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

Scot Wingo and Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg sit down with David Bellinger, Executive Director and Senior Analyst at Mizuho, who covers about 20 consumer and retail names including Walmart, Costco, Target, Wayfair and Chewy. David was one of the first analysts to pick up on agentic commerce, and buy-side investors have been calling him ever since to ask whether it's real and when it's coming. The conversation covers why the Muse launch feels like a near-term catalyst for the whole sector, why low-price, fast-shipping players like Chewy may gain from agentic demand rather than be disrupted by it, and why trust hasn't caught up for repeat purchases like groceries while discovery categories such as apparel and home decor are showing early incrementality. They also get into Walmart's quiet advantages: hundreds of millions of SKUs, a Spark Driver network of about 1.6 million drivers, and roughly 10 dark stores in testing. Jason makes the case for Stitch Fix as the original agentic retailer. One standout: Target said about two-thirds of the code behind its app has been rewritten over the past 18 months. David's take on the timeline is that investors want 30, 60 or 90-day ROI, while this payoff might take 1,000 or 2,000 days. He thinks it's all coming anyway. Listen in. 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.

In this joint episode of The Jason & Scot Show and Retailgentic, recorded in our mobile studio on a trade show floor, Jason and Scot welcome back Matt Nichols, General Partner at Commerce Ventures, for his third appearance. Matt leads retail tech investing at the firm, which has backed commerce and fintech infrastructure for 14 years. The conversation lands in one of the busiest AI news weeks we've seen. Matt splits it into two threads: how AI changes the way consumers shop, and how it changes the way retailers run. The guys get into why ChatGPT pulled back on native checkout, whether Amazon is right to block Muse, why browser-based agents are an interim kludge, and how voice is teaching all of us to talk to the robots. Matt also lays out two theses most VCs don't share: an AI-native replacement for email platforms like Klaviyo, and a new low-cost aggregator to replace the high take rate intermediaries in travel and food delivery. Then everyone takes a swing at the question Wall Street keeps asking: can anyone crack the Shopify and Amazon fortresses? Our favorite moment is Matt's description of building an aggregator for the AI era. You build it, you tell ChatGPT to hit your server, and you get crickets. As Scot puts it, the hard part of the job isn't seeing the future. It's predicting when it shows up. 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.

Episode 354 of The Jason & Scot Show is all earnings. Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg and Scot Wingo break down Amazon's Q3, Google's Q3, and DoorDash's acquisition of Instacart, which Jason sees as an infrastructure play to power DashMart. They cover why Google's search queries went up while search revenue slowed, the Wall Street "Muse Mania" around Meta's shopping agent, AWS selling out its capacity while promising 40%+ growth in '27 and '28, and how Amazon's grocery and everyday essentials push is changing its mix. Andy Jassy also takes a not-so-subtle shot at Walmart. The big one is Amazon Ads. Analysts expected 18% growth and got 12%. Add Q2 and Q3 together to cancel out the Prime Day shift and ads still slowed from 22% to 19%, with 17% guided for Q4. Jason's theory: the agent hurting Amazon's ad business isn't Muse or ChatGPT. It's Alexa for Shopping, Amazon's own agent, which carries far fewer ads than traditional search. 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 on day two of the RetailClub AI Festival in Huntington Beach, Jason and Scot sit down with Eli Anselm, an investor at Ridge Ventures. Eli spends his time on early-stage B2B enterprise software, and he has been thinking about agentic commerce since before most of the industry had a name for it. The conversation covers how Ridge defines agentic commerce (hint: it's much bigger than an agent buying a house with your credit card), why the data layer has to come first, and where AI-native ads and dynamic offers could reshape categories like travel. Eli also explains how the bar for a Series A has moved since 2024, why speed and execution are becoming the real moat, and what founders get wrong when they pitch investors. There are a few great stories along the way: a snowboard, bindings, and boots bought in 10 minutes with the help of a couple of agents, and a furniture company that found $4 million in overspend on pallets alone. Jason and Eli also debate whether the shift to agentic shopping will move faster or slower than the shift to mobile. 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.

Bonus episode for Jason & Scot Show listeners: we're sharing an episode of AdGentic, another show in the ReFiBuy Media Network. If you've been following our retail media conversations, this one asks what happens when the ads move inside your AI agent. If you like it, subscribe to AdGentic for more. Personal AI agents feel magical right now, and part of the magic is what's missing: ads. Kiri Masters walks through how Google, Facebook, WhatsApp and Amazon all started clean and ended up ad-funded, why AI is following the same script, and why that might not be the worst outcome. The real question isn't whether ads come to your agent. It's how bad they'll be. In this episode: → The broken no-ads promises of Google, Facebook and WhatsApp → Ensh*ttification, and why ads are still the least-worst way to pay for consumer tech → Subscriptions vs fees vs ads, and why fees quietly turn into ads → What Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots and Instinct have said about making money → The ad formats starting to appear in AI, and the ones agents might borrow   Subscribe to AdGentic Substack: https://www.adgentic.ai/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/adgentic-podcast Podcast: https://adgentic.transistor.fm/ -- 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.    

In this live episode, Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg and Scot Wingo take the stage for an audience-driven debate on the future of AI in retail. The room picks the topics, and Jason and Scot argue the sides. Sometimes they even disagree. They start with why Walmart has moved so fast on AI: a top-down mandate from Doug McMillon that began when he found out his own team thought AI was "illegal" at Walmart. Then they set the table with where e-commerce growth stands and tackle the most-argued question on LinkedIn: what counts as agentic commerce? Fully autonomous buying, AI-native checkout, or any AI assist along the way? Audience questions take it from there: whether shopper agents can stay on the consumer's side once someone has to pay for the inference, what happens to retail media when discovery moves to a chatbot, whether fashion and brand-driven categories are immune, and whether agents just flood the market with cheap marketplace goods. One standout: Scot figures that roughly 67% of the pixels on some Amazon search pages are ads. Jason's counter is that you can't run 20 sponsored prompts per answer, so the ad business has to get by on fewer, pricier placements. Scot says Google has already shown that can work. 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 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.