’t listen to my podcast so you’re fine it’s fine it won’t split.

[7:42]Maybe today she will.

[7:43]Yeah well more likely like her friends listening to the podcast will out me to her, uh I I tried to convince her that she should really get a gaming laptop for her her birthday but that didn’t seem like she was very excited about it either yeah.

[7:57]That that’s 1 of those that sounds like a gift more for you women are very good at sniffing that out.

[8:02]

AI in Retail: The Future

[7:59]Yeah yeah.

[8:02]If only there was some way that the computers could get smart enough that you could just kind of have a dialogue with it and it could suggest a birthday gift.

[8:08]Uh there there you go Chad GPT right.

[8:14]Um and so so you think about your tenure career and we’re we’re you know at the launch of Facebook Instagram’s not a thing yet we’re, were predating the iPhone, and today I really think of beauty as sort of a digital leader that’s often been a first mover and and you guys in particular are usually 1 of the very first Brands out with, all these sort of new touch points and so I’m I’m sort of curious like, is that just part of the brand that whenever there’s something new you feel like you have to be there and maybe some of them will hit some of them will miss or or like do you now have data that that’s, where your your customers are and you need to meet her where she is like what goes into the calculus of you know as we record this ched gbt announced instant Commerce 2 days ago, so I imagine if there there probably already were a bunch of conversations about if and how you guys would lean into something like that like.

[9:12]Absolutely I would say first and foremost it’s less about being on a platform but more about where is our community and making sure, wherever our community goes we are there for them so it started with the Tik Tok, you know almost like 5 years ago and there was it was just a thing and then we knew we wanted to lean in and it starts with hey let’s just test and learn we don’t know anything we’re just going to jump in and then we got signals and the signals told us our community is starting to move there so then we partnered with movers and shakers which is now part of stag wall basically and what we ended up doing was they brought their expert expertise on Tik Tok shop the New Gen Z they need a platform really well and we leaned in and we had the biggest campaign on Tik Tok from a beauty perspective at that moment so I would say that it’s all about going with our community is, we know it’s not day 1 we might not know anything but once we get signals we lean in.

[10:14]Are you seeing them on chat chat just like yeah I don’t need to know any signals but.

[10:16]100% yeah.

[10:18]Cuz all the data I look at the survey data says you know like 800 million active users half are doing some kind of shopping but then if you look at the demographics it skews um largely younger and and kind of into that demographic sweet spot for you guys.

[10:31]Exactly I mean even if like fun fact I mean I’m a lifelong learner and recently I’ve been spending a lot of time with like house searches changing is our content showing up on search as we had a brief discussion about AEO SEO Geo right all of that is changing so I’m really grateful to have an amazing team they’ve been doing this work for almost a year now all our content we’re trying to get it ready so it is showing up on chat gbt on perplexity and all the new you know AI engine so we we do try to stay ahead because we know our community is going over there it’s a lot of work and it’s just at the beginning and the fun fact that I learned was an average search is like, 6 words right it could be show me something right on Google right like it it would be very simple but if you go to chat gbt average is 23 words, I am this tone I want this ingredient I want something in you know for skin or I want a routine so imagine the amount of content Supply changing need it is incredible so it is a lot of work that we started to do but it’s a lot of work ahead that we still have to do.

[11:42]As a manager you’ve got these things that are not changing fast and then things that are changing fast I imagine even on the product the the physical product side you have that too, how do you manage that is there 2 teams that manage that or do you have like an incubator piece and then a, you know this is a platform that’s not going to change how how do you manage that those 2 different speeds.

[12:03]Yeah I would say that elf speed is a tagline everybody wears proudly, because you know if I compare ourselves to like the big you know sort of Beauty Brands and so forth, they have a lot of people they have the muscle power we are almost 1.5 billion dollars with 650 people, we are very productive with what we do everybody has to have the test and learn culture Need for Speed is part of our culture and doing that as quickly as we can with no red tape is part of our culture so I would say that throughout the organization of speed is a thing, and so it’s not 2 different things everyone when we know that we have big campaigns we all come together and if we have 1 thing that we say is 1 Team 1 dream, people say it as a cliche I say we do it we do it loud and proud in the organization.

[13:03]Do you do you actually think that that your your size which you’re obviously not small, but your your size for the the amount of business you do is a is a potential advantage that you you you have less sort of institutional silos you have less innovators dilemma and I imagine in some of these these bigger more established companies that have been around for decades that jumping on on these new opportunities is more challenging.

[13:29]100% And I think that is 1 of our superpowers and it starts from the top our CEO tangam mean his whole thing is we, we no matter how big we get we have to be able to maintain our it’s day 1, and there’s a word that are my CMO always sort of talks about its social and it’s a Japanese word it is about like day 1 like how do you start you’re like a lifelong Learner in in literal meaning so for us that is something that we start from the top, and really sort of embedded in our culture through and through.

[14:04]Yeah I feel like there’s some bookstore in the Pacific Northwest that I feel like is into that whole day 1 day 1 culture too yeah I don’t I don’t.

[14:13]Sadly they’re not they’re not really.

[14:15]Ivan not anymore.

[14:17]There’s something that like when you when you get to 2 or 3 trillion it kind of breaks down.

[14:20]I’m I’m sure.

[14:22]

Maintaining Company Culture

[14:21]We call that a high class problem.

[14:22]Yeah and that is something that you know if you talked about what keeps us up is like how do you maintain that culture because the bigger you get, now we are expanding in international we went from just being in US offices to we have an office in London we have an office in India we have an office in China so as the culture scales, and you know your company scales how do you like maintain that in your DNA it’s a challenge.

[14:49]For sure so you you already breached the topic of of AI and obviously Scott’s chomping at the bit because he he thinks it’s going to be a thing I the jury’s out.

[14:58]In a skeptical just like he he was about Tik Tok and everything else.

[15:02]Yeah and and for sure retail media Networks, there have been feuds on the podcast about.

[15:07]I have I’ve heard them I’ve heard them yes yes not news you guys are the ogs.

[15:12]I I yes what we lack in insight and value we we make up for an age, but so I actually want to go back in time a little bit before the, at the topic of AI was the dower like way back in the day there was this thing called like social and influencer, um which obvious I’m being sarcastic but is obviously super important in in the beauty space so you you mentioned Tik Tok shop who also is going to be on our panel tomorrow so that’ll be.

[15:43]Ah there you go.

[15:45]Uh but before they even did Commerce I would have argued that like it would the the Advent of these social media networks and and in the United States at least in particular Tik Tok have been super important because the I think about 2006, or 2004 rather mom is taking her daughter to Macy’s and they’re having their first cosmetic experience and they’re discovering those cosmetics, at that that vendor provided display in Macy’s um, I’m not going to be too too mean but like not a lot less people are going to Macy’s to discover cosmetics, and my hypothesis is people are probably not discovering l, the first time at that shelf that before they ever get to the store they already know the elf is what they’re looking for because their favorite micro influencers have already talked about it on on the, Tik Tok so and and you guys were were an early sort of mover in in that space and I imagine it didn’t happen by accident like did you like was that something that you had to evangelize for people to really sort of lean in and I I can imagine like everybody’s like oh man it’s it’s these celebrities we have.

[16:58]Yeah.

[16:58]Hire all these celebrities and and you guys really you know we’re very successful at building an army of of influential people that weren’t necessarily all celebrities.

[17:07]Yeah I would say that when we did the campaign there were many celebrities that did our hashtag song but we didn’t pay them, there is a virality that comes with Tik Tok shop and I was doing more than influencer it’s the content creators it’s the you know somebody who’s, first it was like it’s for young people know I’m on Tik Tok and by the way I have 32 1,000 followers I’m no way a gen Z or a millennial but I think.

[17:40]So it is it is a platform that brings a culture which moves at speed of swipe to life and, it is constantly changing and now shop has already changed it in many ways the accessibility and that impulse buy you know, and even the different types of creators is it live is it you know you’re doing live shopping are you doing engagement what are you doing and the type of creators that are showing up, authenticity is what really really is important and I do think that, it’s also blurring the lines between Affiliates and commissions that you use to pay and so forth so Tik Tok has changed this whole landscape altogether and and for us it’s now how do you sort of adapt to this Creator economy and I think that’s, what we call connected Commerce now in many ways is it’s not just like what happens there but the Halo impact that happens to the full ecosystem.

[18:41]Yeah and what’s been interesting to me is here here in the west the that that Creator economy has been super important and that’s where the, the demand the discovery was happening and that’s where the desire was happening early on in in China commerce was also happening, not so much here right like there were all these early you know Facebook Shops and and all of these different pilots and you know there was all these these interesting debates like gosh, China just ahead of us and it’s a time machine and it’s going to get it opted here or is, fundamental differences in the in the markets but then you’ve mentioned Tik Tok shop a couple times like in my mind Tik Tok shop was really the first social platform to sort of, very successfully break through in that, and really kind of shorten that cycle from from desire to fulfillment because so many people are buying, and I’m I’m curious do you like in your mind is there a is there an obvious reason like what did Tik Tok shop do to sort of unlock that that Commerce where a lot of their their predecessors had not been successful.

[19:46]I would say it comes down to because it started as not shopping right it’s it it was influencing shopping but it wasn’t shopping because we were the first Enterprise brand to integrate with Tik Tok shop as well so I would say that they really fixed they they fixed the plumbing, I call myself plumber sometimes because there’s pipes that if they’re not connected and your consumer experience is fragmented they’re not going to come that’s why I don’t think Instagram shop could ever do what Tik Tok shop, and that’s because they really focused on these authentic connections building that connection authentically with the consumer but then ensuring that, they didn’t didn’t just launched shop you know sort of in a haphazard way it was very well thought out there is a platform for creators there’s a platform for the brands how the checkout happens they take every single thing into account, the very open to doing unique things for Unique Brands so I think it’s a lot about how much thought that they have put, into the platform that’s why I think they they’re more successful than any other Commerce platform.

[20:57]Yeah yeah and I I do have a hypothesis that it had to be Brands like you that that would have been the first movers because you think about it you know the, the more established cosmetic brand of that time we’re not direct to Consumer right like they were all wholesale Brands and, the they were they were investing in Tik Tok as a as a brand platform and as a media channel um but then suddenly when this new thing Tik Tok shop you know arrived suddenly you needed, a fulfillment arm and you needed to do new complicated things like set a price and.

[21:30]Or partner with retailer and they weren’t really into that you know they were like I just want to sell on my site I don’t want to sell on Tik Tok I want the traffic.

[21:37]And what you know people still underestimate the Hilo impact of Tik Tok on the broader ecosystem, it’s that consumer that sees a video and wants an impel impulse Buy, then they want to they love altar they want to use their Awards and some product launches in Alta like there’s a big influence that comes from there.

[22:00]Oh I totally agree and I actually think people underestimate the value of Tik Tok shop because they, because it does have transactions they look at their transaction volume and they say well the ROI is the the net income on on those transactions and that is absolutely a a major contributor, all of those those Tik Tok shop Impressions like I you know for every 1 of those that results in a transaction I’m sure 10 of those result in a consumer in an aisle at,

[22:30]

The Impact of TikTok Shop

[22:29]before uh yeah.

[22:30]We see those spikes every time something goes viral on Tik Tok shop for us we see this bike not just in our direct to Consumer but overall, that week is amazing so I do think that that is a big big factor and how that changes with the algorithm and you know sort of what’s happening with the company but I I think it’s still a major influence on the consumers shopping Behavior.

[22:56]You guys are selling so many places do you spend a lot of time thinking about attribution because I imagine, so so I’m of the the the world that it’s just like unknowable so so you just kind of have to look at big trends like spikes and things Jason believes you can have a CDP and plug it to a thing and track everybody.

[23:15]As per usual Scott Wilding this character.

[23:19]I like to put words in the mouth but uh there are a set of people which may or may not include Json that think you can spend enough time and get 90% of the way there and that gives you where do you guys fall on that Spectrum.

[23:30]I would say that you know we do have a CDP we also have a very Omni Channel loyalty program we don’t care where you buy as long as we can maintain that relationship we have almost 6 million members, they can shop anywhere they can scan their receipt and they can reward however they want they can get venmo card they can get you dollars they can get PayPal they can get Amazon card.

[23:54]So I can double dip for all all you folks listening.

[23:58]Exactly so for us it’s really important that, you know we don’t want to restrict our consumer we want to give them options and then we want them to give give them a reason, to come to our site and that could be experiences it could be special launches it could be what we do with beauty Squad it could be special products that we drop and things like that so I would say that we probably you know we have to be mindful of the retailers needs wants and desires, but that’s why we try to take a neutral stand of you know our consumers, all the options that they want and those options are just increasing with what’s happening with shopping in general so.

[24:39]And uh feel free not to answer this do you guys sell directly on Amazon in like a third-party kind of model or is that all a first-party kind of thing or it’s not on Amazon at all.

[24:47]And no we are on Amazon we are big on Amazon so I would say that definitely first Party 1 p and this relationship goes back since the origin when we started selling but around 4 years ago we really Amazon is everyone all the retailers don’t you know really particularly care, appreciate and uh so it also took a lot of organizational change management to gain PE get people’s Buy in tell them via Amazon was important and what we can gain from it and when we saw the numbers with the focus well they’ve been, skyrocketing so.

[25:31]

Attribution in a Multi-Channel World

[25:31]Yeah so I feel like Scott’s been very patient and chomping at the bit on the on the AI.

[25:35]AI topic yes.

[25:37]Yeah so so you’ve gone through these multiple iterations and we we did social influencer and then we did social commerce and you you guys basically I won’t say or I’ll say it for you you dominated all those platforms, um and so now we have the robots and Scott is of the opinion that is going to put all of those old things out of business that we won’t have websites anymore and uh we won’t have stores anymore and it’s.

[26:01]Alright Mama yeah.

[26:03]Scot wingo and Marc Andre and a robot selling everything.

[26:05]There you go there you go there you go.

[26:06]And so 1 1 thing that’s interesting about AI is there’s kind of 3 buckets that people are investing in there’s there’s kind of infrastructure so the creation of your products and you guys are a lean team so I imagine you’re already using it, augment that that that’s like a Hallmark of that and so there’s like efficiency pricing and back office kind of.

[26:26]Mhm mhm.

[26:27]And then there’s kind of things I call below the homepage so better search.

[26:30]Yeah mhm.

[26:32]Recommendations maybe make the Loyalty program smarter then there’s the stuff above the homepage which is the channels and you know should you know how do you optimize your products on the answer engines what do you guys you know, what what can you say is going on there and and what are some interesting things you think about and all those buckets.

[26:50]I would say the first 1 that we already spoke about like search how search is changing and how you show up on these new newer platforms, content content content so I would say our number 1 Focus has been very much around that, the second bucket is around with the existing platforms that are coming out with AI capabilities we are turning them on to just learn because that content then needs a supply chain, right every uh we serve every eye lip and face well that’s a lot of eyes lips and face that’s a lot of content.

[27:23]Twice as many eyes as.

[27:24]There you go so then how do you.

[27:27]And when you say platforms that’s like meta having AI.

[27:30]Exactly or if it’s having like we.

[27:32]Or on Amazon Rufus or all okay.

[27:35]Exactly so turning on those capabilities for personalization, um and then there are things that we’re testing on ourselves so we created a product called aluer and that was when Chad GPD just came out we were like okay, what is this saying we want to learn and we just learned by doing so we ended up training all our social comments for the past 5 years we built a product on Amazon’s bedrock, you know sort of platform and essentially it has now been trained that 90% of the comments are autogenerated by AI but we have human in the loop so the community manager still has to make sure it’s you know good it can go out there but it’s reduced their time greatly right so it depends on we’re testing and learning in all different areas whether it be experienced, whether it be you know sort of showing things up better more personalized to them or showing up on the engines that are now going to be the future like perplexity and chat gbt.

[28:36]Do you ever feed it back into product development where you.

[28:39]We’re starting to so I would say that is something that we’re starting to look at we’ve you know we started with hey let’s just build and kind of learn and then we went into all right these platforms are coming out with their, things like every everything is an AI but is it really an AI so we leaned into certain partners that we felt were truly you know AI they were not just like smoke and mirrors like fenticonazole

[29:19]

Implementing AI at Elf

[29:14]it’s not 1 thing it’s multiple different things that we’re testing because this landscape is changing so much.

[29:20]Yeah now I’ve seen some retailers again you know the organizationally they’ll have like a separate AI team like a chief AI officer and stuff and but I noticed on LinkedIn you’ve got kind of like you know your title and then bar AI so it seems like, pulled into your orbit more than like a separate thing.

[29:35]Yeah so.

[29:36]So do you see it cutting like is it cutting across horizontally across everything or is it like a vertical.

[29:42]Horizontal across everything I am you know I just happen to enable it I would say that just like when you think about, there’s AI generative ai agentic ai the different forms and AGI like all of that Journey at the very first there it’s data, you think about data data is currently is in tables you have to turn data into a dialogue, that’s cataloging knowing what your data is where it is tagging it like that’s a lot of Plumbing work, and then its Integrations how do you then integrate seamlessly so you can capitalize on the Big Value you know generative AI use cases.

[30:21]The the at my previous company Channel advisor we never really got into this Pim thing but now it’s coming up all the time and knowing.

[30:28]Yeah.

[30:29]And it’s weird like I had a conversation today where they’re like can you take the data that you guys you know we enrich your data and they’re like can you put it back in the pin and I was like sure and then they said but we also use salsify for this other thing you know.

[30:41]Yeah.

[30:42]Because I thought soft everyone I talked to that has a pimp they don’t really use it.

[30:46]They did.

[30:47]Have you figured out this pimp, because it’s a perplexing to me I don’t.

[30:50]Uh it is still perplexing to me so what I would say is.

[30:54]Maybe Jason knows it we’ll we’ll have to hit him up here.

[30:56]So what I what is working is syndication right like every retailer wants certain pdps in a certain way, so salsify or whether it be syndigo they all provide similar like you can Syndicate right but it doesn’t S solve for in some cases the enrichment piece which is, so so critical it’s how people are shopping and buying and that is evolving so it’s very similar to what’s happening with search and I think it’s like how do you enrich it now for these AI platform, so

[31:31]Yes to your point like people people kind of got trained by Google to search a certain way by keyword and now Chachi PT is training them to search by conversation and that’s a whole another set of.

[31:42]Another sad altogether.

[31:43]I don’t know if the things that call themselves pims but aren’t really pims are set up for that or not.

[31:48]Yeah yeah that’s a million dollar question.

[31:50]What do you think about pims Jason.

[31:52]Yeah well it’s a it’s a tool and when properly deployed can be a useful tool for your point in the vast majority of organizations they probably have multiple pims and they’re each owned by different stakeholders with different size.

[32:06]But they’ll say that we have 1 source of.

[32:07]It’s not a it’s not a single source of Truth yeah it’s rarely.

[32:10]Understand that.

[32:14]I would I would say other than like some very newish digitally native companies like the Pim is rarely the source of Truth you run you wrote a funny article on on LinkedIn saying like hey if your vendor is more than 10 years old they’re probably not a native AI company, um and in that in the same way all of these companies were doing business and had product catalogs for many years before they had a Pim so so the Pim became an and not a instead of, um solution which is problematic and unfortunate.

[32:46]Yeah for sure.

[32:50]I do think though like to me the, it’s it’s a good starting point to think about oh man the ai’s appetite for enrichment and um uh these these, much more context um is much higher right and and we already weren’t good at it like if we forget AI, we all had bad product catalogs right and it’s super easy to find bad examples in the, if we think about the pandemic when suddenly everyone had to start grocery shopping online and grocery has this this unique problem we don’t, know the inventory when we’re going to pick your product so we’re always going to have out of stocks and have to do Replacements right so suddenly everybody’s like writing software to suggest Replacements and, The Replacements are comical how how bad they they were because our our catalogs like miscategorized things and and had gaps and so we’re we’re slowly getting better at that and now the the robot wants.

[33:50]100 times more attributes for better context so we’re all trying to figure that out I actually think the problems even more complex than that because, we knew what the customer wanted in her search and we we knew what Google wanted in its algorithm, the robot is going to keep changing its mind every day and so it it’s non-deterministic so so you go oh man, I need a bunch more context for the kind of prompts people are typing into Chad gbt today but then tomorrow when apple rolls out a new AI intelligence in its operating system and people, like start sending it prompts in a different context, it’s it’s going to want even different attributes so instead of thinking of this as a 1-time problem to be solved its,

[34:52]

The Future of AI and Retail

[34:45]now all of our jobs to to evolve it and resolve it every day on an ongoing basis for the rest of our life.

[34:52]We call that job security High 5 yeah yeah woo we’ll be doing this podcast forever.

[34:58]It’s job security for the 2 of you that actually do it, I just talked about it so I.

[35:04]You just add more slides to salt at some point you’ll have like a.

[35:07]Yeah there you go.

[35:09]Thank you for pretending I don’t already have a 2000.

[35:13]It’s constant Evolution it is changing every single day I started my substack just because I learned by writing and.

[35:22]Poster what’s your substack.

[35:22]So it is called AI chef and basically it is you know I I wanted to write about topics that as a public company you know of course I can test and learn but then when it comes to application of it I have to be careful I have to think about governance I have to think about how am I going to you know sort of build trust in the model how does it not hallucinate because Chad gbd lies, has a lot, right right you shocked right and and I think so I started doing that and through the process every week I follow okay what’s what’s happening and I do a tldr on it and there is so much changing so much changing constantly and it is a game of like hey you you got to focus on what, the price is going to be at the end of the day we know Commerce is now already conversational so what is the biggest impact well showing those search engines then if you have Shopify already, I think you enable that pretty quickly and if you don’t then you better figure out really quickly how to enable that so I do think it’s picking your battles on where you can focus because, there’s just a lot that’s coming out and some of it is still it’s smoke and mirrors I don’t think all is real.

[36:39]This is a super basic question but when I talked to a lot of retailers and Brands they’re kind of hung up at the lowest level so so usually it’s either it’s an or and maybe even an and so either the legal department is so freaked out by AI, they’ve said absolutely no Ai and then they told the IT department or the IT department on their own or they use like cloudflare 1 of these types of things, they’ve defaulted to no Bots um.

[37:03]Yeah yeah.

[37:04]So I found a lot of retailers that are really big Advocates at the top of the chain can’t even get off you know basically the the the 1 yard line because they’re they’re they’re legal and or their it Department won’t let them off to how did you convince them that this was an okay thing.

[37:20]I think it goes back to elf is a different kind of a company, it’s a cultural thing it’s a mindset for us it is not and we started with the mindset of Learning and Development we want everyone in our organization to be a prompt engineer, they must learn how to prompt and it’s not just for the company it’s for also, their careers people’s org structures are going to change what people do is going to change the pipeline I, art what keeps me up is because I have a 11 year old daughter I think of like how do I get her ready for this because there are jobs that are going to, be not there for the young kids so how do you build a a a pipeline for them and how do you get them in those skill sets where, you know they will have career so I think Beyond just my you know the work I do but also the generations to come how do you impact them.

[38:13]Yeah Jason would tell you join an advertising company.

[38:17]Yeah we’re we’re immune to all.

[38:19]You are so immune.

[38:21]Someone always needs a Super Bowl.

[38:24]Cuz I I’m sure none of these AI companies are mostly focused on replacing us.

[38:32]Uh yes yes I yes I feel like um the.

[38:36]The Consulting.

[38:38]Team has has more problems than, I do think it’s it’s like Mark Zuckerberg is like main keynote now.

[38:44]Is I’m going to get rid of agencies.

[38:48]I’m glad you heard agencies I just heard pooboo says, um no it it is interesting though I I do think you know you mentioned you have an 11 year old I have a 10 year old um Scott’s kids are all like 40 so, no not not quite empty nesting.

[39:04]We get started younger in the south.

[39:08]The it’s interesting to see the world through their eyes though, because like my son he is 100% convinced that Alexa knows the answer to every question that he.

[39:19]Everything oh my gosh.

[39:22]A day does not go by that he doesn’t ask her something and I go she’s not going to know that and then she answers and makes me look like an idiot.

[39:26]Answers yeah.

[39:29]It’s because you upgraded all your 900 devices to Alexa plus and now she’s twice as smart.

[39:34]Yeah we are actually recording this on a new Oxo launch day so there’s I I uh yeah I have 4 new x’s on pre-order right now.

[39:41]Wow okay I missed all.

[39:41]There you go there you go.

[39:44]We’ll do another pod on the new.

[39:46]It’s amazing how that generation teaches us how to I mean the latest is like even on the trends have you heard of 67 that’s the latest trend.

[39:54]No enlightened me.

[39:55]767 it’s a song that just came out in I believe, I don’t know the full story in Australia then because of Tik Tok and the virality became a thing so now every school teacher is like, kids are like 6 7 6 7 and it’s the latest meme is 67 and I don’t know what it means I think it’s like a little bit of this and a little bit of that but.

[40:22]I’m going to I’m going to do a perplexity.

[40:23]But it’s like a big thing right now 6767 and I’m like what the hell is 67.

[40:28]Like 1 Trend ahead of me I’m still everything is uh Demon Hunter.

[40:31]You know demo K-pop demon and oh my gosh.

[40:34]And I I actually had some PTSD on the show floor because someone used it as their walk-on music yeah and that’s it’s playing on an infinite Loop in my house.

[40:38]Oh they did oh my God.

[40:42]Yeah they’re coming on The Tonight Show tonight or tomorrow night.

[40:46]Oh wow okay no I can’t read.

[40:49]Fictional band coming on.

[40:50]They’re gonna have the old yeah the the cartoon or the.

[40:53]

Balancing AI with Humanity

[40:52]Yeah that’s awesome yeah I can’t wait.

[40:54]Yeah so is AI like everything we’re going to be thinking about and talking about for the foreseeable future is there anything else on your radar screen that you think is sort of interesting for the future of Commerce that maybe people aren’t talking about enough.

[41:08]I would say that it is right now ai is top of my I it’s not a it’s not, like a moment in time this is a generational change I don’t even know how vast how it is very accelerated, I frankly I couldn’t tell or predict what’s going to happen all I know is, change is not like coming changes here just with whatever is going on so it’s how quickly can you adopt to it so I obviously culture is moving at at the speed of swipe, and it truly is with AI so AI is very much top of mind but the other contradiction to that would be, just uh how do you still keep it with humanity and with the human in the loop you know, so I think that’s that’s a a big challenge for the organizations to figure out too because this is where org design and you know sort of the future of Workforce also gets impacted.

[42:10]Yeah do you think you’ll have like an AI influencer is that something you guys would would you work with an AI influencer would you create an AI influencer.

[42:17]We never say never but I I don’t know if that’s in the books right now but I think if it begged something where it was something that made sense for either a campaign or our ethos then we would.

[42:31]Yeah I do think something sort of implied in your your human in the loop thing is is I think super important is is this it’s it’s an old cliche concept but this notion of customer centricity, like 1 of the battles I suspect we’re going to see play out in all of these AI engines is they’re all going to want to, own the world and the customer data inside of their walled Gardens right so we you talked about hey Google got 6 words in their search and now we’re getting 20 words in the prompt, the the bigger problem is the the results that that prompt gives you aren’t based just on those 20 words they’re also based on the complete historical memory that that, that agent has of everything and and I I strongly suspect that all of these big AI owners want to keep all of that memory.

[43:21]100%.

[43:22]In their wild Gardens in a in a sort of similar way all the retailers want to keep all the first party data.

[43:28]In their world Gardens.

[43:30]About their customers and like we didn’t we didn’t.

[43:32]And I want to keep everything in my booty Squad program.

[43:35]Absolutely and we we didn’t poke on that but your beauty, is a really clever way of you getting taking some of those those first-party customers of your wholesale partners and having them become first-party, data for you and in that in that same way I do think 1 of the big, challenges and opportunities in this agentic future is for you to say hey we can’t just be satisfied with chat gbt having all this memory about what’s important to the beauty shop or or, or Microsoft or whomever that that part of your Charter is going to be to know as much about that that customer in, inside the walls of your organization.

[44:19]100% and that was no different than when we started talking about customer data platforms and having that golden record and knowing where your consumer is shopping and what are they doing and I do think, 1 of the ways that we’ve been able to do it is through our loyalty program our loyalty program is is sort of the heart and soul of how we connect with the consumer and what information they trust us with and then our job is how do we then activate, you know that um.

[44:49]Yeah it it is interesting because obviously, wealthy programs have been trendy for a long time I would argue there was the there was kind of a saturation point when when everyone had the exact same mechanics in their program and.

[45:01]RN and burn yep.

[45:03]Yep and and you know the average consumer had 40 you know widgets in her wallet and and it was the efficacy was sort of diminished um but it does feel like, wilty is having a moment and that moment is a lot more bespoke than it used to be.

[45:21]100% then how do you it’s about it’s evolved into just hey I get rewards to experiences and where I am and what I like to be treated with how do I you know I could be in concerts and do you put money in their coinbase wallet versus, you know geolocation gives them something that they can go hunt for you know it’s like how do you gamify it in many ways so, if you don’t have a good loyalty strategy for the, Creator Commerce connected Commerce then it’s just a earn and burn program similar to everybody else.

[46:02]Yeah well I think that may be a a great final point to leave it on um you’ve been super generous with your time I know you have a big beach party to go to to tonight.

[46:11]Oh yeah oh sure sure yes yes yes I do.

[46:14]To be well-rested for our our panel in the morning.

[46:21]

The Importance of Loyalty Programs

[46:22]To go shopping for some elf uh elf Beauty socks.

[46:23]It sucks or I do have the lip gloss ready for.

[46:28]I I will I will gratefully accept the the lip got, like 1 amendment I do have to add because in case Skynet is listening um I just want to point out that it was you not me that said that chat jbt lies and I, I I welcome our robotic overlords and I.

[46:46]It hallucinates it’s hallucinates let’s just say that.

[46:49]Hi I’m I’m entirely teasing but this has been a fascinating conversation we’ll have to come back in a year because it’s all going to be different.

[46:56]That absolutely who knows if we exist.

[46:59]And you mentioned your substack AI shelf um is that just AI shift.com or you go to substack and search for AI shf C agf.

[47:06]Yeah and or actor Chopra and you’ll find it.

[47:10]Awesome and then uh do you publish your like are you a Avid LinkedIn writer or and we now know you’re on Tik Tok so so there’s that um where else do you would you like to direct people that want to follow.

[47:22]LinkedIn is Professional Profile substack is more learning I’m learning it and I’m in fascinated by you know sort of how people engage.

[47:30]Learning in the open.

[47:32]Yeah I will put links to all of that in the show notes, and hopefully listeners found this show super valuable and the way you could reward us if you did is you could jump on the iTunes and leave us that that 5-star review we’re we’re coming up on on 10 and a very.

[47:48]We need to we haven’t had a review in like 9 years so we need some more.

[47:52]That’s right that’s right.

[47:52]Ever since my mom stopped dreading it’s been it’s been a little.

[47:56]Caught that she was review spamming so, way like half our reviews Echo thanks for taking time out of the busy shows and everything to join us we.

[48:04]

Conclusion and Farewell

[48:03]Thank you thank you for having me great conversation.

[48:05] Yeah yeah uh and and thanks very much everyone and until next time happy Commerceing!

Jason & Scot Show Episode 330 ChatGPT Instant Checkout and recent tradeshows.

Retailgeek — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 01:40:30 +0000

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 330 discusses the launch of ChatGPT Instant Checkout and recent tradeshows including GroceryShop, NRF Europe, and RetailClub.

Subscribe:

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0:38 Welcome to the Json and Scott Show

2:34 Catching Up After Two Months

2:59 Insights from NRF Europe

7:04 Retail Club Experience

13:22 Key Takeaways from Grocery Shop

24:09 Sampling Experiences at Grocery Shop

38:48 AI Trends in Retail

52:11 Closing Thoughts and Next Steps

Join Jason and Scot as they celebrate recording their first live episode in three years for the Jason & Scot Show! Recorded on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025, this episode captures the excitement of being back together in person and highlights their dynamic discussions on the current state of retail and upcoming trends.

From reminiscing about their podcasting journey since its launch in November 2015, Jason and Scot dive into the latest happenings in the retail space, especially from the two shows they recently attended: NRF Europe and Retail Club. Jason shares insights from his time at NRF Europe in Paris, where he participated in engaging discussions about retail innovations and the necessity of multi-lingual capabilities in a diverse market. With impressive attendance and notable exhibitors, he reflects on the event’s success and the importance of adapting to multiple regional markets within Europe.

Meanwhile, Scot delves into the Retail Club event held at Huntington Beach, California, highlighting its unique vibes with a beachside setup and a focus on AI-driven retail discussions. The event offered a refreshing departure from traditional conferences, focusing on interactive workshops and relationships rather than panels. Together, they explore the implications of AI in retail, including its transformative power over various operational aspects, and the importance of adapting to the evolving marketplace landscape.

Jason and Scot also engage in a lively discussion about AI’s role in shaping customer experiences, their predictions for the future, and how retailers can effectively harness these technologies while remaining competitive. They examine innovations such as electronic shelf labels, which are becoming increasingly prevalent in stores. Scot can’t help but reference his ongoing obsession with the concept of “Agentic Native Vertical Brands,” hinting at the evolving terminology in the retail sphere.

In the latter part of the episode, they discuss their experiences at GroceryShop, where significant trends are emerging in grocery retail—especially regarding macroeconomic conditions, emerging AI technologies, and the vital role of retail media networks. The conversations shed light on how AI can enhance not only the customer experience but also the operational efficiencies of retailers. The broad-impact implications of GLP-1 medications on consumer habits are discussed as well, marking a notable trend in grocery shopping behaviors.

Towards the end of the episode, Jason raises his anticipation for the upcoming trends in commerce, making it clear that the integration of AI into the shopping experience will continue to redefine how retailers operate. From discussions around inventory management, product recommendations, and dynamic pricing to the emergence of social commerce, this episode encapsulates the cutting-edge of the retail landscape.

Tune in for this inspiring and enriching episode filled with insights and excitement around retail innovation! If you haven’t already, subscribe to the Jason & Scot Show for more engaging discussions and updates on the future of retail.

This episode was recorded on September 30th, 2025, at the GroceryShop conference, a fantastic gathering of thought leaders and innovators in the retail space, where Jason and Scot share their unique perspectives and observations on the fast-evolving landscape of retail.

**Episode 330 of the Jason & Scot Show was recorded on Tuesday, October 30th, 2025.**

Transcript

Jason

[0:23]Welcome to the Json and Scott show this is episode 330 being recorded on Tuesday September 30th that’s a lot of threes

[0:38]

Welcome to the Json and Scott Show

Jason

[0:32]I’m your host Jason retail gee Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scott Wingo.

Scot

[0:38]Hey Jason and welcome back Json and Scott show listeners if this episode sounds a little different to you it’s because Jason and I are in the same room which hasn’t happened I asked our, analyst team which includes chatgpt.

Jason

[0:53]The Json and Scott show historian.

Scot

[0:55]Yes and the historian said that our last episode recorded live was episode 292 which was came out on June 13th 2022 so it’s been 3 years um since we did a live 1 and that was about I think we’re at shop talk back then 1 of the, the shutter.

Jason

[1:15]Which might have been in the same venue as probably in in.

Scot

[1:18]Have been in the Mandalay Bay you never know.

Jason

[1:20]Yeah we we are in a fancy suite and I feel like we have we’ve recorded before in fancy we get invited in nice places.

Scot

[1:27]We do I’m having vuja de yeah yeah the and another note I don’t know if you realize but a lot of people say how long have you guys been doing this and I looked that up our first episode dropped on November 14th 2015 where we talked about the first singles day which this crazy company in China called Alibaba had come up with this clever way of promoting themselves so that, we are coming up dangerously close on a 10 year anniversary doing this.

Jason

[1:54]I know it’s it’s remarkable to think about I don’t.

Scot

[1:57]It feels like 20 years I kept I kept saying in my head it actually started earlier because I have this whole story we were on the shop.org board and but then this like actually having a good bit after that.

Jason

[2:08]Yeah yeah uh I felt old back then but we were totally Young.

Scot

[2:11]But yeah I think we’re getting younger now though we got Benjamin where Benjamin Button podcasters.

Jason

[2:16]I like it.

Scot

[2:18]So we have a thousand things to catch up it’s something about 2 months.

Jason

[2:21]Going to be a 6 hour show.

Scot

[2:22]Well I made sure that we did this when you were hungry so we have a time box of how long you can.

Jason

[2:29]Before I get hangry before hungry goes to hangry okay.

Scot

[2:32]Yep so I’m going to give it like 30 to 40 minutes.

[2:34]

Catching Up After Two Months

Jason

[2:34]All right I’ll let you be the judge.

Scot

[2:35]So we could we could do some speed rounds so I had on the topics here the cover so first of all it’s been 60 days and you’ve been to about 820 places so I want to get any kind of updates on that and then we actually went to 2 different shows we could talk about I went to retail Club and then you went to someone something in Paris that was so fancy I can’t even say the name of it.

[2:59]

Insights from NRF Europe

Jason

[2:57]Yeah it’s really tricky it’s called um NRF Europe.

Scot

[3:00]There you go yes in a you Europe yeah so I want to hear what all is going on in Europe so let’s start there so how was internet Europe.

Jason

[3:10]Yeah so this is the first year of interf having a show in Europe uh obviously they’ve had Big Show here in the US for.

Scot

[3:17]Is it like a franchise with the Big Show or a totally different vibe.

Jason

[3:19]No it totally is uh so big show is a 100 years old which is crazy to think about.

Scot

[3:24]I know it’s not replacing Big Show but yeah.

Jason

[3:27]And so then last year they did a Asia show they did a show in Singapore um which shockingly you and I were not invited to I don’t believe, yeah but I here by all accounts it was just excellent and well attended and so they’re now trying to have a show on the 3 big continents so they’re trying to have a show on Europe and so the first year was in Paris which is as you know the mothership for my, my corporate over awards at pubis.

Scot

[3:52]Ah I see why you went.

Jason

[3:53]Uh well it was.

Scot

[3:53]Now to see you rub elbow.

Jason

[3:55]Yeah yeah yeah so I had some clients that were interested in going so we we all went together and got a chance to speak on the stage and I would say for the first year of a show, it was it was impressive like the if I dropped you in the middle of the trade show for you would have felt very familiar there were quite a few vendors that were like pretty you know big robust booths there were a lot of attendees perusing and learning new stuff, they’re probably there were some good stage content there was probably less tracks than say a Big Show in New York um, I would I would say like for the first year of a show it was super impressive.

Scot

[4:31]Cool did it have 8000 Brazilians.

Jason

[4:34]They did not there were a lot of foreign languages, 1 of which was English um but yeah 1 of the challenges you know Everyone likes to always think of Europe as a place and it really isn’t right like and and so particularly in retail, there’s big retailers in Germany that don’t do business in France or England and so you you know you had a lot of attendees that were, like very regionalized and so in some.

Scot

[5:00]And European.

Jason

[5:00]Yeah yeah and so you know poor if you’re an exhibitor which you and I both made a living as exhibitors in the past, you know you have to have 3 different language speakers that at least in the booth and.

Scot

[5:11]Good news is all these people in Europe can speak multiple languages I don’t know how they do it I can speak barely speak English.

Jason

[5:16]Yes I believe my boss speaks about 5 languages better than I speak 1 which is annoying.

Scot

[5:20]Yep and then did did you do content or you were there more on the spectating side.

Jason

[5:24]No so I did a a session on the the big stage with the the chief experience officer from Sam’s Club, so Diana Marshall so she’s awesome she she owns all customer experience at at their clubs and so she had her team came we did a retail Safari we visited a bunch of uh retail in France, and we had a fancy dinner with my boss at our corporate headquarters the pubis corporate headquarters is 33 Shams to a it’s a.

Scot

[5:55]Oh very nice that sounds fancy.

Jason

[5:56]Yeah it’s a pretty prestigious retail shop and we we actually do run a shop there we have store called pubis drugstore that we’ve been running since 1954.

Scot

[6:05]Wow any JS cargo or is that just cliche.

Jason

[6:09]No they so there is also a restaurant at pubis on the shanto and they do serve as escargot so yes I would probably just get a burger but you I know have a much more refined pallet.

Scot

[6:19]Les Big Mac and.

Jason

[6:23]The deluxe there right because no.

Scot

[6:25]Yeah I can’t remember the whole thing and then uh so Sam’s isn’t in Europe so she they were just kind of bringing the US perspective.

Jason

[6:32]Yeah yeah and they are they’re in a number of other markets not Europe at the moment but yeah so they were they were going as the Learners and and sharing some of the the innovations that they’re doing there so.

Scot

[6:42]Have clubs even jumped to Europe is that a thing.

Jason

[6:44]It is a smart thing there are some clubs there’s kind of like some B2B wholesale clubs like restaurant supplies and things like that are a little more popular the, retail specific clubs not in the same way we have here,

[7:04]

Retail Club Experience

Jason

[7:00]there’s a lot of retailers that are trying to add paid membership options as a step up.

Scot

[7:05]Mhm interesting, cool well on the retail Club this was a new show from the founders of shop talk and grocery shop so Anil Christina and I forget the other 2 but the same team and it’s interesting I didn’t know that she probably knew this but when they sold that to what is it hive.

Jason

[7:23]Hi via or hi Maybe.

Scot

[7:25]Hi I don’t know how to say it so they sold those 2 shows to an event group or they kept underlying technology so the technology that they had to develop for the way they do apps and I’ve been in these meetups it was kind of the same platform so it had an odd familiarity to it but what they decided to do is make it kind of a, like a getaway or an escape type of a thing so it was a very unusual in that a it wasn’t a convention center and it was on the beach and when we were deciding if we wanted to go, I love different so we decided to go all in on my new company refi by and I couldn’t really Envision it until we got there but it was at Huntington Beach which was really cool and there’s a.

Jason

[8:03]Southern California.

Scot

[8:04]Yeah so it goes Pacific Coast so there’s hotels Pacific Coast Highway and then there’s like a parking lot kind of a thing in some areas that some areas there’s peers and stuff but there’s a little parking area there for beachgoers and then there’s a very long beach and then those so actually we’re on the beach we were in that little parking lot so they take over a stretch of that parking lot and they converted into a trade show with tents and all kinds of things so it was really a lot of fun it was way more, boutiki kind of reminded me of the very early shop talk where you know I think was was that like a under a thousand people and there was also that summer in RF show that had this kind of Boutique Vibe I can’t remember the.

Jason

[8:41]Like the merchandise Summit the waiter became Nexus yeah.

Scot

[8:44]Yeah yeah that where it just kind of felt like more approachable like you kind of you knew like if you knew 20 people you could kind of meet everybody that you want.

Jason

[8:53]Was there like 1 track of content so or were there multiple things going on at the same time.

Scot

[8:57]The whole thing was AI so so that’s why it was in our sweet spot but within their they did have several tracks and it was less their whole be different part was shop talk into some extent grocery shop have largely turned into panel, Channel driven discussions so they were kind of like the you know not panels so there was a lot of workshops a lot of retailers presenting with vendors kind of in concert with each other type things and then there were like some expert areas where we could just sit and talk about different topics and I led 1 of those on you know where it was funny they had someone.

Jason

[9:30]You had a controversial topic.

Scot

[9:31]Yeah and and you know they just kind of said could I talk about it I was like sure I’ll take any side of an argument as you as you well know so you know and I think it kind of got spurred by I had Roy Rubin founder of Magento on my retail gentic podcast and he kind of said he sees a day where we may not have websites at all and they’ll be the first billion dollar kind of a digitally native vertical brand, there’s probably some new name for this maybe AI we’ll we’ll use and without a website so it’s just going to sell directly to Consumers maybe through social and or and on social you don’t really need a website like Tik Tok shop um someone has to check out but you know, we won’t count that.

Jason

[10:09]Agentic First Commerce.

Scot

[10:10]That can be hosted by some you know in any Some Cloud somewhere or stripe or something and then over on the Gen AI side eventually you’ll be able to transact this was recorded a while ago and so so they they kind of thought that was an interesting point to discuss so they simultaneously and I think they may have should have stacked these in hindsight but they had a guy from Skechers kind of saying no websites will never go away and here’s why, and then I had to do the side of the argument that you know yes we won’t have websites so it was it was a fun to.

Jason

[10:38]You are Roy Rubin in this scenario.

Scot

[10:40]I I was a Roy Rubin yes I got to put on his shoes they were a little small for me but but I I suffered through.

Jason

[10:45]Prestigious though yeah I’m coining it right now A nvb agentic native vertical brand.

Scot

[10:52]All right I like it let’s go buy the domain name all right do we do AI or calm I guess it doesn’t matter if there’s not gonna be a website.

Jason

[10:59]No yeah you don’t you don’t need a URL you just need a AC you just need a ACP stack.

Scot

[11:02]Forget domain names Okay cool so it was a lot of fun so it was really good and for us for my company it was great because it was everyone in retailers and Brands is thinking about this so so they were our people so it was great.

Jason

[11:15]And did you guys use that occasion to Launch.

Scot

[11:18]We did yes so it kind of worked out that having done 5 software companies this is a strange 1.

Jason

[11:24]You’re going to get it right eventually.

Scot

[11:26]Well it changes every time so I don’t think I will the engineers because everything we’re doing is AI augmented they’re using you know clogged code and and these types of things.

Jason

[11:39]So not Cobalt.

Scot

[11:39]No not Cobalt there wasn’t really in the consideration set but you know maybe next time or maybe if you start a company you could, and so they’re going, they’re going fast but then they’ll hit a slow spot so it’s like hard to time so as we got closer we realized if we really, push some things hard we could launch at the show so it worked out to be a perfect time for us to launch our product I was also worried it’s been kind of like 1 of the worst kept secrets in in my world that chat CBT is working on a checkout, felt like that would create a you know a blast zone and as a small company it’s very hard to get a pressure release out that, doesn’t land in the blast zone of a big company doing something so it worked out great we were not in the blast zone and then I think what are we 3 weeks later while we record this yesterday that actually dropped on the 29th so September 29th so this our release.

Jason

[12:32]So mark that day and.

Scot

[12:40]So that was good so that was well received and we got to finally you know kind of reveal what we’ve been working on and and share to the world kind of our take on things so it’s been a lot of fun.

Jason

[12:49]Well congratulations on that it’s exciting I’ve I have some fomo for not being able to go to retail Club.

Scot

[12:55]Yeah next year we’ll have to you know tell your boss no more Paris or maybe they won’t line up so we’ll have to kind of see how it lines up next year.

Jason

[13:02]Yeah yeah yeah we’ll have to see I think interf is going back to Paris next year I don’t know what the plan is after next year like it might move around in Europe or something.

Scot

[13:09]Yeah seems like they have NFL level aspirations to expand the brand which is which is smart.

Jason

[13:14]All those 3 letter acronym organizations are very similar.

Scot

[13:18]Hey if the NFL can do it the NRF can.

[13:22]

Key Takeaways from Grocery Shop

Jason

[13:20]Yeah they even have some of the same letters in common.

Scot

[13:22]Kind of they absolutely do cool so let’s kind of let’s keep the road trip fibs going and let’s talk about the road trip we’re on right now how what are some of your key takeaways from grocery shop.

Jason

[13:35]Yep so as you you just alluded to we are at grocery shop which is the, the digital food show saying food because well it’s mostly grocery I think there’s increasing amount of kind of digital restaurant coverage here as well, and the I’d say the topics here are pretty predictable I would have came in expecting 3 big topics I would have expected a lot of discussion about macroeconomics and, tariffs and pivots to more value Brands and private labels and all of that I would have expected of course a lot of conversation about AI, you you and I are like pretty pretty deep in it but like to a lot of other people AI might mean like, process enablement and making your employees better and making content more efficiently and all this stuff it might not necessarily mean, net new consumer behaviors replacing websites and stuff like that but I would have expected a lot of AI stuff and then retail media networks and for sure if you go look at, money spent on this show all the big sponsors and exhibitors it’s so funny because it used to be a bunch of vendors that were trying to sell stuff to Walmart and instacart and and all these big retailers now it’s all the big retailers spending money trying to sell stuff to to all the the brands because it’s all Walmart connect and and door Dash ads that are that are the big big signature sponsors.

Scot

[15:02]Yeah I think the brands must feel very excited to be be be you know sought after so much for this or.

Jason

[15:08]Yeah I think there’d be more excited if if they didn’t feel like a wallet.

Scot

[15:12]Yes yeah yeah yeah that’s true and then because retail media networks is so popular and you’re now known as the guy that’s anti- retail media Network do they throw tomatoes at you when you walk by or how does how does that go for you this is a tough gig for you.

Jason

[15:24]Yeah no I mean obviously my my opinions and optimism about retail media networks are a lot more nuanced than like you you like to portray them.

Scot

[15:36]No it’s Curie blame but I’m curious I knew that.

Jason

[15:37]No no I think Kerry and I agree more than we disagree um and I think things are, things play out wildly different than I expect all the time I just want to be totally clear anyone that listens to our.

Scot

[15:49]We do have our annual predictions which you’re not very good at let’s.

Jason

[15:53]Episode every year knows.

Scot

[15:54]The tenure balance on.

Jason

[15:56]Side note I’m super pissed because I feel like my prediction for like 8 of our ten years was that this is going to be the year of electronic shelf labels, and I I got tired of losing that prediction so I stopped saying it but like I’d say about 75% of the booths at this show and 100% of the booths at interf Europe were electronic shelf label booths.

Scot

[16:14]I was going to tell you I saw these really nice color ones and I thought oh I got, tell Jason but I figured you already if I ever send you a picture you’re like oh that’s an ABC 123 and it you know that’s old technology and blah blah blah so I feel like you’ve already seen it there are I’ve been impressed by the number of digital shelf things on the show.

Jason

[16:33]Yeah well at the at the risk of digressing even further I get to work with a bunch of like really smart interesting people and 1 of the favorite people I get to work with is this Legend in our industry named Andy Murray and Andy, founded a a 1 of the original Shopper marketing agencies called Saatchi X he’s the former Chief marketing officer Walmart he ran Asda in the UK so like a a true legit retail Legend and he calls me about once a week right now and he’s like super excited he’s like dude there’s this new thing called electronic shelf labels and I think I think they’re going to change the world.

Scot

[17:08]It’s obviously doesn’t listen to our podcast because you’ve been talking about this for 10 years.

Jason

[17:11]Exactly and I’m like I’m trying to politely say yeah yeah I agree Andy I’m pretty pretty excited it’s a thing.

Scot

[17:18]And listeners can’t hear you but you’re very dapperly dressed you’ve got a pocket square which is unusual and you’re wearing some branded socks which is not unusual but you gave a really nice panel today that I saw or I guess a fireside chat is a better branding of the.

Jason

[17:32]There was no fire involved I almost none of the Fireside Chats.

Scot

[17:35]Virtual and no fire fireside chat and then sadly I didn’t get in until and I missed your first thing so you’re and then you have something tomorrow so run listeners through the 3 things you you have 2 you’ve talked about and 1 coming up.

Jason

[17:49]You’re overselling me I had 2 things so I had had 1 today and so we had a panel with the the head of Ecom at Sam’s Club, and so everything Sam’s Club.

Scot

[18:01]It was a panel yeah.

Jason

[18:02]Yeah if if people if people aren’t keeping pubis track, Sam’s Club’s a new pubis is called so we’ve been working with Walmart for a long time and we were very honored to to add Sam’s Club to the portfolio this year so so I’ve been getting to spend a lot more time with those folks, so so this panel was on kind of seamless on Omni Channel experiences and the the evolution of, of that whole thing and so we wanted a retailer and a brand so the the retailer was Sam’s and the brand was Marzetti foods which Marzetti is beloved manufacturer of many of the sauces that we eat both, both the the grocery sauces but all the restaurant branded sauces most so for you and I most relevantly all the Chick-fil-A sauces.

Scot

[18:44]I heard that the Chick-fil-A 80 gallon Ranch squirty thing is very popular in my house people we drink the ranch dressing the ranch I guess it’s a dip by the gallons so thanks to those folks yeah.

Jason

[18:56]I might know a guy if you if you if you need a connection that could be.

Scot

[19:00]Sadly I don’t think I can carry that much on the plane on the way.

Jason

[19:02]No hopefully hopefully they they ship yeah so that was the panel today and uh.

Scot

[19:08]Now are we using Omni Channel harm like when I was last in deep and e-commerce that was on the way out everyone was like saying harmonized like what’s the latest lingo on the.

Jason

[19:16]Uh so yeah so I don’t like to get into all the buzzword Bingo the none of these words are perfect I hate all these words a lot of people still use Omni Channel if you were going to use something new it might be connected Commerce.

Scot

[19:31]Hmm I like that.

Jason

[19:33]The 1 that has the most momentum at the I am glad to be rid of the word channel so like, you and I are super old we started out at multi-channel and then multi-channel became cross Channel and then cross Channel became Omni Channel I did another event earlier this year and someone’s like, what’s your what’s your best advice for Omni Channel and I said don’t do it and there and they looked at me very disappointed like that wasn’t in the rehearsal um, and what I mean by that is like all this emphasis on the wrong on the wrong thing like that retail used to be about channels and you had 1 guy that owned the catalog and 1 guy that owned the stores and then eventually e-commerce when it became a thing and, all all of those those divisions are sort of meaningless at this.

Scot

[20:17]It was vertical and now it’s all horizontal yeah yeah and what’s tomorrow about.

Jason

[20:22]Yeah so tomorrow is the 1 I think you’re you’re going to miss it but I think it’s the 1 you’d be more interested in its kind of the expanding Universe of Commerce touch points so there’s 1 I don’t know if you’ve heard, yeah yeah um, yeah uh so so social commerce um so 1 I have 3 panelists 1 of the panelists is Tik Tok shop uh.

Scot

[20:45]Which you and Sutra both said would never be a thing I just want to put that back onto the record.

Jason

[20:50]Yeah I feel like you.

Scot

[20:51]People don’t go to a cocktail party to buy stuff that may have been tsukareta quote.

Jason

[20:56]Yeah um I think you might be putting some words in my mouth.

Scot

[20:57]But you strongly agreed you guys.

Jason

[21:00]I will acknowledge that like I definitely have never been the most bullish on Commerce on the social platforms and in spite of my lack of optimism Tik Tok shop is wildly successful.

Scot

[21:12]They pulled it off.

Jason

[21:13]Total total props to them and so there’s a lot I think we can learn from their execution side note you’re helping me practice because I somehow from their birth have mispronounced them Tik Tok shops plural, yes yes yes so I’m desperately trying to to reform my pronunciation yeah I’m sure I will.

Scot

[21:34]Good luck tomorrow if you if you think too much about it you’re sure to.

Jason

[21:37]I’m I’m sure I will blow it on stage yeah so we’re gonna we’re gonna talk about those sort of expanding social channels, door Dash will be on the panel and we’re like increasingly like that’s a Commerce Channel Beyond restaurants and ready to eat food and.

Scot

[21:53]This is exciting today I saw the announced an autonomous delivery robot that can go on a bike lane and it’s really cute it’s got like little it looks kind of like a mini Herbie the Love Bug and so it’s got like these 2 cute little big eyes that are at sensors and it looks like it zips in these bike Lanes so it’s not like 1 of those slow little tank looking, you see so that could be an interesting topic.

Jason

[22:14]Yeah yeah yeah I will have to add that to the to the the discussion guide for tomorrow and then we have ELCA shop who’s from Elf Beauty uh and so.

Scot

[22:24]Oh we should have her on the podcast if you could swing it.

Jason

[22:28]That’s a great idea I will see what I could do to make that happen listeners tune in.

Scot

[22:31]Do you have special so today you wore your Sam’s socks do you have Tik Tok Elf or doordash socks or pubis.

Jason

[22:41]I don’t because I I don’t really Pander to panels panelists I Pander to poop as this client.

Scot

[22:48]Got to be a client to get the socks I got it all right we got to get you some Json and Scott show is like a if there’s no 1 you’re pandering to you could slot us on.

Jason

[22:54]Ooh I should I do have Jason socks grocery shop gives you weird.

Scot

[22:58]I have Jason.

Jason

[22:59]Weird speaker gifts every year right and so 1 year it was these cool like aprons and oven mitts, it it’s kind of jumped the shark because you know what it was this year it was soap in the shape of a Frozen TV dinner so like a Saulsbury.

Scot

[23:16]I got that and I was like what and it smelled kind of funky.

Jason

[23:19]Yes it was not a appealing looking or appetizing in any way sort of thing but 1 of the years here at grocery shop it was socks with your grocery shop character on them.

Scot

[23:31]Nice very cool this is my first grocery shop and my favorite part of this show is all the free samples of food I’ve been I did not know that was a thing so I would go into a talk and there’d be a bag of Cheetos, um the Cheetos Naturals order of those are called those are actually delicious.

Jason

[23:46]Yes I also can recommend.

Scot

[23:48]Had to pause myself not to eat the whole bag I looked at the calories I was like oops this is a this is.

Jason

[23:52]The side note to to my friends that live you can explain this to me there are 3 servings in that bag each serving is 110 calories but the bag is 390 calories.

[24:09]

Sampling Experiences at Grocery Shop

Scot

[24:04]I also saw that and I thought well maybe that includes eating the bag or something or maybe it’s like a fractional or.

Jason

[24:09]I’m assuming if you eat the whole bag at once that you’re burning more calories or something I don’t I don’t know.

Jason

[24:21]And buy samples I think you like there’s there are a lot of food samples and stuff but in the store of the future there’s a lot of grocery shop swag samples is that what you meant or oh okay.

Scot

[24:29]Oh no there’s like actual food yeah I got some Sasquatch soap I got I’ve always wanted to try that but not like Risk a whole bar and then there was a couple food items I thought well I’ll try these so yeah I actually didn’t get in the swag, you there was a limit of 5.

Jason

[24:44]Uh I don’t think they’re here this year but last year uh feastables was here in a big way which made me very very popular in my family yeah yeah we should get him on the podcast.

Scot

[24:48]Ooh Mr Beast he’s from North Carolina yeah Greensboro Greenville I’ll work on it.

Jason

[24:58]There’s no entrepreneur in that neck of the woods that doesn’t Revere Scott Wingo come on.

Scot

[25:02]Well I think he’s way on some other level than I am what other content did you get a chance to check out.

Jason

[25:09]So I I have tried to consume as much content as possible um so.

Scot

[25:14]LinkedIn feed has been a just like a a buffet of of grocery shop content it’s been great.

Jason

[25:19]I try I try to pick out some interesting Snippets from each thing I sit in on and share them I feel like there’s you know what’s competing with me now is the darn AI, so at every and I think this is just going to be a thing in the future at every 1 of these sessions there’s now a bunch of people with their phones or laptop open and they’re recording the session and the, the stupid AI robot is writing like, a summary of the content which I’m totally fine with and that’s useful and I’m grateful to have all those in my library but then they have them plumbed to a workflow where it’s generating an automatic LinkedIn post, and so there you yeah they’re now.

Scot

[25:58]It’s not as witty as you can’t can’t possibly be.

Jason

[26:00]I feel like I’m sure I’m going to lose in the long run but right now I feel like my curation still has some some advantages.

Scot

[26:07]You know the AI can’t get humor the store off on that even the grow which is supposed to be the funny 1.

Jason

[26:11]A lot of people in my family would say the same about me yeah but they’re giggling when they say it so I feel like I’m winning when when someone’s giggling while they’re saying you’re not funny exactly exactly.

Scot

[26:20]Rings the whole joke the whole purpose anything stand up.

Jason

[26:25]So a topic that I should have anticipated that came up that was maybe not on my radar ahead of time is, the impact of glp1 on this industry um and so obviously intuitively it makes sense but I like the scope of the numbers is somewhat startling so like 1 out of every 8 Americans is on a glp1 and depending on what stats you believe, they consume 20% less calories or spend 10% less at the grocery store and so there are all these companies that you’re either a glp1 headwind company or a glp-1 Tailwind company so if you have, high fiber products or nutrient-dense products or products that help remediate this the digestive symptoms, it’s a huge Tailwind if you’re you know unhealthy calories or alcohol it’s a very real headwind and, most of the big Grocers have now said that they can like absolutely see the impact of glp1 in their their shopping data.

Scot

[27:31]That is interesting yeah Yeahs on my side it retail, Club I kind of started this mental framework of the AI having kind of 3 subsections so there’s like a lot of you know back office optimization things like pricing and store allocations and supply chain and all that and then there’s like a level up it’s kind of like from there up to the home page so there’s, tons of vendors that have taken what I call the conversion enhancers, come out with a better recommendation engine a better on-site search engine a better lots of on-site chats trying to copy Rufus and Sparky type things so on and so forth and then you have the stuff that sits above that that’s kind of saying all right how do you optimize the traffic source that is this new way of selling things out, the links so so I think here at grocery shop so it’s been kind of an interesting book end because at retail Club everyone was like thinking about all 3 kind of simultaneously and they had projects going in all of them they tend to.

Scot

[28:29]You know the if you think about those buckets the most risk so these AI people kind of have it’s like it reminds me a lot of the early Chief digital officers where they kind of have their neck out in the org so they you you don’t start that with like a replatform right like a with a capital R like a big project like that with a capital P you they would do like little things like the conversion enhancers or or something like these channels I just saw on the marketplace so I think that’s kind of like what I saw a retail Club a lot a lot of it was they were thinking about the infrastructure maybe doing 1 or 2 things in the middle and then doing a little bit more on the on the other side because it’s less risky and new and not and it’s going to bring traffic which everyone loves traffic and also everyone’s trying to remediate the you know Jai is kind of a pull and that it’s like okay there’s all these people using this and it’s early and let’s learn about it the push is and I was surprised at retail Club to learn this I I saw it in the data but like people were more freaked out than I was expecting their Google SEO or their free organic Google is down but a lot of them their sem is down too even though they’re actually spending more so you know the fact that Google is at reacting to chat TBT and causing less traffic to go Downstream because they’re having to put answers do AIO reviews AI mode and Gemini it has caused a dramatic drop for many retailers depends on where they are in this adoption curve it seems to be going like on the.

Scot

[29:48]On The Cutting Edge of this whole thing is like Beauty and and kind of things that are in that younger generation and and and then grocery prize and feeling it at all on the other side of that all the things in between whereas here I haven’t heard anyone talk about that and it’s all mostly back office things and and hardly anyone talking there’s vendors that are you know trying to talk about all 3 but more of its back office and they’re even just kind of like thinking about it and learning more about it.

Jason

[30:15]Yeah yeah I glad you brought that up because I actually want a rift with you a little bit on that because I I come as no surprise to anyone I try to consume all your content and I’ve I’ve heard your framework a couple times, and I like sort of independently had my own framework and I I think they’re similar, they might even be the same with just different semantics but I want to not even I’m not debating it I’m I’m striving to learn and get better so I thought if I put mine out there we could we could potentially.

Scot

[30:41]While the joint framework.

Jason

[30:42]See if we could we could refine them both right so first 1 I think is exactly the same I’ll call it, the back of house use cases or the efficiency use cases all the things retailers were already doing you can now do better and more efficiently with AI right and so the 1, that I actually see the the biggest early results on are all the the store associate enablement all these tools that take tasks out of the retail store that that stuff is all real like you know all the money you spent, changing shifts and scheduling hours and all of these things all the supply chain optimizations that they do right so so AI.

Scot

[31:21]And there’s a physical world thing that that is very prevalent here at grocery shop where you know I would say there’s probably 20 booths that have some kind of a robotic thing and if we had seen these 5 years ago we would have stopped in the hall and been like what the heck is that, uh even walking in the lobby I had to like get out of the way of a robot that was cleaning the floor you know it was just like a little R2-D2 cleaning the floor yeah totally you know autonomous doing its thing and you know so there’s lots of things now that will go and count your shelves kind of at night and I remember early on we would talk about those as if they were like this huge new experiment and now that seems to be relatively like a mundane.

Jason

[31:56]Oh yeah yeah I think I think there’s a ton of that for.

Scot

[31:59]I think a lot of it is unlocked because.

Jason

[32:00]Out of stocks and Merchandising compliance and like when I started my career every brand in America hired a bunch of kids, college kids to go to school stores with disposable cameras, and take pictures on 35 millimeter film of all the shelves they paid for and send them back and they went into some giant Procter and Gamble shoe box, and think about it it wasn’t like every brand sent someone to go take a picture of the same.

Scot

[32:28]Seems inefficient.

Jason

[32:29]Yes yes so so AI has has very credibly and legitimately made a lot of uh things in the store and in the retail model more efficient right and, many of those things pay for themselves like there’s vendors that are very excited about them and they’re they’re certainly right to be so um.

Scot

[32:49]And then what’s next.

Jason

[32:50]So number 2 for me is what I call the on-site customer experiences, so you’re you’re calling that kind of like the below the PDP stuff but that’s uh.

Scot

[33:01]What the homepage.

Jason

[33:02]Yeah yeah so that’s the like all the AI improvements to ratings and reviews it’s the better search engine it’s an on-site answer engine instead of a search engine so to me both Rufus and Sparky today are, examples of, on-site customer experience AI it’s the customer experience chat Bots it’s all all of these things that walmart.com or target.com might have as part of their experience that are AI based, and they are also very meaningful and interesting and you know there’s a lot of vendors here that are focused predominantly on those and so then my third bucket is, offsite customer experiences so things that are changing consumer Behavior about how they discover products decide what to buy and where to buy it from, before they picked a retailer so that like chat gbt you know could send me to a Shopify site or an Etsy site or something else Google AI mode could could do that, some kind of Auto replenishment AI service for my dishwasher that you know helps me figure out my my dish soap replenishment all those sorts of things, that are sort of Upstream from picking a particular Merchant to me is that third bucket and so you say it slightly different but I kind of feel like they’re pretty similar buckets.

Scot

[34:27]I agree yeah yeah yeah and I feel like you’re you’re probably influenced by the Walmart you know they talk about the 4 super agents so they have a an associate 1 a what you’re probably, 1 yep.

Jason

[34:43]Yeah so customer facing is Sparky uh the associate 1 I don’t believe has a name but the app that most of them live in is called at Walmart, they have a 1 called Marty which is uh the partner 1 uh so all the vendors Walmart has been kind of a a leader in automation for vendors for a long time they used to have this thing called retail link and you know they have a lot of tools that vendors use so now, they have an AI tool, and then the third 1 is for developers because you know this but a lot of people may not know Walmart has more than 10,000 Engineers Building Technology Stacks at Walmart and 1 of the most proven use cases of all for AI is, coding efficiencies and coding optimization and I I’ve I’ve heard rumors that refi by relies heavily on.

Scot

[35:28]Yeah it’s in our DNA you got a got a mCP it up.

Jason

[35:32]So so Walmart has those kind of 3 what they now brand super agents and that’s I think another good way to think about it is it’s less about the job to be done for each 1 of those and more the constituent that uses it.

Scot

[35:44]Yeah and I also spend a lot of time talking to retailers about theology so so Amazon has taken the theology that they are going to be they’re not going to let agents in the front door and they’re they’re going to let they’re going to have their own agents that can go out so they have, Rufus which is an answer engine for for you know kind of a better search engine they won’t use that word but I think it is, and then they then they have buy for me where a brand can now not be selling on Amazon right now they’re mostly what I would call hybrid mode they have some 1 P they don’t want to do 3 p so it’s a way to kind of like augment 3 p with a off-site, urgent to check out type thing that’s in, an experimental phase but they do not they block chatgpt and all the other engines from crawling whereas a Walmart has more of an open door policy where they want to embrace all the agents so it’s really it’s gonna be interesting to see.

Scot

[36:35]Which of those Works um and if you’re if you’re 1 of the top big guys you can make those decisions I would argue I mean you you know do what you want but, if you’re smaller you should be embracing these things because you know the in my experience do these waves of we’ve been at this a long time the brains and retailers that embrace, these big waves of change marketplaces mobile Tik Tok shop and things of that nature they tend to build an edge, get in front and they start to they get the a lot of the learnings are sequential and not easily caught up, on or there’s a network effect like building influencers and people that are you know want to be affiliated with your brand earlier versus if you’re the 50th beauty company you’re you’re going to miss out on, so those types of things so yeah we’ll see.

Jason

[37:26]I I often I call that the Frenemy meeting like we have a lot of these meetings like are these these agents hitting our site our friends our enemies or Frenemy and what are we going to do about it I certainly agree with you if you don’t have a lot of Leverage, you should be participating in as many of these things as you can I do have some empathy it’s easy for me to look at Amazon and go oh that’s a mistake to to lock the door, they they have the world’s largest product catalog they have a billion items in it and if.

Scot

[37:56]And all the reviews I think the I think the reviews are really what they’re trying to guard they they don’t want to just be Reddit they don’t want to be like a you know a repository for a chat gbt to pull reviews.

Jason

[38:06]Yeah and this probably doesn’t surprise anyone but like you know, everybody’s doing studies right now to see what what kind of things the the robots prefer at the moment my company, watches a lot of digital shelves uh so we have a lot of digital shelf data from Walmart and Target and and Kroger and so they they actually looked at what Rufus and Sparky in particular preference and I think surprising No 1, reviews are amongst the the most influential attributes on that page and number of reviews like like the the Sparky products are almost universally,

[38:48]

AI Trends in Retail

Jason

[38:45]products that have over 4 stars and have over 4,000 reviews.

Scot

[38:49]Absolutely yeah cool what other uh any other topics you want to talk about before we go grab some food.

Jason

[38:56]Oh when you throw out like I I there’s a bunch of topics I would have wanted to talk about but now when I’m comparing them to grabbing food uh, they they seem wildly less less interesting i i 2 more things on AI and then maybe we’ll we’ll wrap up with a a typical length show for us the.

Jason

[39:15]New chat gbt instant checkout, so obviously like you you kind of already showed your hand a little bit if you’re a small company like you probably would want to add that feed and see what what happens when your product starts showing up in in openai prompts and see if you can sell anything the, and I I’ve I’ve read what you have wrote about it I’ve been equally interested this this implementation at the moment it’s got some strengths and weaknesses but 1 very clever thing is they are not the seller of record, um which I think a lot of us were curious to see is would open AI try to be the seller of record which has a lot of, positive and negative implications Amazon is a Marketplace that is the seller of record so they jump through a lot of technical Hoops to make sure that they’re not the seller of record, so if you’re a direct to Consumer brand if you have your own fulfillment if you already are a seller of record somewhere, the threshold for you the barrier of entry for you to add chat gb2 t as a new customer acquisition channel is very low, and so in most cases I would say oh man you should definitely try that there’s very little to lose but there are a bunch of wholesalers, that sell other people’s stuff and I’m kind of curious because I work with a bunch of those and they’re all asking me what they should do so what would you do.

Scot

[40:41]So so the good news is the way they’ve implemented this is unlike traditional Marketplace Integrations, where it’s the whole enchilada or nothing you can’t just list on Amazon and get traffic you have to list and sell on Amazon same with eBay same with the market the.

Jason

[40:57]With sell and buy an ad by the way but yeah.

Scot

[40:59]Well now it’s by an ad and we really would like you to use our fulfillment, yep so so like the stack has gotten deeper and the economics have gotten you know more in favor of the marketplace many times for but you know the customer experience has gotten better and and correlation with that the what’s interesting about this is if you want to do the checkout you have to do the feed and the checkout integration however you can just do the feed so you can kind of tiptoe into this so everyone’s already tiptoeing in so these spiders are their crawlers are hitting your website even if you’re a wholesaler and you’re not selling direct and you know so even without the feed you can some people just block that so that’s that’s a choice I I wouldn’t recommend that but you know, I’ve talked to a lot of people where their legal department is just kind of early on said or their it department where they’ve said anything that looks like a robot we block because we don’t want distributed distributed denial of services attacks and we could we could spend a lot of time talking about that but but that’s you you need a more nuanced approach because these things identify themselves and you can white list them and yep so if that is a worry there’s.

Jason

[41:58]And when you are almost certainly have already whitelisted is called Google.

Scot

[42:02]Yeah googlebot yes so it it’s kind of like would you block googlebot and and I would say that to the lawyers too because your catalog.

Jason

[42:08]Alibaba in China does for example and it worked for them.

Scot

[42:11]I think all of China blocks the Google bot and the great fire 1.

Jason

[42:13]Yeah well I meant the Alibaba blocks the Chinese version of Google uh bowed out like so literally you can’t do a search on the on a universal search engine.

Scot

[42:22]In the early days of Amazon they blocked um that as well and they’ve actually had this on again off again with Google shopping because, they’re they’re very well aware that Google shopping feeds are getting consumed by Gemini so so there there are these things are already training on this dude this so so the lawyers think they’re going to protect this product data it’s already out there so 100% it’s our it’s already in everything so you’re protecting something the horses are out of the barn and they’re running around crazy but anyway so so that’s that’s kind of interesting so so number 1 you can even do things on your site to optimize that and and we can help with that kind of thing and so it’s in metadata and and the piece that’s missing, and this is in the feed specification is context so we have we have an industry has have optimized towards search which is very keyword based and SEO is this Nuance Art and Science where you want to have the right keywords but you don’t want to keywords bam and you get punished if you don’t like kind of down the Fairway on this thing so so the way people have bought online is widely influenced by search engines historically so therefore our PDP is kind of like start they’re very concise and they tend to be keyword dense but not repetitive for this very the overlap of SEO and human optimization is the VIN diagram is almost overlap 100% Jai and a lot of people use this Geo I won’t use that but you know it these llms crave way more content.

Scot

[43:45]But inside that content they just don’t want a bunch of extra stuff they they do like that they want context and because if you if you, you know if you’ve used these engines you’re in this conversation and you’re typically starting way up even maybe above top of funnel where you’re kind of like, hey it looks like you’re going to Las Vegas it’s hot there do you want a short sleeve t-shirt and you know so so you kind of walk through the these use cases of where are you going what are you in the beauty category there’s these scent profiles people have color profiles and because it has memory once you tell it any of this stuff it remembers it forever, so it it has it has more context about the buyer across Merchant than we’ve ever seen even intrum Merchant I don’t think you know maybe chewy knows more about your dog than chat does today but in the future it will actually you know you know more about that anyway so so you have to you can actually do that even without being in this feedback the feedback makes it easier because the problem is what we’re finding is this is the first time we’ve had all this content that is important but you don’t really probably want on your PDP you know the consumer doesn’t want to have to slug through all this like 80 pages.

Jason

[44:49]Yeah the signal and the noise becomes.

Scot

[44:51]So it’s been a little tricky talking to some of our customers are like well where do I put this we’re we’re fine being the repository for that but a lot of them like want to put it in the pin but the PIN can’t handle it all and all this kind of stuff so so it is this feedback is a nice way to basically fire hose it in and control what goes there and when because the crawler you can’t you don’t have to wait and sit wait for it to come back.

Jason

[45:11]And it has a structure.

Scot

[45:12]Yes and it has a really nice structure that’s important because a lot of people may think oh it’s just a feed and if you’re already doing a Google feed do 1 of these it is a very different feed it’s kind of like.

Jason

[45:21]Or at least it should be.

Scot

[45:22]Oh yeah it’s like you mentioned Cobalt earlier it’s like COBOL and python they’re they’re you know 1 is like super old generation and this 1 is not a you could certainly do that it’s actually going to probably hurt you because you need to use the extra capabilities of this new feed to give a lot of this contextual information, but but it is nice because you don’t have to kind of go both feet in or or you know cannonball in by doing the checkout I would definitely recommend everyone do this feed if you don’t have a policy of blocking all the all the things even if you block them this is a way to go your team and say what if there’s a way for me to give them a direct feed and not have to unblock I don’t know about that my my sense is that will work I haven’t actually tried that specific situation because I you know I if you everything I’ve read it it the feed augments and kind of like at enhances the things that the crawler has found so we’ll we’ll see how that works out.

Jason

[46:11]Okay and so then my my last question on this thing, the I’m excited that they launched it I think there’s some cleverness in the implementation that was a pleasant surprise to me they also, to me it appears repeated a lot of the mistakes that you and I have seen since frugal, right so so at the moment it’s a 1, there’s a very small subset of all merchandise sold in the world that’s economical to sell as a single SKU right so so limiting and problematic like obviously like I think we all expect that’s going to yeah yeah it’s going to expand.

Scot

[46:48]Playing cards.

Jason

[46:53]But there are all these other edge cases that turns out you have to support in order to be a robust successful platform right and so people want to, multiple tender types and they want gift cards and promo fields and all of these things but 1 that’s super important is when I’ll get it, right so we’re at grocery shop they’re talking about food use cases here people usually aren’t, shopping for food that they’re not planning on consuming for a month so they want to know when they order it when it’s going to arrive, not how many days is UPS going to take to give it to you once you give it to UPS at an undisclosed period of time and so like these are the kinds of, rough customer experience is that everyone always launches the first time they launched Facebook Commerce the first time they launched Instagram Commerce Pinterest Commerce 8 of the efforts at Google Converse like have all made these same mistakes and there’s a fair amount of them in this first generation, effort from.

Scot

[47:54]Yeah I I would say they’re kind of in the middle so you’ve kind of given a binary thing but you know so the early days of so Twitter I I’ve been to all these because the first thing they do is call us at Channel advisor and we would say here’s how you’re going to do this right number 1 yes you need an inventory feed but at checkout you need to check it and and they’d be like why are you doing that you just gave us inventory feed and we’d say well chopping is a dynamic thing and it changes in their stores and all this kind of stuff and they would never do that so so the out of stocks were like 70% on these, to their credit chat GPD does have a web hook that as you go through this flow comes back and says is this widgets on stock so that’s nice so they that’s 1 that they’ve they’ve definitely identified the other 1 they’ve done is instead of having to do some really Arcane upload a sales tax Matrix this too simple and not down to the locality and then some shipping thing like as a FedEx table some developer found and says just use this FedEx table they’ve all done this it actually has web hooks for those pieces so it actually when it when you get into the shipping phase it will it will give you a it’s not as precise as Amazon or or you know a on-site experience but it’s a little bit better than than than than I think you would expect.

Scot

[49:01]But you know there’s no tracking information to retailer pings you on that but I think that trade-off for retailers actually and all those other experiments The Merchant of record was the marketplace and I think this is a game-changer because it sends this really interesting signal, that they’re going to be way more friendly now I may be wrong like we’ve all had this remember Facebook was going to be friendly and gave you this page and then like oh you’re gonna have to pay for everything you just did all right so this could change but but Merchants records very powerful because, Amazon and every other Marketplace basically says we’re renting you our customer and in fact if you Market to them if you Market to the customer at Amazon they will.

Jason

[49:37]That’s out of our terms and conditions we’re going to put you in the penalty.

Scot

[49:39]That is not a 3 strike thing that is a you know it’s not a speed bump 1 strike you were off I’ve seen hundred million dollar retailers.

Jason

[49:47]Their whole industry is dedicated to just getting you out of that penalty box.

Scot

[49:50]Yes there are and yeah so so this is they’re basically saying this is your customer you’re acquiring we’re just going to make it easier for them to check out and then they’re your customer if you want to remarket to them if you want to add them to the Loyalty program if you want to get them to opt in follow all the rules and all that jazz so so I think that’s exciting and I think there’s going to be a lot of Merchants that get really energized by that as soon as they kind of get their head around it because you and I you know I probably know, hundreds if not thousands of Amazon sellers many of them got kicked off for you know these very minor infractions and things like mixed inventory that weren’t their fault but you can never find it the Amazon machine just rolled over them that that would love to have a channel that was more emergent from me so so I I think, yes it needs a lot of improvements yes the other thing I I’m excited about is by partnering with stripe guess what Stripes really good at all those things you just mentioned you know multiple currencies loyal you know I don’t know where stripe is on the spectrum of Loy loyalty but I I have a feeling they could get their head around it by partnering with someone that is that good at this stuff the can certainly do a cart like they have all these cart Technologies so so I think we’re going to see this by next holiday I think it’s going to address a lot of the things you said.

Jason

[51:00]Yeah I think it’s going to be interesting and again it’s it’s a first offer so um.

Scot

[51:05]The thing they did that was smart is all those other efforts were kind of engineering driven, and a lot of them died too because the other the other limiter they put them on was like all the Google ones they’re like yes we’re really excited about this I was like oh great what surfaces is going to be on and they’d be like it’s going to be on a 10% exposure I was like well that’s a lot at Google, on on the latest Android app and you’re just like okay not many people get the latest, Google Android so so by that point you’re like a percent of a percent of a percent of a percent and you have like and then.

Jason

[51:34]It’s innovator’s dilemma they don’t.

Scot

[51:35]And then they close at 60 days later and I’m like why they’re like No 1 used to you know just wasn’t material enough and you can tell the add part of the business is the innovator’s Dilemma set this thing you know someone higher up set it was some engineer did a 10% project and thought it would be good for users and someone did the math and said this doesn’t, work this will cannibalize ads kill it so they they kind of killed it through the the corporate, you know thing of like okay we’ll do a test just like make sure it’s on 5% of Android on a Tuesday with if it if it’s a full moon and yeah that kind of thing.

[52:11]

Closing Thoughts and Next Steps

Scot

[52:12]Yeah we we will probably talk about it more here because it does cut across our world and it’s going to be interesting to see how Amazon and the bigger picture reacts to this but I have a podcast retail gentic where we focus on this, that doesn’t have to align with your travel schedule which makes it a little bit easier to be more frequent.

Jason

[52:27]Yes yes people are telling me that they they like the the collection of hosts much better on that other podcast.

Scot

[52:32]Yep so 50% less host but the frequency is higher so.

Jason

[52:37]Yeah twice the insight for half the hosts that’s hurtful but you know it is what it is uh well awesome Scott it’s been so fun to do a show in person with you again.

Scot

[52:47]Yeah it’s fun to hang out with you I always I remember but it always surprises me how much a Starbucks you drink so it’s been fun to get have such a aggressive Starbucks buddy.

Jason

[52:58]Hi I am here to enable your bad habits.

Scot

[53:00]Thanks I appreciate that.

Jason

[53:02]Yeah and thanks everyone for for listening look for our next episode probably coming sooner than you expect and spoiler alert we might have recorded more than 1 episode.

Scot

[53:10]Oh you let the cat out of the back so a reward for lasting this long.

Jason

[53:14]Exactly and until next time happy Commerce.

Jason & Scot Show Episode 329 Amazon Q2 2025 earnings report.

Retailgeek — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:06:10 +0000

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 329 is an evaluation of Amazon Q2 2025 earnings report.

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0:38 Welcome to the Jason and Scott Show

12:57 Amazon’s Mixed Earnings Report

18:07 The Impact of AWS on Retail

21:18 AWS Performance and AI Concerns

28:55 Amazon’s Advertising Strategy

33:33 Amazon’s Relationship with Google

35:24 The Future of AI Investments

39:44 User Experience and Advertising

42:42 Economic Uncertainty and Consumer Behavior

Welcome back to the Jason & Scot Show! In episode 329, recorded on August 1st, 2025, we dive into the highly anticipated Amazon Q2 earnings report alongside other critical tech giants’ earnings results. Your hosts, Jason Goldberg (the retail geek) and Scott Wingo, bring their expert insights and analysis of a rollercoaster earnings season that saw mixed results across the board.

Kicking off the episode, Scot sets the stage with a review of Google’s recent earnings results, which painted a mixed picture. While search revenue indicated a solid 12% growth, concerns about the impact of AI on search operations raised eyebrows. Google Cloud did not exhibit the explosive growth anticipated, leading investors to remain cautious. Following this, we turn our focus to the simultaneous announcements from Microsoft and Meta. Each company churned impressive earnings and strategic maneuvers, surpassing expectations and highlighting strong growth driven largely by their AI advancements.

Transitioning to Amazon, the top story emerges: the company reported Q2 earnings that, unfortunately, mirrored Google’s mixed performance rather than the triumphs seen with Microsoft and Meta. Despite a revenue growth of 12% and operating income surpassing expectations, investors reacted negatively to AWS’s performance, which failed to keep pace with its competitors. Jason and Scott dissect the factors leading to Amazon’s stock drop post-earnings call and the implications for its sprawling empire.

Amazon’s retail performance, particularly in North American and international markets, sparks a lively discussion. Notably, the North American retail business beat expectations by 2%, and international retail excelled by 7%. The hosts clarify that while the overall performance was commendable, it left much to be desired when juxtaposed against AWS’s stunted growth and other tech players’ successes.

Delving deeper, Jason emphasizes the company’s continued enhancements to its supply chain, signalling improvements that strengthen their retail operations, crucial for maintaining growth amidst increasing competition. He also highlights an interesting trend: for the first time, first-party sales outpaced third-party sales, reflecting a noteworthy shift in Amazon’s marketplace dynamics as consumer spending leans towards everyday essentials.

As the discussion progresses, Scott raises a critical point about the evolving landscape of online advertising and the pivotal role it plays in driving Amazon’s growth. Despite a slight deceleration in year-over-year growth for the ads business, it remains a bright spot for Amazon, contrasting starkly with AWS’s performance and hinting at the challenges faced in balancing user experience against monetization strategies.

The conversation pivots towards AWS, where the hosts dissect the figures that fell below investor expectations—the margins declining for the first time since the previous year, raising questions about structural issues. The ambiguity surrounding Amazon’s ability to capture AI growth is a focal point, with analysts expressing concerns about lagging behind competitors.

Nearing the end of the episode, a fascinating turn occurs when Scott sheds light on Amazon’s recent decision to withdraw its shopping ads from Google. This pivotal move sends ripples across both platforms, provoking various theories about strategic shifts and implications for competitors. The duo shares intriguing insights into how this action marks a significant stake in the ground regarding data ownership and market positioning.

As the episode wraps up, Jason and Scott reflect on the broader landscape of AI, retail, and shifting consumer behaviors, suggesting that while Amazon remains a dominant player, its approach and evolution will be crucial in navigating future market dynamics.

Be sure to listen in for their final takeaways from the earnings calls and nuanced observations regarding the tech landscape. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five-star review on iTunes, and stay tuned for next week’s insights!

**Episode 329 of the Jason & Scot Show was recorded on Friday, August 1st, 2025.**

Transcript

Jason:
[0:23] Welcome to the Json and Scott show this is episode 329 being recorded on Friday August 1st,

Jason:
[0:30] 2025 I’m your host Jason retail geek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scott Wingo.

Scot:
[0:38] Hey Jason and welcome back Json and Scott showed listeners. Well today we are going to go over Amazon earnings it was a very eventful earnings season so let’s set it up before we jump into Amazon. So back on July 23rd so about a week ago Google announced their results and they were what I would call mixed. Search grew 12% which was good. But there were some concerns and management kind of dodged some tricky questions about what’s going on with AI overviews and how that’s impacting search Google Cloud did very well but not what I would say crushing it. So then their stock did not reactgreat or bad to that so it’s been kind of flat to down slightly since thenso then that was the setup last week. And then on Wednesday of July 30th we came in and had Microsoft and meta announced on the same day which is really hard for our internet analyst friends out there to have 2 Big E’s announcing at the same time but they they survived.

Scot:
[1:44] Came out I just uh did this alphabetically and. Meta came out first and it was a a Whopper so it was a the best thing you can do in Wall Street is, to not only meet expectations but meet them and then raise next quarter’s expectations and that’s what meta did so it was a what we call a classic beaten rays which is a. It’s kind of the the Holy Grail the upper right quadrant the place to be if you’re a public company. So they beat the Topline estimates by 6% which is good but then they just crush the bottom line coming in about 21% more profitable than Wall Street, expected and then the icing on the cake if it as if it couldn’t get any better it did is they their growth is accelerating so in the first quarter they grew 16% year-over-year and then in second quarter they grew 22% year-over-year, so that’s a really material quarter on quarter roll acceleration to their business. And they they attribute a lot of that to the use of AI internally at meta to run their advertising systems and automate the whole. Supply chain of advertising from you know bid management which is where they they’ve been working at, probably the most and then now add creation that type of stuff and Wall Street rejoiced and the stock was up 8% which these are Big market cap companies and that’s a really big move.

Scot:
[3:11] Jason anything on meta before we move on to Microsoft.

Jason:
[3:14] No I mean I think you you covered it interestingly, I would just point out I found it interesting it was so much about the future and Ai and kind of meta as a technology company and you know historically all the revenue at meta comes from. Advertising and you know there are all these macroeconomic uh interesting conversations that at the moment that are a play about the future of that advertising business and all these Chinese advertisers that are on again off again on on The Meta platform I was, somewhat struck by how little conversation like how little any of that seem to matter like their current. Predominant source of Revenue seem somewhat Irrelevant in the whole dialogue am I do you feel like I missed that or do you think it’s.

Scot:
[3:57] No I think that’s right yeah yeah because they’re they basically give away Ai No 1 really cares other than it it’s impact on the business. The and then Microsoft came up and they said hold my beer so they also did a beat and raise and both on the top and bottom line. And then they’re they’re really confusing because they talk about AI overall which is includes a bunch of stuff, and that grew 157% which is just Bonkers but I. Parsed what that means some of its tokens and it’s just really hard but then the other thing that Wall Street was really pleased with, and you’ll remember for the longest time Amazon wouldn’t break out the ads business and everyone was really frustrated and then for the longest time they wouldn’t break out the AWS business and everyone was frustrated, and same at Microsoft they have not broken out their Azure platform which is their cloud computing separately uh and then they finally for the first time made a disclosure on that, uh Wall Street just really liked that and they always take it as a signal when companies disclose things that the company’s feeling really great about that long term and, and is opening up new disclosures because they feel like they’re all going to go up into the right.

Jason:
[5:09] And isn’t it always a coincidence that they decide to do that on a quarter that’s quite favorable.

Scot:
[5:14] They yes it is because if you did it when you were not doing well no 1 would care so like why why do that and then the, yeah so wall Street’s weird like that lots of it’s a psych it’s 80% psychology in ways and 20% reality but that’s that’s kind of. How the world Works anywayso I think the most Germaine part to our discussion in there is that the, Ai and it’s not Azure in this disclosure grew 39% and so that was good and analysts had they kind of pick apart at it and get to a number and their their guesstimate was 34%. That stock went up about 8% at at the peak and is down now a little bit.

Scot:
[5:55] But for a while there Microsoft was the second company to get the the 4 trillion dollar market cap which Nvidia passed a while ago, so that was the setup coming into this so you had Google mid Microsoft and meta crushed it, and then within within Google and Microsoft their cloud computing is accelerated quarter-on-quarter so, I think expectations really started to rise going into the Amazon report that AWS would see something similar because you kind of think well there’s this AI tide lifting all the boats certainly we will see it in AWS and that brings us toAmazon newsyour margin is z opportunity.

Jason:
[6:44] So unfortunately Amazon’s results were probably more similar to Google’s than than meta in Microsoft in in your setup Scott it was sort of mixed but but in you know a a pretty bad way of your Amazon investor probably so predominantly that’s because AWS didn’t expectations relative to to the other big cloud platform businesses and you know given all that that favorable traction that meta Microsoft got like that we’re already starting to see their their stock get punished I think, after hours trading started like in the middle of their earnings call and the last time I checked Shares are down like like 6% which is. Kind of put you at that 2.5 trillion dollar market capyou know which means they they, was something like 150 billion dollars since the earnings call which you know a few billion here billion there it adds up.

Jason:
[7:36] What’s I guess slightly weird or lost in all that conversation is like the top line was pretty good like like they were beats like Revenue was up 12%, which was a beat versus expectations operating uh margin was was up which like like. I think they came in for the quarter like nearly 20 billion write 19.2 billion good job intern which which was a Beat, and so the overall business performed well and there is we’ll we’ll break it up of course all down and we’ll we’ll highlight a lot of things that are going well but big picture. AWS is still a fast growing business for them and grew fast it didn’t grow as fast as their competitors, and as we’ll dive deeper into it the the narratives surrounding that was not completely fulfilling and so the the stock is is taking a hit at the minute at the moment but.

Jason:
[8:27] Kind of going back to the to the top level there were a lot of interesting things that came up in in the earnings call in a few things that were interesting that didn’t come up for those of us that care mostly about retail I would I would say like. The supply chain discussion you know continues to Roll Along that you know the people are forgetting about 18 months ago they made this major transformation from from a national distribution system to a regional Hub and spoke system and they’ve been, claiming wild successes both, improving their service level by having faster delivery and more products available for faster delivery and improving their profit profitability and the cost to serve going way down and all of those Trends continued this quarter, they’re improving their service levels Nationwide for delivery and they’re improving their cost to serve which is, beneficial to their margins the the North American retail business which you know the way they measure it because their Marketplace and and have this big ads business is slightly problematic but but kind of just base it on Gap. North American retail was a Beat by 2% potentially more importantly International retail was a Beat by 7% the US is Amazon’s most mature market and so, in a lot of ways.

Jason:
[9:42] You know it’s it’s slowed down because of the law of large numbers and so the analysts really pay attention to how Amazon’s growing in these more emerging markets and and seems like there’s still gas in the in the international growth for Amazon, the I saw 1 Tibet in their earnings that that online Revenue increased by 11% I’m sorry 10%, I have seen some analysts that are saying that like the US Quarter over quarter gmv growth was probably 11%. And they’re now predicting that the annual gmv growth is going to be in the area of 8.7% so those are all good numbers, if you consider the US retail industry is growing right now at 3.8%.

Jason:
[10:24] And even e-commerce at the moment across the US is only growing about 7% and so you know talking about Amazon growing between 9 and 11%. As big as they are is is super impressive physical stores grew this is a relatively small number in the overall scheme of things that Amazon and of course it’s it’s it’s almost exclusively Whole Foods at this point but Whole Foods has been kind of a.

Jason:
[10:48] A mixed story for Amazon so growth there is interesting physical stores grew 7.5% year-over-year so that’s now up 5. 6. 1 interesting thing third-party seller growth for the first time that I can remember in a long time they had good third-party seller growth I think it was like 10% but it was actually slower than their first-party sales growth so, I mean I would argue that transcends the day they invented the marketplace has been that the 3p has grown faster than than 1 P with a few exceptions this quarter they saw 1 p, drove faster and partly that’s back to the supply chain story because there’s always been a lot of demand for these low-cost everyday essentials that, in the old Amazon supply chain we’re not very efficient to deliver an Amazon wasn’t as competitive on but as they’ve improved their supply chain there are a lot better at selling these like you know I just need a pack of paper towels I just need a pack of of razor blades and in a macroeconomics world where, a lot more consumer spending is going to those everyday essentials the fact that Amazon is competing more successfully in that space and selling more 1 P every day Essentials because the.

Jason:
[11:59] Party Marketplace is not a an awesome offering for those everyday essentials at the moment so that was all super interesting subscription Revenue was up unit sales were up. The I still think they’re they’re hovering around 62% of all their their Market retail sales are Marketplaceand I think they they had a stat in the. In the discussion that every day Essentials are now 1-3 of their their total sales which is. Another unsung story of kind of Amazon successfully Reinventing their business while No 1 notyeah let me take a breath Scott do you.

Scot:
[12:36] Yeah I thought I thought that’s a good recap I thought it was interesting it, you know we’re in like the summer movies Zone and I just saw Superman I’m gonna see Fantastic 4 and I know there’s going to be there’s always these multiverses I almost wonder like if there was a universe where.

Scot:
[12:50] All of retail missed but AWS did better I I think the stock would have been up 10 so so we’re in this really weird phase.

Jason:
[12:58] That Tobey Maguire Spider-Man version of okay sorry.

Scot:
[13:16] But in a way AWS is bringing down the retail part of the business which is kind of crazy for because for the longest time it was the other way around.

Jason:
[13:23] I was going to say the retail business owes.

Scot:
[13:24] It’s a weird Bizarro world world.

Jason:
[13:26] Owes AWS carrying that water for some quarters.

Scot:
[13:29] It does yeah yeah but as as we’ll get to you here’s a tip for you there is another piece that’s carrying the retail part what do you think that is Jason.

Jason:
[13:38] Oh my gosh you know what would be interesting is if you had the world’s attention and you you you rent it or sold that attention in the form of like some kind of advertisement.

Scot:
[13:48] Yeah how did dads do.

Jason:
[13:50] Well obviously this has been. A big story to Amazon for a long time and it continues to to be 1 of the bright stars in Amazon growing much faster than the overall business and so you know we’ve we broken down the math the number of times the the annual run rate on their ads business is well over 60 billion dollars a year this quarter, they they did 15.7 billion which was a beat versus analyst expectations and so the the year-over-year growth was like 23% 22.9 percent, so that that is actually a slight deceleration of the ad growth because it’s been growing so fast but obviously compared to the overall Amazon business. This is a 60 billion dollar business that’s that’s still growing. You know super fast and and well in excess of of wall Street’s expectations which were like 17%.

Jason:
[14:42] So so the ad business continues to be a bright star sparked side note that’s the bane of my existence because every other retailer on the planet sees that and they want to replicate that and for variety of reasons most retailers. Can’t and shouldn’t try. My whole industry spends a lot of time whipping up the the lather around retail media networks and and as we’ve covered in the past on this show, if you’re not Amazon or Walmart retail media networks are kind of mehso I’ll just shout out to to Carrie in case you’re listening. The but again good quarter for Amazon the ads are going up there’s some big news in ads that will will talk about later.

Jason:
[15:22] The thing I’m always watching in their ad business is is I would actually argue, there’s 2 add businesses at Amazon and they kind of off off skate each other there’s sponsored product listings on a third-party Marketplace which is. All the high volume stuff and it’s it’s you know that that’s true the true retail media network but increasingly. Amazon is a darn successful Media company with sports franchises and unique programming and so you know you you’d want to hear them talking about their ad success for all of that content and how that compares with, Disney and HBO or whatever they want to call themselves this month and and the you know the the old school television networks and you’d want to see how their growth rate there is comparing with those other content providers uh and talk about that separate from how their retail media is competing with Walmart but we can’t because they they bundle all these 2 wildly different things together and call it adds, but and and we didn’t get a very good hint about how much traction they’re getting on on the content ads they are continuing to increase the, the inventory of type of ads and so that’s somewhat interesting and of course you know I’m always listening for tidbits about those 2 Worlds colliding and how you might introduce shoppable ads you know or or more ads with a direct call to action in all that content and and this quarter there wasn’t much discussion of any of that becausethe, Ai and AWS stole all the all the attention.

Scot:
[16:50] Yeah on on the add topic everyone I talked to about prime day said Amazon was pushing ads so incredibly hard that it was almost a gate for you had to buy make commit to a big ad Buy before you could even get into the programs and stuff, so so I suspect we may actually see this 1 accelerate again into Q3 because, the Amazons really leaning in and and you know but at some we we’ll talk about this in a minute but I have some theories on this ad thing that.

Jason:
[17:20] Yeah I mean I I would just say like whether Amazon’s trying to lean in or not like it’s almost inevitable because of their assortment right like you’re you’re a billion items now no 1’s ever going to organically find any of your items and so ads are the only path to Discovery for all all of the sellers on the platform and a smaller version of that same thing is playing out for Prime day like there there used to be 3,000 items for sale on Prime day and 100 lighting deals right and and you could browse all those in the same way that people used to browse the internet on Yahoo but you know now, there’s no way to to browse any of those things so unless you have an ad promoting your,

Jason:
[17:59] Prime Day deals or promoting your Lightning Deals nobody’s ever going to see them and so even if Amazon wasn’t putting the screws to people which they are. You would still like advertising is now the the most important and necessary path to any kind of success on on Amazon’s platform and obviously Amazon’s not overly disappointed about that.

Scot:
[18:22] So this brings us to AWS so as mentioned the top line was in line to a slight beat but the bottom line missed so Wall Street was expecting 10.9 billion on the bottom and it was 10.2. So that’s a that’s a pretty good miss their or bad Miss. It grew the AWS grew 17.5% year-over-year which is good but it was not an acceleration which again the comps of gcp and Azure did accelerate, this is the first time the margins of actually declined since the second quarter of 2023, on the call and we’ll talk about this a little bit more but specifically they talked about they are very capacity constrained. And they they called out power a lot of these data centers that are trying to be built are are really having a hard time getting to enough power to build out things so that’s an area but I think. They’re actually kind of low on the the king of all this is NVIDIA they make the the biggest gpus that these centers need Amazon has its own chipset I don’t think it’s nearly as good as Nvidia and it’s cheaper which is great. But they’re not adding enough of those and they’re not adding enough Nvidia. So that’s a huge problem they also called out part of the part of the margin decrease was some just structural things around how you calculate stock based comp and some depreciation things so a lot of it wasn’t really a change in the business model.

Scot:
[19:51] The the so that that’s kind of like what’s in writing and then what happened is in the conference call and that I think you got a chance to listen to this, the Jassie just seemed off is kind of like how people described it and especially when it came to this AI topic and let me just read like a little note I thought was interesting. RBC has an analyst Brad Erickson and he said the title of his report for the whole quarter was is this a structural issue or just an off night and here’s a little excerpt, on the other for AWS growth didn’t accelerate like its peers margin missed and Management’s commentary on the call did little to attenuate investor fears that AWS may have a bigger structural issue in capturing its fair share of the growth from AI. The retail strength pushes our estimates higher and Target Target moves up modestly but admittedly the Optics of AWS underperformance in isolation and Management’s commentary make it hard to defend Amazon so. You know there was this really long rambling answer that jasse gave where this the question was specifically like are you doing enough to capture. AI share and he answered it a little bit in this like 8 Minute answer but then he kept talking about how they’re using it internally and it’s helping the retail business it felt like a big. Hey not a very great answer because it kind of went.

Scot:
[21:07] All over the place but then it felt like a hard diversion from answering the question which people were kind of he didn’t lean in and say we’re crushing it in AI we’re going to dominate and I think that’s what they wanted to hear.

Jason:
[21:18] Yeah it should have been a 1 cent, yeah well so a like I I want to say the analysts that actually asked the question was the Morgan Stanley Guy Brian Nook and I I when I was listening it was awesome because he he, pre-war in the question I think it started something like hey I have 2 questions for you about AWS they’re a little tough but I’m going to throw them at youwith with.

Scot:
[21:39] Please don’t penalize me for asking a hard question.

Jason:
[21:41] Yeah which is literally like the the setup right and then he goes into this there’s a Wall Street you know Finance person narrative right now that AWS is falling behind in generative AI and that you’re losing share to your peers what’s your rebuttal to that right and. You know again you would expect a a polished CEO like Andy who had generally kills it in these in these settings to have a. Short crisp answer about why oh we’re actually killing both of those but since we’re so far ahead of them, like it’s harder for us to earn the growth right that would have been the easy 1 sentence answer right like we’re we’re 3 times larger than them so we we we grew a little bit slower than them. And there are all these endemic constraints on all of us the world doesn’t have enough electricity the world doesn’t have enough chips right like you could have come up with some. Some kind of conversation like that but you for your point like he went on a 8 Minute narrative that like I I think included a couple visits to his own shopping behaviors and thingsand it it was just unclear like. Did he just miss the importance of the question and he gave a bad answer or was he literally like trying to dodge the question and and distract people. I tend to think it was the first that it just it wasn’t wasn’t hishis most Stellar answer but.

Scot:
[22:57] Yeah the the problem isthey don’t have a model right so so Microsoft is married open AI they are an investor.

Jason:
[23:05] Side note did you see that openai is now buying capacity from G gcp too.

Scot:
[23:10] Yeah yeah yeah they’re the rumor is they’re building their own tpus they’re going to use that to kind of start coding against TPS and they’re going to build their own their own inference. The they do have a relationship with anthropic. But anthropics kind of taking a hard left turn into the coding vertical which is great but you know the workloads Amazon is looking to help people with their probably more corporate and so they they’re kind of, I do think they’re in a little bit of a hard position with AWS and I don’t think they’ve leaned in enough on building against this I think I think it’s probably because they’re a little bit more conservative with their retail background, I don’t think they’re going like all suck on this and paying people billions of dollars and building, you know as much infrastructure as they probably could have so so I think there is a there is an argument that there’s a structural issue here. Yeah Amazon’s good and they have all the resources to be able to get out of this I don’t feel like it’s un unfixable.

Jason:
[24:07] No and I but I would say just in general Amazon is used to inventing a darn good moat that gives them some kind of endemic competitive advantage and you know at the moment like everybody’s in the same boat on electricity right like there’s so many so you know so many, sides to build data centers next to hydro electric dams and whatnot and and you know the, the market for energy is pretty efficient and Amazon has some cool IP they I think they would argue stronger than you would that the their IP for for chips is, is competitive but they don’t have their own Fab so like they don’t they don’t have a way to Seoul to solve their capacity problems so they’re kind of in the. Level Playing Field which they’re not used to.

Scot:
[24:50] Mhm, yeah absolutelyand then that brings us to guidance which was also mixed so the midpoint of Revenue was a bit up from consensus which is viewed as positive but margin was light. And you know everyone’s parsing through that given this kind of psychological fear around AWS and kind of reading through it that. There’s no no anticipated fix in AWS in this guidance. So so there’s a little bit of a wall of worry around Amazon right now and you know just a a we’re doing this actually we usually record at night we’re doing it during the day oddly today but you know it’s down 8% now. So a couple other interesting tidbits I I I did think it was interesting, that they specifically called out that tariffs have not impacted demand or margins or, cause ASP or average order value or or the ticket price to go up so so they they basically said so far they’re not seeing anything from these tariff changes which there was a lot of worry around that on the retail side of the business. And then. I thought you had teased this earlier but what did you you know another interesting tidbit is what’s going on between them and Google right now what what are you seeing there.

Jason:
[26:03] Yeah well so there was there was big news last week while we were recording our last episode Scott that Amazon essentially took all of their shopping search ads off of Google and you know for those that don’t know Amazon is the largest Advertiser on Google and they spend something in the order of 17 billion dollars a year on on ads and I’ve always argued like this is the greatest unsung story in the history of business that Amazon essentially buys 17 billion dollars worth of eyeballs from Google every year. And then they they sell some paper towels to those eyeballs and make money on those paper towels but then, they once that eyeball has bought a paper towel from Amazon Amazon shows them an ad for a third party Marketplace seller and they sell the ads that they show for 60 billion dollars. Um so it’s it’s awesome eyeball Arbitrage they buy 17 billion dollars of ads from Google that that by the way means Amazon has the largest share of products search results on Google they’re about 60% of all, product tiles that pop up on Google are send you straight to Amazon and so it seems like these 2 have this. Very synergistic relationship that seemed like it was working done well for both of them and so then overnight Amazon goes.

Jason:
[27:24] Yeah we’re turning that down to zero and and when it first happened everyone’s like oh this something weird is happening here and we’ve seen them, reset before where like maybe they over spent slightly and they pulled back for a short period of time or they did a test in some some Geo and so I kept like.

Jason:
[27:42] Pulling more data at waking teams up in the middle of the night like hey let’s figure out what the scope of this is is it really as big as it seems is it a blip, is it some kind of test what you know is there some are they under some negotiation and this is a negotiating tactic like there are all these hypotheses. You know now it’s been a week later the ads are all still offand you can imagine that.

Jason:
[28:06] Google has a bunch of salespeople they just lost 60% of the revenue that are now knocking on every other Retailer’s door in the world saying hey you’ve got an unprecedented chance to buy more share of voice like, you know and they’re they’re trying to get all the other retailers to step up and and. Take over Those ads it’s a a reverse auction For Those ads so when the the biggest spend or leaves obviously the the cost of those ads goes down nominally and so that’s, that’s been interesting and you know they’re all we like to talk about all these new AI shopping things a lot of the AI shopping things at the end of the day result in a, product tile that you can click on to buy something and now all those ones that are being fed by Google don’t have Amazon product tiles in them so.

Jason:
[28:53] So this was a super interesting thing. The number 1 topic I’ve I’ve had with any of my retail clients over the last week has been related to this all you know the internal teams that in my big giant Ad Agency are spun up around this I’ve got, Limitless hypotheticals about what could be going on but we all frankly were eagerly waiting last night for some, mention or explanation to answer all this this conjecture and I with some pretty carefully and as far as I can tell there was Zero mention Amazon, did not bring it up in any way and someone surprisingly none of the analysts or reporters on their 2 calls like nobody nobody asked them.

Scot:
[29:34] The at the same time yesterday they added code to robots text and also to their their, you know it’s very clear there now blocking Google’s not their web crawler but their AI crawler that they have perplexity anthropic and open AI are now being blocked by by Amazon, so Amazon is and then they’ve also blocked operator for a while and which is now called Agent at openai. So Amazon’s taking this we are going to put a Walled Garden around our data and we’ll we’ll AI out which is what they’re buy for me project does is like when you’re on Amazon you can send an AI agent out of Amazon to buy within their ecosystem, but they are not they’re they’re they’re allowing you to shop from Amazon out but not out into Amazonnow my.

Scot:
[30:22] My thesis is Google shopping is data they realize they’ve made some internal decision where they’re like here’s the benefit we get from advertising on Google shopping and here’s the cost and those inverted and I think on the cost side. If you think about what is what is Google shopping get they get a data feed of product data and I think Amazon is increasingly believing that is valuable in in their world, I think that’s I think that’s wrong but that’s the theology so it’s hard to you know there’s no right or wrong I guess is what you believe but then also, it may not just be the product catalog I think it’s probably actually more about the Google can use that for signals right so if you have. 100 million skus from Amazon and Google shopping you can they don’t see the transaction data but they see the click data so they they know what the most popular products are at Amazon and that may be, that’s a little bit more gold Dusty to me than just product catalog data is starting to get some idea of the the, the sales rank of products and and whatnot and I think that’s Amazon’s kind of saying why don’t we start like building a fortress of our data right now and then over time we can decide what we let back out, I think that’s what’s going on.

Jason:
[31:37] Yeah I I generally agree there’s you know this the there’s a aam’s razor which is the the likely answer is usually the the simplest I I think fundamentally. Amazon and Google are more direct competitors and they each see that each other aspires to to move into each other’s things and so they, there the US need uh each other and they must want to share any helpful insight with each other and so I think this is just. A a move in that direction I’m I’m sort of with you like I don’t personally value the product feed in and of itself that much but. All the most common economic model for all of these things is advertising in the old world of advertising advertisers sold reach like here’s how many millions of people saw my ad over the last 20 years of digital, like I would argue unfortunately everybody’s pivoted to the.

Jason:
[32:30] The direct effectiveness of the ads did someone click on that ad and then immediately buy something and I actually think there’s too much focus on that and it’s it’s not prudent. In that world what you most need in order to establish value for your ads is data about how many people bought something right and so for Google it’s super valuable to know how how many of those ads resulted in someone on a product detail page and the product detail Pages people ends up on the most, is on Amazon so by taking that that that 17 billion dollars of Revenue away from Amazon they’re taking away that’s super important signal that from Google that that Google could have used to dramatically improve all its AI to become a better Marketplace and shopping engine itself any of the, if the 10 year future of all this AI stuff is that that that the best answer engines that win the glass and win the attention of the consumer are are actually the sellers then you know Amazon wants to be that and they don’t want to help Google be that.

Scot:
[33:34] Yeah I thinkI think it’s interesting I wish someone had asked the question because I would like to hear the Meandering answer on.

Jason:
[33:37] I I do too I’m I’m not surprised that they didn’t bring it up but I it didn’t occur to me when the night started that no analyst would bring that up.

Scot:
[33:47] I think they’re so worried about AWS they don’t care about in their retail stuff at this point.

Jason:
[33:52] Yes and this is why it’s annoying when when obviously people should only be talking about retail all these other silly distractions are really annoying.

Scot:
[33:59] I have a 2 a mini soap box and then a bigger soap box so my first soap box it’s not. My first 1 is it’s just like mind-blowing to me so so I went through and now that we’ve had this cycle Google Google’s capex for 2025. Is going to be 85 billion so they it was 75 and then they bumped it up 10 and almost all of this is going towards Data Center and AI meta is at 72. Microsoft 80 and Amazon 118. If you swirl all that together you get 355 billion for 2025 in investment in basically gpus and data centers to support this AI buildout. That doesn’t include what open AI is doing themselves they have a partnership with Oracle and then also Elon at X and and then also Tesla is building a huge AI data center that there’s there’s probably another hundred billion out there so let’s call it. 500 let’s round it to what you know what’s 100 billion between friends so it’s half a trillion dollars in capex in a year.

Scot:
[35:06] To put that inspect in perspective over the last 10 years Amazon has spent 115 billion in fulfillment centers so think about that so so in 1 year,

Scot:
[35:16] we are spending on AI investment 5 times what Amazon spent for their whole fulfillment network over the last 10 years so. It’s just it’s just nuts to me that this is such a big you and I have been at this a long time we’ve never seen anything on this scale, of build out and there it’s not speculative the every 1 of these companies is seeing their revenue surged from usage of these things these are not they’re out of the experimental phase and they’re into having dramatic business impact phase, it’s like the weirdestit’s a it’s an exciting time becauseit’s gonna change things in ways we can’t predict but it’s also scary so that’s.

Jason:
[35:56] I I think there was a specific narrative in it might have been in the middle of Andy’s 8 Minute rant but where he basically said like, we’re we’re probably not even in the first inning of this game yet and it’s already 123 billion marked into run rate right like, like how often do we talked about you know the that scale of numbers when like it hasn’t even scaled yet like it’s crazy.

Scot:
[36:22] And then the other 1 is if we if we so now let’s narrow the feature back to Amazon the the lens and if we if we look at the internals of Amazon there’s, the fastest growing component is ADS at 23% and then you have AWS at at 17.5. There’s just something wrong with that and then overall they’re going 12% in the retail business is growing kind of smaller than that so the.

Scot:
[36:46] I really worry about this ad component I I think. I think a year ago or so the user experience at Amazon jumped the sharkit’s not getting better it’s getting worse this ad load is crazy and they’re clearly pushing it. You know even further that we’re going to see it accelerate more. And I think it’s this Canary in the coal mine that they’re covering up for you know a degradation of something and it it just feels like. In my heart of hearts you cannot have a deteriorating user experience for very long in this world because people will start to go other places and I I feel like they’ve opened up a strategic error here, where the agentic shopping folks are going to drive a huge wedge into it now they can try to block it and everything, but I also think these agentic browsers are unblockable and I don’t. I think all that effort they’re doing on that is going to end up being for not and it’s going to be really interesting to see. Hey if I’m right and when this starts to be a problem for us at all and what it all looks like when it you know if it does. It’s probably the biggest strategic opening I’ve ever seen anyone have against Amazon since I’ve been following them for 20 years and I’m going to be really interested to see if openai or you know 1 of these companies can drive a wedge in there.

Jason:
[38:04] Yeah no I I generally agree the worst sentence I heard in the whole earnings report last night by the way Scott was there I can’t remember if it was a response to a question or it was part of some other answer but Andy says that oh when he was bragging about how much better Alexa plus is than than previous things and we we you and I talked about this in the last podcast it it is excellent in a lot of ways. And he mentioned that that he could well imagine you know a version of ads being in that at some pointwhich, a was from a user experience standpoint was pretty disappointing for me to hear like I I think there’s a bunch of things that are problematic about voices a user interface for a lot of things and then once, once you add more Interruption to the voice like I think it’s potentially awful right and the I I agree like if other people invent. Alternative versions of this that are less dependent on ads than Amazon’s is they’re just going to be at a fundamental, customer experience disadvantage and in the past they’ve had, such a huge moat because of their supply chain advantages that they could kind of get away with it for a short term but I’m with you I don’t think they can get away with it in the long run.

Scot:
[39:17] Yeah yeah so it’s going to be interesting to watch that I noticed they do have ads and Rufus now so Rufus is already not very good and it already is like down a notch in my book because. Uh I’ve been a really good example is to take some of these everyday essentials and that’s where the ads are really just kind of at this fever pitch cpg type stuff.

Scot:
[39:36] Like I was getting these dog Dental things and I asked ruthless about it and it did everything it could to sell me something else and not give me the thing I wanted.

Jason:
[39:45] Yeah and you know again we’ll probably have to do a new an episode about this but I I actually think there’s a vast overdependence on ads as an economic model and it it has worked great for the last 20 years I don’t see it working as well going forward compared to some of these other businesses there there’s a lot more ambiguity about how effective ads actually are right and the all the math that we all use is is horrible the Hocus Pocus and and doesn’t doesn’t measure very well but here’s the biggest thing if if the world goes from 1 quick to zero click if if there’s a bunch of these every day Essentials if we turn over shopping responsibility for those to the Bots then. Ads don’t matter anymore in in any of those categories like the AI like the ad was to help a human do something that was hard for the human is the most generous version. And when the human isn’t doing that there’s no purpose for the ads and so all the businesses that are based on the revenue from Those ads. Are going to have to reinvent themselves so I I think it’s um, it’s going to be a super interesting time I can’t wait to be a retired senior citizen talking to the smart people that are running these businesses down the road and hearing how it all played out because I. I don’t think I’ll make it that farbut Scott I wanted to touch I know we’re running up on time you did mention 1 other thing you talked about.

Jason:
[41:07] Amazon said we see we’ve seen no sign of effective tariffs on the on the business so far which is certainly accurate from what I I heard them talk about. I did just want to point out Terrace is super interesting in the macroeconomics because it arguably has 2 effects like, people lose consumer confidence in their their worried about their their own economic situation and they spend less so it can have a detriment effect on spending but it also, we’re not living through the the worst of the tariffs like the it’s mostly a fear of future tariffs and so that actually has a positive effect people rush out to spend money, before the the tariffs come into full effect and so the the most.

Jason:
[41:49] Obvious example I’ve seen of that this week was UPS also reported yesterday and they had the a pretty crazy earnings report they specifically said, we’ve seen consumer demand fall off a cliff like we’ve seen like consumers are super worried about these terrorists and they’re not spending on anything and then in the next breath they’re like, but consumers are so depressed about the doomed economic situation that they’re like indiscriminately spending to make themselves feel better right so they, UPS kind of put every theory of of what impact terrorists were having out there all all in the same earnings call uh so I’m going to Discount all of that but I’m just going to tell you the. The mic drop moment in the UPS call was and so stuff is so uncertain and so confusing that we’re not going to issue a go forward guidance.

Jason:
[42:35] And I I do think that’s an interesting note for for all of us that you know the next 6 months of this year. Have a lot more uncertainty than I think some of us us realize and you know it could go in a bunch of different directions it’s going to be really interesting.

Scot:
[42:50] Yeah so we will be here reporting on it at the Jason’s gotcha.

Jason:
[42:55] And hopefully that added some value for you and if it did we sure would appreciate it if you jump on iTunes and leave us that 5-star review regular listeners will know, that the Amazon earnings calls are Scott’s second favorite episode of the Year second only to May 4th episode. But that is all the time we have for today we finished a little early so you’re all welcome and until next time happy commercing!

Jason & Scot Show Episode 328 E-Commerce news and AI Answer Engine Week

Retailgeek — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 21:02:53 +0000

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 328 is a discussion of e-commerce news including US Department of Commerce June data. and a recap of the latest Answer Engine news that impacts commerce including Perplexity Commerce, ChatGPT 5.0, and Alexa+.

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EP328 – Navigating E-commerce News and Innovations in AI Answer Engines for Commerce

0:36 Welcome to the Jason and Scot Show

4:53 Consumer Trends in Retail

5:03 Upcoming Retail Events

8:42 Insights on E-commerce Growth

10:35 Earnings Season Insights

44:13 Amazon Prime Day Analysis

51:30 New Developments with Alexa

56:00 Predictions for the Holiday Season

In this episode of the Jason and Scot Show, recorded on Thursday, July 23rd, Jason and Scot delve into the latest shifts within the e-commerce landscape, emerging consumer trends, and the role of Artificial Intelligence in retail transformation. Jason has been on the road, engaging with industry professionals and moderating discussions around pressing retail topics such as social commerce and consumer behavior, particularly the growing usage of answer engines amid an evolving shopping cycle involving giants like Amazon and Google.

Scot kicks off the episode by teasing insights from Jason’s recent travels and virtual think tank participation, where they investigated consumer trends such as the surge of ethical purchases and the dynamics of social commerce influenced by platforms like TikTok. The duo explores the implications of consumers increasingly relying on answer engines throughout their shopping journeys, particularly in the wake of mounting competition from dedicated AI solutions.

Listeners are treated to an analysis of recent U.S. retail data, highlighting core retail sales growth—a modest 3.8% year-to-date—contrasting the slower pace of e-commerce growth, now at only 6.8%. The conversation turns to the dichotomy between successful retail giants like Amazon and Walmart, against a backdrop of underperforming categories like electronics and home improvement, veering into the impact of macroeconomic factors on consumer spending behavior.

The episode also takes a closer look at notable earnings releases, particularly how tech giants like Google are grappling with a shift towards answer engines like ChatGPT, disrupting traditional search methodologies. Scot shares insights on Google’s recent performance metrics that seem to mask a creeping decline in organic search volume, while Jason echoes concerns about the current retail media landscape and the challenges it poses to user experience on platforms like Amazon.

With light humor and camaraderie peppering deeper analysis, Jason and Scot examine the implications of Walmart’s recent hires in AI technology and strategy, reflecting on how retailers are pivoting to become more like answer engines amidst intensifying competition.

As they look ahead towards the upcoming holiday season, expectations are tempered by economic uncertainties and supply chain disruptions, hinting at an uneven landscape where larger players may gain traction at the expense of smaller retailers.

The pair wraps up the episode by expressing optimism for the future of AI in simplifying shopping experiences while also critiquing the current voice shopping functionality on devices like Amazon’s Alexa+. Join them as they illuminate the complexities shaping today’s e-commerce environment while addressing the pressing questions retailers must answer to thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Don’t miss out on their engaging discussions; be sure to subscribe for the latest insights into retail trends and innovations!

This episode is packed with valuable insights and anecdotes, perfect for retail enthusiasts and industry professionals looking to stay ahead of the curve. Enjoy the show and don’t forget to leave a review!

**Episode 328 of the Jason & Scot Show was recorded on Thursday, July 23rd, 2025.**

Transcript

Jason:
[0:23] Welcome to the Json and Scott show this episode being recorded on Thursday July 23rd I’m your host Jason retailgeek.

Scot:
[0:36] Hey Jason and welcome back Json and Scott show listeners Jason it’s been too long you’ve been a busy traveling person do you have any fun trip reports to share with listeners.

Jason:
[0:49] Uh I have been doing a lot a fair amount of travel it’s mostly been client travel so I won’t share that report until my performance review but. The I did today have kind of a fundament that the interf hosted a virtual think tank so they picked 3 popular topics that, the retailers weren’t interested in talking about and they each got to sign up for a topic and they had kind of 3 moderators 1 of which was myself and I moderated a topic around, emerging consumer Trends which many of which would be familiar to you Scott.

Scot:
[1:23] Yeah let me guessFriendster is coming back.

Jason:
[1:29] It that yeah the big Trend was Friendster and then the that consumers will only buy Purpose Driven ethical organically grown products those are. Those are the 2 Trends if you just focus on those 2 and do nothing else you’ll be totally fine.

Scot:
[1:46] Stated preference and observed preference get some every time.

Jason:
[1:49] It it does it does indeedbut know there was a there was a bunch of good conversation. In our in my breakout 1 of the big topics was social commerce and. You know how Discovery is playing out on the social networks and whether it’s a Commerce platform or it’s a interest generating platform that refers and.

Jason:
[2:09] Kind of the es and flows of the the Chinese platforms like Tik Tok so they’re they’re all kinds of interesting conversations and then that that started to. Kind of swerve into AI topics that you would be particularly interested in but then very predictably the other big consumer Trend was just the answer engines and and consumers increasingly. Using answer in engines at various points in their in their shopping missions and what people are doing to address that and prepare for that and and all those sorts of things and I kind of the, the table setting was you know everyone feels like, like we’re going through the first shopping cycle with the Amazon Prime week and now back to school where you know the biggest 2- e-commerce platforms out there have native answer engines that are available to everyone now in in Rufus and Sparky, and the the third party answer engines have have really ramped up their Commerce capabilities and and of course you know Google has pushed, push Gemini well in front of traditional search so, so lots of reasons that consumers on purpose and and involuntarily are are starting to use answer engines on their path to purchase.

Scot:
[3:25] A topic near and dear to my heart in fact we’re going to talk a little bit about it tonight and probably I don’t know how deep he went on that 1 but I think we’ll go a little deeper probably we’ll see.

Jason:
[3:34] Yes yeah you’ve thought about it a lot more than these folks because these folks have like actual day jobs that they have to.

Scot:
[3:41] This is my day job.

Jason:
[3:42] Yeah exactly that’s what I mean but but it’s your whole day job.

Scot:
[3:45] You make it seem like I don’t have a day job thanks man ouch.

Jason:
[3:47] No no no no yeah apologies.

Scot:
[3:49] Yeah and if you’ve missed a couple pods I do have a new startup called Rey by which stands for research finding by, and I started a new substack and podcasts specifically focusing on this answer engine and the intersection with e-commerce so it’s been a lot of fun to ramp up on a totally new very fast-paced, new trend so it’s been a lot of fun working on that.

Jason:
[4:12] Yeah and you you basically become a Content monster.

Scot:
[4:15] I have yes I thought okay this I’ll start writing a little bit about this and then suddenly like 800 things happened in the span of 4 weeks so it’s been very busybut that’s what we call AI time.

Jason:
[4:29] I like it I like it never be this slow again.

Scot:
[4:32] Yeah it was funny I started Channel advisor with this idea that Marketplace would be big and we had eBay as our first 1 and it took 7 years for the next 1 and.

Jason:
[4:42] I feel like and like 2 podcasts I go you admitted that that trend is kind of played outyeah.

Scot:
[4:46] MarketplacesI think well we’ll see we’ll we’ll we’ll call it a 2.0 a Phoenix Rising From the Ashes.

Jason:
[4:54] Yes I know where you’re going with that.

Scot:
[5:03] I’m back at it and so are you so we’re both going to be super busy this fall your first step with a much more glamorous sounding show that I’m doing where are you going in mid September.

Jason:
[5:14] Yeah so I feel like all of these retail shows decided that the same week in September would be a great window which is annoying because, I I I would have an interest in in attending all 3 shows but faced with going to a show in my hometown of Chicago going to Huntington Beach California or going to Paris France, I chose the smart career move for myself and I’m visiting our our corporate motherland in Paris France, where the national retail Federation is holding their first big show Europe so most listeners of this show would be very familiar with big show us which is the biggest retail show in the United States it’s about 30,000 attendees. And last year they did Big Show Asia for the first time in Singapore I believe, and this year they’re expanding to another continent to Europe in their hosting it in pubs backyard in Paris France so if you’re someone that’s going to attend that show or be in Europe that week anyway, definitely looked me up and in addition to the show we’ll we’ll try to do some some P fun pubis event in my my boss is very well connected in France.

Scot:
[6:23] Yeah and you can meet to the CEO of Google assist I’m sure Jason can connect you.

Jason:
[6:26] Our tourour tour.

Scot:
[6:28] Jason and our tours are tough our tight does even know your name.

Jason:
[6:31] She yes so I I don’t like to Pander so I I I hesitate to say.

Scot:
[6:37] So the guy that wears Walmart socks every day.

Jason:
[6:40] Well I like to Pander to my clients not my employer um.

Scot:
[6:42] Okay okay okay your selective pander.

Jason:
[6:46] That is that is fair uh but I I I will pay like a rare compliment like our tour of the CEO of pubis, is super Hands-On and he he knows most of my clients as well as I do he’s like fostered his own personal relationships with, all the major CEOs like he and Doug McMillan talk all the time and our tour for sure knows me and appreciates, the the random little niche that I know something about.

Scot:
[7:16] Our tour if you’re listening I want to make a plea for Jason to have another title a word added to his title this will come up later.

Jason:
[7:23] Yeah he’s going to want to be in French or something though and I can’t I can’t yeah I can’t uh abide that I don’t think. So where are you going to be well I am having quaison with our Tour on our balcony overlooking the shampoo.

Scot:
[7:37] Yeah well you’re doing that I’m going to be in Surf City United States Huntington Beach at retail. Retail Club so this is a new event from the folks that did shop talk and Neil and team and it’s kind of a series of instead of locking into a format it’s going to be. Changing it’s almost kind of like a what is it when you go on off-site it’s kind of like an off-site kind of thing, so it’ll be a retreat so yes it’ll be Retreat kind of oriented with different themes and this theme is going to be AI so I’m going to be speaking there on Tuesday about aenta Commerce but then we’re going to be a sponsor as well so we’re we’re pretty excited about that it’s going to be our our first show we’re going to as a company so we’re going to go pretty big on it. And then after that I thought I would stop by shop talk Chicago but you just told me you’re going to be in Paris so I’m going to miss you and I’m going to see some of our old good old friends at shop talk as well but I’ll probably miss the a day of that.

Scot:
[8:40] And and come on the second day.

Jason:
[8:42] Yeah well you can you can stay at my house while I’m in Paris and then maybe you could record some re retail Janet episodes from the studio here.

Scot:
[8:50] Yeah hang out with your son and teach him some Star Wars stuff teach him teach him to make fun of your title and stuff this is going to be you’ll come home for 8 weeks of misery.

Jason:
[9:00] I think that’ll be like something he would vibe on is any any way he can make fun of dad he’s in here you you could teach him more detailed Star Wars and he’ll teach you fortnite it’ll be perfect.

Scot:
[9:09] Yeah yeah and then I saw your little animated character there is it a bobblehead but I saw you’re going to be at Shop grocery shop talking about some grocery stuff.

Jason:
[9:19] Let the record show that I have a character character uh, yes I feel like a Neil when he first started his first show which was Monday 2020 like invented this like hired this illustrator to do these characters for all the speakers and then he carried that forward to shop talk and grocery shop and and, I don’t I don’t think you’ll have it for money for for retail Club I assume because I think the event company he sold those previous shows to owns it but, uh so that’s a character jerk you I know for a fact have a retail Scott Wingo bobblehead because I was present when you were awarded it as a retiring board member at shop.org.

Scot:
[9:59] I do have a I have actually several so I have many customers over the years that have sent me bobbleheads I don’t I guess I have a head that was meant to Bobble.

Jason:
[10:07] Yes I’m jealous because I feel like you got the you are the last that was a parting gift that all serving board members got and, and you you got to leave under good terms and all that stuff and then the shop.org kind of dissolved as it got absorbed by the in our reference so I never got you know a proper thank you in boo like you did.

Scot:
[10:28] Oh I’m sorry.

Jason:
[10:29] Yeah I’m okay.

Scot:
[10:31] I’ll find a way to get you a bobblehead at some.

Jason:
[10:33] Hope we all earn it sometime in my career.

Scot:
[10:36] Yep well before we get into show season it’s earning season so we are well into Q3 but this is that kind of, yesterday started this drum beat of earnings that come out which are the Q2 announcements that people have in our universe before we go into that why don’t you set the table because you have some new US Department of Commerce data to walk us through.

Jason:
[11:00] Yeah yeah yeah so is everybody knows the Department of Commerce published retail data every month. For the previous month and so middle of this month I I want last Thursday July 17th, we got the June data so that’s a 6-month look back at retail this year, and so the the Top Line the the number we look at is core retail sales so that’s retail sales minus automobiles gas stations and restaurants, and for June. Core retail sales were up 3.9% over June 2024 but year to date core retail sales are up 3.8% year to date so, 3.8% is basically exactly the 10 year historical average if you take out the coid spike, so that’s kind of the exact rate of growth we would expect and that’s exactly where we are so on the 1 hand you go oh this was a very average year.

Jason:
[11:54] But as soon as you double click if you look at the retailers you’ll see, a handful of retailers are way outperforming that including Amazon and Walmart and Costco and most of the rest of retail is way underperforming that and the categories are also very bifurcated, so personal care and health is vastly outperforming that, and some there have been some real laggers the last couple years Electronics really haven’t grown since Co and they’re I I believe still in negative growth if I recall Sporting Goods are low do-it-yourself Home Improvement is is well below that average, and then kind of a new Evolution, grocery is now underperforming the retail average so grocery year to date has only grown about 2.8% and for the last couple years.

Jason:
[12:41] Groceries been 1 of the the bright spots in the retail store so kind of interesting that that groceries kind of caught up with all of its inflation macroeconomic issues, and interestingly groceries losing share to restaurants, and that is because we’ve all adopted this new behavior in addition to dining out we now are using restaurants for more of our at home consumption via VIA delivery than ever before and so, while restaurants and grocery stores used to compete kind of 50/50 for Sheriff stomach restaurants have opened up a sustained advantage over grocery stores so, all of that’s interesting but what would maybe be most interesting to listeners on this show is e-commerce and you know while retail’s been growing at 3.8%, we’re used to talking about e-commerce growing at like 15% or slowly kind of Dipping down to 12%, last year we were talking about 9% and right now we are talking about e-commerce year to date non-store sales which is kind of an inflated version of of e-commerce, growing at only 6.8% so the law of large numbers is really catching up with e-commerce it’s no longer even growing twice as fast as all of retail.

Scot:
[13:59] Yeah I have thoughts on it let’s talk about that when we talk about a.

Jason:
[14:04] Yeah so to me that just that’s an interesting backdrop for all of this.

Scot:
[14:09] It is and that’s just for the quarter.

Jason:
[14:13] No that so most of the data pretty much every data point I just read you is year to date.

Scot:
[14:18] Year to date okay so probably the first but that doesn’t that’s like the first it doesn’t go all the way to Q2 does it.

Jason:
[14:24] Yeah January through June 6 months of data so half of the yearso so January through June 2025 versus January through June 2024.

Scot:
[14:33] Okay I always thought it took like forever for the e-commerce to come out but again.

Jason:
[14:36] There’s a there’s a better version of the data that’s 60 days in a rears but I’m using the advanced version of the data which is 30 days in reverse.

Scot:
[14:44] That’s what happens when you know the CEO of poop you get the 30-day version.

Jason:
[14:50] Exactly yeah I I said our tour is very good at customer relations he’s a little less Hands-On with data.

Scot:
[14:56] Okay but you just saw his name around I’m sure.

Jason:
[14:59] Wait I actually you mentioned bobbleheads I have a little like our tour doll I travel with and I frequently bring it out at client sites. We we used it for a pitch like 13 years ago and it has lived in my briefcase for the the last 13 years. I did that’s so when we first used them in the pitch that’s exactly what I did I went on a store visits all over the world and I took pictures of our tour and at grocery stores I mostly took pictures of our Tour on the great Pointe shelf because I thought it was, funny that the French dude was on the French product but maybe that was a joke that only I could appreciate.

Scot:
[15:42] Yeah it’s like a what this is just normal. Okay so let’s talk about earnings so first up and we’re recording this kind of at the early part of the cycle and hopefully I can mail Jason down and we can talk a little bit about Amazon if not we’ll post on LinkedIn so yesterday the 23rd, Google was first to go and, I’ve been wondering you can’t look at the data so for example today chat gbt released that they now have 2.5 billion prompts, a day which they’re kind of equivalent to searches and, just in the so that’s in July and then in December so what is that 7 months ago they had 1 billion so they’re growing 150% every, you know half a year basically which is just crazy and at some point this has to show up in the Google data but Google keeps saying everything’s fine and it’s been a really interesting.

Scot:
[16:40] Puzzle for me and same thing this time you know so they have they built this search portraits it’s being attacked by answer engines and at some point we’re going to see cracks in that and I think we may have seen some this timeso. On you know overall it was well received by Wall Street the the their cloud computing Google cloud is doing great the AI everyone’s using it it’s awesome, everything’s good and in fact they announced they’re going to even do even more capex and additional 10 billion for AI because they’re seeing it impact all parts of their business, it’s definitely helping the you know all their ad algorithms YouTube all those things are getting a big Boost from AI. But on the calls they’re increasingly dodging questions about the interior search metrics so these are things like the volume of search queries the click-through rate, and then then at the same time they’re like we’re not we’re not disclosing that and you shouldn’t really pay attention to it and you’re kind of like all right so so it’s almost kind of a little bit of a magician trick of misdirection. And you know 1 of the data points that they do always reveal is paid clicks and that was only up 4% but we know the search business was up 12%, so when your your paid click your your revenue is higher than your volume that means your prices went up it’s pretty simple algebra on this 1 so CPC went up.

Scot:
[18:03] Google CPC is only tend to go up when the search volume flattens or goes down because the you know there’s, there’s just less volume there and people get more competitive for itespecially with your kind of backdrop that you know e-commerce is growing 6.8% and and whatnot so, so it feels like they’re getting pricing going upwhich is interesting so I I think I think that search volume we will discover search volume is flat to down.

Scot:
[18:34] Okay so that’s my first pointand then, you know I think they are seeing erosion from gen Ai and they’re buying themselves time to figure out what to do about it and have other parts of the business to step up and coverthe other thing that’s happening is they have, that they have like 4 different ways you can do AI now so let’s see if I can do this off the top of it there’s AI overviews which are the little box that’s on the standard search results. Then there’s Gemini and all the flavors of Gemini which is like a separate thing and has its own Mas that they disclose, now they have another thing called uh What’s this called AI toolbox, I can’t remember the name of this 1 but it’s like this whole other mode you can put Google search into where now you’re in like this AI mode those are the 3 things so so, it’s always interesting in the CEO of perplexity says if they were so big on AI why don’t they just put all this stuff right in Search and the answer is obvious because it will cannibalize the search Revenue way more fast than they want to.

Scot:
[19:34] And what I’ve noticed is I’ve run a lot of experiments on this and the aios are only primarily showing up on non-commercial searches so any informational searches like.

Scot:
[19:46] Math questions or fact oriented questions things that you would normally get off Wikipedia type stuff, but if you start doing commercial searches especially in our world of retail travel Financial Services those types of things you do not get AI overviews or if you do, they come very very late in the process it’s almost like they’re purposely delayed so you have time to click on a Blue Link before you see an AI overview so. What they say though is would Wall Street ask they keep saying AI or reviews are monetizing the exact same as paid search which doesn’t make any sense because there’s no click so it’s it’s basically impossible and everyone scratching their head like how could this beand.

Scot:
[20:25] What what people are guessing is people see the AI overview and then they still click on a Blue Link but I don’t think that’s happening because the AI overviews are getting pretty good and they answer your question so why would you click on the Blue Link, and and so but I think what’s happening I think it’s a tricky weasly way of, basically saying 0 equals 0 because if it’s non-commercial terms that AI aios are on they’re not really bid for that often those terms tend to be under 20 cents for for clicks and it’s you know usually sites that are, like WebMD or something that are really lowly poorly monetized and not going to be. Paying a lot for that traffic so if you have something that’s basically near zero and you’re replacing it with something near zero you can make that statement that they monetize the same but what if the same is you know pennies pennies per click not dollars or something like thatso so I think you know for listeners I would say go to your own experiments but if you start to see things like. Car insurance or the terms we all know are very robust and highly competitive you know new uh laptop computer these types of things I think you’ll see they don’t have ai overviews and that’s what’s going on there. But anyway that’s my little Soap Box on I think. I think by the end of this year the emperor will have no clothes and Google have to admit that there’s problems with the search for trust that that is coming from these answer engines. What do you think and I totally off base.

Jason:
[21:54] So I don’t I don’t know that you’re off base I think the macro problem you’re describing I totally agree with my personal experience, anecdotal but slightly different than yours so I would say like so I have a handful of commercial searches that I run as test cases all the time and virtually all of those now get a AI overview. So I I can’t say from my firsthand experience that like AI o is disproportionately not showing up in commercial searches. I I I you know it’s all it’s all hard to say because we all have like pretty personalized results also by the way but what I would say is, my AI overviews are surrounded by sponsored product listings and I my suspicion is. If someone clicks on a sponsored product listing which is in no way related to the AI overview right that Google is calling that, a click through on the AI That’s artificially you know trying to claim that.

Scot:
[22:55] The page that shows in yeah.

Jason:
[22:56] Yeah. I I do think I mean just to make this really simple like you know in the in the dawn of Google there were 10 Blue Links when you did a search and you clicked on 1 of those links and it took you to a web page that created that actual content and.

Jason:
[23:09] Way before Google started publishing all these AI things they started rolling out these things they called answer boxes and answer box was, hey maybe we don’t send you to the New York Times or maybe we don’t send you to travel velocity maybe we pop up an answer box with what the best fair is for the for your flight, and let you buy the flight straight from us and that is super controversial because, it arguably is a better customer experience it’s lower friction and it creates an opportunity for Google to make some Commerce revenue and most importantly it creates an opportunity for Google to really know what the outcome of that search was did you end up booking that trip, so there’s a bunch of good things Google gets by having the answer box but the huge problem they had was they were. Therefore no longer sending that traffic to travel velocity or the New York Times and so a, they couldn’t sell ads to those companies and B those those companies were you know trying to sue them and say hey that’s not fair use of our content like, you’re you know when you were using our content to send people to us that was 1 thing but now you’re stealing our content, and not giving us any way to monetize our content and so that was kind of a battle that was fighting and now that they have aios at the top of search.

Jason:
[24:26] I I think Google has just said you know what we can’t even fight this battle like let let them be mad but like we’re not going to win if we don’t have ai results and the AI results can’t be, Advertiser friendly like they have to be consumer-friendly and so I think I think, they recognize that that’s the way search is going and for your point I think they want it to transition as slowly as possible to preserve their legacy business until they’ve, they built a good enough AI infrastructure to replace all that Revenue. The 1 other thing that I do think is happening I I think their revenue is is kind of at this point disconnected from search volume. And so I do I do think there’s a fair amount of anecdotal data that search volume is still going up you would think of all these answer engines were really taking a dent that search volumes would be going down.

Jason:
[25:18] You’re right we don’t have perfect data on that but what has also happened is, remember the largest advertisers on Google and meta in q1 were these Chinese Commerce companies it was, meta it was Teemu and shien and 1 when the threat of tariffs kicked in and the the end of diminum, they all panicked they pulled all their ads off the US platforms and their their visibility in the US dramatically declined that was a significant amount of Revenue that Google and and meta lost, and somewhat surprising it’s all come back, and so there’s there’s kind of a donut where there were a few months of of softer ad revenue from these Chinese companies that I do think meaningfully impacted Google’s earnings.

Scot:
[26:08] That that could be far yeah could be a factor.

Jason:
[26:10] Yeah so yeah I think it’s a it’s a complicated story I wish I wish we could see the real data and know for sure what’s going on but I I definitely agree with you big picture. Answer engines are going to be give our our our more customer Centric they’re going to give customers better results and that’s what customers are going to expect and so if Google tries to, stick with something that’s more Advertiser friendly and less consumer-friendly in the long run they’ll lose the audience.

Scot:
[26:36] Gotcha so coming up next week on the 30th we have a double header with Microsoft and meta announcing where we’ll get some more, talk about Ai and it’s been in the news meta has been hiring people this is where you and I made bad career choices that that are experts on AI for hundred million dollar signing bonuses so we missed out on that I haven’t gotten my call yet at least.

Jason:
[26:58] I assumed you got 1.

Scot:
[27:00] No I’m not the kind of AI person they’re looking for I don’t sit there and work on model design, and then the big 1 for our world is Amazon which comes out Thursday the 31st so it’s going to be interesting to see how they’re doing. That is it and then I was thinking about you because I saw an article come out where Walmart has hired someone from instacart to be an EVP and I knew you would be jealous of their title so it is, EVP of AI acceleration product and design and I checked and I was like oh man finally someone that has a title with more words than Jason’s but I did the comparison and you’re still safe by you have 2 more so you’re good. So what did you make of this Walmart beefing up their AI Talent.

Jason:
[27:43] Yeah well so I I think it’s interesting you know I think. Where and we’ll probably talk about this later but we’re all speculating like what’s the economic model going to be for all these these answer engines and obviously 1 of them is, that they’re gonna try to sell stuff and either make money on the the margin from selling stuff or become a Marketplace and make money on the take rate from, from generating sales.

Jason:
[28:06] And so essentially they’re all trying to become more like a retailer and the retailers are all having to respond by become more like answer engines right and so you see both Amazon and Walmart you know as the 2, largest retailers in the ecosystem both growing much faster than the industry average they’re making the most investments in trying to, compete with these answer engines rather than, like exclusively abdicate these customer experiences to the answer engines and so Walmart has had a bunch of initiatives out there they’ve had a bunch of kind of Standalone things they’ve had Sparky they very early adopters of.

Jason:
[28:45] Answer engines for employees for their 1.6 million Walmart associates and lots of stuff, what I think the announcements this week do is consolidate a lot of those efforts and really put extra weight and resources behind those efforts so they actually, name 2 new EVPs in AI they have sort of a a tech platform role and they they have sort of a business product management strategy role and so they 2 uh EVP is, a very significant role in the leadership team at at Walmart that’s they’re part of the the executive leadership team and, adding 2 2 roles dedicated to AI on that teamfeels like a very big signal that Walmart, thanks this is the most significant thing going on in in Commerce, and then today they announced like 4 new what they’re calling super agents but like dedicated shopping answer engines that they’re rolling out for different missions.

Scot:
[29:46] Are these like Sparky Sidekicks or what what’s their.

Jason:
[29:50] I think so don’t know for sure the you know these are press releases at this point but the the the sense I got is that these are sort of Next Generation Sparky.

Scot:
[30:00] Sparky plus plusthey should have called on the Fantastic 4 and done a Marvel tie-in dang it why did you not Pitch that call me.

Jason:
[30:08] Uh I’m in so much trouble now.

Scot:
[30:10] The so Walmart will be announcing their off cycle so their fiscal and calendar years are are are very different but and sometime I think in mid August is when they drop, q1 next year results which is just kind of how they’ve been doing it for decades on decades so we’ll be watching to see what’s new there hopefully they’ll have some more AI news when they when they do that.

Jason:
[30:33] Yeah I will say we I I mentioned customer trips 1 of those customer trips because it was a public event Walmart has their shareholder what used to be called their shareholder meeting now called their Associates week. In Bentonville 2 weeks ago and so I I was there for that and got to speak with a lot of Walmart associates at different events and things and. Right AI is is definitely a topic that that people in Bentonville are talking about and thinking about.

Scot:
[31:01] Gotcha.

Jason:
[31:03] May or may not have gone to dress up as Willy Wonka for 1 event.

Scot:
[31:06] You’d be a good Willy Wonka.

Jason:
[31:10] Yeah me and timothee chalamet are are basically interchangeable.

Scot:
[31:14] Absolutely you probably it’s the glasses you probably get that all the time.

Scot:
[31:18] The big news in my world is the financial times had a you know basically a scoop where they talked to a bunch of retailers where chat GPT, previewing a hosted checkout and this is not the Shopify checkout this is a chat GPT native checkout. And I was very quick to post on that it went somewhat viral and and that was a fun thing to talk about and I did a long post on this but my my theory all along has been and and you know this was like. November last year and I thought this would take 3 years to play out and here it is not 6 months and it’s it’s kind of happening alreadythe that. The The Dominoes kind of go, the hardest thing to do in our world is get consumer attention and you know think of that as a distribution so so getting the the heart and mind and wallet of a consumer is very hard. Chat GPD is leading that but the gai engines generally are are all growing at crazy Paces as we mentioned, and then if you can get that you are on the high ground and you get to pick where you go next so, they’ve all clearly chosen the monetizable categories like shopping and travel as areas they want to go into some of them have diverged off more into coding Claude anthropic is kind of more over on that side, that is a little lost right now while they try to figure things out but they’re going to come back and I I imagine they’re so tied to our world of Commerce that it’s going to be a top priority what whenever they get their footing.

Scot:
[32:47] So you know why. Why have a comparison shopping engine like experience and then send traffic Downstream and not get the conversion data, and maybe you can have an ad like kind of thing but then now you have to have an agent go check out for you which is kind of a pain why not just have the check out there too and basically become a Marketplace, in my mind a Marketplace is when the transaction happens, off of the brand or Retailer’s website and I think that’s where we’re going to go and once Chad CBT does that then they’ll all do it and they’re going to really love having that closed loop data because these engines really, thrive on data in context and closely data is what they would you and I call it, conversion data they call it AI reinforcement learning with AI feedback so so I think ours is simpler to say.

Scot:
[33:41] They you know the they can start training models on okay you know Google trains on click-through but conversions better and you can really, personalized and hone and it’s going to be better than any personalization we’ve ever seen because a it’s a better technology than B it’s going to be cross brand and retailer so as a consumer it’s going to be very delightful because you know, and you only have 1 account for the whole internet and it’s going to be very powerful so that’s where I think this is going and that’s going to be really interesting to Think Through, who participates what’s your strategy as a brand or retailer, I have seen having the Arc of around 30 years of doing this the companies that tend to lean in on these things tend to. Do better and and win over the long run so that’s what I advocate what do you think about that whole thesis and what are you recommending to clients if this comes up at all.

Jason:
[34:34] Yeah so ah I I generally agree with your thesis I would even say I don’t think you or I were very surprised about that announcement you and I both. Follow openai pretty closely and Sam Altman did an interview like a month ago with Ben Thompson on the strategy and he basically said like when they’re talking about economic models for open AI he said hey, I don’t think I could ever imagine usdoing sponsored ads. Because they’re they’re generally not very customer Centric like we’re never we’re never going to wait the results to who pays for the result we’re going to let the the answer engine pick the result that it thinks is most helpful for their customer.

Jason:
[35:15] But he did say but I sure could imagine us taking a commission on the sale, and you know Sam’s a super smart guy he’s he’s not a Commerce guy and he may or may not have known it but he was basically describing, the marketplace economic modeland then of course he has hired Fiji Sumo who is currently the CEO of instacart in less than a month she’ll be the CEO of product at openai, and if you’re if you’re not aware instacart is also basically a Marketplace. And so like I think it’s it’s very reasonable that they think their long-term monetization strategy at least for a big chunk of their, their their business is is, a Marketplace and I I think this is that this is going to be super fascinating I think the big battle we’re going to see play out is the Battle of the economic models right and you know this is where the Googles of the world and the metis of the world have kind of innovators dilemma that, they they were extraordinarily successful within Advertising based model, and if these big new companies if anthropic and open AI come in and their model is different. You can do different arguably more customer Centric things like I would actually argue Google has a disincentive.

Jason:
[36:32] To give highly relevant personalized results that, if if you want to sell ads you want to sell the ad to as many people as possible so you want as many people as possible the land on the same place. And the the answer engines want to give every person a a super contextually relevant answer that might be very different for each 1 so you can’t. You can’t let people buy the top position in those results.

Scot:
[36:59] Yeah he he said he actually used the word affiliate with you which I thought was interestingyeah soI think this is gonna be really interesting so and also something that kind of.

Jason:
[37:09] What if I said an affiliate model is basically a marketplace where you don’t have a centralized UI.

Scot:
[37:16] Yeah the checkoutusually affiliate is a link-based way of tracking the checkout that still happens Downstream but at at the retailer.

Jason:
[37:26] Yeah but at the abstract level it’s really a yeah.

Scot:
[37:28] Ract absolutely yeah yeah yeah there’s no shopping.

Jason:
[37:31] Said oh a Marketplace is a place where where I collect take rates by having everyone go through 1 choke point which is a URL and and Affiliates are kind of hey I pay a take rate if they generate a a transaction regardless of where the. The transaction is generated but yeah.

Scot:
[37:48] Sure that’s a Marketplace Tik Tok shops as a Marketplace in my mind.

Jason:
[37:52] Yeah 100%.

Scot:
[37:53] And then the other thing to put in your mental calendars is we know chat GPT 5 is done there’s been all these hints it’s amazing and they’re getting rid of the dumb model selector it’ll automatically route you to the right model for what you need and, I think you and I have been to this cycle so many times that if you are interested in Commerce these next between you know August 1 and October 15th and you kind of need it earlier if you’re going to need some. Adoption from retailers or brands, so I think in the next 60 days we’re going to see a a barrage of interesting things going on here and I think something in chat gb5 could be. The this kind of ties to another thing going on which is the what I call the agentic browser Wars so about 3 weeks ago perplexity came out with their agentic browser called comet, and I am a perplexity Max user so I was able to there’s this other Trend in this world where you have to buy yourself off the wait list just you and I are painfully aware of. And the so this is so I’ve been on I’ve been using it for 2 weeks and it’s interesting because I would the Commerce is really good like the way it helps you research if you have something open and you want to like you’re you happen to be it’s kind of like having a browser extension on steroids where you have something open you’re like you know I really like like to learn more about this before I I buy something or.

Scot:
[39:19] I want a product that looks kind of like this anything like that it’s just right there and it’s really good at that kind of top of the funnel what I would call the research part. But then the normal perplexity find and buy with the product cards and all is better than what comet has and they’re actually disparate.

Scot:
[39:35] User experiences so at some point I feel like they’re going to have to marry these back together so the big surprise with me has been. The productivity gains because I can have an email open and I can say like someone sent me an email with like all these different date time I’m sure you’re constantly you’re doing this you probably have an admin but I don’t.

Scot:
[39:55] And you know I could just tell it hey find my open time I need an hour window and go ahead and and send them a calendar appointment and send them an email saying I picked this date and I sent them a calendar and it just does all that, so I I found it’s giving me like maybe a 15% productivity boost on my day-to-day kind of administrative stuff that I do so so that’s pretty amazing. I do think that when Chachi PTA comes out with 5 somewhere, it is very well known they are working on a browser they hired 2 of The Architects of Google Chrome people have seen the browser and talked about it I think maybe they do a mega drop and it comes out 5 comes out with the browser I don’t know we’ll have to kind of see how that goes, and that’s going to be interesting and then you know, I don’t think we’re too far away from meta everyone’s going to come out with the browser because you’re going to really need to do that to really control the experience and get more context, basically if you’re going to do this agentic stuff it creates an unblockable situation because when you’re you’re basically living inside the user session and some things are running on their computer you can’t block it because you’re blocking users so so it becomes a Checkmate for any kind of cloudflare agent blocking or any of this kind of stuff, all that is game over so it’s really fascinating to watch this all play outhave you you probably have not had a chance to play with it at this point I.

Jason:
[41:18] No no no I both I both have comment and I I of course watch I’m a regular Watcher and listener of the reach agentic podcast so I watched the demo you published uh yesterday right. And in fact I have some notes about all the things you got wrong but we’ll we’ll cover that later just kidding yeah no I think it’s super interesting I think a really interesting question is like. In the long run where do people go to use these answer answer engines right and my kind of mental framework at the moment is there’s kind of 4 4 models, the the first place people used to answer engines is they were dedicated URLs so I went to CET gbt openai.com or I went to perplexity.com and you know openai even started claiming very high traffic on their website, I don’t think that’s a a good long-term solution I don’t think it’s very customer friendly and I don’t think that ends up being the place customers are going to go.

Jason:
[42:12] Then we started seeing the the e-commerce sites add answer engines right in the search so so you kind of had rudimentary LMS like built-in instacart search and then you had. The vast majority of all e-commerce traffic in the United States of America are on 2 websites Amazon and Walmart and they both have, always on dedicated answer engines in Rufus and Sparky and you know they’re both pretty excited about those I actually think that that’s way too late in the purchase cycle for the answer engine to start its job so I actually don’t think that’s, the long-term winner. I I think you need the the answer engine to be more ubiquitous and a ac across retailers to solve more complex problems and so you know to me building it into the browser. Makes perfect sense because it it lets you solve more complicated problems it lets you pick the retailer or the destination that could best solve a particular problem and for your point, it solves a lot of the the kind of blocking and and traffic shaping problems that that we’re about to confront with with all the Bots crawling the web.

Jason:
[43:22] And the other thing is that the devices right and so you know you you both have open AI bot Johnny Ives company which everybody thinks is building some kind of, AI device and Amazon announced that they’re buying B which is some kind of AI device so it’s super early days I think it’s risky to bet too much but, to me it makes more sense that you need to answer engine as Upstream as possible in the the path to purchase and that means, in the browser or on the person soI I think these browsers are going to be super interesting whether it it needs to be a native browser can, Microsoft build you know a good,

Jason:
[44:02] answering Jim plug-in gin architecture into Edgewell you know Google embed a good enough version of Gemini into Chrome like these are that these are all the battles that are coming next.

Scot:
[44:13] Absolutelyand this is a good time to Pivot to some Amazon news.

Scot:
[44:29] Yeah the big amazon news is we are past the all-new extra-long Amazon Prime day, this year it was 4 days of 3 which you know made, just by default a record Prime day which Amazon was toutingand but we’re comping with an extra day so a little bit of an unfair comparison, I now I’m back in the game I’m talking to a lot more agencies that manage lots of these Amazon stores for Brands and then sellers themselves and and a bigger, spectrum of folks not Channel advisor scale but but enough where it’s not anecdotal but it’s not challenging for sales so someone in the middle there and the feedback was really interesting so, the things I heard were that the traffic on the individual days, from deals you know they can’t see Amazon’s traffic but just like volume level was pretty muted across those days and that before Prime Day this year Amazon was pushing ads very very hard, it used to be ads were a way to juice things and whatnot then they were kind of like. You know mostly hinted they were a must have and now it’s basically look if you don’t commit to a pretty serious add Buy you’re not going to get this placement in this little doodad and this little badge and all this kind of jazz so so I thought that’s interesting. To meand this kind of goes back to the 6.8% right so so I.

Scot:
[45:52] My hot take is Amazon has become the ad units have tipped over where Amazon has become not very useful anymore it it’s very hard to find anything.

Scot:
[46:03] I was I had an example where I was looking for I my dogs like thisgreeny alternative called veggie dense and I was trying to reorder it and I didn’t even, I should have gone to my orders but I was just like gonna find it and order it real quick and it showed me you know, it had like in a page of a hundred things 1 of them was my product and it was buried everything else was an ad it was like, 90% add saturations for this particular for some reason dog treats is like at the peak maximum of the spectrum and it was just a wake-up call that, they are so focused on this and it’s so misaligned with the user experience I think this, and I know you have strong feel you you’re you’re retail media is big in your world but in my world I think a little bit of it is okay but if it all gets so big it really is counterintuitive to the user. Finding what they want at the criteria they want in ordering it and it it just is I think it’s slowing down all of e-commerce and. You know so I’m kind of excited that they have a little competition now I think it’ll be a wake-up call for Amazon to really shake off and really put the customer first again I think they’ve lost sight of that.

Jason:
[47:11] Yeah so hey I I 100% agree you’ll remember I’m not the retail media Advocate like I think you started a whole Feud.

Scot:
[47:20] I didn’t you did you called her outhey.

Jason:
[47:22] Uh with the fact that like I I think there’s a role for some retail media like but it’s overhyped like in the same way like if you go to a traditional clothing store, the like a few mannequins are helpful like they they inspire you and give you ideas and the stuff on the mannequin sells more but if the whole store is.

Jason:
[47:42] Companies that have crappy products that aren’t selling and are and are paying to put their product in front of the product you actually want. You would never go back to that clothing store and and you know I think we’ve absolutely crossed that that chasm in Amazon I I think there’s, counter now that have them at over a billion skus so you you can’t find anything there they’re the the revenue from ads are way more important to Amazon now than the revenue from from 1 P product margins or 3 Peak rate so so AI, I generally totally agree with you I also think I don’t know if you followed it but there was an actual controversy around if Prime day was, strong or soft right that that, you know it’s 4 days so so there’s no valid comps Amazon’s in the information gathering business not in the information sharing business so we we know they only share. Self-serving data that. Reflect them in the best possible way and so you know day 2 of prime day vendors started coming out that have no earthly idea how Prime day is going.

Jason:
[48:48] And 1 was this company called momentum Commerce that has like you know a they’re small agency that has a handful of clients that buy ads on Amazon and they came out and said oh. Prime day is down 41% from last year and the Amazon all the analysts read it and freaked out and the Amazon stock actually went out and then, Amazon spun up the whole PR engine to attack momentum Commerce and talk about how they absolutely could not possibly have a clue.

Jason:
[49:17] What was happening on Amazon Prime day and side note while all that’s going on you can imagine. Every executive at my company and all my competitors companies sent notes to their clients talking about how Prime days down 41% because they they are and so I’m the guy coming in after them going yeah we probably don’t believe that data by the way right.

Jason:
[49:38] So so that was like a big controversy, I’m more interested in the press releases Amazon issued and not what they say because because I know they’re only going to say things that they care about what I like to do is pop up last year’s press release and this year’s press release and see what bullets they took off, and when you do that on Prime day you you see a lot of the volume bullets and numbers went away and that tells me everything I need to know that like, that Prime day is increasingly diluted I’m sure it was perfectly fine but it was not there was not, like meaningful there certainly was not outsized growth in Prime day and I I you know here over and over again the signal and the noise ratio, on Prime is a day is is increasingly diminished and you know there’s a mountain of worthless deals and so you know you can’t you can’t even stand out by offering a deal on Prime day you’re still you know amongst 100 million skus, when you offer a lightning deal so so yeah I I agree, that like I I think these guys are going to have real innovators dilemma as they face these these new companies that are going to you know enter the Commerce space with, a model much more focused on giving the customers what they want instead of making the customers the product.

Scot:
[50:55] The also on the topic of Amazon and now pivoting to at least on my side a more positive thing is I’ve been pretty negative on wait let me make sure okay I got everything off uh my device whose name is Alexa.

Jason:
[51:08] I I I remembered to mute mine to right before the show too I feel like this is might be the episode 327 for those that are in the pool how many weeks it would takeJason Scott to turn off their Alexis.

Scot:
[51:30] You spotted on Prime day that if you happen to buy and this was a little bit of a sneaky trick but you and I at least I did both fell for it. That if we bought a Amazon show which is the 1 with the little screen on it, that you would be opted into the program so I got that and I’ve really been enjoying it I I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised I kind of thought if it’s this delayed and the Articles I’ve read had a lot of negative things to say. That it would be a problem it’s not, it’s not perfect but I think it’s a solid B+ I I personally find it way better than Rufus um for shopping and then the the real delightful thing is the non-shopping part which is interesting so you can connect it to, let’s see Uber Lyft, there’s a couple open table but not resiThumbtack I don’t know desire to do that and then a couple you probably have the whole list in your head but there’s a list of things you.

Jason:
[52:21] Yeah right ticket Ticket Master is a big 1.

Scot:
[52:23] Ticket Masters supposedly really good where you canI don’t think I would. Yeah but you can you can ask it about upcoming concerts and stuff so so it’s really really good on all those things, have you had much time to play with yours and what’s your your hot take.

Jason:
[52:39] Yeah yeah 100% so a like minor gripe I’m pretty sure both you and I already own the device that we had to rebbe in order to get into the.

Scot:
[52:48] Yeah but what’s nice is they all all my devices flipped over.

Jason:
[52:51] Yes, yes and so and so yes I have it to like you I was very pessimistic they like announced this thing 18 months ago and super delayed in shipping it and we kept hearing internal reports that like, it wasn’t very good and they had to Pivot engines from the in-house 1 to anthropic and there’s all this stuff and it did just made me have low expectations and. Alexa which was revolutionary when it first came out was very long in the tooth so I was kind of embittered on the whole ecosystem and I would say it also has completely turned around, my opinion so first of all the main thing we use Alexis for in our world is home automation I I literally have hundreds of smart devices in my home and I I think I have.

Jason:
[53:35] 14 Alexa devicesand, it was a nightmare like like you would give it the same command and turn on the same light that you did every night for the last like 300 nights and sometimes it would work sometimes it wouldn’t sometimes, the word you use would be accepted sometimes it wouldn’t and under the Alexa plus it is so much smarter and I can give it complicated commands like turn off all the lights in my kitchen except this 1 and I can even tell it like from now on when I say, primary bedroom I mean master bedroom or whatever you know and it it it permanently learns. What I mean in a way more organic way so I feel like as a home automation control thing it got it caught up and got a million times better it has become another legitimate answer engine that we use in our life so we. Alexa’s also always been Mission critical for child rearing because we use it constantly for timers for screen time and things like that and, now you know my my son who’s 9 like ask it all kinds of questions that it had no earthly hope of answering um.

Scot:
[54:40] You’d like to say I’ll have to go to the web.

Jason:
[54:42] What’s the value of this Pokemon card who’s you know who’s the best soccer like all these things and now, it is very helpful credible answers for literally everything he asks and and so it’s game-changing we use it with our son as an answer engine all the time. And I I have tested the shopping and it is better at shopping I do also agree it’s better than Rufus I gotta be honest. It’s always been my opinion that voice is not the most exciting user interface for shopping for for some kinds of replenishment it’s fine. For Discovery shopping it doesn’t make a lot of sense and and I still think that’s true the the screens on the on the sevens and 11s that we have are you know maybe a little more helpful but but, I wouldflat out props to the whole Amazon Plus team like you you did a great job of lowering expectations and then wildly surpassing them.

Scot:
[55:36] Yeah yeah so I’m excited to see how it develops hereI do think. Having the show makes shopping good because you can see the products but it still doesn’t solve the voice voice shopping thing is is hard because you, unless it’s a reorder and you know exactly what you’re getting I’m not really sold on this total voice shopping thing so but maybe they’ll convince me otherwise.

Jason:
[55:58] No yeah I I tend to agree.

Scot:
[56:00] That’s all I had anything else you wanted to chat about any you ready for a holiday prediction or you want to keep that in the in the box for a while.

Jason:
[56:07] No no no we are we’re deep in Holiday planning with most clients at this point and. Yeah I’ll just I’ll be slightly Debbie Downer and say like I think it’s going to be a challenging holiday period I think there’s a lot of um macroeconomic stuff that’s not super favorable there’s a lot of disruptions in the supply chain that happened in, q1 and at the very beginning of Q2 as a result of all the the trade tariff Wars and uncertainty and most retailers just you know were really conservative on, on inventory planning so I I actually think. Will probably end up with an average holiday season but it’s because the biggest retailers have all these intrinsic advantages and I think I think Amazon and Walmart are going to clean up this holiday they’re going to have better inventory than everyone else, and they’re they’re going to get a disproportion you know a way bigger than their fair share of customer traffic which is going to. Put a bunch of other retailers that are already on the edge in in significant distress so I think I think it’s going to be a very bifurcated holiday with a couple big Winners and a lot of people that are really struggling.

Scot:
[57:16] All right well I think we should leave it there.

Jason:
[57:19] Yeah that is perfect place to stop we got in under the hour thank goodness. And as always if you got any benefit out of this this episode we’d love it if you jump on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review and, make sure you subscribe to Scott’s substack and listen or watch because you can you can actually watch the retail Janet podcast on YouTube as well.

Scot:
[57:42] Yeah and until next time.

Jason:
[57:43] Happy Commerce thing.

Jason & Scot Show Episode 327 Agentic Commerce

Retailgeek — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 01:09:13 +0000

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 327 is is a discussion of AI Agents and their role in the future of commerce.

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Happy Fathers Day!

In this exciting episode of the Jason & Scot Show, recorded on Friday, June 6th, 2025, hosts Jason Goldberg and Scot Wingo dive into the latest happenings and insights in the world of strategic e-commerce, AI technologies, and retail innovations. This episode picks up where Episode 326 left off, continuing the engaging conversation sparked by their recent discussions around AI and its implications for the retail sector.

Kicking off, the duo discusses the monumental news that Fiji Simo, the former CEO of Instacart, has been tasked with leading OpenAI’s consumer products division. Jason emphasizes the significant shift this represents for both Fiji’s career and the trajectory of OpenAI, pointing out her unique blend of extensive e-commerce experience and her focus on the future of AI. Both hosts speculate on how her leadership role at OpenAI could steer the integration of AI into commerce, particularly in areas like agentic shopping and advanced AI-driven search capabilities.

Shifting gears, Jason and Scot review an intriguing overproduced conversation between OpenAI’s Sam Altman and design visionary Jony Ive about a mysterious new device rumored to empower user access to AI. Scot and Jason share their thoughts on the potential implications of such a device, questioning whether it might be a powerful, screenless AI assistant or simply another Alexa-type solution.

The conversation then transitions into a critical discussion about the evolving landscape of search and commerce. Jason unveils his recently published point of view report on AI disruption in commerce search. He argues that while AI-driven search technologies are still in their infancy, they hold the potential to drastically redefine user experiences and efficiency in online shopping, making it imperative for brands to adapt their marketing strategies accordingly.

Scot highlights recent statistics from eMarketer that predict exponential growth in AI-related ad spending, setting the stage for a potential paradigm shift in online marketing and advertising dynamics. They explore whether innovative AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity may challenge traditional platforms like Google and reshape businesses’ approach to SEO and content strategy.

Both hosts don’t shy away from discussing broader social implications, such as the significant role of social media in commerce, especially platforms like TikTok. They reflect on how social media is transforming the way consumers discover and purchase products, paralleling it with the changes brought by AI technologies.

In a particularly engaging segment, Jason and Scot examine the recent foray into humanoid robots by Amazon, comparing it to other technological innovations like drones. While amused by the prospect of robots delivering packages, they share a similar concern regarding the practicality and future significance of such technologies. McDonald experts remain skeptical about whether humanoid robots will fundamentally change e-commerce, preferring to focus on the profound changes they believe AI will bring.

As they wrap up this marathon double heaer episode, Jason and Scot discuss how perceptions of shopping are evolving, particularly distinguishing between needs fulfillment and the discovery process, and how AI agents could redefine these experiences in a retail context.

Listeners are encouraged to subscribe, share their thoughts and reviews, and engage with the show on social media platforms and through Scot’s new substack, Retailgentic.ai.

Tune in to Episode 327 of the Jason & Scot Show for an insightful exploration of the present and future of AI in retail, recorded amid their back-to-back sessions fueled by the wealth of information gathered during Jason’s global journey in e-commerce.

Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 327 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Friday, June 6th.