Podcast
The Watson Weekly: eCommerce Strategy & News
Hosted by Watson Weekly · EN
Stop reading the headlines and start understanding the frameworks.
The Watson Weekly is the premier resource for eCommerce executives, delivering sharp, independent strategy on the industry's most critical developments. Join 20-year veteran Rick Watson as he cuts through the noise to help you understand not just what is happening, but why it matters to your business.
Broadcasting three times a week:
Mondays: Strategic deep dives into earnings, mergers, and market shifts.
Wednesdays: Candid interviews with C-Suite luminaries and tech innovators.
Fridays: Join the Watson Weekend for Spirited debates on controversial topics with co-host Jessica Lesesky.
From AI implementation and marketplace dynamics to supply chain logistics and retail operations, we cover the entire commerce landscape. Whether you are a CEO, VP, or operator, this is your competitive advantage in audio form.
15episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Shopify Tripled AI Orders — From a Base It Won't Name
1w ago00:13:43Tap to summarizeFour companies reported. Three of them are paying more to grow.UPS did $22.8 billion in the second quarter, up 7.6%, raised full-year guidance, and watched the stock fall 6%. The model right now is charging more for fewer packages, and domestic operating profit took transformation charges on the way through.PayPal put up $8.68 billion, up 5%. Volume keeps climbing. Take rate and operating margin keep sliding. Buybacks are doing the work of holding EPS flat.Amazon hit a record $200.6 billion quarter with strong AWS growth, though part of the earnings line came from a paper remeasurement on its Anthropic stake rather than from operations. Capex is going up again, and it is going into AI capacity.Shopify grew 34% to $3.58 billion and spent much of the call on AI. Management says AI-driven orders tripled year over year. Management did not say what that is worth in dollars.The Watson Weekly is sponsored by Avalara. Learn more at avalara.watsonweekly.comThen the Investor Minute: Poshmark, Procter & Gamble buying Thorne, Domo going to Progress Software, Calilmacus, and King Kullen finding a buyer on Long Island.#watsonweekly #paypal #ups #shopify #amazon
Transcribe →Shopify Has Stripe by the Throat and Both Sides Know It
2w ago00:09:17Tap to summarizeShopify's Q2 makes the SaaS apocalypse thesis hard to defend. Revenue grew 34% to $3.5 billion on GMV of $115 billion, up 32%, with gross profit up 31% and free cash flow up 55%. Operating expense keeps falling as a share of revenue, which is exactly what analysts reward, and also what happens when a company spends a couple of years cutting headcount.Rick and Jessica work through what's actually moving those numbers. Merchant solutions grew 37% and now accounts for 78% of total revenue, while the subscription line isn't growing anywhere close to GMV. Sales and marketing spend grew 20% against 32% GMV growth, and R&D grew 13% even with the AI investment story running at full volume, which is the ratio that keeps analysts quiet. Read that revenue mix honestly and Shopify looks like a payments and lending business that happens to sell software.That's the setup for the Stripe question. Merchants process on Stripe, but their relationship is with Shopify, so if Shopify ever swaps processors, Stripe is the one holding the bag. Meanwhile the Shop brand creeps forward another notch every year, from a checkout button to a consumer login to its own installment product. Identity is the wedge into a consumer internet strategy that has very little to do with helping merchants sell more socks.Analysts wanted to know whether Shopify will sell AI as a separate line item, and Harley Finkelstein has one answer he'll give you 27 different ways. Shopify is the layer underneath every agentic surface, so GMV has to flow through it and the register rings on the way past. The risk buried in that plan is an agentic front end that becomes the wallet itself and routes around Shopify entirely, which stops being hypothetical when PayPal is in play and Stripe is circling. Whether Shopify would ever make a run at PayPal depends on how cheap it gets, and on whether Harley decides he needs a wallet of his own before somebody else builds one.Also in this episode, why Sidekick's real moat is context rather than model quality, what happens to app developers who don't hand their data over, and transaction and loan losses running at $141 million against $80 million.The Watson Weekly Weekend episode by Avalara. Accurate tax at checkout, visibility into tariffs and duties before an order ships, and fewer surprises for your customers. See what Avalara has built for growing brands at avalara.watsonweekly.com#watsonweekly #shopify #stripe #paypal #shoppay #ecommerce #retail
Transcribe →Agentic Commerce Does Not Exist. It's Also 25% of Commerce by 2030
2w ago00:25:13Tap to summarizeHolden Bale runs strategy at Merkle, the dentsu-owned consulting firm with roughly 16,000 people worldwide and about 4,000 of them sitting in data science. He came on to walk through what Merkle's consumer research actually shows about AI and shopping. The numbers do not line up with the conference talk track.Twenty-two percent of consumers across North America, Central America and most of EMEA now name an AI app as a first stop for product search and evaluation. Google still sits around 78 percent, Amazon around 49. More than half of men and over a third of women say they already use AI tools to shop. That is self-reported, and Holden is the first to discount it.The gap brands keep missing is what happens after discovery. Fifty-three percent say they leave the AI app and buy on a website. Eleven percent claim they bought inside the app. Holden says that second number is fiction, and explains why the GMV math cannot carry it. He has a slide he brings to conferences in red type: agentic commerce does not exist.Then he gives the forecast anyway. A quarter of an eight trillion dollar B2C market flowing through discrete AI apps by the end of the decade, most of that share taken out of marketplaces. Somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of commerce running autonomously. The condition for all of it is Amazon and the LLM firms working out a commercial arrangement instead of a lawsuit.One more number worth sitting with. Merkle surveyed 100-plus companies above a billion dollars in revenue. Eighty-eight percent had deployed something powered by a large language model. Six percent could prove it moved EBITDA.Holden's advice to brand executives has almost nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the product data most companies still cannot pull out of nineteen different systems.This episode is brought to you by Avalara. Tax, tariffs and duties get complicated the moment you add a channel or cross a border. See what Avalara has built for growing brands at avalara.watsonweekly.comNewsletter: watsonweekly.comChapters 00:00 What Merkle actually does, and why strategy and execution stopped being separate jobs 03:15 The Shoptalk data: AI is eating search, not shopping 06:11 Is AI traffic invisible, or are brands just not tracking it 08:25 The social commerce comparison, and why perceived attribution matters 11:36 Avalara 13:07 The 2030 forecast: 25 percent inside AI apps, 10 to 25 percent autonomous 16:47 Who has time to train a personal AI 17:49 Order history is the one thing the LLMs do not have 21:34 What a brand executive should start now 24:34 Test and learn, minus the learn
Transcribe →Eric Miao, Attentive | Nobody Has Four Brand Voices
3w ago00:28:54Tap to summarizeCRM is heading for the same automation wave that erased the ad operations team fifteen years ago — and brand marketers aren't ready. Eric Miao of Attentive explains what survives, why most companies don't really have a brand, and why earned media is getting impossible to trust.Rick Watson talks with Eric Miao, chief strategy officer at Attentive, about the coming shift in CRM: why the daily hand-made-decision model was always a gap filled by weak tools, why channel best-practices keep getting confused with brand voice, and how fake avatars and planted virality are draining trust from earned media. Eric also cools the Google-to-zero panic for commerce, points to shopping as the lowest category for LLM referrals, and lays out what CMOs should stop doing — and where their people's real advantage lives.This episode is sponsored by Avalara. Learn more at avalara.watsonweekly.comChapters0:00 Cold open: CRM's ad-ops moment is coming0:43 Eric's ad-side origin: from Twitter to Attentive1:06 Why the ad-ops team disappeared2:16 CRM's data gap: 100 billion points vs six3:55 Do brand marketers know what's coming?4:27 Where brand captures all the profit6:17 AI tailwinds and the pop-up nobody remembers seeing9:04 The company with four brand voices16:47 Owned relationships as the last trusted channel18:24 Is Google going to zero for commerce?20:16 What CMOs are underweighting on Mondays23:34 Attentive's real problem: automating journeys without the black box26:35 The marketer is the processThe free Watson Weekly newsletter — the why behind the week's biggest ecommerce & retail stories, every week: https://www.watsonweekly.com#watsonweekly #attentive #crm #ecommerce #brandmarketing #retailmedia #ai
Transcribe →Inside Lowe's AI Portfolio: Shop, Sell, Work
4w ago00:31:16Tap to summarizeMost enterprise AI strategy looks the same on a slide: pillars, a center of excellence, a list of pilots. Chandhu Nair has to turn that picture into shipped product across more than 1,700 stores.As SVP of Store Technology, AI, Data and Innovation at Lowe's, Chandhu runs everything through one filter: shop, sell, work. If a project doesn't land in one of those three buckets, it doesn't get funded. That discipline produced six lighthouse areas and 20 crown jewel use cases, scored on ROI, technology readiness, organizational change readiness, and brand risk.We get into what that looks like in practice. How the Milo Companion app started as a store scorecard tool and got redirected by the head of store operations, who said it would only matter if it could answer questions about every product in the building. How Chandhu pitched a two-store pilot at 60% accuracy and grew it into five million associate questions. How watching associates talk to their Zebra devices instead of typing forced a roadmap pivot to two-way voice. And how Pro Companion cut call prep from two hours to minutes, while Materials AI turns a contractor's handwritten list into a quote in minutes instead of days.The Watson Weekly interview is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and compliance for leading eCommerce brands. For more details: https://avalara.watsonweekly.com.Also in this one: why Chandhu measures leading indicators before lagging ones, when he kills a project, and what the Foundation Building Materials and Artisan Design Group acquisitions mean for agents sourcing across three catalogs at once.His closing advice is worth the listen on its own. Don't take any of this as a playbook.
Transcribe →Shopify Just Evicted Every Vape Seller
Jul 1700:25:58Tap to summarizeIt's the model, stupid. OpenAI just had its worst run of news in months, and Rick Watson thinks the fix is simpler than anyone inside OpenAI wants to admit.This week Rick and Jessica Lesesky work through three stories about platforms and owners deciding what business they actually want to be in.First, Shopify pulls the plug on vapes. Every merchant selling them got a notice to strip the products by July 8 or lose the store. States leaned on Shopify over illegal sales, and Shopify answered with a blanket ban rather than a state-by-state fix. To Rick, this is not Shopify taking a stand for entrepreneurs, it is Shopify reading the writing on the wall and staying on the right side of the law. If your category is drifting from gray to red, the payment processor is the pressure point, and you may want to own your software before someone else decides your business for you.This episode is sponsored by Avalara. Learn more at avalara.watsonweekly.comSecond, the great private equity traffic jam. Nearly a decade into the exit drought, PitchBook's midyear scorecard is not pretty. Per their data, the big buyout deals that were supposed to reach a quarter of all activity have slipped toward 19% by May. Rick counts roughly 13,000 US companies sitting in PE portfolios, an eleven year backlog at the current selling pace. Sellers don't know what their asset is worth. Buyers can afford to wait. His take is that the AI bubble may have to deflate at least a little before the ordinary software deals start moving again.Third, OpenAI's worst Thursday: lawsuits, exits, and a dead browser. Apple trade secret allegations, a top lieutenant stepping back for health reasons, the head of safety systems out the door, and the Atlas browser shut down less than a year after launch. The new model, ChatGPT 5.6, draws strong benchmarks and better press, and OpenAI positions it as beating Opus at a fraction of the cost. Rick argues the deeper problem is governance. The list of ex-OpenAI founders now running billion dollar startups keeps getting longer, and you cannot win a race this fast while your talent walks out the side door.Can a $20 subscription outrun Google's distribution, Apple's install base, and Anthropic's grip on enterprise? The magic eight ball points to no.#watsonweekly #shopify #openai #privateequity #apple #anthropic #ecommerce #chatgpt
Transcribe →The $40 Billion Retail Tax Nobody Sends You a Bill For
Jul 1500:29:26Tap to summarizeRetailers quietly deduct three to five percent of a brand's invoice for compliance mistakes that have nothing to do with the product itself: a label an inch out of place, a carton that breaks the routing guide, a shipping notice the retailer's scanner can't read. Across the US that's roughly $40 billion a year, and it comes off the top line, not the cost line. You made the product, you shipped it, and you simply don't get paid for part of it.Rick Watson sits down with Elle Smyth, cofounder and CEO of RetailReady, and Art Nimbley, IT Director at Pierre Fabre USA, to work the chargeback problem from both sides. Ellie built an AI-native compliance platform that ingests the 399-page Walmart routing guide so warehouse operators don't have to memorize it. Art rolled it out during a 3PL switch and watched technical chargebacks fall to near zero on the very first order.They get into what a routing guide actually is, why an ASN transmitted at 12:55 and 55 seconds still isn't always enough, how one Pierre Fabre employee was losing 40 hours a month building shipping notices by hand, and why Art keeps challenging billion-dollar retailers when he's convinced they're wrong. He's three for three so far. If you sell into retail and you've been writing off chargebacks as the cost of doing business, this conversation is worth your time.The Watson Weekly interview is sponsored by Radial and Avalara.
Transcribe →July 13th, 2026: Nike Posted a Record Quarter, Shopify Reviews, Walmart's Ad Platform, and Target's Marketplace
Jul 1300:13:40Tap to summarizeNike says net income jumped 407%. Strip out a single tariff refund and full-year profit actually fell. That gap is the whole week in one number.Rick Watson runs through it: Shopify moving its incentivized-review ban from partner guidelines into hard App Store policy, and deleting reviews tied to fake accounts across listings. Nike's headline quarter and the one-time $986M refund propping it up, with profit down 3% and China still unresolved. Walmart pulling Walmart Connect, Connect International, and Sam's Club Connect into a single ad business built on data from 10,000-plus stores. Target Plus adding Forever 21 and Clarks, chasing K-beauty, and offloading electronics risk while its marketplace grows nearly 60%, though curation may be too small to matter at Target's size. And the Investor Minute: Kroger and Giant Eagle at $1.65B, Jersey Mike's filing to IPO, and The Zero Proof buying The New Bar.Sponsored by Avalara.
Transcribe →Taylor Swift Got Married and Every Brand Crashed the Reception
Jul 1000:21:59Tap to summarizeThe Swift–Kelce wedding turned into a marketing free-for-all, and Rick and Jessica sort the brands that pulled it off from the ones that face-planted. The Knot circled Madison Square Garden with billboard trucks. A fake antique-shop ad about furniture rolling into the arena still racked up 11,000 likes. From there they get into Target finally waking up to the marketplace it's ignored for years, and Shopify's promise to clean up fake app-store reviews, which will probably sweep out a pile of legit ones too. Retail news with opinions attached.The Watson Weekly is sponsored by Avalara. It works with platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce, helping teams manage compliance faster and scale with confidence. Learn more at avalara.watsonweekly.com.
Transcribe →The Different Storefront Is Dead: Shopify Design at the Enterprise
Jul 800:28:30Tap to summarizeThe era of the weird, different storefront is over. On Shopify, design that converts beats design that surprises.That is the argument in the third and final episode of our Enterprise Shopify series. Rick Watson sits down with Elara Verret, Chief Digital and Customer Officer at Reitmans, and Isaac Newton, Co-Founder of Pattern (part of Domaine).Reitmans is a 100-year-old retailer with roughly 400 stores. It moved its flagship onto Shopify in under a year. Elara's own team had scoped that work at two to three years.The conversation stays specific. Why the enterprise case for Shopify is agility and focus rather than cost cutting. Where customization earns its keep and where it just leaves you a maintenance bill. What happens when merchants start editing the storefront in VS Code and someone has to ask, politely, to turn off their Sidekick access. And the plateau Isaac sees over and over: brands that grew fast three to five years ago, then watched a dozen copycats erase what made them different.Headless comes up. Both have opinions.The Big Green Bag Of Promise: Enterprise Shopify Webinar Series is sponsored by Avalara, Domaine, and Pattern.The Big Green Bag Of Promise: Enterprise Shopify Webinar Series is not sponsored by Shopify.
Transcribe →