Sweetwater has a reputation that arrives before the box does. Ask any working musician and you get the same two details without prompting, the candy and the phone call.

Laura Smith is Vice President of Marketplaces at Sweetwater Sound, the nation's largest online musical instrument retailer, and hers is the job where that reputation is easiest to lose, because she is the one selling Sweetwater's products on somebody else's storefront.

She starts somewhere unglamorous. Consistency begins in the product data, and on a catalog as large as Amazon's the real risk is listing a product against the wrong page, one a retailer usually did not write. When the page is wrong, her team routes the fix back to the brand and will execute it on their behalf.

What she is most direct about is fulfillment. Sweetwater keeps its Amazon business through the third-party site specifically so it can control that, which means the guitars still go through a 55-point inspection, still sit in a humidity-controlled warehouse, and still get packed the same way. The warehouse never learns which channel the order came from, and customers who arrive through Amazon get routed back to Sweetwater's own service team.

On AI in content she answers yes, and then fills in the second half that usually goes missing. Humans first, because Sweetwater sells to musicians who research deeply before they buy. AI shows up as throughput rather than authorship. She also makes the case that Amazon is an opportunity rather than a competitor, and extends the same logic to LLMs and TikTok Shop without overselling how far along any of it is.

Guest: Laura Smith, Vice President of Marketplaces, Sweetwater Sound

John Riewerts leads product engineering at Acoustic, a marketing engagement company. He joins us on day three of eTail Boston to take apart a phrase every marketer uses and few define, bringing the audience closer to the brand, and to explain why the listening half of marketing is the half that gets underbuilt.

Riewerts frames the discipline as two tools. Marketers send messages, which becomes campaigning. And marketers listen, which means reading behavior, because as he puts it, no consumer ever sends a brand a message saying whether they like it. They answer through their actions instead.

He also walks through Acoustic AI, the company's new layer on top of the platform, and the argument behind it. Generative tools are only as good as the context they are given, so the value is in what the model gets to read. Beyond writing messages and building segments, Acoustic AI pushes unprompted recommendations when it spots repeat buyers slowing down, interest building in an out-of-stock product, unsubscribes spiking on one campaign, or consumer fatigue climbing.

He closes on four pillars, product, campaign, audience and behavioral intelligence, and a critique of the current tooling. Marketing automation is campaign-centric, and nobody lives in a single-campaign world.

Guest: John Riewerts, Lead Product Engineering, Acoustic

Mike Heilig is the general manager at Binary Anvil, a web development agency and systems integrator that has been running for 18 years, built mostly on Adobe Commerce, and has since branched into other platforms and a product of its own.

He takes on the SaaS promise directly. Moving to SaaS genuinely removes the hosting and patching burden, and then relocates the difficulty rather than deleting it, because business complexity does not go away. His fit test is simple. A very simple business may belong on SaaS. B2B requirements, complex catalogs and complex price lists probably do not. The mistake he sees merchants make is shopping for technology before writing down the business outcome they want.

The conversation turns to Flux, Binary Anvil's React and Next.js headless front end that attaches to an Adobe Commerce backend and supports B2C and B2B out of the box. For D&B Supply, a large farm and ranch retailer, rebuilding on Flux while keeping the Adobe Commerce backend moved site speed, conversions, organic traffic and search rankings, and cut roughly 57,000 dollars a year off upgrade cost. Heilig explains why decoupling the front end is what makes upgrades cheap, and credits Adobe for maintaining old APIs instead of deprecating them.

On AI mediated commerce he is patient rather than breathless. Structured data, machine readable documentation and clean APIs are the groundwork, the requirement is on the horizon rather than here, and the open question is whether shoppers are ready to hand a credit card to an agent at all.

Guest: Mike Heilig, General Manager, Binary Anvil

Leif Welch named his company after a music startup that failed inside a year, and he kept the name through the rebuild anyway, because the idea sitting underneath it, connecting buyers and sellers with more transparency than either of them was used to, had always been the part worth keeping. The first Jamloop was a marketplace for musicians to find new and used gear, with a social network for local players attached to it.

Jamloop is now a platform for brands and their agencies to advertise on streaming television. Welch describes it as a Facebook or Google Ads style platform for the connected TV world, with an analytics layer that tracks store visits, website visits, purchases, and whether the campaign earned a real return on ad spend.

Recorded on the eTail Boston floor ahead of his keynote, Welch previews the argument he is taking to the stage. Search and social are demand-capture channels running into saturation, and television has always been the thing that creates demand in the first place. He splits AI into two jobs, creative versioning and platform-level campaign operations, and closes with the 70-30 blueprint Jamloop is putting in front of advertisers now.

Guest: Leif Welch, Founder and CEO, Jamloop

Jeff Wender is Chief Revenue Officer at Minty. He opened with a term worth stealing: money maxing, which he describes as what shoppers have always done when costs are high and every dollar has to stretch further.

The number underneath his pitch is the one merchants already know and mostly ignore. Roughly 5% of people who land on an ecommerce site buy something. The other 95% are in discovery, moving between sites and comparing, and the brand has no idea who they are. Minty works that 95%, using a permissioned database of over 450 million connected devices to identify those shoppers and put an incentive in front of them.

On AI, Jeff refused to give an opinion and gave data instead. Minty's national holiday shopper survey found 78% of people expect to use AI in some form this holiday season, mostly for discovery rather than purchase. Their answer is Minty Promote, which syndicates a brand's products and incentives across the major LLMs so the brand is in the conversation when the recommendation gets made.

Also covered: the Shopify app and where the instrumentation sits, the Minty Ads retail media layer, and why full funnel matters more than any single tactic.

Chapters

(00:05) Introductions at eTail Boston

Recorded live at eTail Boston 2026.

Sidd Motwani, co-founder and CEO of Malachyte, on real-time personalization that starts before the first click. Malachyte builds a user vector, a numerical representation of each shopper's intent and preference, with no third-party cookies, no purchase history, and no sign-in required. Sidd and his co-founder built the user vector platform at Spotify, where it powers most of the application across music, podcasts, and audiobooks.

In this conversation:

Chapters

00:00
eTail Boston and the data and AI track

01:19
What Malachyte does

02:04
The Spotify user vector story

02:52
Free pilot and the roadmap

05:02
Agentic commerce and proactivity

Sidd Motwani: LinkedIn

Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026. To learn more about our at-event interviews, go to talk-commerce.com/events

Jeff Otto, CMO of Riskified, shares insights on how AI and machine learning are transforming e-commerce fraud prevention, enhancing customer experience, and protecting merchant profitability. Discover the latest innovations in identity verification, fraud detection, and the future of agentic commerce.

key topics

• AI and machine learning in fraud detection
• Identity graph technology and cross-merchant fraud prevention
• Balancing fraud prevention with customer experience
• Emerging threats like deepfake and fake customer calls

Chapters

00:00
Introduction to Riskified and Jeff Otto

02:01
The Evolution of Fraud Prevention in E-commerce

05:31
The Role of AI and Machine Learning in Fraud Detection

09:32
Challenges in Customer Service and Fraud Prevention

13:24
The Future of Agentic Commerce and AI Integration

17:15
Metrics and the Cost of Fraud for Merchants

20:54
Conclusion and Future Directions for Riskified

Catherine Hayden, Chief Marketing Officer of Kate Farms, on why health nutrition is not a niche category.

Six in ten Americans live with a chronic health condition. Catherine explains what that means for how Kate Farms markets, and what changes as the brand expands into 6,800 doors across Walmart and CVS.

In this conversation:

Chapters

00:00
Introduction and What Is New at Kate Farms

01:03
The Here for the Champions Campaign

01:54
Fireside Chat Preview

02:36
How Kate Farms Uses AI

04:15
Building Awareness and Closing Thoughts

Catherine Hayden: LinkedIn

Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026. To learn more about our at-event interviews, go to talk-commerce.com/events

Cem Atik, co-founder of Harucon-Ventures, shares insights on turning marketing into a profit control system, leveraging data and AI in e-commerce, and the importance of human creativity alongside AI. Discover practical strategies for data-driven decision making, optimizing unit economics, and the future of AI in marketing.

key topics

• Turning marketing into a profit control system
• Leveraging data and AI in e-commerce
• Importance of unit economics in marketing
• Future trends of AI in marketing

takeaways

• Tracking full control of unit economics is crucial for profitable marketing.
• AI is a powerful tool but requires human oversight and interpretation.
• Emotional messaging significantly improves ad performance.
• Benchmarking costs helps identify inefficiencies and optimize margins.
• AI should be used as a partner, not a replacement for human creativity.

Chapters

00:00
Introduction to Sam Atec and Harucon-Ventures

02:24
Transforming Marketing into a Profit Control System

09:00
The Role of AI in Marketing

11:42
Understanding Click-Through Rates and Emotional Marketing

19:38
Future Trends and the Importance of Human Creativity

Danny Kirk, founder of ReddiReach, shares insights on how Reddit and AI search optimization can boost brand visibility and influence search engine rankings. Discover practical strategies for leveraging Reddit data, understanding AI filtering, and preparing your brand for the future of AI-driven search and commerce. https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielpkirk/

key topics

• Reddit as a data source for AI and search
• Strategies for brand engagement on Reddit
• Impact of AI filtering and content quality
• Future trends in AI search and e-commerce
• Practical steps for SEO and brand visibility

Chapters

00:00
Introduction to Danny Kirk and ReddiReach

01:53
The Power of Reddit in AI Search Optimization

09:25
Strategies for Brands on Reddit

13:56
Navigating Local SEO and E-commerce Challenges

18:24
Future Trends in AI and E-commerce