Retailgentic | Consumer Behavior & Retail Trend

This week Scot goes on a markets deep dive with one of Wall Street's leading internet analysts. It’s a tour through the mega-cap playbook (Meta, Amazon, Google, eBay, Shopify) and how professional investors are actually pricing the agentic-commerce shift. Colin covers over $12 trillion of market cap across five names alone, so this is the view from the models, the channel checks, and the trading desk.

This is a wide-ranging, numbers-forward conversation about where the money moves as agents become the buyers and which companies Wall Street thinks come out ahead. 

Highlights:

• 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗣𝗘𝗘𝗗 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸: Baird’s formula for internet winners: Scale, Product, Engineering, Efficiency, and Data. Nail all five, and the competitive advantage compounds.
• “𝗟𝗲𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗱𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝗹𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴”: Colin explains why skeptics are dramatically underestimating the size of the opportunity.
• 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗮 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿’𝘀 𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗽𝗶𝗰𝗸: Colin’s highest-conviction AI bet is Meta driven by WhatsApp business agents, Meta AI, and unmatched consumer reach. (Last year’s pick: Google.)
• 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗶𝘁𝘆: The real value won’t live in foundation models, it accrues to the platforms, applications, and distribution layers built on top.
• 𝗔𝗺𝗮𝘇𝗼𝗻’𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗲-𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗱𝗼𝗼𝗿: By opening its catalog to AI agents, Amazon may have crossed a line it can’t reverse and that could strengthen its ecosystem even further.
• “𝗖𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗲𝘆𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗯𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘀”: If AI agents skip search results and category pages, they also skip the ads, putting pressure on retail media’s biggest revenue stream.
• 𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝗼𝘄𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗶𝗻𝘀: The long-term winners will control identity, payments, checkout, and fulfillment, not just discovery.
• 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗪𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗲𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝗽𝗶𝗳𝘆: AI could bypass storefronts and even Shop Pay. That uncertainty alone is enough for investors to discount the stock.
• “𝗪𝗲’𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝗲𝗲 𝗶𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘆”: Colin expects agentic commerce adoption to meaningfully accelerate after Q4, even a one- or two-point lift on today’s numbers would be significant.

Colin is one of the sharpest lenses out there on how the market is actually pricing all of this. Enjoy the conversation!

Timestamps:

3:28 Meet Colin Sebastian
5:04 20 years of history & the Wall Street event
7:00 From bartender to Baird
7:56 Baird's coverage universe & "TMT"
9:29 The GTA VI mega-launch call
11:12 Buy side vs. sell side, explained
13:52 The SPEED framework & top picks
16:16 What is agentic commerce?
20:05 Sizing it: trillions & consumer surveys
22:42 Meta's social-graph advantage
25:05 Amazon's walled garden & the one-way door
29:40 Google, UCP & why models get commoditized
32:36 eBay's used-goods moat
39:44 Retail media networks at risk?
44:33 OpenAI, ads & the closed-loop logic
48:36 Payments: PayPal, stablecoins & who wins
51:57 Protocols: UCP vs. ACP
52:23 Why Wall Street is nervous about Shopify

👉 Connect with Colin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cosebastian/
👉 Learn more about Baird: https://www.rwbaird.com/

🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:
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This epsiode is a platform-and-stats deep dive: Scot gets Mani to pin down what agentic commerce actually is (with a four-stage framework that’s the cleanest map we’ve heard), then pulls out a run of genuinely wild numbers on what Shopify is seeing across millions of merchants, before going deep on the catalog, the protocol soup, and everything that shipped in the Spring ‘26 Edition.

Highlights:

• Crawl, walk, run, fly: The framework of the episode. Crawl is AI-driven discovery (the biggest, most impactful stage today); fly is fully discretionary, budget-based buying. Mani’s verdict on where the industry actually is: “somewhere between walk and run today.”
• 8X traffic, 13X orders: Shopify’s Q1 numbers… AI-driven traffic to merchants up 8X year over year, and orders through those channels up 13X.
• AI buyers just hit harder: New buyers who discover a merchant through AI order at roughly twice the rate of organic search, are about 50% more likely to convert, and spend about 14% more per order because they show up deeper in the consideration funnel.
• 70% of AI orders are long tail: About 70–71% of AI-attributed orders last year fell outside the top 100 product categories. Models “don’t need to learn how to reach for the small merchant, they just need to learn the intent of the buyer.”
• 2X on fresh data: The Shopify catalog, over a billion products across millions of merchants, converts about 2X better than stale or scraped data, thanks to real-time pricing and availability straight from the merchant.
• A “7 out of 10 at everything”: On how AI is reshaping product, design, and engineering roles.
• The non-merchant-of-record era: Don’t become the marketplace reselling goods, just be the interface to the merchant. The merchant keeps the customer relationship and runs their own checkout.
• UCP was a “labor of love”: Shopify was at the genesis of the Universal Commerce Protocol.
• Sidekick, Pulse & Autopilot: Sidekick usage is up about 4X year over year; Pulse turns Shopify’s data into proactive recommendations right on your admin homepage; and the guiding principle stays “always put the control in the merchant’s hand.”
• B2B may reach “fly” first: By 2030, Mani splits the world into DTC and wholesale/B2B and bets B2B, where both sides transact professionally and obsess over efficiency, may hit full automation before consumers do.

Mani’s four stages are the cleanest map of agentic commerce we’ve heard, and the numbers behind them are frankly staggering. And as he reminds us, we’re still in the early innings. Enjoy the conversation! 

Timestamps:
03:55 Welcome; watching Shopify's rise from ChannelAdvisor
04:38 Mani's path to VP of Product at Shopify
06:37 The Wish / ContextLogic founding story
08:18 Vibe coding and "AI makes everyone a 7 out of 10"
11:10 What Mani owns across the commerce loop
12:42 Non-merchant-of-record channels (ChatGPT, Gemini)
13:45 Defining agentic commerce
14:44 The crawl / walk / run / fly framework
17:50 The stats: 8X traffic, 13X orders, +50% conversion, +14% AOV
20:03 Out-of-the-box UCP compatibility and agentic storefronts
23:10 The Shopify catalog superpower (2x conversion)
26:40 WebMCP and the protocol stack (AP2, x402, Web Bot Auth)
29:15 UCP: Shopify's labor of love
32:24 Top things merchants should do to win
35:28 The escalation "escape hatch"
37:24 Word of mouth and the long tail, 70% of AI orders
42:41 Spring '26 Edition: Shop app, Ship & Pick Up, Pulse, Autopilot
48:10 Where it all goes by 2030: B2B vs DTC
52:29 Wrap-up

👉 Connect with Mani Fazeli: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcfazeli/
👉 Learn more about Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/
👉 And check out the Shopify newsroom blog here

🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:
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Kartik Hosanagar wears a lot of hats: Wharton professor, serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and now co-founder of an applied AI lab building simulation tools for AI search. Scot and Kartik land in almost exactly the same place on where agentic commerce is heading, but they get there from opposite directions: Scot on gut and operator instinct, Kartik on research. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about treating AI as a customer, the levels of agentic commerce, and what brands should actually be doing this week, this quarter, and this year.

Highlights:

• AI is a new customer category: Once shopping goes agentic, Kartik argues you have to ask of AI what you ask of any customer: how do we inform it, persuade it, and what biases does it have? 
• The driverless-car model: Agentic commerce has levels 0–5, just like autonomous vehicles. Level 5 is “buy the shoe and make sure it arrives in a week” hands-off; Instacart-style automation and AI-enabled discovery are lower levels and we’re already in the era.
• The funnel got outsourced: Top-of-funnel work customers used to do themselves like discovering brands and building a consideration set is now done by AI, so shoppers arrive far later in the funnel. Discovery is “fundamentally transformed.”
• 4 words → 60 words: From his CommerceNext keynote, average search went from about four words on Google to about 60 words on the first ChatGPT turn, then multi-turn. Nobody types “men’s running shoes” anymore; shoes show up on conversation turn seven.
• UCP, ACP and the protocol wars: Kartik explains Google’s UCP (product feeds today, transactions later), why OpenAI backed off ACP instant checkout, and reads Amazon joining UCP as “testing the waters,” not a strategy reversal
• Counterfactual simulations: Bodhium builds “digital twins” of ChatGPT and Gemini and spins up virtual worlds where your site looks different, testing a thousand hypotheses in minutes to find what makes AI answers more accurate and favorable. Market research, but for AI.
• The today / this quarter / this year roadmap: Now: audit conversations, visibility, and which bots read your site. This quarter: build simulators and a UCP/MCP workstream. This year: scale it with agentic workflows. 
• Two front doors: Kartik doesn’t think websites disappear, but “a website is not the right front door for an agent.” Expect a human web door and an MCP door for agents, plus omnichannel behavior where each feeds the other.

Kartik calls himself an "agentic commerce maximalist," and after this conversation you'll see why... the research and the gut instinct point the same direction. Enjoy the conversation.

Timestamps:
03:04 Welcome: the "renaissance man" background problem
03:49 Kartik's cocktail-party version: academic + entrepreneur, Yodle
04:36 The Yodle / Milo mobile-social-local era (and Fidji at OpenAI)
06:05 Wharton AI Center and what Kartik researches
07:37 The thesis: AI search is more than another channel
10:08 Defining agentic commerce: the driverless-car levels
12:34 UCP, Gemini, and why Amazon joined
15:55 Amazon vs. Walmart strategies (Rufus vs. Sparky)
16:29 Bodhium Labs: what it is
17:00 The AEO/GEO problem: guesswork and the Reddit trap
18:56 Research-led counterfactual simulations
21:02 The long tail: multi-turn conversations replace keywords
22:49 CommerceNext keynote: 4 words to 60 words
24:57 The "AI is just another channel" misconception
26:48 Shopper trust: high for discovery, not for checkout
28:15 You can't fully control what AI thinks about you
30:51 The roadmap: today, this quarter, this year
34:41 Rufus, Sparky, UCP, and MCP endpoints
36:37 Does agentic commerce grow the pie or shift it?
38:32 Do we still need websites? Two front doors
40:39 Where to find Kartik: LinkedIn and Substack

👉 Connect with Kartik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kartik-hosanagar-22272115/
👉 Learn more about A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525560882?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
👉 Visit his substack: https://hosanagar.substack.com/

🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:
📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai
📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

This is a report deep dive, and Deloitte gave Retailgentic the exclusive first look at brand-new research: hundreds of senior merchant leaders and a thousand-plus recent online shoppers, both sides of the counter, with trend data from two years back layered in. The result is a map of where brands and consumers see the same picture and where they see completely different ones. And the data is fresh, fielded this spring, analyzed over the last month, unveiled here.

They describe exactly what those leaders do differently, and why it pays off. You want the edge? This is it.

Highlights 

• The basics are the new battleground: Accurate search, real inventory visibility, clear delivery dates, easy returns are no longer differentiators, just expected. And a majority of consumers say brands haven’t improved on them in two years.
• The perception gap: Only 16–18% of consumers rate brands “excellent,” while brands rate themselves in the low-to-mid 30s, a false-confidence gap that’s driving under-investment where it matters.
• 57 definitions of personalization: the “golden term” has “probably 57 different definitions”, but ~70% of consumers say personalized experiences genuinely matter. Get it wrong and you hurt trust more than you help.
• 14–15 loyalty programs: 99% of surveyed brands offer one and 80% of customers belong to more than one, the average U.S. consumer is a member of 14–15 but active in only four or five. “You are fighting for head space.”
• The cashback gap: Over half of consumers say cashback is the loyalty benefit they’d value most but only 14% of brands offer it. Customers want financial value and simplicity; brands keep adding tiers and complexity.
• The leaders’ payoff: Consumers spend 34% more with the brands that nail the basics + personalization + sticky loyalty, 57% will try a new product from them, and 55% will recommend them to family and friends.
• Efficiency over experience: The two top-reported benefits merchants cite from AI aren’t customer-facing at all, they’re better decision-making and greater efficiency. Brands are getting their own house in order first.
• Machine-readable product data: Product content is still “teeny tiny” and over-optimized for the keyword era, even as LLMs collapse the old 20-tabs-and-a-spreadsheet decision into one answer. If the data isn’t there, the agent won’t infer it, it just gives what’s available.
• Connecting the dots: Data, loyalty, and AI in isolation aren’t enough; the winners execute across all three and make deliberate choices about the purpose of the store vs. the site vs. the app vs. the LLM.

Fresh data, both sides of the counter, and a clear-eyed read on the gap between what brands think they’re delivering and what shoppers actually feel. Bobby and AP brought the goods. Enjoy the conversation! 👇

Timestamps:
01:57 An exclusive first look
06:12 Meet Bobby Stephens & Apurva Pangam
07:19 AP's background: 20 years in commerce
08:01 Bobby's background — buyer to footwear founder
09:29 Where they fit in Deloitte's retail team
10:18 Inside the report: methodology
12:32 The consumer side — the basics
14:47 The perception gap & false confidence
15:50 Personalization: 57 definitions
17:30 On-site agents: Rufus, Sparky & TSA
20:02 Playbooks, CDPs & the customer P&L
21:21 AI for operational efficiency
25:40 Making product data machine-readable
26:38 Answer engines & the decision collapse
29:34 Loyalty: everyone plays, few win
33:52 Who's winning: profiling the leaders
38:44 Connecting the dots
40:18 Closing & where to find the report

👉 Check out the report: https://www.deloittedigital.com/us/en/insights/research/b2c-commerce-experiences.html
👉 Connect with Bobby Stephens: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-stephens-digital/
👉 Connect with Apurva Pangam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apangam/
👉 Learn more about Deloitte: https://www.deloitte.com/

🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:
📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai
📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

This one's a research deep dive. Forrester just published "The State of Agentic Commerce" for Q2 2026, a client-only report built on a fresh consumer survey, and its headline read like a splash of cold water: the hype is running past reality. 

We invited principal analyst Chuck Gahun on Retailgentic to defend that framing, walk through Forrester's (strict) definition of agentic commerce, and separate what consumers are actually doing from what the market keeps promising. 

Highlights 

• Shopping vs. buying: Forrester defines agentic commerce as “shopping or buying experiences that include AI agents acting autonomously on behalf of consumers, buyers, or sellers”, and until buying is involved, they call it conversational commerce, not agentic commerce.
• The 38 / 17 gap: Among consumers familiar with answer engines, 38% use them for product discovery but only 17% complete purchases, a trust gap Chuck says is the single thing holding agentic commerce back.
• Who’s liable?: When something goes wrong on an answer-engine purchase, 44% of consumers said they’d hold the answer engine itself liable, a sign of how many guardrails, policies, and return paths still have to be built.
• The Amazon corollary: “On Amazon, I’d let my kids, my friends, my family have my credit card and go shopping.” That same trust does not yet transfer to ChatGPT or Gemini, closing that gap is the whole game.
• The merchant verdict: “We’re not telling anybody to wait. We’re telling them to go in strategically while the commerce trust angle is catching up.”
• Machine advantage: Forrester’s four-quadrant merchant framework (agentic fit, machine advantage, operations, and organizational adaptability) pushes brands to build content strategy for machines, not just humans.
• The SKU mountain: The hardest conversation in the field, “you need to upgrade 100,000 SKUs,” and the merchant answers that one SKU takes six months, so “this is gonna take infinite years.” Protocols like OpenAI’s ACP and Google’s UCP keep changing underneath them, on an exponential curve.
• Old B2B PDFs are gold mines: Those spec-heavy, JavaScript-free product pages everyone mocked turn out to be exactly what agents want, and Chuck says B2B (business & industrial) is actually taking off faster, with a report prediction that 20% of B2B moves to human-authorized, agent-executed transactions by year-end.
• Death of the retail website?: A companion Forrester paper argues the website isn’t dead, it’s becoming a repository of data for agents. By 2030, Chuck expects “dual optimization”: machines bring the shopper, and the site’s only job is to convert them.
• Less traffic, 3X conversion: Organic traffic is down, but answer engines filter the traffic so well that conversions are up.

A sharp, honest look at where agentic commerce actually is right now: the trust gap, the merchant playbook, and a few 2030 predictions worth arguing about. Enjoy the conversation

Timestamps:

03:47 Meet Chuck Gahun, Forrester principal analyst
05:03 Chuck's background: two decades, Sapient, the services side
07:57 How Forrester's commerce team is structured
10:52 Defining agentic commerce: shopping vs. buying
12:37 Conversational commerce vs. the strict definition
13:49 Semi-autonomous vs. autonomous (the dog-treats test)
14:38 Inside the answer-engine consumer survey
15:47 The numbers: 38% discover, 17% buy, 62% research
16:22 Beyond retail: healthcare, travel, government
19:48 Figure 1: owned vs. not-owned, four levels
21:47 The trust gap and who's liable (44%)
24:37 Marketplaces, merchant of record, and returns
27:52 What Forrester tells merchants: don't wait
29:57 Product fit, profitability, and the ACP/UCP specs
31:58 Figure 3: the four-quadrant framework & machine advantage
35:53 The SKU problem and exponential change management
38:35 The B2B surge prediction
41:25 2030 predictions & death of the retail website
46:32 Less traffic, higher conversion: the 3X surprise
47:18 Where to find Chuck, events, and outro

👉 Connect with Chuck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckgahun/
👉 Learn more about Forrester: https://www.forrester.com/
👉 Get the report: https://www.forrester.com/report/the-state-of-agentic-commerce-q2-2026/RES195671

🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:
📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai
📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

In this episode, we sit down with Jennifer Peters, Director of DTC, MarTech & Digital Compliance at OLLY, on building an AEO foundation the right way: FAQs and catalog attributes, measuring agentic visibility, and staying human-centered in a regulated CPG world.

We start with a Shopify “side quest”, how a self-taught developer ended up in AI god mode with Claude and MCP, before getting into what OLLY actually is and why a brand that does most of its revenue in-store suddenly cares so much about its website.

Jennifer has been quietly building one of the most grounded, real-world Agentic Commerce playbooks we've heard on the show. She shares the basics done tightly and gives a clear-eyed take on what's worth investing in while the ground shifts week to week.

It’s a grounded, refreshingly un-hyped conversation about building for the agentic era without losing your head, or your customers. Hit play.

Highlights: 

• The cold-resource, high-impact win: Jennifer on catalog feed enhancement.
• The FAQ slam dunk: OLLY added FAQs to its PDPs using content already on the page, just repackaged into bite-sized chunks. LLMs love the format, and so do humans.
• AEO is just good SEO: Clean up your schemas, clean up your data structure, and do the things that are good for your brand anyway.
• Attributes Google never asked for: A partner ingests OLLY’s public catalog and pushes back AI-ready attributes, none of them customer-facing.
• The website is now the point of entry: A site that was “7 or 8% of the business” is now the brand authority source agents go to first, for OLLY’s own site, Walmart’s Sparky, and Amazon’s Rufus.
• Trust but verify: OLLY triangulates recommendations across Profound, Contentsquare, and Envive. If all three flag the same thing, it’s probably worth acting on.
• Don’t “do AI to do AI”: “We’re not changing the goals because we have AI. We’re keeping the goals and just doing a better job getting to them.” Same OKRs, just faster.
• Fix the un-AI basics first: Connect your DAM, your creative stack, and your marketing stack before you try to sprinkle AI magic on top. Scot adds that AI can be the excuse to finally get it prioritized.
• The AI bubble in the bubble: From San Francisco, Jennifer on the coming counterculture: “No AI in our creative” as a selling point, growing data center backlash, and Ronny Chieng’s Harvard commencement speech.

Jennifer is exactly the kind of hands-on practitioner this show exists to find: strategic, tactical, and refreshingly honest about what’s real and what’s noise. We’ll have to get her back in a year to see what other magical (and weird) things she’s figured out. 

Enjoy the conversation.

Timestamps:
00:00 Cold open — lowest resource, highest impact
00:21 Welcome to Retailgentic
01:36 Scot's intro: a real practitioner doing the work
04:13 Welcome, Jennifer Peters
05:20 Jennifer's background: agency, Cokesbury, OLLY
06:51 Becoming a self-taught Shopify developer
07:56 Side quest: Claude, MCP, and AI "god mode"
11:34 What is OLLY? The square-bottle homeland
12:18 Inside the DTC + MarTech role
13:15 Why the website is now the point of entry
16:21 Jennifer's agentic commerce journey begins
17:48 Start with the basics: AEO is just good SEO
18:21 FAQs on PDPs — the easy slam dunk
19:48 Catalog feed enhancement & digital attributes
21:52 Profound and the AEO vendor landscape
23:57 Panel data: "super sus"
24:42 Trust but verify across tools
25:45 The Reddit problem
27:14 Bazaarvoice and review syndication
28:44 Don't skip the un-AI basics
30:20 Measuring impact without getting fooled
31:31 Same OKRs, AI just gets there faster
35:40 Does it leak into Walmart & Target?
37:48 Sharing content across channels
40:06 What's next: AI backlash and counterculture
42:37 Where to find Jennifer & outro

👉 Connect with Jennifer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-peters-3bbb6220/
👉 Learn more about Olly: https://www.olly.com/

🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:
📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai
📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

Scot Wingo sits down with Andrew Bell, ReFiBuy's new VP of Research and host of the new RetailPlaybook channel, for a deep dive on Alexa for Shopping, Amazon's patent playbook, and what agentic commerce optimization looks like across Amazon, Walmart, and Target.

This is a launch episode. We're announcing two things at once: Andrew Bell joining ReFiBuy as VP of Research, and the debut of RetailPlaybook. Going forward Andrew hosts Retail Playbook himself, but for episode one Scot jumped in to introduce the channel and interview Andrew in person. It's airing here on Retailgentic as a crossover. 

Highlights: 

• 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗔𝗖𝗢 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸-𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰: "Good ACO on Amazon means optimizing for Alexa for Shopping, while also keeping the basic mechanics of SEO" — two distinct layers in symbiotic union, and a different playbook for every marketplace.

• 𝟭𝟬𝟬 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀: Amazon just announced its shopping agent (the artist formerly known as Rufus, now Alexa for Shopping) is reaching roughly 100 million people.

• 𝟲𝟬% 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗹𝗶𝗳𝘁: Andrew is seeing conversion rates climb ~60% on product pages in particular.

• 𝗔𝗺𝗮𝘇𝗼𝗻'𝘀 𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲: ~$400B in counted revenue, with true GMV likely north of $600B once you account for third-party sales.

• 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗡𝗼𝘃𝗮: Alexa for Shopping runs on Claude, Amazon's own Nova, and custom models — and the question that matters is "is your product being reasoned through?"

• 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹: Andrew frames each marketplace like a different era of basketball, Jordan's two-pointer game vs. today's spread, zone-defense, three-point era. Different era, different playbook.

• 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗔𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝗔𝗦𝗜𝗡𝘀: Andrew studied Ancient Greek and preaching, then self-taught business by reading every book on the Barnes & Noble shelf over six months.

• 𝗣𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗧𝘂𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆: Andrew reads Amazon's granted patents every Tuesday (and non-granted ones Thursday), scoring each on a levels 1–5 framework because "patents are Amazon's playbook of the future."

• 𝗗𝘂𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗨𝗖𝗣 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀: Andrew thinks Amazon joined the universal commerce protocol to publish its data outward; Scot thinks they'll pull UCP inward. They agree to see who's right.

A new channel, a new voice, and a host who reads Amazon patents for fun. If you sell on Amazon, Walmart, or Target, as a brand or a third-party seller, this is the playbook you'll want open. Enjoy the conversation.

Timestamps: 
01:02 Scot introduces the new podcast
02:39 In studio — Retailgentic x Retail Playbook, first time meeting IRL
03:06 Andrew joins ReFiBuy as VP of Research + channel launch
04:13 The vision for Retail Playbook (and how it differs from Retailgentic)
05:54 "ACO everywhere" — answer engines vs. retailer-hosted agents
06:09 Amazon's scale: $400B+ and 100M Rufus users
06:55 60% conversion lift; vertical + horizontal agents; built on Claude and Nova
08:34 Why playbooks work — the Jordan-vs-LeBron era model
11:48 "Christopher Nolan style" — rewinding to Andrew's story
12:02 Andrew's background: Ancient Greek, Bible school, self-taught
12:23 Touch of Class: $100K/mo to $4M, 1,500 pages by hand
13:00 GPT store, tens of thousands of sellers, 1,000 ad campaigns
15:08 NFPA: unauthorized resellers and 3x buy box
16:25 "Amazon Science Made Simple" — patents as source of truth
18:08 Patent Tuesday and the levels 1–5 framework
19:07 Use-case language and predicting the Alexa–Rufus fusion
20:51 How Alexa for Shopping ranks: 100 → 30 → the best 5–8
22:39 Full autonomy: price-trigger auto-buy
23:18 Sparky goes live on the web — and where Walmart lags
25:35 The Death Star flywheel and Amazon's selection obsession
27:34 Shop Direct and the dueling UCP theories
28:53 ChatGPT's 20% commerce intent and the horizontal flank
30:49 Back to Retail Playbook: the first Substack and query-planning optimization
32:13 Where to follow Andrew + outro

👉 Connect with Andrew Bell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-bell-540403275/
👉 Learn more about RetailPlaybook: www.retailplaybook.ai

🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:
📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai
📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

Roger Dunn has watched retail media grow up from the agency side (Mediacom, GroupM, WPP), the tech side (he launched Criteo's retail media business in Australia), and the brand side (a global retail media role at Diageo, home of Johnnie Walker, Guinness, and Baileys). Now he's Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) at Thrad, a Silicon Valley startup building the ad infrastructure for LLMs, "ChatGPT ads, but for everyone else."

In this episode, Roger and Scot get into where advertising actually lives inside answer engines, what's working today, and how brands should think about showing up when shopping stops looking like a search box.

Highlights: 

• What Thrad is building: both the supply side (helping retailers and chatbots monetize conversational surfaces) and a self-serve buy side where brands can run ads across existing AI inventory globally, not just in the four countries where ChatGPT ads have launched.
• The new ad formats: sponsored messages, sponsored prompts, polling ads, and product carousels, plus the steady stream of formats Google unveiled at Google Marketing Live.
• AI-native campaigns: how Thrad turns a URL, a brief, or a prompt into keyword, prompt, and dynamically generated persona targeting, and why creative (human faces beat a bare logo) is where the human edge still lives.
• What ChatGPT ads look like right now: CPCs roughly in the $1–$5 range, and why the early “hot mess vs. holy grail” takes are both missing the point.
• Roger’s definition of agentic commerce: not a robot doing the final click, but AI shaping every stage of the journey: discovery, comparison, price, review synthesis.
• The state of the field: Gemini’s full-court press, Perplexity’s Comet browser, Meta routing UCP checkout into Instagram, the Shopify question Wall Street keeps asking, and where Anthropic/Claude might (or might not) play.
• Down Under as a test lab: Woolworths’ Olive, Bunnings’ Buddy, a duopoly retail market, and why Australia keeps getting the pilots.
• The advice brands actually need: start small (think $10–20K in a market) but start; get out of “keyword jail”; and the analogy that lands it: keywords are ice cubes, prompts are snowflakes. A few uniform ice cubes everyone fights over, versus infinite unique prompts where a challenger brand can finally own its wedge.

This is a genuinely useful tour of the side of agentic commerce most of us squint at, ads, from someone who has built the playbook three times over. Enjoy the conversation.

Timestamps:
02:00 Scot's intro — who is Roger Dunn?
05:17 Conversation begins — live from Sydney
06:47 Roger's backstory — UK to Australia, the agency years
08:00 Criteo, Epsilon, and a global retail media role at Diageo
09:05 What Thrad is — ads inside LLMs
09:38 Why retail media is "the nirvana of marketing"
11:13 SSP, DSP, self-serve — and ChatGPT ads in just 4 countries
17:58 The new ad formats: sponsored prompts, polling ads, product carousels
19:53 AI-native campaigns — URLs, briefs, and dynamic personas
22:30 Real ChatGPT ad numbers — CPCs and why human faces win
24:30 Roger's definition of agentic commerce
27:05 OpenAI's $100B ad target
27:55 Answer engines, product cards, and checkout in Australia
29:13 The state of the arena — ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta, Perplexity, Apple
30:57 The UCP checkout in Instagram and the Shopify squeeze
32:50 Inside the Australian market — duopolies, Temu, and Shein
35:52 Will Anthropic/Claude ever do commerce?
38:55 Retailer-hosted agents — Alexa, Woolworths' Olive, Bunnings' Buddy
42:17 The top questions brands are asking Roger
48:44 Escaping "keyword jail"
50:40 Ice cubes vs. snowflakes
52:00 How challenger brands find their wedge
54:30 Where to find Roger

👉 Connect with Roger Dunn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogerdunn/
👉 Learn more about Thrad: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thrads/

🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:
📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai
📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

This is an exclusive first look at ShopAgentic, and we cover a lot of ground with both co-founders. First we go over the big company news, then rewind through two decades of e-commerce history that brought Alex and Kai to this moment, and why they think the ground is shifting under the entire industry.

From there it’s a wide-ranging conversation about what changes when agents, not humans, become the buyers: how a commerce platform built for this era might actually work, how merchants would use it, and where payments, protocols, and front ends are all heading. 

It’s part founder story, part state-of-the-union on agentic commerce, and part early peek at what they’re building. Hit play. 👇

Highlights:

• The €1.9M pre-seed: Led by Mayventures and Greenfield Capital, with around nine entrepreneur and business-angel tickets, a “US-feeling” round raised in Europe.
• Who buys, not just how: Kai’s framing for the whole thesis, agentic commerce is the first shift that changes the buyer itself, not just the channel.
• Built for humans, not agents: Why the founders believe legacy platforms, even the ones they helped build, aren’t architected for what’s coming.
• The ACP moment: The OpenAI release that made the duo sit down and say “this is gonna change potentially everything.”
• The weekend prototype: Asked for screenshots for the pitch deck, Kai vibe-coded a working demo instead, and it’s part of why investors leaned in.
• A squad of agents, not a platform: The product reimagined from the outcome backward, sold into innovation budgets rather than million-dollar replatforming.
• Ephemeral UIs: “The fast fashion of front ends” interfaces generated on the fly
• The protocol soup: Why UCP is “the one to go for” right now, and how ShopAgentic wants to absorb that complexity so merchants don’t have to.
• A wake-up call for brands: “You’re not even part of that conversation. That’s why you’re not seeing the traffic.”
• Debut at K5 Berlin (June 22–24): Their first time on the trade-show circuit, including a business-user AI hackathon.

Two founders who've lived through every era of e-commerce software, now betting the next one gets rebuilt for agents. Whether you run a brand wondering where your traffic went or you're just curious what a platform "born agentic" looks like, this one's a glimpse into the future. Enjoy the conversation.

Timestamps: 

04:21 The big news: a €1.9M pre-seed

06:07 How the round came together (the inbound snowball)

07:54 Alex's background: age 14, Magento, CouchCommerce

10:09 Meeting Stephan Schambach and building NewStore

11:35 The German e-commerce family tree

13:27 Kai's background: Metro, robotics, commercetools

16:19 From SaaS to open source to composable

17:30 Why agentic needs a new platform — the ACP moment

20:28 The founding story (and a little Guinness)

22:07 The weekend prototype that sold investors

25:43 How agentic commerce is actually different

26:04 The "squad of agents" vision

27:59 Dashboard, chatbox, and voice for merchants

30:30 Vibe coding, Lovable, Visa, and ephemeral UIs

32:30 Stablecoins and cross-border payments

34:48 x402, MPP, micropayments, and the local-agent explosion

37:07 Debut at K5 Berlin (and a hackathon)

38:17 The agent OS and guardrails

39:09 Navigating the protocol soup: UCP, ACP, AP2

42:00 Who should be an early merchant

44:14 Launching agentic-first

44:48 LinkedIn, shopagentic.com, and wrap-up

👉 Connect with Alex: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderringsdorff/
👉 Connect with Kai: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaithomaskrause/
👉 Learn more about ShopAgentic: https://www.shopagentic.com/

🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:
📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai
📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

This week we have a rare double header. Scheduling conflicts meant no three-way interview, so we sat down with two Salesforce leaders back to back, both there to unpack the company’s big June release, headlined by the launch of its newest platform, Storefront Next.

First up is Nitin, who walks through the full sweep of the June release and makes the case for why, taken together, it's Salesforce's biggest commerce release in five years. Then Lennart takes us deeper into the agentic guts, one of our favorite parts.

The two interviews rhyme in one important way: both leaders insist that agentic commerce on your owned-and-operated channels matters just as much as showing up in ChatGPT and Gemini. As Nitin puts it, skipping your own shopper agent is like the old days of saying "I participate on Google Shopping, but I don't have search on my website." 

Highlights 

• Biggest release in five years: Nitin frames the June release as Salesforce Commerce’s biggest swing since he arrived.
• “It’s 2026, let’s combine the two together”: The forced choice between enterprise-grade and easy-to-launch is a false distinction that can be engineered away.
• The acquisition cheat code: Rather than spend five years building modern AI search in-house, Salesforce bought Cimulate. It now powers every shopper agent prompt, and it’s available even to non-Commerce Cloud customers.
• “This code should be written by Claude prompting and not by you”: Storefront Next ships you to the 90% point out of the box; the last 10% is vibe-coded. Migration utilities plus Claude Code shrink what used to be a capital-T front-end project.
• Live in under 30 minutes: Lennart’s demo path: name the storefront, connect a code repo, click go, and you’re previewing a high-performance site in under half an hour.
• You need your own Rufus AND to play off-site: Both guests hammer the distinction between agentic commerce on owned-and-operated channels and syndicated commerce via UCP on Gemini, OpenAI, and beyond. One without the other is like being on Google Shopping with no search box on your own site.
• Focus is magic: Nitin consolidated 20 initiatives down to 4–5, runs two-week iteration cycles instead of two-year PRDs, and credits that discipline (plus AI-native development) for the release’s scope.
• Advisor and confidant: Lennart’s favorite anecdote… a jewelry brand found customers were more comfortable asking an agent “how big should the ring be, how much should it cost?” than asking a friend.
• Checkout wisdom from Nitin: Stop offering eight payment options. “Just put Apple Pay on your PDP” four options max, on a good day.

The era of choosing between enterprise and easy looks like it's ending and the agents are coming either way. Enjoy the conversation.

Timestamps:

01:43 Scot's intro: a rare Salesforce double header

04:17 Part 1: Nitin Mangtani, EVP & GM of Salesforce Commerce

05:40 The Cimulate acquisition story

06:50 Inside the June release: search, Storefront Next, merchandising, POS, OMS

10:00 Four kinds of customers, one platform

11:50 Migration, Claude Code, and the 90/10 rule

14:10 Shopper agents: owned & operated vs. syndicated

17:05 How Cimulate is baked in search and agentic collapse into one

19:05 "Enterprise or easy" is a false choice

20:15 Focus, two-week iterations, and acquisitions as a cheat code

23:10 ChatGPT leaving checkout and the state of agentic commerce

26:10 Part 2: Lennart Stevens, VP of Product, Agentforce Commerce

27:15 Lennart's background: two decades on the partner side

29:15 Where Storefront Next fits in the Salesforce lineup

32:45 The unlock: a storefront live in under 30 minutes

35:20 React, Tailwind, shadcn + MCP server and 40+ skills

38:05 Design partners and the adoption curve

40:55 AI readiness: e-commerce leaders' #1 concern

43:50 The shopper agent as advisor and confidant

44:45 Agentic merchandising and the Figma unlock

👉 Connect with Nitin Mangtani: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitinmangtani/
👉 Connect with Nitin Mangtani: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennart-stevens/
👉 Learn more about Storefront Next: https://www.salesforce.com/blog/storefront-next/

🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:
📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai
📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic