The Future of Shopping is Nearer Than You Think, with Natalija Pavic, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Commerce Cloud at Salesforce

Sometimes talking about the Future of Shopping, in capital letters, can be so annoying. Well, thanks for telling me someday we will be flying like the Jetsons, look it up GenZ, but what good does that do me now? That’s why it was so satisfying to talk about the near future of shopping - the cool, impactful experiences that are being created now by early adopters, with Nat Pavic, founder and host of the Salesforce Commerce Cloud Innovations Podcast, and product marketer at Salesforce. Take a listen - maybe the next best thing for your company is nearer than you think.

Every quarter, the ecommerce education consultancy Allume Group consolidates the output of expert conversations, annual reports, and the latest data to create their Allume Insider report, or AIR. It’s chock a block full of the most current insights into the present and future of ecommerce. Andrea Leigh, Founder & CEO of Allume Group rejoins the podcast with the takeaways from Q2 based on their research.

A few weeks ago, Spencer Millerberg, Founding Partner at DetailPage.com was on the podcast talking about the latest in SEO trends in digital commerce. But we invited him back for a deeper dive on Amazon AI, as they are the bellwether of where SEO will go in the next few years. The changes are ones no brand should sleep on, and the opportunities to win market share based on the right product page content to feed that hungry beast Rufus will be considerable. For example, Amazon has added hidden fields to fuel some of this new SEO. And only 7% of brands have them filled out. Sure, SEO is just a game, but this time rules are REALLY changing. Spencer joined the pod to talk about what’s happening, and what’s ahead.

The pressure to achieve omnichannel growth profitably is on, and it’s changing the way brands need to operate. Jamie Schwab, now Vice President, Global Digital Commerce at Colgate-Palmolive, has lived through the stages of ecommerce from being the secret side show to its role as a driver of growth at companies like Unilever, Newell, and Dole. Now he leads a center of excellence for the people, process, data, and tech that will achieve the expected profitable omni results through enabling the best omni consumer experiences. It’s an exciting and challenging journey, and Jamie joined the podcast to share the details.

With 25 years in digital commerce, seasoned by tenures at Estee Lauder and J&J, Jennie Alexander has learned the essential ingredient of commerce - always keeping the customer at the center. Easier said than done, and Jennie is now sharing her data, organizational, and humanistic lessons from her work with others through her work as an ecommerce and digital consultant. She joined the podcast to share the fruits of those hard-fought lessons.

Did you know over 70% of traffic to a detail page is organic? Now that you are aware, do you know what you need to do to win your share of that traffic, and hopefully some of someone else’s? The answers to that question have changed right underneath our feet, and winning has become much more of a science than an art than ever before, driven by the power of AI. Spencer Millerberg, who changed the ecommerce game once before with OneClick Retail, is now at it again as Founding Partner of DetailPage.com. He joins the podcast with the facts and figures around the changing game of Ecomm SEO.

When money was free, the term “profitable growth” used to be an oxymoron in the world of startup DTC brands. But no longer. Profitably attracting and keeping consumers has become essential for today’s DTC challenger brands. And it turns out that achieving that is a deep mix of analytics, media, and creative skills that are constantly in a mix of testing, learning, and scaling modes. And it turns out that achieving that is a deep mix of analytics, media, and creative skills that are constantly in a mix of testing, learning, and scaling modes. AJ Patel had a career at Unilever spanning those skills and modes, and he has now leapt to the startup world at U Beauty. He joined the podcast to share some of those learnings and how he and his team are applying those in a startup context across every shoppable moment.

It was Jeff Bezos who first said “your margin is my opportunity”, and the Andy Jassy regime continues that strategy as Amazon continuously adjusts vendor terms to maximize profitability and win the price war. Amazon consultancy Consulterce and our friends at Stratably recently teamed up on a survey of brands about their Amazon relationship. Martin Heubel from Consulterce returned to the podcast to dig deep into some of the best defensive strategies that brands can use to gain some higher ground with the world’s everything store.

We are definitely in test and learn mode in AI, and many organizations are struggling with how to structure and focus their experiments to move past the hype towards impact. Well, struggle no longer! Or, at least, struggle less, thanks to the learned minds at firstmovr, who have taken the fruits of their AI strategy engagements with their clients and turned them into a framework called the MAITRIX. Chris Perry and Oskar Kaszubski rejoined the pod to offer you the blue pill that will help you make order from chaos and align the organization on a meaningful AI path.

The drive towards a more sustainable future is gaining a lot of momentum under the requirements of the Digital Product Passport regulations passed recently by the EU. The DPP will reshape data transparency across the value chain to allow retailers, distributors, and ultimately consumers to select products that match their environmental values. We hit the compliance deadlines for some categories in 2027, and the journey for every actor in the supply chain will be complicated. Raphael Gutierrez, Director of Global PXM and Product Strategy at Valtech, joined the podcast with a primer on the Digital Product Passport and how to build the foundation for compliance starting now. No surprise, it starts with people, goes to process, and ends up at technology.