The Watson Weekly: eCommerce Strategy & News

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.

The Watson Weekly: eCommerce Strategy & News is a business podcast hosted by Watson Weekly, with 300 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 85.

Watson Weekly hosts The Watson Weekly: eCommerce Strategy & News, a business show with 300 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #321

  Anthropic Has $518B in Compute Bills and $4.6B in Revenue

  Oct 5, 202613 min

  Amazon now lets US sellers run their eBay, Shopify, TikTok and Walmart sales inside Seller Central, free of charge. Amazon says more than 95% of its independent sellers already sell elsewhere, and each of those outside orders now sits next to an Amazon shipping button. Rick Watson thinks most sellers will be reluctant to put their Walmart numbers inside Amazon's software. Oura postponed its NASDAQ debut the day before it was due to price, after planning to raise up to $2.2 billion at a valuation as high as $15 billion. OpenAI has said it won't list in 2026. Reuters reported on Anthropic's prospectus, which shows $4.6 billion in revenue last year and about $518 billion in cloud and infrastructure commitments. Two customers made up nearly a quarter of that revenue, and many large clients aren't on long-term contracts. Amazon asked Meta to take Amazon out of Muse, Meta's new shopping agent, while Amazon's own Buy For Me feature lists brands' products without asking them first. Brand Finance puts $73 billion of food brand value at risk from GLP-1 drugs, with Lay's the most exposed at $6.88 billion, though Rick gives more weight to Cornell's basket data showing a 6% drop in grocery spending in households using the drugs. Amazon also signed a long-term freight deal with Kuehne+Nagel that covers AWS data center logistics and includes a call option on Kuehne+Nagel shares vesting over up to seven years. Investor Minute: Jolly acquires Rye. Infillion acquires Foursquare. Numeral raises $100M in Series C funding. Overfuel raises $6M. Databricks acquires Row Zero. Rick is moderating Shopware's Agentic Commerce Virtual Summit on October 29. Register at watsonweekly.com/events. Newsletter and past episodes at watsonweekly.com. #Amazon #AgenticCommerce #Anthropic #GLP1 #CPG #Shopify #WatsonWeekly

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  Episode #320

  Amazon Blocks AI Shopping Agents as Oreos Climb From 10% to 70%

  Oct 2, 20269 min

  Amazon is blocking nearly every AI shopping agent, starting with Perplexity. Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky go through Goldman Sachs' 64-page report on agentic commerce, which opens on Amazon's blocking and includes a section on agent liability that is labeled TBD. Rick reads the blocking as a negotiating position, the same move Amazon made with Buy With Prime and Shopify. Jess thinks Amazon is right to keep agents out and points to Meta's record on account security as a reason to be careful about handing any agent your cards. Shopify and Walmart are going the other direction, though nobody is reporting what Walmart actually sells inside ChatGPT. They also cover who is on the hook when an agent buys something it shouldn't have, and what happens to retail media, a $170B business last year, when the shopper reading the page is a bot that never sees an ad. The back half is about Oreos. Mondelez found its cookies came up in about 10% of AI cookie recommendations, brought in AEO and GEO firms, and now shows up around 70% of the time according to the Goldman research. Rick and Jess also disagree on whether you separate the cookie before eating it. For brands that aren't showing up in agent results, part of the fix is technical work on their own sites, and some are blocking agents they don't know about. This episode is sponsored by Avalara.

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  Episode #319

  Your Data Lake Won't Make You AI-Ready

  Sep 30, 202628 min

  Every retailer wants AI agents, and very few have data an agent can use. Abhi Sachdeva, co-founder and CTO of EKYAM, has spent 18 of his 24 years in technology inside retail, running tech at 1-800-Flowers, Tory Burch and QVC. He joins Rick to explain what data readiness requires and where retailers keep getting it wrong. A data lake stores rows. It doesn't tell an agent what those rows mean or which system to trust, so the agent picks up the first answer it finds and presents it with full confidence. Ask a retailer for its customer count or gross margin and different teams will often give different numbers. People know which dashboard to believe. Agents don't. Abhi walks through what he thinks a semantic layer needs to include, and the piece he says most companies leave out, which is the history of how the data changed over time. Rick and Abhi also get into buy versus build. Abhi's view is that retailers should never build the control layer (governance, gateways, LLM monitoring, cost tracking) because it changes every time a new model ships. What retailers should own are their definitions and workflows. He thinks the big consulting firms are right to push master data cleanup and operating model work, and wrong when they spend 12 to 18 months building a bespoke agent data layer the client then has to maintain alone. On ownership, Abhi puts meaning with the business (merchandising, finance, supply chain), enforcement with technology, and a small product data team between them. By his estimate, about 5 in 100 retailers he talks to have that team in place. He also explains what happens when a marketing manager starts uploading customer CSVs to a chatbot on their own, and why the answer is governance rather than a ban. Abhi's company is built on the bet that data readiness is never finished. Weigh that accordingly. The last decade of retailers building and rebuilding their own checkouts suggests he has a point. This episode is sponsored by EKYAM. #AIAgents #Retail #Ecommerce

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  Episode #317

  Amazon Wants to Handle Agent Payments While Blocking Agents

  Sep 25, 20262 min

  Rick Watson reports from the Retail Club AI event in Huntington Beach, which he's calling the source of the agentic fog he first described at Shoptalk. This is the second stop in the on-location series that started there. It's hot, there isn't much shade, and lunch is small portions from a handful of food trucks. The talks are better. More presenters are now separating the places where AI fits from the places where it doesn't, and Rick says the startup alley has been the strongest part of the show. The booth he keeps coming back to belongs to Amazon. It used to be the Amazon payments booth. This year it's Amazon agentic payments, and the only change Rick can find is the added word. He has trouble with the idea that retailers should hand their agent payment strategy to a company he describes as blocking agents all over the internet. #watsonweekly #amazon #agenticcommerce #retailtech #ecommerce #aipayments #retailclub

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  Episode #316

  Hairstory Collected Tax It Never Remitted, Then Fixed It

  Sep 23, 202628 min

  Hairstory launched at the end of 2015 selling online to consumers and hairdressers across the US. It collected sales tax from launch but registered in only a handful of states, so for about a year the tax it owed everywhere else sat in a separate bank account and kept growing. Catching up, even with Avalara's help, took months of pulling order-level data for each state's forms, work that fell largely to cofounder Erica Halliwell, who had taken on sales tax with no background in it and says it left her in tears at least once. Erica and Katie Overdevest, who runs Hairstory's ecommerce, tell Rick how the company got current and what that made possible. A cold call from DHL about its delivered-duty-paid service let Hairstory ship abroad from its one US 3PL without registering for VAT or GST in other countries, and Erica credits Avalara with calculating VAT and other local taxes in each new market. Later the company set up entities in Europe and Australia with local banking and fulfillment, moved to Shopify in 2023, and cut five websites down to one. Katie and Erica also talk through why Brazil and China are harder to enter and what consolidating subscription vendors meant for tax calculation and fixed local pricing. Erica says Avalara's managed filing still needs more manual work in Europe than in North America, and that her finance team, which is her and one bookkeeper, closes the books within ten business days. This episode is sponsored by Avalara. Learn more at avalara.watsonweekly.com. #watsonweekly #ecommerce #salestax #avalara #shopify #dtc #crossborder

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