The Jason & Scot Show - E-Commerce And Retail News

Recorded live at the RetailClub AI Festival in Huntington Beach, Jason and Scot sit down with Kristi Carlson, VP of Digital Technology at Kendra Scott, and Chris Hardisty, who leads the brand's e-commerce business. Kristi is a 25-year Austinite who came to Kendra Scott from Whole Foods. Chris is an old friend of the show from their shop.org board days.

The conversation covers what's next for a founder-led brand with 165 stores, including the Western-inspired Yellow Rose by Kendra Scott concept and its new Nashville store with a bar and restaurant inside. They dig into the hardest problem in jewelry e-commerce: recreating the sparkle, the lighting, the Color Bar, and the energy of store associates on a screen. They also talk about why sharing the stories behind Kendra's designs matters for customers and for LLMs, and how years of work on data quality set the team up for AI.

A standout number: virtual try-on now covers about 94% of Kendra Scott's products online. Kristi also explains how her team built RFM segmentation and affinity models more than three years ago, which gave them a real head start now that tools like ChatGPT put that data in everyone's hands. And yes, Kendra is taking Mark Cuban's seat on Shark Tank.

Enjoy the show.

http://jasonandscot.com

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

Recorded live at the Retail Club AI Festival in Huntington Beach, Jason and Scot sit down with Tom Verrilli, Chief Product Officer of Whatnot. Jason says Whatnot is now his answer when big brands ask what they aren't paying enough attention to, the way TikTok Shop was two years ago. Tom came to Whatnot after nearly seven years at Twitch.

The conversation covers how Whatnot grew from a static Funko Pop trading site into live commerce across 224 categories in nine countries, where fashion is now the biggest vertical by order volume. Tom explains why live selling gives small brick-and-mortar businesses back the personality that a product detail page strips away. He also walks through Whatnot's auction and fixed-price formats, including sudden death auctions, flash sales, and "party purchase" group buying. Other topics include how trust works when every sale is on video, why "a format is not a moat," and how real-time recommendations (and the acquisition of the AI company Shaped) tell a Star Wars Lego collector apart from a grandma buying Lego for her grandkids.

The headline number: sellers did about $8 billion in sales on Whatnot last year, and Tom expects that to comfortably double this year. His thesis is that live commerce is where e-commerce was in 2005, and that everything sold online will eventually be sold live.

Enjoy the show.

http://jasonandscot.com

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

Recorded live from the Retail Club AI Festival in Huntington Beach, Jason and Scot sit down with Nicole Netland, head of design and research at Google Shopping, fresh off her main-stage session. Nicole brings a rare vantage point: years of retail experience at Amazon, Target, and Best Buy, and now a team that designs shopping experiences across Search, AI Mode, Gemini, and YouTube.

The conversation starts with personalization, a topic Nicole admits had been "a little bit sleepy" until now. Context changes everything: AI Mode queries are three times longer than traditional search, and shoppers can now connect Gmail, Photos, and Calendar for results tailored to them. From there, the three dig into Universal Cart and why a cart is also a wish list, how AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini fit together, and why Google believes the consumer pull is real this time after years of shopping experiments.

They also get into how AI is transforming the practice of UX research and design itself, and where multimodal shopping is headed as voice, text, images, and video blend into one experience. And yes, product data still matters. A lot.

Enjoy the show.

http://jasonandscot.com

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

The second half of the briefing starts with the experience layer that holds Amazon's grocery push together, including the new green grocery interface and the end of the three-cart problem. From there it's Prime at 21 years old and why Amazon would rather it never became a profit center, a walk through the Prime Air drone factory, and where Alexa+ and AFS go next. It closes on the scenario that should worry every retailer, which is a shopper who asks ChatGPT first and never opens Amazon at all.

Correction: we credit Prime with a DoorDash Plus membership. The Prime restaurant delivery benefit is Grubhub+.

http://jasonandscot.com

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

Jason and Scot are in the same room for once, recording from Seattle after two days inside an Amazon executive briefing on grocery and Prime. They get into why grocery is the frequency engine every retailer covets, how Walmart wrote this playbook back in 1990, and what Andy Jassy actually meant when he told investors grocery had seen a "trajectory change." Along the way: a field guide to every data source people use to guess at retail numbers, and why the weekly stock-up trip is quietly dying.

http://jasonandscot.com

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

Recorded live at NRF Nexus, Brian Seewald joins Jason and Scot to talk through the digital side of the Victoria's Secret turnaround. Brian traces his path from a May Company buying-office trainee to running e-commerce at The Limited in 2007 ("I don't know if this internet thing is gonna work"), then digs into what conversion rate even means when traffic quality varies wildly by channel, why the VS and PINK apps punch above their weight, and how PINK Wednesday Drops went from a small hack to a real part of the business.

He and Jason get into why no digital bra-fitting tool, quizzes, body scanning, virtual try-on, has replaced the in-store experience, and Brian lays out the AI and agentic commerce work: Google's UCP, TikTok Shop, an AI assistant on bra PDPs, and the unglamorous PIM and content foundation that has to come first. "We don't want a solution looking for a problem."

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Learn more 👉 www.jasonandscot.com

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

Recorded live from NRF Nexus, Jason and Scot sit down with Josh Krepon, President of U.S. D2C and Global Digital at Steve Madden. Josh shares his path through Ralph Lauren, Victoria's Secret, Tory Burch and Cole Haan, and what it takes to operate inside founder-led companies. At Steve Madden, a $3 billion business with an in-house sample factory and brands including Dolce Vita, Betsey Johnson and Kurt Geiger, his remit covers stores, e-commerce and marketing under one P&L. He makes the case that this alignment moves decisions faster than siloed org charts allow.

The conversation turns to social and TikTok Shop. Josh is candid that its real value is discovery, and digs into the economics of low AOVs, creator commissions and not owning the customer. Brands that can hold full price at higher price points have a structural advantage there. On tariffs, he describes a constant calculus of what to pass through, what margin to absorb and where to cut cost, and how quickly the sourcing math keeps flipping.

The back half goes deep on agentic commerce. Steve Madden is live on Google's Universal Checkout, a partnership Google name-checked on its own earnings call, and recently launched two brands on DoorDash. Josh explains how AI has upended vendor selection, where a long operating history can now signal legacy technology, and why short pilots have replaced long RFPs. He closes on where this lands: discovery, not autonomous checkout, is the real prize for a brand like his.

EP344 - How Brooklinen Is Preparing for Agentic Commerce

Live from NRF Nexus in Colorado Springs, Jason and Scot sit down with Abbie Weiss, SVP of Digital & E-Commerce at Brooklinen, to talk digital-first retail, changing discovery, customer experience, and preparing for agentic commerce.

Abbie shares how Brooklinen is expanding across retail, B2B, and the design trade while keeping customer experience, and "ease, at the center of its strategy. They also explore the changing role of discovery, influencers and affiliates, the blurring lines between awareness and conversion, and how Brooklinen is preparing for agentic commerce through better content, catalog readiness, and cross-team collaboration.

http://jasonandscot.com

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

n this episode, Jason and Scot reunite after seeing each other in person, sharing stories from recent conferences and discussing how social media, micro-influencers, and AI-powered shopping agents are reshaping the way consumers discover and book travel.

The main event, though, is Amazon's Q2 earnings. They break down AWS's continued growth, stronger margins, and Wall Street's reaction to Amazon's aggressive AI investments. From retail performance and gains in everyday essentials to robotics, custom AI chips like Trainium and Graviton, and the company's rapidly expanding advertising business, this episode unpacks the biggest takeaways from one of Amazon's most important quarters.

http://jasonandscot.com

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

Recorded live from NRF Nexus in Colorado Springs, Jason and Scot sit down with keynote speaker Mitch Joel. His core thesis is that the attention economy is over and we're entering the intimacy economy, where the winning brands make every customer feel like the experience was built just for them. From there the conversation covers why digital commerce broke serendipity and discovery, how curation becomes a competitive edge once AI can scale it, whether agentic shopping is actually what shoppers want, and how AI is being deployed at companies (often pointed at internal productivity instead of the customer). It closes on trust, and the uncomfortable cases where AI improves the experience but only if you don't disclose it.

http://jasonandscot.com

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