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Ellie Ronning is part of the enterprise strategy team at Signifyd, where she works with some of the largest direct-to-consumer retailers and merchants in the country. She is a former merchant herself, with fifteen plus years on the business side in New York. Brent talked with her at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Signifyd is a commerce protection platform, a decisioning layer across the customer journey from account login to checkout and returns. Signifyd backs each decision to approve or decline an order with a liability shift. In this conversation Merchants who say they don't have a chargeback problem are often over declining good customers to keep chargebacks lowIn Ellie's words, "They're leaving a lot of money on the table by over declining"The Signifyd commerce network draws on transactional data across the merchants it works with, so a customer who is new to one site has often been seen elsewhere in the networkSignifyd has been a machine learning company for about fifteen years, and its models are learning to tell an agent's transaction from a human'sOn agentic commerce, merchants are starting with search and discovery, refining item data, attributes and brand voiceEllie's hot take, agentic commerce will push merchants toward a unified commerce strategy, because you can't have siloed data in an agentic world This episode is sponsored by the B2B Commerce Trends and Opportunities Report, presented by Shopware and written and researched by Content Cucumber. Grab your free copy at contentcucumber.com/b2b-commerce-trends-report. Signifyd signifyd.com Ellie Ronning on LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/ellieronning Talk Commerce talk-commerce.com

The Agentic Commerce Guy is a new short segment of Talk Commerce. Brent Peterson sits down with one guest for about ten minutes on one agentic commerce topic, and it comes out on Wednesdays, the same day his Agentic Commerce Guy newsletter goes out on LinkedIn. Subscribe at linkedin.com/newsletters/7343682760978460672. Rahul Talari is co-founder and CEO of Relvino, which gives every shopper their own AI marketing agent for email and SMS in place of the rule-based flows brands build in Klaviyo and Attentive. Rahul calls the rule-based model "the spray and pray approach," with cart abandonment emails at two hours and an SMS at ten hours, timed on market research assumptions about when a shopper will come back. Relvino drops flows and segments and builds an agent for each shopper from onsite clicks, email and SMS engagement, and CRM data, so a brand sends 50 emails to the shoppers with the strongest intent in place of 1,000 emails to every cart abandoner. Rahul shares the results Relvino reports, 80% fewer sends than the incumbents, a two to six times revenue lift for brands doing $100 million to $500 million, 35% open rates against a 26.6% industry average, and $7.64 in revenue per email against $1.07. He also walks through the non-AI software QA layer that checks each AI-written message against the brand's guardrails before it goes out. Relvino relvino.com

Jehan Hamedi is the founder of Vizit, an AI company working on the analysis and understanding of visual content and imagery for enterprise brands and retailers. He has spent about 15 years in the AI industry building, designing and scaling AI measurement systems. Detection and classification can tell you what sits inside an image, and Jehan's interest runs past that into a harder question, which is whether an image moves a particular shopper in a particular market and category to choose a product. Vizit trains models on behavioral, product, sales, social and search data to simulate the shopper, produces Vizit Scores against the competitive set, and feeds that context into generation through Vizit Spark, so a low scoring image gets rebuilt rather than described. In this conversation, the first impression Jehan says a shopper forms in under 13 milliseconds, the crickets you get when you ask a brand manager to name their best images, how context separates a generalist image generator from one aimed at conversion, what shifts by country when you photograph cat food, and his prediction about scoring images before they ship. This episode is sponsored by the B2B Commerce Trends and Opportunities Report, presented by Shopware and written and researched by Content Cucumber. Grab your free copy at https://contentcucumber.com/b2b-commerce-trends-report/ Links Vizit https://www.vizit.com Jehan on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jehanhamedi/

Jordan West of Social Commerce Club, a TikTok Shop agency, joins Brent to talk about how a path through dropshipped hoverboards, Shopify, Facebook ads and a string of acquired brands led him to go all in on TikTok Shop. The conversation covers why creators who only get paid when they make a sale hand brands a steady supply of human made content, how creative that works on TikTok carries over to other channels, and why he sees TikTok as the strongest top of funnel channel brands have had in North America. Jordan also explains how a local service business can use TikTok without a product to ship, why he believes every business owner has to be the top content creator for the business, and what brands should do heading into Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the rest of Q4. Links Jordan on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-west-marketer Social Commerce Club https://socialcommerceclub.com Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.

Mohammed Hedadji is the CEO and one of the co-founders of Nodus, a growth systems agency for retail and high consideration brands. Isaac Morey sat down with him for the final interview of Shoptalk Fall in Nashville, the day after Nodus turned four. In this conversation, Mohammed traces Nodus back to almost ten years at Red Ventures working with Walmart, Procter and Gamble and Apple, and explains why the middle market needs a partner that grounds marketing in the P&L before adding more tools, since the average brand has double the vendors it had five years ago. Nodus is staffed half with senior marketers and half with engineers and data scientists. He describes Ember, the Nodus tool that checks performance marketing every ten minutes, the firm no replace rule Nodus keeps for its people, AI slop as the result of a shortcut, and his hot take on partners that measure their own results. Find Nodus at nodus.io and Mohammed on LinkedIn. Talk Commerce is at talk-commerce.com.

Mark Sifrit is the general manager of North America for G10X, a digital and AI solutions company that builds AI and technology solutions at scale for enterprises. Isaac Morey sat down with him on the floor at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. In this conversation, shoppers move from traditional search to agentic search, and Mark asks whether a company shows up in the answer at all. He covers what a company keeps private, what it makes public and how agents reach it, why agents learn through their interactions so a company can go back and educate them, and why the first wave of AI projects proved a company was AI ready without solving a business problem. Mark defines AI slop as a mixed message, when the agents cannot tell what the source of truth is, and walks through the AI enabled development lifecycle G10X built, including GlassX for production monitoring and GTX for end to end testing. Find G10X at g10x.com and Mark on LinkedIn. Talk Commerce is at talk-commerce.com.

Matt Christensen is president and co-founder of DDS, Distributor Data Solutions, out of Salt Lake City. DDS sits between manufacturers and the distributors who sell their products and moves rich product data, images, descriptions, videos and attributes, into the shape each distributor can use. Our Shoptoberfest tape in Nashville did not survive the Bavarian Bierhaus, so Matt came back to the studio for a make-up, a special Shopware edition. In this conversation, DDS customers run from 10,000 SKUs to close to 15 million and every manufacturer stores and names the data differently. Shopify, BigCommerce, the PIM companies and Shopware are pushing wholesale, electrical, plumbing, HVAC and industrial supply ahead faster than Matt has seen. AI took enrichment and normalization from code to a custom spec about a hundred times faster. A large distributor shows sixty or seventy percent of the catalog online, and agents cannot find the rest. B2B launches slip six months or a year on the data, not the platform, at five to fifteen minutes per SKU. Find DDS at distributordatasolutions.com and Matt on LinkedIn. The B2B Commerce Trends and Opportunities Report, written and researched by Content Cucumber and presented by Shopware, is free at contentcucumber.com. Talk Commerce is at talk-commerce.com.

Parag Mamnani is the founder and CEO of Webgility, which automates accounting for multi-channel brands and retailers. He built eCommerce stores on osCommerce and X-Cart before Magento, ran Amazon Webstore until Amazon sold it to Shopify, and started Webgility almost two decades ago on three words written on a napkin, integration, automation and insights. Brent and Parag go back to the early Magento Imagine days. In this episode Brent and Parag cover: Why the commerce platform is not your system of truth, and why the accounting system is the only place the real margin and cash flow liveAlmost right is not good enough. Nobody accepts 95 percent accurate books, and the best AI accounting benchmarks land in the low 90sAI as a pretty intelligent intern, sycophancy, and the first awe-inspiring report that falls apart when you double-clickHow Webgility works with QuickBooks, Xero and NetSuite, and the battleground over who owns the general ledgerThree habits for business owners, a clean system of record, a monthly close rhythm, and time spent reading the financialsBlack Friday, agentic commerce and why Parag expects agents to stay a small share of transaction volumeParag gives the Free Joke Project an eight. This episode is sponsored by Webgility. Links from Webgility Webgility https://www.webgility.com $300 worth of free eCommerce books audit for Talk Commerce listeners https://www.webgility.com/ecommerce-books-audit Limited-time offer, 50% off the full-service bookkeeping package https://www.webgility.com/schedule-expert-session Parag on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/paragmamnani/

Brent sat down with Brandon Urich at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Brandon is the president of SwiftOtter, a full-service digital agency that grew out of the Magento developer training business its founder Joseph built, and that now works across Adobe Commerce, Shopify and BigCommerce with headless builds on Next.js. The conversation covers how the best kept secret in the agency space turned its attention to agency services, the point where an eCommerce platform's content tools cap out and a headless front end takes over, why the failed headless projects of five to ten years ago look different now that AI lowers the cost of custom UI, whether headless levels the field between platforms, why a multi-platform partner earns more trust than a single-platform one, Brandon's definition of AI slop and why SwiftOtter trains its team on when not to use AI, his hot take that guardrails are where everyone is stuck, and OmniGuide, the guided shopping application that embeds in catalog pages, PDPs and search so the research stays on the brand's website. Links SwiftOtter https://swiftotter.com Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.

Brent sat down with Yurii Kuzminov at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Yurii is the CEO and founder of Axceleris, an agency that started in Magento more than sixteen years ago and now partners with both Adobe and Shopify. The conversation covers why Yurii comes to events for the meetings and watches the sessions later, the hard decision to add Shopify after years of being against it, why a straightforward D2C store often lowers its total cost of ownership by migrating off Magento and why some D2C merchants still belong on Magento, how AI lets his developers deliver more in every paid hour and gave Magento a second breath, the London agency round table where one shop moved a Magento site to Hyvä with most of the work done by AI, Shop Pay arriving on Magento and what Shopify's benchmarks say about guest checkout, why there is no best platform on the market and why a single-platform agency will always tell you otherwise, and his view that AI content is fine when a person with real experience sits in the loop. Links Axceleris https://axceleris.com Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.

Isaac Morey sat down with Allison Reilly at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Allison is the founder of Closai, a startup building a consumer purchase intelligence layer for retail, where a shopper opts in to connect their purchase history with the apps, agents, brands and retailers they choose. The conversation covers what happens to a camera bought at Best Buy once the shopper opts in, why a retailer gets a personalized home page instead of a static one, why Allison compares Closai to Plaid and says a retailer cannot build the neutral layer itself, her layman's definition of agentic commerce as a souped-up Google search that remembers your context, the Shopify integration and retail partnerships she has coming, her take that the messy middle between human-made content and AI slop is where the nuance lives, and her hot take that the future of commerce is personal and connected. Links Closai https://closai.io Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.

Isaac Morey sat down with Aaron Sheehan at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Aaron is the VP of Strategy and Partnerships at OroCommerce, an e-commerce platform made for manufacturers and distributors. The conversation covers the complexity that comes with B2B sales, what is different about Shoptalk this year with a new B2B focus, why Aaron says AI has solved few problems for B2B companies whose challenges are the same ones they have had for 20 years, why the fax machine is not dead, why B2B companies point AI at their own paperwork and workflows and not yet at their customers, and Aaron's answer on AI slop, which draws on the idea that people confuse the work with the output. Links Watch the interview on YouTube https://youtu.be/bIVrEDzfvHE Aaron on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronsheehan/ OroCommerce https://oroinc.com

Ose Amiegheme leads email product at Intuit Mailchimp. Before Mailchimp he worked on Adobe Express and spent time at TikTok, and he describes himself as a product manager who is a creative at heart. Brent and Ose talk about why email keeps outliving the predictions of its death, what Ose sees in Mailchimp's numbers when merchants invest in owned channels (he says those merchants get 10 to 20% more ROI), and how predictive models build segments around who is likely to buy and who responds to a discount. They get into how agents will weigh a brand's engagement with a shopper when they recommend products, why Ose sees AI as a floor raiser for small businesses with human judgment taking the work to the next level, the analytics agent and insights to action work at Mailchimp, and the connector that brings Mailchimp data into ChatGPT and Anthropic. Links Ose on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ose-amiegheme/ Intuit Mailchimp https://mailchimp.com

Isaac Morey sat down with Ben Riggle at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Ben is the managing director for Channable in North America, and Channable takes a retailer's product data and optimizes it for each surface the products go out on. We cover the difference between agentic discovery and agentic checkout, why Ben thinks the word agentic may fade into search and discovery, why product data is the source agents and LLMs rely on, the 30 conversational attributes Google added, why rules fix more than AI does when AI is checking AI, Ben's definition of AI slop, the AI readiness tracker Channable launched, and his hot take on data control. Channable is at channable.com.

Scott Ohsman of Always Off Brand and I recorded our Slightly Off Commerce collaboration at Shoptoberfest in Nashville, and Ethan Giffin waited about four hours for his turn at the table. He runs The B2B eCommerce Agency, formerly Groove Commerce, and the rebrand describes a change that happened to the business before it happened to the name. We cover how the agency got pulled into manufacturing and distribution, the complicated situations behind his book Closing the Digital Revenue Gap, why the buyer entering the workforce now expects Amazon, Uber and Starbucks in a pocket, what he calls the five-legged stool of alignment between sales, marketing, IT, operations and finance, and why he likes Shopware for complex catalogs. The B2B eCommerce Agency is at b2becommerceagency.com, and a free copy of Closing the Digital Revenue Gap is at b2becombook.com. The B2B Commerce Trends and Opportunities Report, written and researched by Content Cucumber and presented by Shopware, is free at contentcucumber.com.