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

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/

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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.

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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.

Jason and Scot are in the same room for once, recording from Seattle after two days inside an Amazon executive briefing on grocery and Prime. They get into why grocery is the frequency engine every retailer covets, how Walmart wrote this playbook back in 1990, and what Andy Jassy actually meant when he told investors grocery had seen a "trajectory change." Along the way: a field guide to every data source people use to guess at retail numbers, and why the weekly stock-up trip is quietly dying.

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 NRF Nexus, Brian Seewald joins Jason and Scot to talk through the digital side of the Victoria's Secret turnaround. Brian traces his path from a May Company buying-office trainee to running e-commerce at The Limited in 2007 ("I don't know if this internet thing is gonna work"), then digs into what conversion rate even means when traffic quality varies wildly by channel, why the VS and PINK apps punch above their weight, and how PINK Wednesday Drops went from a small hack to a real part of the business.

He and Jason get into why no digital bra-fitting tool, quizzes, body scanning, virtual try-on, has replaced the in-store experience, and Brian lays out the AI and agentic commerce work: Google's UCP, TikTok Shop, an AI assistant on bra PDPs, and the unglamorous PIM and content foundation that has to come first. "We don't want a solution looking for a problem."

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Learn more 👉 https://www.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 NRF Nexus, Jason and Scot sit down with Josh Krepon, President of U.S. D2C and Global Digital at Steve Madden. Josh shares his path through Ralph Lauren, Victoria's Secret, Tory Burch and Cole Haan, and what it takes to operate inside founder-led companies. At Steve Madden, a $3 billion business with an in-house sample factory and brands including Dolce Vita, Betsey Johnson and Kurt Geiger, his remit covers stores, e-commerce and marketing under one P&L. He makes the case that this alignment moves decisions faster than siloed org charts allow.

The conversation turns to social and TikTok Shop. Josh is candid that its real value is discovery, and digs into the economics of low AOVs, creator commissions and not owning the customer. Brands that can hold full price at higher price points have a structural advantage there. On tariffs, he describes a constant calculus of what to pass through, what margin to absorb and where to cut cost, and how quickly the sourcing math keeps flipping.

The back half goes deep on agentic commerce. Steve Madden is live on Google's Universal Checkout, a partnership Google name-checked on its own earnings call, and recently launched two brands on DoorDash. Josh explains how AI has upended vendor selection, where a long operating history can now signal legacy technology, and why short pilots have replaced long RFPs. He closes on where this lands: discovery, not autonomous checkout, is the real prize for a brand like his.

EP344 - How Brooklinen Is Preparing for Agentic Commerce

Live from NRF Nexus in Colorado Springs, Jason and Scot sit down with Abbie Weiss, SVP of Digital & E-Commerce at Brooklinen, to talk digital-first retail, changing discovery, customer experience, and preparing for agentic commerce.

Abbie shares how Brooklinen is expanding across retail, B2B, and the design trade while keeping customer experience, and "ease, at the center of its strategy. They also explore the changing role of discovery, influencers and affiliates, the blurring lines between awareness and conversion, and how Brooklinen is preparing for agentic commerce through better content, catalog readiness, and cross-team collaboration.

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.

n this episode, Jason and Scot reunite after seeing each other in person, sharing stories from recent conferences and discussing how social media, micro-influencers, and AI-powered shopping agents are reshaping the way consumers discover and book travel.

The main event, though, is Amazon's Q2 earnings. They break down AWS's continued growth, stronger margins, and Wall Street's reaction to Amazon's aggressive AI investments. From retail performance and gains in everyday essentials to robotics, custom AI chips like Trainium and Graviton, and the company's rapidly expanding advertising business, this episode unpacks the biggest takeaways from one of Amazon's most important quarters.

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 NRF Nexus in Colorado Springs, Jason and Scot sit down with keynote speaker Mitch Joel. His core thesis is that the attention economy is over and we're entering the intimacy economy, where the winning brands make every customer feel like the experience was built just for them. From there the conversation covers why digital commerce broke serendipity and discovery, how curation becomes a competitive edge once AI can scale it, whether agentic shopping is actually what shoppers want, and how AI is being deployed at companies (often pointed at internal productivity instead of the customer). It closes on trust, and the uncomfortable cases where AI improves the experience but only if you don't disclose it.

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.

Jason and Scot introduce their first video recording and speak with Travis Hess, CEO of Commerce, about the company and the state of e-commerce. Travis discusses his background in services, the rebrand from BigCommerce to Commerce, and current work on B2B capabilities, AI features, and easier launches. Check out the FIRST video podcast episode:

We're unapologetic fanboys of Apple and great retail experiences on this show, so for Apple's 50th anniversary — and the 25th anniversary of the first Apple Store — we brought on the person who actually created the modern Apple Store concept: Ron Johnson.

Ron built his career in 10-year cycles, and each one changed retail. At Target, he dreamed up the first designer collaboration in retail history (Michael Graves) and helped turn a Midwest discounter into a place people bragged about shopping. At Apple, he opened the first stores in 2001 — when Gateway was folding, Dell was winning, and everyone thought a 5%-market-share computer company had no business signing mall leases. He named the Genius Bar (Steve Jobs told him nobody would buy it), killed the cash register with a mobile checkout built on an iPod Touch, and left in 2012 with a million people a day walking into Apple Stores. Then he took the hardest job in retail — CEO of JCPenney — and he's refreshingly honest here about what went wrong.

What we get into:

→ The Michael Graves deal, and why "design" beat "fashion" at Target → Why Steve Jobs hated the idea of mall stores — and how Ron changed his mind → Where the Genius Bar name came from, and the meaning behind it → Killing the cash wrap: mobile checkout in 2008, self-checkout in 2010 → Spending the morning of 9/11 with Steve Jobs → JCPenney, situational arrogance, and the change-management lesson he owns → Why omnichannel won — stores didn't, online didn't → What agentic commerce and AI actually do to shopping (and Satya Nadella's "token capital")

Ron's book, Shop Different, comes out September 22nd from HarperCollins. It's built around the Harvard Business School case study of his career — Harvard's most popular first-year case — and it's going to be one of the must-reads of the fall for anyone who loves retail. Links to buy it are in the show notes.

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 340 of the Jason & Scot Show was recorded on Friday, June 19th, 2026

EP339 - The Non-Agentic Episode In this episode, we challenge Scot to talk about all the interesting things happening in the commerce indsutry, without talking about Agentic Commerce. Including USDC Sales Data, Q1 Earnings Reports, upcoming Prime Day, and the latest on Direct to Consumer from China models from Tik Tok Shop, Shein, and Temu. 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.

EP338 - Amazon Q1 2026 Earnings

Chapters 0:32 Welcome to the Jason and Scott Show 1:36 Spring Break Reflections 3:20 Upcoming Events and Workshops 5:47 Healthcare Insights 8:00 Amazon's Prime Day Changes 9:58 Amazon's Q1 Earnings Overview 20:04 Amazon's Retail Performance Analysis 28:28 Fulfillment and Delivery Innovations 30:26 Global Instant Commerce Trends 31:32 Revenue Breakdown Insights 35:01 Whole Foods Performance 42:47 Advertising Business Growth 46:34 The Future of Agentic Commerce 54:05 UCP Developments and Strategy 1:04:41 Closing Thoughts and Reviews

In this episode, hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg and Scot Wingo dive into Amazon's strong Q1 2026 earnings, highlighting a 17% year-over-year revenue increase and its rise as the second-largest grocer in the US. They discuss Amazon's significant investments in AI and AWS, which achieved 28% revenue growth, and the expanding advertising division competing with giants like Google and Meta. Tune in for insights into Amazon's strategies in the evolving landscape of retail and commerce.

Episode 336 of the Jason & Scot Show was recorded on Friday, February 6th, 2026

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of ReFiBuy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

**The Future of Agentic Commerce**

In Episode 337 of the Jason & Scot Show, recorded on March 10th, 2026, hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg and Scot Wingo explore the transformative impact of agentic commerce, as discussed during a panel at Citi's 2026 Global Consumer and Retail Conference. Joined by experts Ron Josey and Paul Lejuez, they examine how AI technologies are reshaping retail, leading to impressive traffic growth for companies like Target and Amazon. The discussion highlights the balance between online and physical retail strategies, the rise of retail media networks, and the potential of AI-driven partnerships. Jason and Scott also analyze emerging market players, particularly in beauty and fashion sectors. Tune in for critical insights on the future of retail technology, and if you enjoyed this episode, please like our Facebook page and leave us a review on iTunes. Thank you for listening to Episode 337 of the Jason & Scot Show!