Retailgentic | Consumer Behavior & Retail Trend

Retailgentic explores consumer behavior and retail trends to help brands and retailers innovate. Join Scot Wingo for expert insights, actionable news, and ecommerce innovation strategies to navigate the future of retail and agentic commerce.

Retailgentic | Consumer Behavior & Retail Trend is a technology podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 70 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Retailgentic | Consumer Behavior & Retail Trend, a technology show with 70 episodes published.

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  Episode #70

  Stripe Global Agentic Commerce Solutions Lead Danny Smith: The Rise of Personal Agents Powered by Link Wallet, WebMCP and More!

  Oct 1, 202627 min

  Danny Smith is the Global Agentic Commerce Solutions Lead at Stripe , where he runs technical go-to-market (think pre-sales architect, not engineering) for Stripe’s agentic commerce products. One of his first projects was adding the payments layer to Amazon’s Rufus shopping assistant, and three years ago he got on stage at Stripe Sessions to talk about agentic commerce. We recorded this one live from day two of RetailClub in Huntington Beach. It was a little overcast, which after a day of baking in the sun, we didn’t mind at all. Jason Goldberg joined me as co-host, and we grabbed Danny between meetings. It was his first time at the show. Danny’s a first-timer, both on the pod and at RetailClub. This week’s episode is a product deep dive: Stripe has been shipping agentic commerce products at a pace that makes three months ago feel like ancient history. Danny walks us through what’s live, what launched last Monday, and what’s coming soon, including how the checkout Scot kept seeing inside Meta’s new Muse app actually works. Jason brings the payments-industry history. It goes back to when card-not-present transactions were illegal and runs up to Stripe’s jump from developer darling to incumbent. We also get into the thing that’s still breaking agentic commerce today, and it isn’t the agents. Along the way there’s a hallucinating agent, a leather jacket, and a Cheeky Pint swag request. Hit play. Highlights : A skill you teach any agent (Claude, GrokBot, your homebrew Hermes agent) so it can pay “in a guarded and secure manner.” Details at link.com/agents. “ ”: Developers really do stop Danny at conferences to ask for a photo. Stripe’s founders’ mantra: “Let’s win all startups, and then let’s go win them again.” : Changing payments at an enterprise is “like open heart surgery.” Jason adds that it’s open heart surgery while you’re running a marathon. ’ : Stripe’s shared payment tokens launched with OpenAI, and Etsy was the first merchant. Link wraps them as a single-use virtual card capped at the amount you budgeted, so the merchant doesn’t have to be on Stripe. : Launched last Monday and built on WebMCP, it makes human checkouts machine-readable at the same time. Stripe merchants on hosted checkout or invoices get it with no extra work. : 42% fewer tokens burned, 38% fewer tool calls, and 39% faster checkout. “Three seconds is annoying to a human, 800 milliseconds is beyond annoying to an agent.” : Through the Agentic Commerce Suite (ACS), some merchants have doubled their web traffic in three or four months just by getting their catalogs in front of agents. Instant checkout on Gemini is expected around late October. . : Most merchants are bouncers that block all bot traffic, and bots were already 53% of internet traffic in 2024. Stripe is working on protocols to tell good bots from bad ones. Stripe is building both sides of the agentic transaction, and Danny is the one out there getting retailers across the line. Enjoy the conversation. Timeline 00:27 Welcome to Retailgentic 01:44 Live from Retail Club, day two 02:05 Meet Danny Smith, Stripe 02:38 From cloud architect to Stripe 03:48 Adding payments to Amazon's Rufus 04:55 Stripe launches agentic commerce 06:08 Jason on payments history & developer-first Stripe 07:40 "Your API changed my life" 08:40 Enterprise payments = open heart surgery 09:05 Meta Muse and the Link checkout 10:25 What is Link Wallet for Agents? 11:00 The weekend Meta scramble 12:20 GrokBot, Instinct & the pipeline 13:55 How Link works at non-Stripe merchants 14:35 The model airplane story 15:40 The world's first agentic token 16:05 Stripe Checkout for Agents & WebMCP 17:10 Two sides of the same coin 17:55 Agentic Commerce Suite & doubled traffic 20:55 WebMCP numbers: 42% fewer tokens 22:10 The leather jacket that got blocked 23:50 Doorman vs. bouncer 25:10 Danny's first Retail Club 26:30 Wrap Connect with Danny: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danny-r-smith/ Learn more about Stripe: https://stripe.com Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along: Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

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  Episode #69

  Elastic Path CEO Bryan House: The $3M Ecommerce Platform “Re-platform” is Dead, What’s Next?

  Sep 17, 202653 min

  This week’s episode is a platform deep dive with one of the longest-tenured companies in e-commerce. Elastic Path has been building commerce software for 26 years and Bryan is now steering the company straight into the agentic era. It’s part founder-journey (craft brewing to CEO is not a typical path), part product deep dive, and part industry-shift conversation about what AI does to the economics of running a commerce platform. Highlights: : Bryan spent eight years as a professional brewer, with an actual brewing degree, at a brewpub across from Fenway Park. "Everything I learned in my career that really moved the needle for me, I learned as a brewer." : Elastic Path's claim to fame was building the store for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, the birth of its self-managed commerce product. $ , : Elastic Path built an AI updater so one developer can upgrade a self-managed platform in about two weeks, replacing what used to be a half-million-dollar annual project. , : where typical platforms cap out at 250 variations per item, Elastic Path supports 10,000, plus bundles of up to 1,500 items. : Bryan's prediction… AI takes re-platforming from a 6-month-to-2-year, $500K–$3M digital transformation down to a setup fee. "That's the place we're gonna see the biggest impact of AI in commerce." - : in a world of AI discovery, every product needs the equivalent of an 80-page PDF of data to train the LLM on when to recommend it. (Scot's line, which Bryan says he "steals with credit" as often as he can.) : a UK custom greeting-card seller saw conversion jump 40% almost immediately after adopting Elastic Path's checkout : customers are asking about UCP and ACP, discovery, and the long tail, not chatbots. -: Bryan's framework for where AI lands first… well-understood patterns like checkout, front ends, and reorders, not judgment-heavy edge cases. Bryan is a product guy after our own heart, and this one gets satisfyingly deep, from CPQ to protocols to the future of re-platforming. Enjoy the conversation. Timestamps: 03:20 Welcome Bryan + podcasting since 2009 04:05 Internet Retailer booth memories 04:55 From craft brewing to software 07:35 The Acquia and Drupal years 08:20 Moltin, Neural Magic, joining Elastic Path 11:05 Elastic Path history: the Olympics store 13:20 Two products: SaaS + self-managed 13:45 The AI updater: killing the $500K upgrade 14:50 80 people, profitable, constraints breed innovation 17:00 Customer base and the B2B focus 19:15 CPQ, PXM, and 10,000 variations 22:45 Serena & Lily case study 24:10 The MACH Alliance backstory (spicy) 29:55 Vibe coding the front end + Shopify as fintech 33:20 AI re-platforming: six weeks and $100K 39:00 The ReFiBuy partnership + the 80-page PDF 40:55 AI roadmap: workflows, promotions, analytics 43:20 B2B agentic commerce and EDI 47:10 UCP, ACP, and the long tail 49:05 Predictions: where the roads are well-paved 51:20 What's next for Elastic Path Connect with Bryan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhouse/ Learn more about Elastic Path: https://www.elasticpath.com/ Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along: Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

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  Episode #68

  Exploring the Intersection of Vibe Coding and Agentic Commerce with Vercel’s Head of Retail Jaime Sorgente

  Sep 10, 202659 min

  This week’s episode is a little different. We’ve has been noticing vibe-code platforms quietly showing up all over digital retail… at trade shows, in conversations with retailers and brands, and on the platforms’ own commerce pages. So we went to the source. This is a platform deep dive with Vercel, the enterprise company behind v0 and Next.js, on what a “vibe coding” company is actually doing in our world of commerce, and it turns out the answer is: a lot more than you’d think. Highlights - : A Deloitte Digital + Google study cites clients found 100ms of load-time reduction drives a 7–8% lift in e-commerce conversion. “If the thing is faster, you’re gonna convert more. It’s just math.” ’ : The Kontoor Brands-owned retailer cut load times from 2.5 to 1.5 seconds on Vercel, grew conversion 20% year over year, doubled its A/B test velocity, and blew away its Black Friday/Cyber Monday plan. - : Vercel in three phrases… a developer tools company, an infrastructure provider, and an open-source software factory. ’ : walmart.com and target.com run on Next.js, and Under Armour, Crocs, Buck Mason, PetSmart, McAlister’s, DeWalt, Clorox, and even Meta.ai are Vercel-delivered applications. : Vercel doesn’t do product catalogs, inventory, or order management. It’s the storefront layer on top of your commerce platform. “We help you own your storefront and own your destiny.” : v0 is now deeply integrated with Shopify, so you can customize your storefront in plain English : Custom storefront projects that were planned for a year are landing in six months, six-month plans in three. : Next.js 16 was built to be readable and manipulated by Cursor, Claude, and Codex, “now we have this new customer, this agent customer, who wants to interact with your code base.” - : Jaime’s conversion story: feeding 50-page client 10-Ks into ChatGPT in early 2023 and realizing everything about go-to-market, and the factories that make software, was about to change. This one really lifted the veil on what the vibe-code platforms are actually doing in retail, and I think we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. Enjoy the conversation. Timestamps: 05:29 Welcome Jaime Sorgente 06:08 Jaime's path to Vercel: ChatGPT and 10-Ks 12:29 Utilities vs. builders 15:00 What is Vercel? The cocktail-party pitch 17:10 Why retail as a vertical 21:20 The Helly Hansen story 24:05 Vercel's other verticals: digital natives and marketing 26:45 Enabler, not competitor: where Vercel fits vs. Shopify & Salesforce 29:35 Beyond the storefront: clienteling and staff apps 30:45 Agents everywhere: Crocs, Amazon image annotation 36:05 v0 + Shopify: customize your storefront in English 37:45 Next.js 16: built for the agent customer 39:20 Custom storefront timelines, halved 40:35 Does owning your storefront de-risk replatforming? 42:20 The 100-millisecond study 44:30 The compounding effect: 4X feature velocity 46:45 Next.js explained: the stage manager analogy 52:20 Framework-defined infrastructure 54:30 Vercel vs. Lovable, Replit, and Base44 58:15 Where to learn more + wrap-up Connect with Jaime: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jsorgente/ Learn more about Vercel: https://vercel.com/for/retail Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along: Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

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  Episode #67

  Behavior Beats Identity: FERMÀT Co-Founder & CEO Rishabh Jain

  Sep 3, 202644 min

  This week’s episode is a deep dive into personalization, a huge category in e-commerce that’s getting rebuilt from the ground up for the AI era. FERMÀT is an AI-native personalization platform that sits on top of your e-commerce platform and customizes the site experience based on a visitor’s behavior, not their identity. That distinction sounds subtle, but it turns out to be the whole ballgame and it connects directly to agentic commerce because agents show up with intent, not an identity. We also pick up Rishabh’s founder journey and some very candid company-building advice along the way. Highlights % : FERMÀT's data shows personalizing on behavior alone, even for fully incognito visitors, converts roughly 20% better than personalizing on identity and past purchases. , : the marketer's dream of one-to-one was "a lack of imagination", the same person is a different shopper on Instagram, Google, and ChatGPT. , , : instead of humans watching a sample of session recordings and shipping site changes months later, agents trained on commerce watch every session, recommend changes, and generate the new experience. : identity-based personalization was state-of-the-art 10 years ago. Rishabh's take on the incumbents: if nothing changes, "their 3 to 400 million of revenue will become 2 to 300." , : even when an Instagram visitor is anonymous, the ad they clicked carries demographics, performance history, and frequency data… context most brands never use. : an agent is only as good as the feedback, context, and iteration speed you give it and every "actually, I also care about the collar" update is behavior data. ' : Platforms are using AI to verify your pages and truth gets rewarded, not dinged. ≠ : support agents should stick to facts and policies; shopper agents should infer. Rishabh is one of the clearest thinkers I’ve talked to on where personalization goes in an agent-first world, and his founder advice at the end is worth the listen on its own. Enjoy the conversation. Timestamps: 02:44 Welcome Rishabh 03:37 Rishabh's backstory: physics, Wall Street, PhD 06:33 Building three businesses at LiveRamp 07:56 Founding story: Apple ATT and iOS 14.5 10:33 Detect, recommend, generate 12:27 Where FERMÀT sits in the stack 13:57 Many-to-one personalization 15:22 The Bloomreach question 19:00 Does current behavior beat past behavior? 21:18 The data: a 20% conversion lift 22:34 The agentic commerce connection 23:44 The real estate agent analogy 25:41 Reading intent from incognito traffic 26:28 Into the weeds: mining a Meta ad for context 30:37 Side quest: the SEO cloaking myth 33:47 Writing for agents, bots, and humans 34:49 On-site shopper agents 39:40 Company building: know your why 42:38 Where to find Rishabh + the 1 to 100 podcast Connect with Rishabh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rishabhmjain/ Learn more about FERMÀT: https://www.fermatcommerce.com/ 1 to 100 podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6WAB5oOzco9oWrQmYmuFZ6 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along: Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

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  Episode #62

  Shopify's Agentic Commerce Playbook: VP of Product Mani Fazeli on 8X Agentic Traffic Growth and the Long-Tail Boom

  Jul 30, 202653 min

  This epsiode is a platform-and-stats deep dive: Scot gets Mani to pin down what agentic commerce actually is (with a four-stage framework that’s the cleanest map we’ve heard), then pulls out a run of genuinely wild numbers on what Shopify is seeing across millions of merchants, before going deep on the catalog, the protocol soup, and everything that shipped in the Spring ‘26 Edition. Highlights: Crawl, walk, run, fly: The framework of the episode. Crawl is AI-driven discovery (the biggest, most impactful stage today); fly is fully discretionary, budget-based buying. Mani’s verdict on where the industry actually is: “somewhere between walk and run today.” 8X traffic, 13X orders: Shopify’s Q1 numbers… AI-driven traffic to merchants up 8X year over year, and orders through those channels up 13X. AI buyers just hit harder: New buyers who discover a merchant through AI order at roughly twice the rate of organic search, are about 50% more likely to convert, and spend about 14% more per order because they show up deeper in the consideration funnel. 70% of AI orders are long tail: About 70–71% of AI-attributed orders last year fell outside the top 100 product categories. Models “don’t need to learn how to reach for the small merchant, they just need to learn the intent of the buyer.” 2X on fresh data: The Shopify catalog, over a billion products across millions of merchants, converts about 2X better than stale or scraped data, thanks to real-time pricing and availability straight from the merchant. A “7 out of 10 at everything”: On how AI is reshaping product, design, and engineering roles. The non-merchant-of-record era: Don’t become the marketplace reselling goods, just be the interface to the merchant. The merchant keeps the customer relationship and runs their own checkout. UCP was a “labor of love”: Shopify was at the genesis of the Universal Commerce Protocol. Sidekick, Pulse & Autopilot: Sidekick usage is up about 4X year over year; Pulse turns Shopify’s data into proactive recommendations right on your admin homepage; and the guiding principle stays “always put the control in the merchant’s hand.” B2B may reach “fly” first: By 2030, Mani splits the world into DTC and wholesale/B2B and bets B2B, where both sides transact professionally and obsess over efficiency, may hit full automation before consumers do. Mani’s four stages are the cleanest map of agentic commerce we’ve heard, and the numbers behind them are frankly staggering. And as he reminds us, we’re still in the early innings. Enjoy the conversation! Timestamps: 03:55 Welcome; watching Shopify's rise from ChannelAdvisor 04:38 Mani's path to VP of Product at Shopify 06:37 The Wish / ContextLogic founding story 08:18 Vibe coding and "AI makes everyone a 7 out of 10" 11:10 What Mani owns across the commerce loop 12:42 Non-merchant-of-record channels (ChatGPT, Gemini) 13:45 Defining agentic commerce 14:44 The crawl / walk / run / fly framework 17:50 The stats: 8X traffic, 13X orders, +50% conversion, +14% AOV 20:03 Out-of-the-box UCP compatibility and agentic storefronts 23:10 The Shopify catalog superpower (2x conversion) 26:40 WebMCP and the protocol stack (AP2, x402, Web Bot Auth) 29:15 UCP: Shopify's labor of love 32:24 Top things merchants should do to win 35:28 The escalation "escape hatch" 37:24 Word of mouth and the long tail, 70% of AI orders 42:41 Spring '26 Edition: Shop app, Ship & Pick Up, Pulse, Autopilot 48:10 Where it all goes by 2030: B2B vs DTC 52:29 Wrap-up Connect with Mani Fazeli: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcfazeli/ Learn more about Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/ And check out the Shopify newsroom blog here Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along: Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

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