Retail Transformers S2E4 - Scot Wingo

[00:00:00] Teaser

[00:00:01] Ricardo Belmar: What if your next customer never visits your website because their AI assistant already bought what they needed?

[00:00:07] Casey Golden: And what happens to brand loyalty when AI is doing the shopping and your product catalog is completely invisible to it.

[00:00:15] Ricardo Belmar: Today on the Retail Transformers podcast, we're talking with e-commerce legend and OG, Scot Wingo, about the rise of agentic commerce and how it might just rewrite all the rules of retail.

[00:00:27] Casey Golden: From dreams of Instant Checkout in chatbots to AI powered shopping agents, this is shaping up to be the future of retail and it's coming fast, whether you're ready for it, or like it or not.

[00:00:39] Ricardo Belmar: Take a few minutes to listen up and don't miss it. Your customer's AI agent definitely won't.​

[00:00:50] Show Intro

[00:00:50] Ricardo Belmar: Welcome to the Retail Transformers Podcast, part of the number one indie podcast network for retail, where we break down the ideas, the leaders, and the bold moves [00:01:00]reshaping the future of retail.

[00:01:01] I'm Ricardo Belmar.

[00:01:02] Casey Golden: And I'm Casey Golden. And today, wow. Today is definitely going to be a top download.

[00:01:08] Ricardo Belmar: I'm excited and we'll get into some of the details why this is an extra special guest for us, especially for me.

[00:01:14] Casey Golden: That's right. Some of the real insider scoop there for everyone.

[00:01:18] But before we do that, we have to talk about some of our own super powerful news, right?

[00:01:23] Ricardo Belmar: Yes, a hundred percent. So fans of the show, fans of any of our shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network, I'm sure have heard us talk about Good pods before.

[00:01:33] Casey Golden: An amazing audience, great following, and we've been super lucky to be building there.

[00:01:39] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. And this past month, in March, I was pleasantly, I don't know, shocked, surprised, I'm not even sure what the right word is. I guess impressed, because I certainly didn't expect this. But during one of the weeks in March, for the first time ever in the history of our Retail Razor Podcast Network, our four shows took the top four spots in the business management weekly [00:02:00] and monthly top podcast charts on Good pods. That's right. The top four podcasts on both the weekly and monthly business management podcast charts were taken up by our four shows. The Retail Razor Show, Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness and Data Blades.

[00:02:16] And not only that, not only that, there's more. We also had the number one spot on the top, weekly and monthly Indie Careers Podcast Chart. And, and wait, there's more. We also had the number one podcast in the top weekly and monthly Indie Marketing Podcast Chart. So yeah, you could say we, we just totally dominated the business podcast charts in March, a complete trifecta of management, marketing, and careers, in the month of March.

[00:02:45] Casey Golden: Wow. I mean, that's amazing. Who would've thought that we'd hit such an incredible milestone before our five year anniversary of doing these shows?

[00:02:52] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, exactly right. And so, you know, excuse this listeners and viewers for indulging for a moment there, but it was hard to hold [00:03:00] back the news any longer. A huge thank you to all of our amazing fans on Goodpods. You guys are amazing. Thank you for the support. Keep on giving us those thumbs up on every episode so we stay on top.

[00:03:11] Casey Golden: Yeah, we absolutely love you guys and after such an incredible show on Spotify Wrapped for our 2025 just a few months ago, now this, but not to leave out any of our fans who are listening on Apple Podcasts.

[00:03:28] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, so we're doing pretty good there too. Love, love the updates there. So we've got two podcasts ranking in the top 20 Retail Management Podcasts right now, and our Blade to Greatness podcast is in the top five retail careers podcast too. So growing fast, right after our blowout month on YouTube in February actually too, where we had 55,000 views that month.

[00:03:51] So everybody's loving the video clearly, loving that shift to video. So if case anyone was wondering weren't, we're gonna keep doing video and audio and keep doing 'em both on all our [00:04:00] shows. So if you haven't checked out the other shows, this is by the way, a great time to go and do that. This is your chance.

[00:04:07] Check out the other shows on the Retail Razor Podcast network. Let us know what you think. Drop a five star rating. I don't know, maybe drop a review or or two. Give us a like on YouTube and, tell a retail friend to check us out. You can find all our shows on our website@retailraiser.com, on the YouTube channel, Retail Razor, and of course in your favorite podcast player, which for a lot of people, seems to be Goodpods.

[00:04:29] Casey Golden: Well that is some pretty big news to report, but I think we've got one more thing to share,

[00:04:36] Ricardo Belmar: We do. We do. So let me tell you about Retail Club. Our new sponsor of the Retail Razor Podcast Network.

[00:04:42] Join 2000 retail leaders at the Retail Club AI Festival on September 22nd to 24th in Huntington Beach. Dive deep into how AI is reshaping retail, while soaking up some sun at a fully outdoor beachside venue. Decision makers from retailers and [00:05:00] brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement.

[00:05:05] Just head to retailclub.com to learn more and get your ticket today. We'll have a link in the show notes as well for you for that. So thank you to Retail Club for helping us bring you this podcast and the other shows in our network.

[00:05:18] Casey Golden: Yep. And it's one of my favorite con, it, it's completely gone up to my favorite conference,

[00:05:24] Ricardo Belmar: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:05:26] Casey Golden: Yeah.

[00:05:27] Ricardo Belmar: yeah. This is only their second year and the first year was completely worth it and we're looking forward to seeing everybody back for this year.

[00:05:33] Casey Golden: Yep. So now that that has been said, I'm very excited for today's episode because we're diving into a topic that's got a whole retail, the whole retail world buzzing, especially after Shop Talk. Agentic Commerce. The question is, is it a buzzword or is it the next big wave in how we shop?

[00:05:56] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, that's right. I mean, if you've ever asked ChatGPT to recommend a product, [00:06:00] you've probably already dipped your toes into the world of agentic commerce. But what happens when AI doesn't just help you shop, it shops for you? Maybe you were one of the few people who took advantage of the short-lived Instant Checkout in Chat GPT and bought something without ever even leaving the chat.

[00:06:15] And maybe you're one of the folks who are hoping that comes back.

[00:06:18] Casey Golden: And who better to help us make sense of this than today's guest, one of the OGs of e-commerce and an OG retail podcaster himself. Scot Wingo. He's not just a pioneer in e-comm, he's practically one of its founding

[00:06:35] Ricardo Belmar: Exactly. Scott founded Channel Advisor back in the, uh, way early days of online retail. Uh, of course he co-hosts the legendary Jason and Scott Show, one of the OG retail podcasts. And he is back with a new venture, ReFiBuy and a new podcast Retailgentic, as well as a Substack newsletter. All are, which are focused on helping retailers navigate the rise of agentic ai.

[00:06:58] Casey Golden: We are talking about ai [00:07:00] shopping agents, instant checkout, inside chatbots, maybe the death of traditional marketing funnels and what retailers need to do right now to stay in the game.

[00:07:11] Ricardo Belmar: We'll hear Scott's take on why this shift is happening faster than anything he's seen in 30 years of tech and why ignoring it might be the worst advice you could take.

[00:07:21] Casey Golden: I mean, holidays right around the corner

[00:07:22] Ricardo Belmar: That's right.

[00:07:24] Casey Golden: So buckle up listeners, because this episode is packed with insights, hopefully a few laughs and most importantly, a roadmap for the future of retail in the next six months

[00:07:34] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, it's really got something for everybody, doesn't it?

[00:07:37] Casey Golden: Absolutely.

[00:07:38] Ricardo Belmar: Okay, then let's get into it. Here's our conversation with Scot Wingo, founder of Channel Advisor, now RefIBuy, podcast host of the Jason and Scott Show, and Retailgentic, and author of the Retailgentic Newsletter.

[00:07:51] Welcome, Scot Wingo!

[00:07:51] ​

[00:07:57] Ricardo Belmar: Scott, welcome to the Retail Transformers [00:08:00] podcast. This is an extra special treat for us, especially for me as your one of the OG retail podcasters. I can say that, the Jason and Scot Show was probably one of the original inspiration for me to even start the first show we had in our Retail Razor Podcast Network.

[00:08:13] So thanks for, for being here.

[00:08:16] Scot Wingo: Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I love retail and transformers was one of my favorite cartoons as a kid, so I'm excited to talk about Optimus Prime and all

[00:08:24] Ricardo Belmar: There you go. Exactly. So you see the, the see because you're here. I'm, I'm Casey will legally allow me to say the usual catchphrase that I use on, on the show about how our guest is always more than meets the eye.

[00:08:34] Scot Wingo: Ah, I like it. Yes, very good.

[00:08:37] Ricardo Belmar: Otherwise, she's banned me from saying that.

[00:08:40] Scot Wingo: You're the only one that understands what it is.

[00:08:43] Ricardo Belmar: Exactly.

[00:08:45] Casey Golden: Yeah, Scott. I mean, I have to say as Ricardo is so fond of saying on the show in particular, you're one of those people who unquestionably defines why we have this show. As a retail [00:09:00] transformer.

[00:09:00] Scot Wingo: Awesome. Thank you. Just a simple guy making his way in the universe, but I appreciate it. So we yeah, I don't. We can go into the backstory. If your interested on the whole Jason Scott Show thing, it's not as exciting as people make it out to be, but

[00:09:12] Casey Golden: We have a huge

[00:09:13] Scot Wingo: a good run.

[00:09:14] Casey Golden: material to cover with you today. So,

[00:09:17] Scot Wingo: Yeah.

[00:09:18] Casey Golden: I hope you've set a few hours aside.

[00:09:22] Scot Wingo: I got till the top of the hour. Let's see if we, we, well, we can fit in.

[00:09:27] ChannelAdvisor Marketplace Origins

[00:09:27] Casey Golden: Well, from Channel Advisor to Refi Buy, you've been driving e-commerce innovation for a while now, Scott from founding Channel Advisor in 2000, what? 2001. And taking it public in 2013 to successfully launching multiple startups and now launching Refi Buy to tackle the AI commerce frontier. Can you take us through some of that journey?

[00:09:52] How did your early experiences in the e-commerce space, like shape your vision for this new era of agentic commerce?

[00:09:59] Scot Wingo: Yeah, so [00:10:00] the idea of Channel Advisor is, there was a long pre-story, but we'll just like, you know, jump right in. We. We had this idea that more and more people would use what we now call marketplaces. The only one we had in 2001 was eBay, and it wasn't really a marketplace. It was an auction site.

[00:10:14] And, and they were just trans. They had just added like the buy button, if you can believe that. It was a big controversial thing, like, like, you know, the big community got in an uproar, like this is an auction site. You can't just buy stuff. It's crazy. But that was the vision. Now it took five years for the next marketplace to come along.

[00:10:30] Now the good news is when it did, it was a good one. It was a bookstore called Amazon, decided they were gonna open a marketplace. And what was unique about the Amazon marketplace versus the eBay one? In the, in the, this is kinda like the, the technical side of these things. Is Amazon is the wild west.

[00:10:46] So, if Ricardo wanted to sell his awesome orange jacket there, he would just go list it and he would just say, this is an orange jacket. He wouldn't even put Nike if he wanted to. Whatever he wanted to do, he could. It's just totally freeform. But then Amazon had this idea because they were [00:11:00]retailer that had battened on a marketplace.

[00:11:02] They had this catalog already, and you had to either map to their catalog or add an item to the catalog and then. What they did is they had kinda like this golden SKU and then hung off that SKU were offers. So if you had, let's say six people were selling a jacket like his you would say, here's the jacket.

[00:11:19] And then here are the people that have offers for this jacket in whatever size, color, combination. That innovation then led to them being very, consumers liked that 'cause it was easier to find stuff. So it was better for discovery. It was also easier on the seller side, and it improved both the seller and shopper experiences.

[00:11:37] And then after that that then, that progressed into FBA.

[00:11:41] Ricardo Belmar: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:42] Scot Wingo: Which progressed into ads and owning the buy box. There's like this whole stack of things that built on top of that basic foundation that now have been replicated many times over. So then Walmart came out, Target, now there's marketplaces all over the place.

[00:11:54] TikTok Shop, I put in that category. Internationally, you've got all those in marketplaces. [00:12:00] So, it was, it was. Kind of quiet for five years in the little backwater of this idea, marketplaces. And then it just went vertical in 2006 and that's how we were able to go public in 2013 is we had, we had, leaned into that pretty heavily and we were in the right place at the right time and had been sitting there waiting for that wave to come along.

[00:12:17] And finally it did. And we got really good at some of these really complicated things that'll come up later in the story, which is how do you, how do you take not just Ricardo's one shirt, but now you've got a store that wants to sell on one of these things and they've got 10,000 SKUs.

[00:12:31] How do you map 'em to those? How do you keep it updated? How do you synchronize? So then, then if you wanna sell on six Marketplace, how do you synchronize all this inventory? So there's this, I've got five of something and I wanna list it on 50 places. How do I make sure I don't sell 200 of the five things I have and create a lot of upset customers.

[00:12:50] So, so there ends up being e-commerce is like, one of the reasons I love it is because it's, so every time we make something easier on the front end for the shopper, the complexity on the [00:13:00]backend goes vertical. And from a technology perspective, I that, that's always a fun challenge is to try to solve those things so that, that's kind of like the Channel Advisor story.

[00:13:10] And you know. So we went public in 2013. In 2015 I moved to the board level. I was, I'd been running the company for, basically 14, 15 years. And it got to be, once you're public, it's really just like a financial job. You're just meeting with Wall Street analysts all the time. And I really like product and customers and building, kinda like that building phase.

[00:13:29] So, then we, we ended up selling that to private equity in 2022. And they rebranded it to Rithum R-I-T-H-U-M, so it's still operating company. I think the combined entity, they combined it with a thing called Commerce Hub and that, yeah, I think it's like a three or $400 million run rate now. So, so a very big kind of software as a service, e-commerce enablement company.

[00:13:50] And then.

[00:13:51] Agents Solve Catalog Mapping

[00:13:51] Scot Wingo: 2024, I was between startups and I was just kinda like, I wasn't really even thinking about it. And I started just learning as much as I could about all these, [00:14:00] bo, both LLMs. And then they, they prefer a database format called vector databases. Some people call it Retrieval Augmented Generation, where you take a bunch of data and put it in a format the LLM can consume.

[00:14:11] So I was reading about that. Then I found, I really liked the Anthropic, put out these white papers and they were really, I, I don't code anymore, but I have a technical background and, and degree, and I'm a computer engineering degree, so I can kinda like rock most of that stuff. I just don't want, wanna write code.

[00:14:26] And so I was reading this Anthropic paper about this new thing they had and it was called Agentic Frameworks. And they said, here at Anthropic we use agents for almost everything. And here's what a new agent is, it's got a little LLM brain and it's got memory and a database, which is a a, a vector database.

[00:14:42] And then we give it tools and it can go do stuff. And that's a really cool thing. And in fact, we're gonna come out with a new way of using tools called MCP. So that's when they came out with this, this protocol called MCP. The, the layman's way of thinking about MCP is it basically gives agents the ability to call APIs.

[00:14:57] So it gives them like. If they can't just like walk up to [00:15:00] an API, it gives 'em like a little framework to kind of say, what is this API? How do I use it, and what do I achieve with it? And then they said, here's like six different ways you can structure these. Well, one of the ways they, they proposed was called an evaluation framework.

[00:15:13] And we had this very manual process in the era of channel advisor where in that mapping process I was talking about with Amazon, about half the time a human would have to get involved. And it was pretty messy because we would say, we have this Nike Orange jacket and size large, and here's, here's what we know about it.

[00:15:30] We have these five attributes. And the Amazon catalog would say, great. We have 30 different SKUs that match that. You gotta pick one. And, and it would be like little things like, well. Is the zipper gold or silver? And how does the color fall and what's the cuff look like? So you'd have to like almost CSI this thing to do a process of eliminating, to get down to the SKU it actually mapped to because you didn't have the data. We had this sparse data problem. So humans did this, and we actually outsourced that to Bulgaria. So at our peak we had you guys are sitting down, we had 500 [00:16:00]Bulgarians doing basically in shifts 24

[00:16:02] Ricardo Belmar: Wow.

[00:16:03] Scot Wingo: because of our scale. And we, we had all these tools built around 'em and stuff.

[00:16:06] But it was very expensive and the quality was never where we wanted to be. So I thought I couldn't shake this idea. I wonder if we could solve that mapping problem. I call it canonicalization. I wonder if we could solve it with these agents. And I talked to a colleague that had left Rithum and asked, like, did, did Rithum still have this problem?

[00:16:24] He's like, oh yeah, it got even worse. And, and you know, it's a big mess because every marketplace you'd have, it would, it would

[00:16:29] Ricardo Belmar: the would be different. Yeah. Right,

[00:16:30] Scot Wingo: more complicated. And so then long story short. In 90 days, we had a prototype of an agentic system that could solve this problem without human intervention and do more.

[00:16:42] We would, we, we had it in, we always wanted to kinda like supercharge people's catalog to add a lot more things that were missing. Like if you found out the cuff had a, you know, it was a squishy or a. You know, elastic cuff versus a button or something. We wanted to capture all that. So then we're like, let's build agents to go do that.

[00:16:58] And we did. So then we were like, what [00:17:00] do we do with this? I thought we were onto something, but I didn't know what to do with it. I thought, are we gonna sell this as like an API or something? And then Perplexity came out with buy on pro the next day, the first agentic. It was really bad, but it, it was kind of like.

[00:17:12] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:17:12] Scot Wingo: see, I could see where it was going. And they're, they're, they had a, they had a golden catalog just like Amazon did. And I was like, and it was a hot mess express, you could tell no one there knew what a variation was. And I was like, oh boy, this is this, this is gonna be this is gonna be big and it's gonna be a big mess.

[00:17:27] And this is gonna be a, a fertile opportunity for us to build stuff, and that's when we decided to start Refi Buy and refi buy stands for I believe agentic commerce will compress the shopper's journey, which I, I call research find buy. So Refi Buy is the, the compression of those three words to, to kind of illustrate what we think is gonna happen here.

[00:17:48] Casey Golden: So you're gonna be able to make it so I can actually do a search to find a pencil skirt only with a double kick pleat.

[00:17:55] Scot Wingo: Exactly. That's,

[00:17:56] Casey Golden: I only want double kick pleats, people!

[00:17:59] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:17:59] Scot Wingo: know [00:18:00] any other pleat is just terrible. I

[00:18:01] Ricardo Belmar: Casey's still looking for the LLM that's gonna help her find that.

[00:18:04] Scot Wingo: Yep. We're gonna get there. Casey,

[00:18:07] Casey Golden: I know, I know. Nobody seems to put it on their product page. I have go and look at the back picture...

[00:18:13] Scot Wingo: this is the frustration with products. Absolutely. This is a hundred percent.

[00:18:17] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:18:17] Scot Wingo: filtered now, which is was our big innovation, doesn't work because you're actually incented as a merchant to have about five or six attributes and no more, because the more you add, the more problems it will cause you. It's oddly enough.

[00:18:30] So there's like a really, there's a big disincentive to provide a lot of In the old world, uh, in the old Google world.

[00:18:35] Ricardo Belmar: Hmm. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

[00:18:37] Scot Wingo: why you're, you're double. What is it? A double kick pleat, whatever that was. Yeah.

[00:18:42] Ricardo Belmar: That's it's so

[00:18:43] Scot Wingo: why every your, your favorite pleat is hard to find.

[00:18:46] Casey Golden: Yeah, it's like on the back of men's jackets you have a

[00:18:49] Scot Wingo: Oh,

[00:18:50] Casey Golden: a little flap. I

[00:18:51] Scot Wingo: Yeah. The little

[00:18:52] Casey Golden: pencil skirt to have the same thing.

[00:18:54] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. Yeah. Right. [00:19:00] I

[00:19:01] can, yeah. Yeah. So you'd think that would be a feature you'd everybody would wanna point out

[00:19:06] Casey Golden: I know. Very rare. Um, there's not a lot of them, so

[00:19:10] it's, you know, needle in a haystack.

[00:19:12] But I think that it's a huge opportunity. These days.

[00:19:16] Getting recommendations is all fine and dandy, but being able to actually understand the product and make all of those features down to pick stitching and

[00:19:28] everything else, like really getting that down.

[00:19:31] Even fabric

[00:19:32] Ricardo Belmar: Which are all the things you can actually see when you're looking at the product in the store. Right. And like two seconds, you know? You know your answer. Yeah.

[00:19:39] Because you're looking at it. Yeah.

[00:19:41] Podcasting Origin Story

[00:19:41] Ricardo Belmar: Right, well, so, so Scott, aside from all all this amazing work you're doing, building these companies, you are also well known as a retail podcaster and hopping on the mic. Starting with the Jason and Scott Show, I mentioned earlier, one of our inspirations for starting this show and clearly one of the original and top [00:20:00] e-Commerce podcast. And just as quick side note, you beat Jason to being on our show. Um, just a little check mark on that one. And of course now you're also hosting the Retailgentic podcast, where you focus on all things agentic ai, and agentic commerce. So I'm just curious, like what inspired you to start podcasting specifically in retail tech right back in the day? What what was the, trigger that caused you guys to, to say, yeah, this is the, the thing we should do.

[00:20:25] Scot Wingo: Yeah, so back when I started, uh, channel advisor there was this group called shop.org, and they were setting, they invented the term Cyber Monday, and they kind of set the, they were kind of like where the movers and shakers were. And I really wanted to be on this board that they had, that a board of advisors, like a financial board, but a, board,

[00:20:46] Ricardo Belmar: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:47] Scot Wingo: And I probably tried for six years and finally got on this board, and then right as I got on the board, they got acquired by NRF which was fine, but it, kind of changed over the, over the next three years it

[00:20:59] Ricardo Belmar: [00:21:00] Mm-hmm.

[00:21:00] Scot Wingo: But on the board, I met this guy, Jason Goldberg, and we would get in very friendly disagreements over things, I would always learn a lot and I was kinda like the, the Amazon guy and I would say, here's why you guys should be worried about Amazon. We would have the Macy's CEO in these board meetings and he'd be like, they can't figure out fashion. The returns will kill him. I'm like, they're actually pretty good at this fulfillment, shipping thing.

[00:21:25] I think he may be underestimating their chances of, it's kinda like the Death Star, you know, I think he may be underestimating their chances of success and, and then I would learn a ton from Jason about payments. He was an omnichannel guy. You know, he had more digital tags. He, he knows like a, a whole nother world than I do.

[00:21:43] And after like our fourth meeting. We were like hanging out at a bar all together. And to him kinda offhand, I was like, we should like record these conversations because if, if I'm learning some up so much and you're learning so much, fly in the wall would learn a lot. And then I got home and the next day, [00:22:00] like this whole setup, it's actually this mic arrived in the mail and he is like, we're doing a podcast and I, I was like, okay. And then we kind of stumbled our way through the first several of 'em, as I'm sure you guys have felt that. Then you kind of find your footing, you, find your audience and all that kind of thing. yeah. So that's kinda like the origin story of how it went. And back then he was at Razorfish, small agency.

[00:22:23] And then they got acquired and acquired and acquired and acquired. I can't remember how many fish ate the other fish, but now he's at like. At some point in the, in the agency world, you end up at like three of them. There's WPP Publicis and a third one, I cannot remember. And he's, he's at Publicis now, and he is like, he's, he's now super senior there and so busy.

[00:22:41] We can maybe record a pod every month or so. So I,

[00:22:46] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah,

[00:22:46] Scot Wingo: but I say it's because of this, the podcast really elevating his, his

[00:22:50] Ricardo Belmar: of course. Yeah.

[00:22:51] Scot Wingo: he claims it's on the job performance,

[00:22:53] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. Well, we'll never know the answer to that one. Yeah,

[00:22:57] Scot Wingo: Yeah. I yeah,

[00:22:59] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, that [00:23:00] be, right.

[00:23:00] Scot Wingo: Oh yeah, yeah.

[00:23:02] Or it didn't happen. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:23:07] Defining Agentic Commerce

[00:23:07] Casey Golden: All right, you guys. Getting back to agentic commerce, maybe still a bit buzzwordy, but Scott, how do you define agentic commerce? That way we can just kind of ready, set our audience for this conversation today. I know some describe it as shopping facilitated by an AI agent that acts on behalf of the consumer from find to buy. But others are saying that if you use AI at all or any type of LLM, period, for finding a product, regardless if you check out, is still considered agent commerce. And I just don't see how that's different from affiliate marketing and, traditional conversational commerce. User experiences that we've seen before, maybe with Alexa or even like TikTok Shop,

[00:23:59] Scot Wingo: Mm-hmm. [00:24:00] Yeah. And maybe, maybe we need, like, one of the ways to solve this is to be clear and when, when I'm talking about agent to commerce, I kind of think of it as a marketplace. So, so it's a new way to sell items off of your website on one of these new channels.

[00:24:13] Casey Golden: so as a sales channel,

[00:24:15] Scot Wingo: it's a sales channel to me. Now that's, this is very much my definition now but that's exactly what, I think the, the other thing to look at is like, who is helping define this?

[00:24:24] And we've got, Google has UC P uh, and then you've got a CP from Stripe and Chat GBT, and they're all defining it the way I am. Right? So it's kind of like this framework for buying things powered by an AI assistant through some of the processor, all of it off of your, in a variety of surfaces.

[00:24:43] That, that's kind of like what they would call it. They use that surface word. I'm not like a huge user of that. It's very Silicon Valley to be talking about your surfaces. Um,

[00:24:51] Casey Golden: I.

[00:24:51] Scot Wingo: and let's talk surfaces and, uh, so, so that's how I define it. Now, if, [00:25:00] if you invest a ton on your own website and you have a, an AI agent and you've really upgraded your onsite search experience, I, I, I'm not gonna proclaim, that's not agented commerce, but that's less interesting to me.

[00:25:11] And what's interesting to me is the, this new, new way to buy things that I think is better and faster, and it's a, an improvement on the marketplace

[00:25:20] Ricardo Belmar: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:21] Scot Wingo: And I think what excites me is as an industry you know, what's irrefutable is we used to be growing at 30% in retail. We, when I say we, e-commerce, digital, retail, whatever we wanna call it, was growing at 30% and retail is growing at five.

[00:25:35] Now we're kind of growing in line with it. We're growing a little bit faster, but it's kind of boring to be honest with you. And, and it's your, it's your skirt problem, right? There's, we've, we've kind of. We've kind of run the first wave of innovation and there's big differences between the in-store and the online experience that, that make the in-store still pretty good.

[00:25:53] And I'm excited because using these new LMS as underlying technology, I think we can improve that. Your [00:26:00] skirt is a great example where if we can get the product attributes right, there's no reason you wouldn't buy that online. And, if, if we could get you the information you wanted.

[00:26:08] Casey Golden: If I could find one.

[00:26:10] Scot Wingo: if you could just find one.

[00:26:11] Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This is a big problem for you. And uh,

[00:26:20] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, it

[00:26:22] Scot Wingo: yeah, I picture you like falling down everywhere 'cause you can't solve this problem and

[00:26:27] Ricardo Belmar: always sitting on the.

[00:26:29] Scot Wingo: just don't do it on stairs. That seems exactly very dangerous. So. Yeah, so I think we're gonna be able to create these elevated experiences that re-accelerate e-commerce, and that's what gets me excited.

[00:26:40] And I think that's only gonna really happen off of your website.

[00:26:43] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:26:44] Amazon Rufus And Ad Load

[00:26:44] Ricardo Belmar: Well, so how do you rate then, things like what Amazon's done with Rufus? Is that kinda, you classify that as something different or the same?

[00:26:51] Scot Wingo: It's kind like using agentic technology to improve their existing onsite solution.

[00:26:57] Ricardo Belmar: Okay. Yeah,

[00:26:57] Scot Wingo: it's probably, I'm all for a broad [00:27:00] tent, so yes, it's agentic commerce, but the part of agentic commerce I'm interested in is this like agentic commerce marketplaces, for lack of a better word

[00:27:06] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, because that's more of like you, you see that as more of something that can, will shake up the e-commerce world that's gotten, like I said before, because the growth is stabilized. Kind of boring.

[00:27:17] Scot Wingo: Yeah. And to, to do that, you, I think we need a counter in the world to Amazon. Amazon has like 60 or 70% of e-commerce depending on how you measure it. And and they've kind of stopped innovating, I think, I would, I love Amazon and I use it all the time, but I hate the, I think they've gone way too high on the ad load.

[00:27:35] And, you know, there's certain times, like I have these dog treats that I buy and I, the only way I can order 'em is if I kind of close my eyes and try to get to the, the sea of Billboards to get to my order page to get to a reorder. I can never search for 'em anymore because they just get buried in

[00:27:50] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, you get placements ahead of in

[00:27:52] Scot Wingo: It's like ninety percent ads and it's got, it's like this has gotta be hurting them. At some point, I get the margin is higher on this, but at some [00:28:00] point doesn't someone there care about the transaction? And I think in a world where they have such large market share, they didn't have to worry about it.

[00:28:07] And I, I think having an alternative that has a better discovery experience will just shake up everything. They wouldn't, they wouldn't have done Rufus if this, if ChatGPT didn't come on the scene

[00:28:16] Ricardo Belmar: Mm. That's for, Yeah, good point. yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:19] Yeah, I guess at some point you have to ask, 'cause this is always the retail media debate, right? Is, at what point is the ad load too much that consumers say, forget it, I give up, I'm going somewhere else. And you almost have to, which is, and the counterpoint is always everyone says, and we've had this conversation other episodes , we had Andrew Lipsman on recently, and this was part of the discussion.

[00:28:37] If it wasn't working, then you'd see Amazon back off, right? They would put fewer ads on the page, on the search result page if it wasn't converting. But clearly there's some consumers out there who, who accept that and enough that they keep doing it. But I think, like with what you just said, you can almost counter that counterpoint by saying, well, it's because they're so big. It's because they own 60, 70%. Where else is someone gonna [00:29:00] go, out if they've already built the habit that they're kind of captive. So it's almost, it almost doesn't matter how many ads they put in there, consumers aren't gonna revolt against it either way.

[00:29:09] Scot Wingo: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:29:10] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:29:11] Casey Golden: well I revolt against, ar around it

[00:29:14] Ricardo Belmar: well, it certainly hasn't helped you find the pencil skirt, right?

[00:29:17] Casey Golden: I

[00:29:19] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:29:20] Casey Golden: goes to Amazon and searches hi to low.

[00:29:28] Ricardo Belmar: Remove all the cheap stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:29:33] Instant Checkout Lessons

[00:29:33] Ricardo Belmar: Well, so, so let's focus in maybe on, on some of the things we're seeing in the wild. So we had, so OpenAI did, I guess I'm gonna have to call it now, the experiment of instant checkouts since they pulled it back. But I'm a fan of saying , there's been this big debate, right, just because they pulled it back doesn't mean that it's dead on the vine and we're never gonna see it again. I think it just proves, at least to me, curious if you, if you think the same, that it just, maybe it was only half-baked when they released it, because things, if, [00:30:00] if we look at it between all these competing LLMs, their challenge is, they can't let a day go by without releasing a new feature. Or, or they lose news media attention. And then they all, at this point have tied making money to how newsworthy they are in a sense, right? If nobody's talking about them, they're probably not making money or getting subscribers. So to me, it isn't that it didn't work necessarily, as a feature, it's just that it wasn't ready.

[00:30:24] Scot Wingo: It was early. Yeah.

[00:30:26] Ricardo Belmar: yeah, I, I

[00:30:26] Casey Golden: Side is Yeah, I know right?

[00:30:29] Ricardo Belmar: I know

[00:30:29] Casey Golden: retail is hard and the math just doesn't math because margins are slim and it's just not really a business model that like really validates

[00:30:39] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:30:39] Casey Golden: the amount of work it's gonna take to do it, and it's gonna be like a whole arm. And that's maybe just not where they wanna put their money right now.

[00:30:49] They'll do it later.

[00:30:50] Let everybody else like do the heavy lifting

[00:30:53] Ricardo Belmar: let's, were you surprised, Scott, to see them take it away?

[00:30:56] Scot Wingo: I knew it was very, very frantic,

[00:30:59] Ricardo Belmar: [00:31:00] Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:31:00] Scot Wingo: was a good start, but it was not complete by any means, right? So, so for any, any, any basic marketplace in my world to work, you have to have multicart.

[00:31:11] Merchant of Record Breakthrough

[00:31:11] Scot Wingo: And I, the thing that was most exciting about it was the merchant of record innovation.

[00:31:14] So that's the first time, I've been doing marketplaces for 25 years and no one's been able to solve the merchant of record problem. Meaning how do you make, how do you make the, the person selling the item, the merchant of record versus the marketplace. So when you buy from Amazon or TikTok Shop, or any of these places, the merchant of record, the name on your credit card is Amazon, eBay, or whatnot.

[00:31:35] And then that means you never, the merchant never has a relationship with that shopper. It is a, it is a, there's a third party and, and that, Amazon is like very, they're a Chinese wall between you and the customer. They do, they're, they rented you, the customer for one transaction is how they view it.

[00:31:49] You are not acquiring that customer. You, you borrowed 'em for one transaction and you owe 'em a lot of money for that. And if you want more, you gotta come back to the till. And so I think, that was like the positive [00:32:00] about the instant checkout the first time that that had been done. But then it, it clearly missed multicart.

[00:32:05] Then you need, you know, and once you have multi merchant of record, you have to have a loyalty program because in the, in the fashion world, in the beauty world, in the e even Walmart, you know, Walmart has Walmart Plus and it wasn't connected. So it was kinda like designed to fail in a way for Walmart.

[00:32:21] And I wanna almost like wonder what was going on inside of there. But anyway. So I think if they had done like three or four things, and then also they got overwhelmed with demand. Like we we're kind of sitting in the middle of this and people getting really mad at 'em because they couldn't get a response.

[00:32:35] Well, you know, these companies are, it's ChatGPT, and you're like, well, they've raised $800 million or whatever or 8 billion or $80 billion. But the people working on this team is like 10 people. And there's no way they're gonna call 600 retailers

[00:32:49] Ricardo Belmar: The commerce team wasn't the big chunk of their staff. Right.

[00:32:52] Scot Wingo: well they, they're, they're, they got a research, they, they got like a lot of, they don't have that many people for the size of money they've raised.

[00:32:59] 'cause a lot of the money is [00:33:00] not going to people. It's going to

[00:33:01] Ricardo Belmar: Infrastructure. Yeah. yeah, It's going to Nvidia,

[00:33:04] Scot Wingo: and, uh, yeah, it's to Nvidia and so. I think, I wish they would've stuck to it, but it's, it's kind of, I, I don't mind where we are because now we have an AB test. So now we have them experimenting with other stuff and Google is going, they're, they've kind of like actually gonna solve this stuff, right?

[00:33:20] They're like, all right, we see that we didn't do these four things. We hear you we're gonna do them. And I had the head of that that group Ashish on the podcast. And when, when I talk to people at OpenAI and Google. They, they're very intentional and they're listening to customers and they're looking at data and they're course correcting based on what they're hearing.

[00:33:39] And they're listening to merchants too. And so, so I'm kind of, I'm just generally an optimist, but I'm optimistic that we're gonna have this AB test. And, and what's funny is all these people are building what, right on the open, this is another thing that's kind of different about this era that we're not used to.

[00:33:54] Is when Amazon, we released stuff, it was fully baked and it'd been through a beta process. That's not how we build in [00:34:00] AI. We just like splat it out there, see how it goes and pull it back. And I don't think our industry's used to building that way either. And it feels really weird to us to kind of see that.

[00:34:08] But as a software guy, this is kind of like how we build stuff now and I'm optimistic they will. I don't think apps, the app thing is gonna work. That's actually a step back, and I think they're gonna realize that. And then they're gonna maybe dust this off. Maybe they'll go see what Google has done and replicate it.

[00:34:27] We're also gonna see Meta come on the scene. Yeah, I think they're, they're probably days away. I think they're probably like less than 30 days away from their checkout solution, which is gonna be interesting. And then we're gonna see what Anthropic does. Now Anthropic is kinda like, they are setting the pace in this world.

[00:34:43] They're just like. Every day they have a new innovation coming out, and it is just mind blowing the types of stuff they're doing. And whatever they come out with, it's gonna be next level. So it's gonna be interesting to see what all that looks like. And so maybe we'll have an a, a test, a B test, a C and a D here soon, and then [00:35:00] we can kind of like see where this industry goes and, and it'll,

[00:35:02] Ricardo Belmar: yeah. This one definitely

[00:35:03] Scot Wingo: of those will work.

[00:35:04] Ricardo Belmar: it definitely feels like being the first mover isn't the advantage for, because you can learn from what everybody else did or got wrong.

[00:35:10] Scot Wingo: Mm-hmm. Yeah, being a slow follower, Microsoft built their whole empire on

[00:35:14] Ricardo Belmar: That's right.

[00:35:15] Casey Golden: Yeah, there's a lot of heavy lifting that needs to happen and I think there's a lot of education when, right when it comes to retail. Two sides of the business that you know, very rarely have been best friends for the last 20 years. There's just all these unicorns floating around.

[00:35:29] Um, and they can, you, people like you, they can only be spread so thin.

[00:35:35] So. Big player, like who do you think is, is really leading the charge right now? Like we spoke about, Anthropic and the, the OpenAIs of the world, but a lot of big retailers are starting to develop their own AI shopping assistants. We have Walmart's assistant, Sparky, and Amazon's Rufus both claiming significant dollars are converting from these [00:36:00] agents. I, I don't understand how this could possibly be true, but Amazon says that 12 billion in sales is being done by Rufus. That's

[00:36:11] Scot Wingo: Touched by, I think touched like you can't really actually check out in Rufus.

[00:36:14] Casey Golden: Right

[00:36:15] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like how are they doing the attribution for that?

[00:36:19] Casey Golden: in your view, who are the pioneers in agenda commerce right now and like which retailers and or tech companies? I think we cover tech companies. Which retailers are you most impressed with, with their early moves? And do you think traditional brands are gonna keep up with this fast paced shift, or are they lagging behind already?

[00:36:40] Scot Wingo: Yeah. What we learned in the marketplace era was that. It is, it is a new era, and at least on the retailer side and the brand side, we'll, we'll, I'll call 'em, merchants, kind of have a catchall on the merchant side. The folks that lean in and get more shots on goal in this world and learn from it, [00:37:00] they, they do create a a bit of an unsustainable advantage.

[00:37:03] So, so I think there's a lot of, even though this is super experimental and small, I think there's a lot of reason to be pretty aggressive about it. If you believe over the next three or four years, it's gonna be pretty big. And I, there there's not that many people that refute that part of it. We just don't know what exactly what it'll look like.

[00:37:19] And maybe we're wrong, but if you, if you're wrong, it's less of a problem than if, if you were right and you didn't take action. So it's kinda like a risk, risk management thing I would think for, for most merchants to think through. So some of the ones that, I think are really innovative I, I was just at Shop Talk on a debate with Ekta at Elf Brands.

[00:37:41] She's very, she's a chief digital officer of this very forward thinking. I can tell you the, all the shoe companies are really involved in this. So, so you're starting to, it's kinda like the two big waves right now are beauty and fashion because they're seeing it in their customer bases. So they're, they're definitely seeing their customer is transacting and, and discovering at [00:38:00] least product.

[00:38:01] Through these, these places, and they're starting to lean in on that and meet the customer where they are. Sephora I thought was interesting. They're kind of going straight to the app and trying to tie that in. They announced that at Shop Talk, so I'd kind of put Ulta and Sephora. They, they're, they're always in this big battle with each other and I think they're really leaning in on this.

[00:38:19] Another one I thought was interesting was Gap announced that they're gonna really kinda lash themselves to the, the Gemini UCP and, and come out with a checkout here soon. So, I think those are some of the, the things to watch. They're the pilgrims and we're gonna kind of see how, how it goes for 'em as they get out there and, and experiment with this.

[00:38:38] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. Yeah. I think those was a really interesting one, especially that the Gap announced and the leaning into that one. And we'll see, I guess that's gives us strong hopes for what Google does with UCP which I, I've usually said in the past, like, I've not been a big fan of the prev, Google's previous attempts at trying to get commerce right. And really off the ground ever since the original Frugal search. Uh, [00:39:00] but, but maybe with UCP, they'll, they'll figure it out.

[00:39:03] Scot Wingo: Yeah, they have, ChatGPT forced them to rethink the search business model and I think they've been surprised at how becoming an answer engine has actually not been as destructive. I have been, I've been very surprised that it wasn't them in the innovator's dilemma. And I think what happened is they're just limiting by, by actually restricting the traffic you get, people will pay a lot more for it and it converts better. So, so I think, I think the auction is the auction format. The AdWords auction format is just so crazy resilient that it actually affords itself to a lot of different mechanisms than anyone ever thought.

[00:39:36] Casey Golden: I think it's, I think Google has a huge advantage. One because we've been using this like auction method. The backend systems of Google, like retailers have been using it, they understand it. All the data and taxonomy and everything that was required to get Google Shopping live.

[00:39:53] With your product catalogs and then all the data they have on what has been working and converting and [00:40:00] search on all of those types of information and product details and optimization there. I think they just have so much more internal insights and history with the brands for commerce that, I mean, if they fail, you had everything set up for you to succeed, you know?

[00:40:20] Scot Wingo: got distribution, they've got, they've got, if ChatGPT just got kind of a million monthlys, Googles at like, way, wait, what is it? 10 billion in the US or something like, it's

[00:40:28] Casey Golden: yeah.

[00:40:29] I feel like they have absolutely everything to be a market leader.

[00:40:33] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:40:34] yeah, for sure.

[00:40:35] Answering the Naysayers

[00:40:35] Ricardo Belmar: So so let's talk a little bit about the, the agentic naysayers that are out there and, and how you kind of respond to that. I, so a lot of the arguments I hear are, well, if e-commerce is still, hanging around maybe 16% of total retail sales, depending on how, how you count anywhere from 15 to 20, then how, how much can this agentic AI piece of that really move the needle or really amount [00:41:00] to, and, and I guess that in a sense, that argument is based on the assumption that it's only really carving out a piece of the e-commerce share, right. Versus the total retail share. And then you have, the outright statements of, oh, well this is all just an AI hallucination anyway because consumers aren't interested in having a machine buy for them. But maybe that gets back to the earlier discussion, right. And point you made about, how do you define this? If it's, if we're gonna force ourselves to define it as AI exclusive and no human involvement. And my view on, on, on that one is really that it, it's hard to generalize because there are some product categories that I think no matter how you present the product, it's incredibly boring to buy.

[00:41:41] And so consumers won't care if you take that off their plate.

[00:41:44] But there are other categories where consumers, you know, like, again, Casey's pencil skirt, right. If it hasn't worked, have other things, find it for that no one's gonna take that off your plate. You are absolutely gonna keep in control of that transaction. And it may always be that way, and that's fine, but there's, [00:42:00] there's a middle ground somewhere, I think.

[00:42:02] Casey Golden: Yeah, I'm a big fan of ISO, like in search of, like, that's a whole business of ISOs,

[00:42:08] Ricardo Belmar: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:09] Casey Golden: but last fall, the biggest conversation was brand.com will, there will no longer be a

[00:42:14] Ricardo Belmar: Won't be brand websites.

[00:42:15] Casey Golden: And now we're in like Q, we're finishing up Q1. You know it's about what, six months later here. Where are we?

[00:42:26] Scot Wingo: Yeah, I was never a, so, so you have maximus and minimalist and or naysayers and the naysayers argument to kind of start with Ricardo's point is, so they usually come from the retail media network world or the payment world. The payment people, they just don't like, don't know enough to know what they don't know.

[00:42:41] 'cause they, they live in the payment stack down. They're worried about, most of them end up being crypto bros too. So, so they're, they're kinda like off, they don't really poke their head up and argue with us too much. It's the retail media network. So, so the two people I just debated were, were Andrew, um, and then Sarah Marzano.

[00:42:58] Um, so she's the Retail Media [00:43:00] Network person at eMarketer. And they're very, they're very nice people, but their, their argument just centers on the definition and then they do agree. But then I'll say things like, don't you think it's helpful to have it, research products for you? And they're like, oh yeah, I use it all the time for that.

[00:43:14] And you're like, to me that counts. Right? And then even if, even if you are still involved, I, it's kinda like a GPS, like that's a computer-aided map is like how I run my life. Like, but. I'm still driving and I still am telling it where I wanna go and sometimes I turn it off 'cause I'm like, I know how to get there.

[00:43:30] I don't need the GPS and I, I kind of view it as that it's gonna be assisted more than taking over. So that's number one. And I think you can then kind of think about different categories of things and put 'em into this bucket of, if we had a matrix of research, find buy. And when I'm buying an essential, I don't need any of that stuff.

[00:43:47] I just like that, that one I can put on autopilot for all three. Check, check, check that. That'll be autopilot. Toilet paper, the next bottle of, whatever it is, the, the usual staples for the grocery, for my pantry. [00:44:00] Then there's things you enjoy, like, maybe you use it a little bit of research.

[00:44:03] Like I don't collect watches, but I had someone say to me, no one would ever use this for buying luxury goods. And I was like, well watch this. I don't know anything about collecting watches. And I had like a, a multi-step conversation and in 10 minutes I learned more about high-end watches and like, then I would have it, other than going into a watch store and talking to a sales associate that had time to have that with me. And I didn't even know like what questions to ask. And it's really good at that. Like, it's really good at telling you the thing, next thing you should probably want to ask is this. And I'm like, oh yeah, that's a good question.

[00:44:31] Why? Why are these things all made in Switzerland? I don't know. Like what's the story of that? And so, so I think there's certain things where you're learning about something where you'll do research with it and then maybe you'll just kind of stop and maybe you'll want to go look at 'em yourself in the store from there.

[00:44:46] And then there's other things where you want it to really help you research and find which, which is Casey's story of like this skirt, right? But it, she doesn't want it to go buy it 'cause she's gonna wanna like stay re you know, every day, find me things that look like this, this pleat I want, and then [00:45:00] surface it to me and then I'll give you a yay or nay.

[00:45:01] 'cause you wanna. Check off on it. So I think that's one where it checks two boxes, but not the third.

[00:45:06] Casey Golden: don't. Taste

[00:45:08] Scot Wingo: it may have deplete, but be, you know, like purple and you hate purple, or whatever it is. Um, or maybe it's not exactly in your size or you're like, well, I'd kinda like wanna see that, or, whatever it is.

[00:45:18] So, so I think there's this matrix we can come up with to, to map this out for different shopping journeys that we go on. And the value oriented consumer, they don't research anything. They're just like, they're, they're kinda like, I want it to find me the cheapest price and I want it to take into consideration, I wanna maximize my points or my, whatever it is they're maximizing as part of the value equation that they're operating with.

[00:45:38] And I think that one's where they don't really do research, but they use find and buy and they're, they would love to just kind of give it a budget and say, if you can get that, if you can get a PlayStation from me and it's legit for under 300. You

[00:45:49] Ricardo Belmar: Do it.

[00:45:49] Scot Wingo: away. Here's, here's, here's my wallet. And so I think there's, you can almost like come up with every permutation and come up with a shopping piece that matches that.

[00:45:57] Casey Golden: I mean, some of that has already been like pre-trained [00:46:00] with early eBay, like the auctioning sites. We put our highs,

[00:46:04] Ricardo Belmar: Right.

[00:46:05] Casey Golden: Our high end, we put in those bids and said, go do it for me. Right.

[00:46:09] So I think there is a, a demographic that would be very easily able to just delegate with some parameters and like. Here's, here's my little like widget of what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do, but like to kind of release that because we kind of already were doing some of that to just let eBay bid for us on stuff.

[00:46:34] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, that's true.

[00:46:35] Scot Wingo: Yeah. And then you know, Casey, to your point, I do think people do tend to take this too far and there's this whole, you know, I'm gonna have my buying agent and it's gonna go out and do all this stuff. I think, I don't think we'll ever get there a hundred percent. We'll kinda have to wait and see.

[00:46:49] The thing that makes me rethink that a little bit is I have an 18-year-old daughter and a, and kids that are in their, their mid twenties. They would totally buy stuff [00:47:00] without being involved. And I think there's a generational thing that you have to, this is like in the early days of e-commerce, there was, there was people that would never put their credit card in online.

[00:47:08] They didn't. And now, now they, so, I think there's a generational thing there too that we, we tend to, I don't share every meal I have on Instagram, but my kids do. And, so it's like there's a generational openness to these things.

[00:47:22] Ricardo Belmar: They are,

[00:47:23] Casey Golden: I don't,

[00:47:24] Ricardo Belmar: yeah.

[00:47:24] Casey Golden: yeah,

[00:47:25] Scot Wingo: When the meal comes, you pause and no one touches,

[00:47:27] Ricardo Belmar: No. Touch it. Yep.

[00:47:28] Scot Wingo: and then we eat.

[00:47:28] Ricardo Belmar: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:29] Casey Golden: I took a of my birthday cake, but that's about it. Unless somebody really impresses me like.

[00:47:37] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. Well, I think the assumption is that if you're, if you're doing that, it says that, you're always getting the, a really impressive meal so you can show it off.

[00:47:43] Scot Wingo: Mm-hmm. When we go on trips, we kind of, the kids know where the Instagram spots are. We'll go take pictures of like the ice cream that bubbles up or something. It's kind of fun. They always have a little present social media presentation at some of these places.

[00:47:58] Casey Golden: So. One big [00:48:00] implication of gentic commerce is how it compresses the shopping journey, as you said. If you can go from a question to a purchase inside of an AI chat, I might never visit. Let's see, one might never visit a retailer's website. Is that handy for the, that seems like it would be handy for the consumer, but kind of scary for the retailers who really does own that consumer in this, in this space.

[00:48:29] If no eyeballs are on their site, no chance to upsell or build a relationship and potentially to hit their advertising revenue in, in retail media. Should retailers be concerned about losing that direct customer touchpoint if that whole piece becomes embedded into these marketplaces or new apps and emerging startups or whatnot, when that marketplace owns the entire transaction.

[00:48:56] Scot Wingo: Yeah, so this is already happening today. It's just we [00:49:00] don't think about it too much. And it's happening on marketplaces. So, so Amazon is the biggest marketplace and they're 60%, if you count the GMV of them, the marketplace and their first party, we call it first and third party, GMV that, so there's like 400 billion a year already happening this way where no one goes to that third party, so like Rock Bottom Golf was one of our big customers at Channel Advisor.

[00:49:23] Now, they have a website, but every Amazon transaction, no one went to Rock Bottom Golf.com. And, they, they just set up their economic model so that they understood that they were, part of their p and l that had to work was they were gonna pay an Amazon tax every time. Now it actually ended up that that was actually less than their website to acquire a customer through Google.

[00:49:43] so,

[00:49:44] Casey Golden: so it's actually just more about mindset and reframing it.

[00:49:47] Ricardo Belmar: Right.

[00:49:47] Scot Wingo: of, it's a

[00:49:48] Casey Golden: already happening.

[00:49:49] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:49:49] Scot Wingo: It's a, can you replicate the p and l by selling through this channel that works on this channel? And then I think there's some motion, there's some pie chart movement between those things. But I don't think it's [00:50:00] all this like it goes to zero. Now, the nice thing about this era versus the Amazon era is you are a merchant of record.

[00:50:06] So it's hitting your payment system, your loyalty program, and then you can actually, you now have an opportunity to market to those customers that didn't

[00:50:13] Ricardo Belmar: Right outside, outside of the marketplace Right. You're not,

[00:50:15] Scot Wingo: So I'd actually say we're in better shape for that than we were in the world where like TikTok Shops is this, this old school model.

[00:50:23] A lot of times when you're selling on Instagram, and you go, people rattle through a Shopify store they never really hit. Yes, they hit the website, but it's like just very ever so briefly to get to the checkout. They almost never even go through the PDP. Um, if you've ever bought something off Instagram,

[00:50:38] Casey Golden: Well, it's like almost impossible to get to it because it opens in

[00:50:42] Ricardo Belmar: It takes you straight to

[00:50:43] Casey Golden: instead of the browser

[00:50:45] Scot Wingo: Yeah.

[00:50:45] We don't want you to go to the PDP. That's, that's where conversions get lost is on the PDP. want you in the moment, like you're, you found this thing that you'd love and you, we

[00:50:54] Ricardo Belmar: Buy it now.

[00:50:55] Scot Wingo: impulsively

[00:50:56] Casey Golden: Right. And I'm like, you're not ugly. What else do you sell? And I can never get [00:51:00] back

[00:51:00] Ricardo Belmar: And you can't get there.

[00:51:00] Casey Golden: to copy and paste. I'm like, ah, just take me to the website.

[00:51:03] So when we kind of go, goes into that, which there's been some, everybody's been talking about loyalty. Everybody's been talking about loyalty programs, integration with loyalty programs. This has been a whole marketplace moment as well that if I buy your brand, regardless of where I buy it, I should still be earning points at your brand. You should know you sell it, you shipped it. Why am I not getting points from you as well? Right?

[00:51:30] In some way I should be acknowledged for my purchase. We've never really. Completely solve that. You've noted that when AI handles that whole shopping journey, the traditional marketing funnel gets pretty much wrecked for, for certain project products. Retailers lose some of that control in the point of purchase. But do brands and retailers need to rethink how they connect with customers in order to stay relevant in a more agentic commerce [00:52:00] world? I know that in the last 10 days I've received three emails that my loyalty programs have decreased, Starbucks, Adidas. And somebody else that I didn't really care about. But I've, I can't say that I don't know the last time I've ever gotten an email saying that my loyalty program is being demoted or changed for like lesser, I'm like, Jesus

[00:52:25] Scot Wingo: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:26] Casey Golden: Christ, how much do I need to spend to get a free.

[00:52:34] Scot Wingo: Yep.

[00:52:38] Times are tough out in retail. Yeah. It's, uh, inflation. Inflation is chewing away at everything.

[00:52:42] And they, they're, they're making the loyalty programs less, less juicy.

[00:52:47] Identity Linking and Loyalty

[00:52:47] Scot Wingo: The, so where we are today, we. The, the best way that I am seeing to do this is the, the Google Way they just announced, and it's not live yet, but it, it's coming quickly.

[00:52:57] So, so they have this history of when they announced January 11th, [00:53:00] they announced UCP and then literally February 11th it, they launched. So, so they're on like this 30 day cycle it seems like. And there's two data points that support this. So, this was just announced, lemme look at the date. March 18th.

[00:53:13] So I think by April 18th we will have live examples of this and I'm gonna bet it's gonna be either Ulta or Sephora. 'cause they're the two biggest loyalty programs outside of Starbucks. And the airline.

[00:53:24] Casey Golden: On

[00:53:25] first.

[00:53:26] Scot Wingo: yeah. So.

[00:53:26] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:53:28] Scot Wingo: And it's called identity linking, which is kinda like a non-sexy name for it.

[00:53:32] But what it, what it does is it takes the identity of the shopper and then it, it looks up in the retailer's. CRM system in an anonymous way, and it links those two together and it says Hey, I've got this this person coming through and here's what I know about her. Here's her email and it pings over here.

[00:53:50] And they say, okay, that's Casey. I'm gonna, I want you to store this tokenized id ABC 1, 2, 3. And then from now on the, they, the retailer knows that [00:54:00] that's you. And they can do all the things. Now, today, it's kinda like with the merchant of record. Now imagine the merchant of record said. I could see this getting really cool where it would say what, what payment mechanisms do you take?

[00:54:11] And do you want to tie it to that? And they would say, well, Casey has an AMEX with us, and here's a token for that. And then now you can see your, your Amex points show up. Amazon kind of does this if

[00:54:21] Ricardo Belmar: Mm-hmm. Right.

[00:54:22] Scot Wingo: the Amex, but it's like, not, not easy. This was gonna be way easier. And, and you'll, you'll always be in the approval flow, I assure you.

[00:54:29] And now if you had all that linked up. The LLM could help you make all these multi-factor decisions that get really complicated. And it's like, all right, this is the same price at Sephora and Alta, which, I wanna, I'm I'm point maxing, you know which one's gonna gimme the max and then may. And I also want you to look across my Amex card, 'cause maybe they have a Amex offer that if I actually use it. And I can double dip and take the Amex offer and apply it here. I think all that is gonna get connected in a way we never could in [00:55:00] the old world. And then you take that and then we're talking about the shopping vertical. Now you put it into travel and even the travel world comes across, right? 'cause there's all these things that will, will give you miles for buying stuff online. And so, so for whatever is important to you as a consumer, it's gonna get really interesting through this. And it's not going to be, be just the. I think loyalty is just like one little step, and I think there's gonna be two or three other steps that are gonna be really interesting.

[00:55:23] Casey Golden: Oh, I like that.

[00:55:25] Through Refi Buy and your Retailgentic newsletter, you've been in the trenches educating others about this new frontier. And you recently mentioned that you've, you've been talking to hundreds of retailers and brands about gentic commerce, and I'm sure you've heard all of the burning questions, the crazy questions. What are some of the most common FAQs or misconceptions that you hear on the brand side from leaders and executives about integrating [00:56:00] AI and shopping? And are there any fears or myths you find yourself debunking a lot that we can just like take care of right now on this podcast and set the world straight?

[00:56:15] Ricardo Belmar: That's right.

[00:56:16] Scot Wingo: Yeah, that, that I could, I could take a very long time answering that one. Let me, characterize it as this. So, so usually the way the conversation goes is kinda like big picture questions, like, why should I do this? Tell me about it, what is this thing? And then it gets tactical really fast. Okay.

[00:56:32] If I wanna do hatGPT what do I do? And there's like a, there's like five or six tactical things. And then it like blows back up to strategic and they're like, 'cause usually those answers are, you need to really think about your, it all comes back to your product catalog. Our, our product catalog is atrophied in what a, in the last 20 years while we've been stuck in what I call keyword jail.

[00:56:51] And in keyword jail we had four words from key from, from Google. That was the shopper context. And we had six attributes. So we, we had more [00:57:00] so, so we. We, being the merchants and retailers, we had way more content than the, our shopper intent. So we were good, right? The, you would, you, you could try entering your pleat thing at Google. Good luck. You, you probably already know. That's not gonna really work. It's gonna, it'll, and it'll send you to a sewing site or something like, it's gonna, it'll, it'll send you off into

[00:57:18] Casey Golden: No idea what I'm talking about.

[00:57:19] Scot Wingo: So then you get trained as a user not to do that. Well, now we need, you're being retrained and now we have the opposite problem.

[00:57:26] Our little five attributes are dwarfed. I can't even make my hands big enough. Imagine as big as the screen is the shopper intent now that these things have about you. And now our product in our, our product catalog is puny and we need to really bulk it up. And there's several things there.

[00:57:40] There's more attributes. You need to really make sure these engines are consuming, the reviews you've collected. 'cause that's really juicy information. And then you need to make sure you're, you're analyzing the reviews and turning that into this third bucket is all the engines have this really fast lane for putting really good contextual information in about your products called a q and a section.[00:58:00]

[00:58:00] And in there you can have an infinite q and a about your products. What occasion is this skirt good for? What's the scent profile of this moisturizer? All these types of things that there's no real attribute for that are, are the types of, I I help retailers think about it. It's the types of things you would set, tell a sales associate at a store, right? That, what are the three questions you ask? If you're working in Sephora and someone's in the, in the, the lip aisle, what are the three questions you ask? How do you need to, you need to provide this extra content around that. So, so then, so that's the tactical part, but then what that blows up is.

[00:58:34] The strategic, and it's kinda like this change management and government governance. It's like, well, my legal is never gonna let us send that information out. Well, let's have a conversation with legal, because guess what? It's already out there. So, so legal has to get their head around it. And, legal has to legal's mind is always like, AI, oh my God. Our whole p and l is gonna go into AI and that'll be terrible. And that's our, and our PII our, our our everyone's email and credit card. So you have to be like, no, that's, we're just talking about product. You're [00:59:00] already sending it to Google for free.

[00:59:02] By the way, and, and that's the, the horse out of the barn.

[00:59:04] I usually have to be the horse out of the barn guy. And, uh, they're like, what? We're doing that? And I'm like, yeah, you, I can almost guarantee you are. They're like, they'll look around the room, they're like, yeah, we've been doing that for 20 years. Why aren't we informed? Anyway, uh, I. Then so there's usually a legal discussion, but then there's a process change management of like, well, for me to, you know, I've literally had conversations with retailers where they'll say to get a PDP change is like a four month thing here.

[00:59:29] And it literally has to have that much sign off, like. Are you, are we really gonna have to do that for every PDP? And the answer is like, yeah, yeah. You, you can. Yeah, you don't. Now what's nice is we also have this idea of a multilevel PDP. So there's the, the human, the human visible, which you don't have to change for this at all.

[00:59:45] Then there's the SEO metadata, and then we, we want you to add what I call agentic commerce optimization metadata. And you can, you can get most of the way there with a data feed, but to get all the way you really need to put the metadata on your site. So, so these are the types of, of things we discuss [01:00:00] a lot of, how do you, how do you set up a team if this is a priority, what does it look like? Who should be on that team? How do you get this process? What are the phases for implementing this and, and how do you go about doing all these things? So, so that's like the, that's the surface area of the types of things I talk about.

[01:00:18] Ricardo Belmar: Yes. So we'll have to label that the, the Scot Wingo playbook for for retailers to become agentic.

[01:00:23] Scot Wingo: Yeah.

[01:00:25] Ricardo Belmar: Well, obviously this discussions we could just keep going on for hours 'cause there's so much material to, to dig into on this.

[01:00:31] Holiday Predictions and Wrap

[01:00:32] Ricardo Belmar: I think the last thing I'll ask you Scot, to just close this out here.

[01:00:34] You make plenty of predictions on these things. As things have gone so far this year like Casey said, we're, we're just closing out Q1 here. What, what's your big prediction for this year's holiday season? Yeah.

[01:00:47] Scot Wingo: Yeah, so, so I think we'll go through a busy period and then the summer will be quiet and then it's gonna be really crazy from as far as announcements from kinda like August, probably mid August to November 15, [01:01:00] it's gonna be. Crazy. So clear your calendars.

[01:01:02] Ricardo Belmar: Okay.

[01:01:03] Scot Wingo: And I think we're gonna see a lot of new entrants. I think we're gonna see all kinds of new capabilities come online because these, these companies are able to build so fast.

[01:01:13] We're not used to this level of, of innovation that's gonna happen. And then once, if Anthropic enters this in a kind of a major way, then it's it's gonna get really bonkers. So, so I think it's gonna be. Pretty crazy. And I think we have a shot at a fairly, like 10% of transactions being, impacted and going through what I'm calling agentic commerce.

[01:01:34] So we'll see. It's probably like 2% now. It's definitely small and basically rounding error. But I think it could be relatively large by this time this year, so we'll see.

[01:01:43] Ricardo Belmar: Hmm. All right.

[01:01:45] Casey Golden: Scott, thanks again so much for joining us on the show. It's such a treat to have one of the OG retail podcasters with us today. Normally this is when we'd ask, our, our guests, like, how do folks in the audience find you? [01:02:00] But somehow, I don't think that's particularly difficult with you. But if people wanna learn more about ReFiBuy. Where, where should we, we set, direct them to, to,

[01:02:12] Scot Wingo: Yep. So ReFiBuy REFIBUY .ai. Gets you, gets you there. And then Retailgentic is where all my writing on these topics happens. And then I'm also Ricardo will tell you I'm very active on LinkedIn, so, connect to me wherever.

[01:02:27] Casey Golden: Great. Well, thanks for that. Ricardo, it's a wrap.

[01:02:31] Ricardo Belmar: That's a wrap.

[01:02:32] Scot Wingo: Thanks for having me guys and transformations don't happen overnight.

[01:02:35] Ricardo Belmar: That's right.

[01:02:38] Show Close

[01:02:44] Casey Golden: ​How much did you love this episode? Drop us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Good pods and hit that subscribe button so you never miss an update.

[01:02:55] If you're watching on YouTube, like and subscribe before you go.

[01:02:58] I'm Casey Golden.

[01:02:59] Ricardo Belmar: [01:03:00] Follow Retail Razor on LinkedIn, Blue Sky, Threads, and Instagram, and subscribe to our substack for highlights and bonus content in your inbox. For transcripts and guest info, head to retailrazor.com.

[01:03:11] Retail transformers is part of the Retail Razor Podcast Network. The number one indie podcast network for retail.

[01:03:17] I'm Ricardo Belmar.

[01:03:19] Casey Golden: Thanks for joining us

[01:03:20] Ricardo Belmar: Until next time, stay sharp, be bold, and keep on transforming retail.

[01:03:24] This is the Retail Razor, Retail Transformers.