EP 341- Agentic Commerce with Travis Hess, CEO of Commerce

The customer is the channel, right? It's merchants, regardless of size or industry, need to reach customers at scale with value, regardless where they buy the good or service. And historically, that's been really, really hard to do. You've had all these explosion of channels, trying to get there consistently, trying to get signal out of what's working, what's not working. The tech is there now. The signal might not all be there, and I think that's what's giving people angst that's getting better, but it's still hard to figure out. Welcome to the Jason and Scotch show. Your source for the latest news and trends in the e-commerce industry. Featuring host Jason Retail Geek Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer of Publicists and Scott Wingo, co-founder and CEO of ReFi Buy. Here are Jason and Scotch. This is episode 341 being recorded on Thursday, July 2nd. 2026, I'm your host, Jason Retail Geek Goldberg. And as usual, I'm here with your co-host, Scott Wingo. Hey, Jason and welcome back. Jason and Scotch show listeners. One brief, exciting announcement after 11 years of an audio-only podcast. I finally twisted both of Jason's arms and convinced him it was time to modernize. He's an old, funny, daddy, and he said, "Audios the future," and I said, "We need to go video." So starting here on episode 341 for the first time, we also have a YouTube channel. So we invite you to come on over there. It's in the show notes. Make sure you subscribe to that. But we'll still be producing the same audio you know and love as well if you're used to listening to your Jason and Scotch there. Yeah. And if you are just listening to the audio, just imagine two incredibly good-looking guys. Yes, Brad Pitt is Jason. I'm more of a Tom Hanks kind of vibe, but there you go. So imagine that. Jason to celebrate our first podcast of the modern era, we are kicking it off with a bang. Today, we are very excited to welcome Travis Hess. He is CEO of Commerce. Travis, welcome to the first modernized Jason Scotch. Thank you guys, Brad. Believe it, I can't believe I'm the first host that's gone video here, but I would agree with the opening comment. You guys are both very handsome. You look great. Thank you. Thank you. Buttering a sample, not help thinner. No, I speak for yourself, Scott. I'm open to buttering up. OK, Jason receives all bribes of buttering. I try to stay constant. Brad, we are super excited. Scott's giving me a hard time for being slow to come to the future. I'd also like to announce this week, I'm finally cutting the cord. I'm going to try one of those new wireless phones. So hopefully I'll be able to adjust to that. But one tradition we've had since the very beginning of the show with guests is we always like to start by understanding a little bit about how you came to your current role. So I'd love to get the elevator version of your background and spoil it alert. I don't even think you know this. We actually technically overlapped somewhere. I actually used to work with your wife, who's also lovely for a brief period of time. And I think back in the cross few days, I think you were there early cross few days. I thought I was going to drop a surprise bomb on you, but you're way ahead of me. I am way ahead of you on that one. I listen, I'm fans of both of you. I don't say it a lot publicly because I'm not asked, but for what it's worth, I followed both of you for a long time. Been in the space forever, like you guys have, came out of the services side of the business. So agency consulting for a long time up through kind of the platform evolution. Jason, you talk about it a lot. Back in the ATG days, graduated into demandware and high-risk and magento, then into the Shopify ecosystem. And now into the commerce ecosystem on the software side. But it's been an unusual path in the sense that I came up through services. I've not seen a lot of others jump from services to software in this capacity, but even a blind squirrel finds an acorn out. And again, I guess. But I do think with where we are in a gentick and Scott, this is near and dear to your heart, I do think with all of the interesting, complex things that are going on, I do think it favors a services mindset for a narrative reason. So we get them back. But very outcome-based, I think a lot of context switching, I think the pace by which everything's operating at, I think, despite it being much slower years ago with on-prem and a lot of the big implementations that are much faster now, I think understanding how things are digested and deployed from a services mindset, I think is extremely valuable in how this is all rolling out and how people are understanding it. So for whatever that's worth, it's been an amazing journey. But I know no worth a docks one, I would say. Fair enough, that transition from software to services is a super interesting one. I do, Scott introduced you as the CEO of Commerce. And of course, insiders will know exactly what we're talking about, but just to kind of level set, there's a well-known, I'd call it e-commerce platform in our ecosystem for a long time, called Big Commerce. And you guys both, you rebranded from Big Commerce to Commerce. I want to say last year, which candidly, Scott and I both kind of think is cool and kind of think is annoying because it creates some confusion. Everyone always says, previously known as. Yeah, I listen to you guys. I understand, it's fascinating. Very few people are in the middle of this. I get comments where people, they love it or they hate it. And they're not afraid to tell you either way, I haven't found a lot of people indifferent to it. It certainly, it wasn't intended to be polarizing honestly. It was to understand the thesis behind it. We were named after the platform for listeners that aren't familiar with it. And Big Commerce has been around for a long time and well-known. We had acquired two other products, Fidinomics, which is near and dear to Scott's heart, given his history, I think was acquired around six years ago, on the feed optimization management side, and MakeSwift, which was kind of a pre-revenue visual editor built out in XJS and React. And in the spirit of coming over and wanting to integrate those products, it was hard to do that after being named of the platform. Everyone keeps thinking of the platform. And if you think of the ICPs across those products, ideal customer profiles. Fidinomics has historically played very much upmarket enterprise. So think big retail, global brand of manufacturing, and things like that. And the Commerce historically grew up years ago, small business, and had moved into mid-market and was opportunistically trying to move upmarket. So just given some of those dynamics, it was not an easy task. Believe it or not, there's not a lot of domains available. And we had a couple big enomics and things like that that kind of voted out. So the domain was available. We bought it, we went for it, and we are where we are with half the audience probably hating it, half of it. Maybe loving it. I think it's bold, but none of these got-- and I would argue where the industry is going. Commerce is fairly apropos. It does create some complexities when you're named after a category. But I do think its value is accruing in different places. I think it's evolving faster than it ever has before. And I think it's a fascinating dynamic. Maybe it makes more sense in another year. To be fair, I am mixed, because I totally agree and get the sentiment of you're bigger than just the platform. I think it's super cool at dinner parties to say I'm the CEO of Commerce. And Scott has nothing-- no ground to stand on, because I want to say the stock ticker for one of his previous companies was E-Com. So I think-- yeah, yeah. So I like all that. It's kind of annoying to name your hotel, the hotel, which is, of course, a true story. It's amazing. I guess, yeah. I think you guys used that on the last episode. I agree. It is annoying. I'm sorry for that. But at least you guys have the colors to where we came from and why. Yeah. And the story of how you were CEO, you were on the board, if I recall. Is that right? No. I came in. I was at Accenture. So I had-- OK. We had sold-- when I'd gone in the Shopify ecosystem, I went to run the largest Shopify agency was bought by a family office. And I wanted to run that. We ended up selling it to another PE that owned a retail agency called the Stable. So at the time, this is like Circuit 2021, 2022 post-COVID. You had all the digitally-nated brand run up. And then as we went cook-less and capital became a little more expensive, they started selling across other channels and also being one of them. And the Stable was well known for taking a lot of those brands into Walmart, Amazon, Target, et cetera, et cetera. And so PE bought that, merged it together. And six months later, we sold it to Accenture. And was at Accenture for about 18 months and was recruited out to come here. So that was the journey. Yeah. And I got to meet the previous CEO. He was always a very-- this is not a reflection on you, but it was more-- I'm not a super fashionista. But he always was really put together with a little jacket and different pocket squares and stuff. And I was always like, wow. I don't know how you have time for that. He was-- Yeah, Brett is a brilliant and just a great human being. And yes, incredibly better dressed than I am. So it was like-- it was comical sort of an odd couple when we were together. I'm a little taller than he is. But he's definitely well dressed compared to me, who's kind of a traditional agency guy and T-shirts and jeans and things like that. So for whatever that's worth, I'd never tried to compete with that. I couldn't. Now, is he kind of the founder that's still on the board? Or he's gone on and done something else? He's gone on done something else. Now, he came in, took a public, had a really proud run, long run here. I think he was in chair for like eight years. years and he was not one of the founders but came in shortly there after, went through the IPO, brewed the business, established a lot of the foundational principles and oversaw obviously those two acquisitions I mentioned previously and yeah, it's off, it's off doing other things. Let's jump into an update on the platform piece. Do we call that, is that the big commerce piece? Big commerce piece, dude, still good. And give us an update like what are some of the big new things going on there and yeah, what, why should customers be kind of excited about the direction of that? Yeah, we've, I mean, a lot of the focus over the last year and a half or so has been integrating the other two products, two big commerce. So we launched a self-service version of a feedonomics called Surface, Late Last Q3, which was, has had a lot of success associated, which was nice. There was always an upmarket product, does have something self-service there, native to the platform, makes Swift that visual editor, has existed in our headless sort of reference architecture called catalyst, but is in the process of being deployed now into the hosted version of that on the platform. A lot of expansion within the platform is well particularly around B2B and those capabilities, obviously ingesting some AI and, and agent to capabilities natively to the platform as well and expanding on things we feel like we are, we have a right to win and, and it's already differentiated in, and market it has historically been very composably oriented and open. So, you know, merchants that, that live in complicated industries or markets that have nuance to requirements could be regulated industries could be B2B could be just enough nuance where they can't live with maybe the rigidity of some other platforms have circumstances where it's just lended itself to that product and almost like what they used to call, what we used to call open SaaS, sort of the benefits of SaaS with some governance and some, you know, some framework and some, some structure, but with the benefit of being able to extend that. So, a lot of, a little bit more of that and a little bit more investment in, in making a little bit easier to go live and all the other benefits that come with AI, how do we launch people faster, how do we make it easier to deploy future features and functions and things like that, but it's been a nice, it's been a nice run, but mostly centered around getting those other two products incorporated and building more of a more of an ecosystem around those. And then when you're, when you're in a, you know, an RFP with, with a battle and you're talking to a customer, how do you differentiate big commerce from Shopify started S&B and has kind of come into this world and then Salesforce was kind of dormant for a while. They seem reengineered re re reinvigorated and vigorated. Yes. Knit is in there now and they're, they're, they're done a big acquisition. They're trying to steer the ship into a jointed commerce. How do you, how do, where does big commerce fit in with that space? I think it depends on the, the certainly the market. Historically, where we've seen, and I've been public about this on earnings, the majority of our new bookings have been B2B oriented. So think traditional manufacturing distribution and the complexity that come with those use cases and dynamics, particularly in mid market. We've been fairly dominant and sort of right to win. At least you're in the room every time and opportunistically we've been bringing that more and more up market and then down market, it's a lot of hybrid. They're doing both B2B and B2C. So think kind of wholesale mixed with maybe direct to consumer sort of dynamics. On the B2C side, I think you're finding regulated industries certainly has been a big niche for us. We've done that very well for a long time. I think B2B to C has been another area where we've got the ability to handle some of that, that complexity so to speak. I think just technically people who appreciate composability appreciate headless. I think lends itself to some agentech principle certainly we can talk about. But I would not say on the platform side, we're going head to head with commerce tools per say on a day to day basis. They certainly play farther up market as does Salesforce traditionally in Adobe. So I would say mentor prize and mid market has been the primary focus of the platform side of that stuff. When you say B2B just clarification, it's more wholesale not so it's wholesale that then ultimately goes to consumer versus like industrial kind of things. No, it's primarily it's the opposite. Yeah, it's small business. It's wholesale, which is like how Shopify would class B2B is more wholesale. Yeah. Or is it more industrial where you've got big, you know, Clujie catalogs and all the complexities area driving efficiencies and account hierarchies and things like that. So yeah, I always thought we said B2B when we met industrial. But now everyone's like, do you mean that not D2C? And I'm like, well, I'm confused. So our industry takes every definition and puts six things into it. It's kind of complicated. It's a job security for Jay. Torture to death. Yes. They hired Jason to unpack it off of them. Yeah. And I mean, just super high level. I think of that industrial industry is quite a bit larger than the B2C that like if you look at the total revenue volume of all the the saw blade manufacturers that sell saws to lumberjacks and all these different, you know, industries that we would never think of airplane parts, car parts, all this stuff. It's probably twice as big as B2C and by the way, B2C is extraordinarily concentrated on a couple of players, whereas B2B is way more fragmented. So, you know, if you're going to win in the platform space, my hypothesis is you'd rather be winning it at B2B, even though, you know, people might talk about you at dinner parties less. Yeah. I'm not invited to a lot of dinner parties. You guys will want to know why by the end of this. But yeah, I agree with you, Jason. I think it's one of the attractions for me coming over here was the B2B capabilities and acumen because I agree the tam there is much bigger. They're not necessarily going to the same shows. They don't get the same accolades. I think Scott, to your point, a few minutes ago, the vernacular because the demographic and commerce now, it's a much younger demographic. We all see that when at least I feel that way when I go to shop talk. I feel like the oldest guy in the room or one of the older guys in the room. And I think the younger generation in the space, certainly AI savvy and things like that, but they don't remember sort of the old days. So a lot of things that aren't necessarily new feel and seem new and people talk about them as if they're new. I would say B2B, you know, is definitely more of a laggard generally speaking like as far as optimization. But I think generationally with all of the AI stuff front and center, this is the first time you're seeing a lot of like giant business transformation where you're blending front office with back office for the first time maybe ever. And I think that is catalyzing maybe a movement here where you're going to see more and more of that tam become exposed in the use cases become a bit more evident because it is a dark art, if you will. People don't know about it unless you're in it, but it's massive and it's complicated and interesting. I think honestly a lot more AI friendly right now in use cases than probably B2C even though B2C gets all the hype. I think it will be way more impactful B2B it already is because of the nature of what people are trying to solve there, which is primarily efficiency gains speed, the elimination of FTEs or at least a redeployment of FTEs into doing more human centric things, which is selling more driving more value, more expansion things like that as opposed to administrative tests. I think I've already seen some data that the adoption rate of agentic commerce and B2B in China is way ahead of B2C agentic. So that's going to be interesting to follow. I do want to double click on the non commerce platform parts of the business. When I think of the platform, I actually think you had two platforms, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but you have what I used to call kind of big commerce classic, which was kind of like SaaS, store in a box, everything you need to get up and selling. Then you had catalyst, which was kind of like, I think newer, like headless construction kit for building your own platform. When you acquired makeswift, I never talked to anyone from your company, so I might have this while you're wrong, but my assumption was makeswift is kind of like a gooey generator or a CMS or an interface developer that you might use to put a front in on a headless system like catalyst. Is that, do I have makeswift, right? Kind of, yeah, you're close. And I would close the win for me for the right. Close is the win. Close is the win. It's complicated. I would not define it as a CMS. It can work with a CMS and we've got many headless customers that end up bringing their own CMS to control the glass and control the head. It's a visual editor in its origination. I think that was initially when it was bought, was the UI, it was the surface, if you will, on the front end, natively to catalyst, which was that headless reference architecture and accelerator that we launched a few years ago. It remains that, although agnostic in nature, if someone wanted to run that on another CMS, if you will, that's totally fine as well. I think with the gentick, what you're seeing makes swift ultimately evolving into is an experience, orchestration, and I think what will become more important as we move more and more into a gentick, a governance tool. I think governance will become hot like Hansel again because I think most people assume AI will easily generate content. It already is and it will be hyper personalized. I think the concern in the angst from brands in particular is great. How do I govern that? Not just how my own own surfaces, but on other surfaces and other experiences that will certainly continue to emerge. I think governance, it will be important. That's what it's evolving into, honestly, which is most interesting down the road. That makes sense. I want to double click on feed. feed dynamics for a second. So we talked about it being a product feed solution and obviously a lot of our listeners will be familiar with it because it's been a core part of the ecosystem for a long time. When people talk about product feeds, I always like to clarify a little bit because I feel like there's one P feeds that are like tools that a manufacturer would use to provide data to a wholesaler and then there's three P feeds that a market place seller would use to list their products for sale on Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, etc. I know feed dynamics does three P feeds. Do you do both or are you primarily around the three P feeds? Historically it's been three P. I think you're going to see more and more use cases on one P potentially because of a feed dynamics ability to go aggregate disparate data and a number of different capacities and obviously enrich, optimize it and syndicate it wherever it needs to show up and whatever capacity. I think with my view of feed dynamics how I would describe it as a product intelligence tool, I think feed is an old term. Maybe it dies. Scott probably has a strong opinion here. Maybe he doesn't. I'm assuming he would given his background. But I view it very much as a product intelligence tool, I think with a gentick and the contextualized conversations that we're having, this is going to become more and more and more applicable, more robust between enrichment and orchestration. I said this in earnings last quarter. I don't think commerce is storefront-centric anymore. It doesn't mean storefronts going away. I think it's extending. I think the value is accruing in other places, most notably through LLMs right now. What's empowering that, as we all know, is the enrichment of the data that's being syndicated into these schemas and into these surfaces that's driving more comprehensive discovery. As that becomes more and more contextualized, you can imagine how important that intelligence is because you're not just talking about availability of a product. You're talking about delivery times. You're talking about possibly margin and all sorts of other nuances that would go into making those recommendations to build and facilitate trust. I very much view it as something that it's an invaluable product market fit in the world of a gentick. I see it evolving pretty dramatically at already is. Yeah. I get it. In a context, pre-ecommerce, when you sold something to a retailer, you might have had to provide four or five attributes about that product. Then e-commerce created this huge headache suddenly you needed to provide eight attributes. People didn't have those eight. During all our triers, eight has expanded to, I think, a 100% compliance on Amazon would now be 300 attributes. The amount of attributes you've needed has dramatically expanded. Back in the dark ages, when Scott started Channel Advisor, it was really difficult to get those attributes to the places that needed them. The plumbing was hard. Today, I would argue the plumbing is pretty easy. What's hard is getting those 300 attributes and getting those 300 attributes right. By the way, I have a feeling the robot would prefer 3000 attributes. You spot your spot. You're literally spot on. I would argue it's funny because we all follow the trades and read LinkedIn. There's a lot of argument being made now that there's still value in this indication that access to these things is somewhat valuable. Early access arguably could be perceived as valuable. But at the end of the day, these are all public. Public schemas, there will be APIs. Access will be made to everyone. There's very little value in that anymore, not to devalue what Scott built over the years because it was invaluable. The time and very, very challenging. I think now the trick is obviously the level of enrichment and the controls that you're able to provide merchants because larger merchants tend to want more control about how things are enriched, where they're enriched, where they're surfaced, how they're surfaced, to their surface next to. There's all this governance stuff that goes into this that's incredibly complicated. Like I said, when I alluded to earlier, the value is accruing in different areas. Historically, it was search terms, drive someone to an own storefront, optimize checkout, try to convert, lift conversion, or whatever. Now that intent is happening in these answer engines. That will become more and more robust. Whether someone chooses to shop within that UI and that gets better, or they want to go click on it and land on a PDP or on a card or on a home page or whatnot, it'll depend on the product category or the user certainly. But arguably, it's hard to argue that checkout is important as it was a year ago, which I think is going to challenge some commercial models out there, which is fascinating to watch. But that's what I mean by the value accruing. I think it's a very different dynamic. I don't think it's ever been more exciting other than early commerce days to be part of this industry because of these changing dynamics. It's also happening at a pace faster than I think we, I mean, it's fascinating. You guys see this every day by more than I do. It's fascinating how quickly this is evolving. It's one of the amazing time to be in the in the space and in the ecosystem. Yeah, I agree. It's reenergizing for sure. And I always wanted to go faster. Now we finally can. So it's like, you know what you're going to go faster. Yeah, I think we all feel like we've got a tiger by the tail there. Let's pivot. We've kind of danced around it. Let's just jump right into a gentick commerce. I have a lot of Jason wouldn't let me talk about it to put. I know. I listen. You weren't allowed. You did a good job, by the way. It was impressive. I lost a bet on that one. Yeah. Yeah. I do think about other things, but I spend 90% time on that. Let's start with the definition because I get in all these online debates, especially with Andrew Lipsman about what is a gentick commerce? What's Travis's definition? Oh, God. This is such a religious argument. I was just talking to Heather Hershey about this not too long ago. People get very literal about it. Is she forced her? The Forster people have like their own, their own, like even more strict. Yeah. When I thought, I thought, you know, Lipsman was here and then he moved over the Forster went over here. So it's kind of funny. Yeah. Listen, I think it's broad personally because I think people just naturally, most people lump it into everything. You could debate whether or not it has to be fully autonomous for it to be considered a gentick. I don't think it does personally for me. I think there's there's three motions here and this you guys can agree or disagree. I think if you think of it as a spectrum, the full right side of that spectrum, however you want to look at it is fully autonomous where an agent is discovering, shopping, buying, transacting, what have you on behalf of someone I think where my mind goes in these categories that are obvious, subscriptive categories or things that are commoditized in general that we don't care about having to return or get right and you know, we kind of do this already through whoever our favorite shopping channel or engine is. On the other side of that spectrum, you're going to have very experiential sort of commerce still where the storefront's still going to be king and the store itself is going to be king because these are high involvement products where again, I want to come in and touch it, feel it, talk to a sales associate, experience it in different ways and you could think of natural categories like high fashion or furniture or whatever. That doesn't mean there won't be, you know, assist there, which is where the murky middle is, where it's going to be agentically assisted, where discovery bare minimally is going to help me narrow down where I may want to look for those things. It might even take it a step further and personally recommend and as we get deeper and deeper and deeper, there are things that are being handled by agents on our behalf and maybe we're just making the final call on checking out. I'm not leaning in so much and trying to define it literally because, "Hey, I'm not smart enough to get that right." And by the way, why would I want to push myself into a corner? I think it's fascinating to see the different models kind of evolve and see where the puck is going. I think it's a combination of all of those things. Let's see where it goes and maybe in six months, I'll be able to give you guys a more definitive definition. But that's how I say, I think it's a combination of all of them. I would consider agentic in nature either assisted or absolute and getting more and more coverage there, obviously. It's certainly front and center is consumer behaviors changing. I agree with your definition. I don't really care what they want to call it. But then what they'll do is they'll say, "This is what I'm going to call it and it doesn't exist, so don't do anything." And that's the part I have issue with because I think you would never tell your customers to do nothing because we see it, right? You talk to enough chief digital officers on B2B or B2C. And this is, I think you mentioned in your fourth, your quarterly report there that people are seeing a rapid descent of traffic to these B2C sites because it's getting starved off by insurringence. And this idea that it doesn't exist is false because we can see it. And then doing nothing, I think, is like the, it's a little bit of malpractice that I kind of felt like I had to call it out a little bit. I am going to disagree with one part of Scott's thing. I do care what you call it. Like I think it is because we've been doing this a long time and you know what, no one has ever talked about in our industry, the cash register industry, right? Like nobody ever calls it the cash register industry. They call it the retail industry, right? And 90% of retail is merchandising, discovery, creating desire and demand, and then fulfilling that demand. And yes, some small part of retail is taking the money, right? And so then when you talk about a digital version of that or a social version of that or an agentic version of that to say we're only going to define that as the transaction, like that, that feels fundamentally wrong to me, right? And you know, I don't care very much if the robot pays or Scott Wingo pays. I care how Scott discovered a new product that he has to have and create, you know, new, new economic activity. I agree. I think when I first I didn't learn this at Accenture, but it became very evident to me there, just given the size and the dynamics of their clients. You've had all these explosion of channels trying to get their consistently, trying to get signal out of what's working, what's not working, trying to figure out all the orchestration on the backend around inventory and merchant of record and things like that. The signal might not all be there. And I think that's what's giving people angst that's getting better, but it's still hard to figure out. But there are exaggerated use cases here that help people understand where this is all go. I would love, actually, Jason, not to turn the question back on you guys, but you guys deal with this all the time. Think of like something as simple as pet food, where you've got a 50 pound pack of food that historically would have sold through, you know, big box retail or a pet co or a pet smart or especially retail like chewy, like the old days, for those of us that have dogs, you'd go down to the pet co and grab that big bag, throw it, throw out your back in the process, put in a cart, check out as a pan in the neck. Now chewy is kind enough to ship it directly in my door affordably. And by the way, chewy, you've got to give hats off to them, digitally transform themselves. They're more than just selling food, you know, they're veterinary care. There's some pet insurance, neutrosuticles, they got all the data on your animals, and they know when one's euthanized, they send you a handwritten card. Guess what else they do? And I've heard you actually one of the better speeches I've seen in the last couple of years, you're talking about private label and how like target and others have done this amazing job. Chewy, very publicly said, you know, a huge portion of revenue wants to come from private label. So if you're like a pet food manufacturer and you've historically sold through chewy, guess what? It's like, whoa, they might be pushing their own stuff. I've got to figure out how to get to Scott or others that may own dogs, Travis, and still drive value. That's hard to do. And I think agentech is a forcing function to everybody of great. I'm still going to buy my dog food from chewy. How does that manufacturer stay loyal? How do I stay loyal to that manufacturer? How do they still drive value and engage with me in the right places? I want to engage that brand. And I think agentech is bringing that front and center, which is, I think the most fascinating aspect of this where we can actually accomplish things we only dare to dream about just a couple years ago, honestly. Yeah, it's kind of smushing things from the side. So the research find by is happening really fast. And then that's causing everyone, you know, a lot of people at the platform layer trying to go down and the payments layer trying to come up. And there's like, and people that were never direct are going to have to go direct. It's going to be a couple years of chaos figuring out what's happening very quickly here. And it's a knife fight in a dark room. And I think, honestly, everyone trying to disintermediate everybody else. And I think, you know, people ask me this all the time, what's the, like, who wins at the end of the day? Who's the big winner? Who would you bet on? Like the few dinner partners, they get invited to. Who's going to be the big winner and all of this? And the answer is, first of all, I have no freaking idea. And by the way, like for us, I don't think there's going to be a big winner. I think what we're trying to do is provide enough sovereignty to merchants where they can participate everywhere without being overly reliant on any one ecosystem, so to speak. And I think that that that sovereignty, that freedom, the ability to have optionality. And again, people use different vernacular, like people talk about interoperability, upmarket. Smaller merchants have no idea what that means. But it means, you know, again, you're going to have to coordinate with multiple systems. You're going to want to be able to swipe things out if that current model doesn't work for you down the road. And that can't be millions of dollars and six to twelve months. And I think ultimately, everyone is trying to own that intelligence layer. And for me, I think that intelligence layer needs to be portable. It needs to be portable for the merchant. They need to be able to take it with them and extract it from an environment or a stack. And I think that's the battle that's happening right now is everyone out there is trying to grab more and more take rate and more and more of mining that intelligence because that intelligence is ultimately the value prop going forward. It's not going to be features and functions. That's an arm race that is already commoditized. It's, we know syndications commoditized. It's going to be some of the value added things and a lot of it has to do with intelligence. That's my two cents for Edward Brooks. Yeah, I was earlier in June. I was at, I did two back-to-back Wall Street gigs, which I'm sure you love those. There were lunchens that were talking about it into commerce because the, you know, you know the setup Travis, but it was the buy side analyst on the stage with me and then a room full of sell side analysts. And it's funny. They'll never ask questions with open, but one on one, I got two questions. Number one, your statements in the last quarter. I don't know why they're coming to me to my state. I've been actually passing on to you. Your statements. Yeah. People are listening to my statements. All right. This is fascinating. All right. Yeah. It was, it freaked him out about commerce, but I think they, it freaked him about, out of, about every other platform. And you basically said, re-platforming his slowed down. You know, this is my, you can correct my words here. It's slowed down because of a gentle commerce and retailers and brands are kind of like locked up and, you know, reevaluating everything because they've seen a decrease in traffic. Everyone kind of like, get freaked out by that and kind of, you know, Wall Street, of course, they kind of took it to this. When I read your comments, I thought you did a, you did a good job bracketing it and saying, it's the pipeline still going, but they, they ignore that part. So I'd love to hear, you know, and I, I also, I've been a public company CEO and I know you're, you know, I only want to talk about the past. I don't want to talk about the future. So I know the rules there. Yeah. So maybe, maybe sell, unpack that a little bit so we kind of understand what you were saying there. Yeah. I mean, listen, I was just trying to be honest. I think pipeline for us, I get asked these questions a lot, just given the dynamic of the stock and the business and like we started sharing some non-GAP KPIs too, just to give people investors a, you know, a bit more of a sight line into how the business is operating. Listen, a gentick, you know, with the traffic drop off, I mean, just being candid, it, it, it does have a bunch of people freaked out. And I don't think anyone's thinking, geez, if I just replatform that's going to solve my issue, I, that was what I meant by it. It was sort of like everyone's trying to figure out what's going on, how to prioritize this, how to structure their organizations. And it, by the way, it's blowing up all these legacy models as you guys know, it's blowing up the services business, Jason, I mean, you live in this more than any of us. Like, does time and materials still exist in the space or is everything outcome based, or fixed or things like that? So, and again, I'm not trying to be absolute, but that's going on. So, so services providers are trying to figure out like what's, you know, being prioritized within, within these conversations. I think Scotchier Point earlier, a lot of the payment guys are already agentically oriented anyway. They're all trying to kind of land grab and do stuff that different platforms are operating in different ways and monetizing in different ways. I think the pipeline for B2C in particular had kind of a freeze frame moment of, hey, let's stop, take a breath and evaluate what this really means for our business because what we do going forward is paramount and what's going to give us the best opportunity. It doesn't mean they want to leave their current platform, doesn't mean they don't believe in like any of those things. It doesn't mean that they believe the storefronts dying. It just means like, hey, my traffic has dropped off. I need to, I need to figure out why that's happened to what I'm doing about it independent of disrupting and distracting my team by like going to one and run a re-platform project. That's what I meant by it. B2B has still been decent for us. I need to see, you know, if I looked at the data, I would say it slowed down for us and who I talked to in the industry of people that aren't public have shared similar things. It's hard to unpack it because of the way people class their revenue. And I think the assumption is like, this is just going like this. I don't agree with that. I just, I don't think anyone believes that the storefront is the end all, be all anymore. They need to be everywhere. Yes, the storefronts are very important. You need to be able to launch quickly. You need to be able to maintain and merchandise and do all of those things. But it also needs to work in harmony to be able to sell across and be discovered across all these other services. What does that mean for my back office? What does that mean for my systems? I'm not going to solve it all with a platform, a single platform. I'm not sure I want to put all my eggs in one monolithic stack either because I need to understand what they're doing with all these, I mean, talk about Salesforce's strategy and how they've changed things in the last couple of months. I don't know. That wasn't on my bingo card. They were going to buy Contentful. I'm not saying it's good or bad, good for Contentful and good for Salesforce. But like this is what's selling some of the, some of the confusion is weird things are happening. I'm not saying they're good or bad, but it's, it's, it's causing people to pause and go, okay, where is this all going? What's most important? And I think you and I, Scott would both argue, Jason, I want to speak for you. Data has never been more important than it is now, product data. And that is not what people would have said two years ago. So or even a year ago, quite frankly. So anyway, that's what I meant by it. It's a long-winded answer I apologize, but. >> I wanted to give you a space to clarify because on these calls you get like, you know, you're so time-boggled. >> 30 seconds to say something. >> Yeah. >> The other question I got was, and it's kind of in a subcategory of sass again or whatever, sass apocalypse, whatever analogy one is. And it basically, people would say, do you worry that these, you know, they would kind of lump you in like Shopify Salesforce commerce will get vibe coded. And then when I would say, well, why do you worry about that? Because I know that there's a lot of things that I'm going to do. It's hard to vibe code what a platform does. But what's freaked them out is like, I guess three things. Number one, Visa investing in Repplet has really freaked people out. So that's one of those payment companies thinking, so they're connecting that and saying, Visa must see a day where these commerce platforms are gone and people just use five platforms. And then another one was, I had Roy Rubin on my other podcast and he talked about no websites in the future, right? And then that was number two. And then the third one is, so meta has that ad on Instagram where there's no Shopify in the middle. So you could see an ad and check out right in there and you just use a UCP check out. So therefore, and you kind of hinted at this earlier, as we all know, 90 or 90% of their revenue is basically check out skin. So if the check out's not there, what happens? So how do you, within the world of your platform, how do you get people's head around, what's the vibe coding risk to what you're building? - It's a good point. I think the durability element, and you've probably picked up on some of this and earnings if you've read it or listened to it, you know, overcoming, you know, convincing people the durability of the platform. I don't believe anyone's gonna vibe code platforms. I mean, the whole reason why SaaS exists is they don't wanna worry about what goes bump in the night and what we're all seeing, at least what we're seeing with all of the stuff we're doing internally with AI. Building stuff is easy, scaling it, deploying it, managing it is complicated and hard. And I think where that's most susceptible, honestly, where I'm seeing it, market, I'm not saying it's real, where you're finding it is like this dopamine rush for the homegrown shops, the custom shops that have huge teams are like, oh, oh, this is amazing. Like it's just the sugar rush where we're gonna be able to go do this at scale. I think there's a lot of that going on, and I'm not saying it's right or it's wrong, but they've got the teams and the infrastructure and the acumen and all of those other things already in the organization to do that. I just don't see, I think Roy Rubin is brilliant for a mere reasons and I know Roy, I think he's a lovely guy and I used to work for his business partner, Roy Erres, who's an equally lovely guy. I don't agree with him. I don't think, I mean, you have to understand from Merchant's perspective, Jason, I would love you to say, why is that good for a brand? If I'm an established brand, why do I want my website to go away? - Yeah, Jason, what's your answer to that? - I don't think you do. I think you want to be everywhere anyone's talking about you and might be considering you, so I think there's an ever expanding number of important touch points and some of those earned touch points are more important than they've ever been before, but that being said, your in-state, your goal should still be to own that customer experience and you need to have something that you own. Like, this used to be a big talking point, but like all these platforms where the interest is happening, there's a hundred million active user, daily active users on TikTok, 43 minutes a day. So huge attention. Nobody owns their presence on TikTok. You are a digital sharecropper and you can't even build followers and then Roy on being able to reach those followers there. It's an algorithm that changes every day. So I would argue you have to figure out how to win on all those places, but your goal should still be to own that relationship on land that you actually own. So it may own the own properties, maybe slightly diluted by the increasing amount of stuff, but it's no less important than it's ever been. - Yeah, I would argue in certain categories, you're gonna see brands over index because it's one of the few things they do completely own, right, and they'd argue that I need that experience to be as immersive as humanly possible. And so I don't think it goes away. I think what changes, Scott, and I think you're teasing on this, back to where the value accrues. Of course, the expectation is brand should be able to launch websites quickly. They should be able to create immersive experience and merchandise and connect to wherever. They also need to show up, Jason, your point, wherever customers want to engage them with value and scale and relevance. And I think the mechanism to do that is different than it once was. And then back to the commercial model, if someone's checking out on meta and dropping right into a cart, yeah, I mean, listen, I think I don't wanna speak for Shopify, their commercial model has been very much oriented to check out and shop pay. And like, listen, I think they've done a brilliant job in growing that business, scaling that business. Like I would never say anything disparaging about it, but I do think the new models call into question the value of check out in the new world order versus before. It doesn't make it go away. I think it just compresses the value. I think the value is accruing in other places. And I think that's where the conversation starts being steered. And that's where we're trying to start steering it. It's like, listen, we've got plenty of customers that use phytonomics that also use Shopify and love Shopify. And they're never gonna leave them or Salesforce or Adobe or HomeAview. I still wanna be able to drive value to those merchants independent of their architecture and their stack. And why shouldn't they be able to have an independent product intelligence layer that allows them to not only drive a better experience with a different platform that's owned, but also other surfaces they need to very effectively show up on now and in the future or other protocols that emerge. So that's my argument. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm just saying I'm trying to articulate why it's different and people in a determined if that's better for them or not. And that's okay. - No, I think that's totally reasonable. Travis, another tradition we have on the show is try to get everyone to make predictions about the future so that we can then play those back later and make fun of every one of them. - Yeah. - Yeah. So, and so I do wanna hear where you think this is all going, but I wanna slightly prompt it. A key question I get every day when we're talking about these topics is the time horizon, right? So one of the super interesting things, like everybody wants to have the conversation, the three of us just had. I've had this conversation 30 times a month. But then the next question is, how economically material is this conversation to this fiscal year, right? And, and you know, my answer is usually, it's not that material to this year. It's very material to your near future. So you better be figuring it out now and you better be getting ready for it now. But you're not gonna make your 26 numbers by getting way better at agentic commerce. And so I guess, hey, I would, I'd ask you to weigh in on, like how fast is all, comma, I would say, it's all happening faster than it's ever happened before. So I don't, you know, maybe I'm wrong. The, how fast do you think all this is happening? And, you know, where do you see it going? I think it's happening fast. However, I agree with you. I don't see it material this year. It doesn't mean there's not a bunch of material preparation for this. I don't think you monetize it necessarily this year. But I think next year is where things really begin to change. And the reason I say that is, a lot of these things are still gated, right? It's like open AI does not have a merchant center as most people know or at least people in the space know. And as a result of that, they don't have a public API that people can connect to. So everything's gated. It's like you've got to get permission to connect there, syndicate, you know, enrich product catalog data in there for some of these larger merchants, they're figuring out how that's gonna work, how they're gonna measure signal, what sort of controls you're gonna give them. So we're still kind of, I think, still early days, skinning these. It doesn't mean this isn't like the number one priority, which I think Scott would argue is like front and center with every organization. People are trying to wrap their arms around it. But you saw kind of the fits and starts last year with open AI and the single item check out and things that those of us follow the space knew that was a disaster and nothing against them. It's like that's not how people want to shop. And like you've got to think of it from a merchant's, like from a brand's perspective. What's important to a brand? Like why would this be good for them? They certainly want to be discovered and they want to be discovered with relevance. It's where the shopping part comes in that gives them angst because what does that look like? What does that feel like? Does that allow me to differentiate? Does it commoditize me? Does it create a bunch of back office, costs and friction? That now I need to, like none of these guys want to be MOR. It's like, no, no, no, no, that's, that's, you guys deal with that stuff. So for those reasons, I think we've got a little ways to go, but I think we will get there very, very quickly. And I think, at the end of the day, I mean, consumer behavior is going to drive most of this. I think, like I said earlier, merchants, regardless of size, need to show up where their customers want to engage them. And I think that's the prep that's happening right now. And a lot of that will be through enriched data and orchestration. And again, I think it's fascinating to participate in it. Certainly, I think next year is going to be the, maybe there's a rush up to holiday. There'll be a bunch of buzz, but I don't know. I just don't see it all landing in time where people are comfortable. I'm calling it right now. Adobe is going to announce this holiday that a Janta Commerce increased by 10,000%. (laughing) I think the numbers are, I think they can't go over 400. I think it's going to be like under four. But is it incremental? I think, yeah. I mean, that's the question. Is it business that someone wouldn't have gotten otherwise? I understand it's all influenced by AI. I just, yeah. Again, I mean, that's the-- That incremental question ruins a lot of fun. It does. It really takes the wind out of the, is this really an incremental thing? Like listen, we've got like a product called a Genetic Checkout where we power discovery and check out through, say, proplexity and Microsoft and eventually be through other services, through feedonomics and PayPal and things like that. Again, it remains to be seen how much incremental. And these are for merchants that don't run on our platform. Great, maybe that takes off. I don't know, but I'm certainly not baking into the numbers thinking there's gonna be a lot of activity there, because I think it's still too early to understand what demographic wants to do it. It's very brand specific. Is there multi-item? I think Google's probably done the best job, protocol-wise, and rolling this out the right way. But even that has been a little gated to and confusing because of all the noise in market, trying to convince people that they're gonna own more than what they already own. It's just sowing a lot of, it's just a lot of fatigue and confusion. And I don't know, you feel the same way? Do you feel like people are confused that you've got to clarify things as that is just an overwhelming amount of information out there? Or do you feel like it's clear as day? There's some, it's split pretty evenly. There's some merchants that really get it, and they kind of, they do have to go through a third cycle, so they'll do like AEOGO. And then they'll kind of realize there's not much to do with that. And then the commerce people hand that over to like the brand people, and then they'll get real serious about, then they kind of realize the product catalog is pretty important, and then they'll dig in. But there's less people at that part of the life cycle than the other part. Yeah. And then being to be people may get there faster because they kind of understood the product catalog because they got these like, what is that? There's some acronym where you have to like, quote, "deprize." What is that? - C-B-Q. - That thing, yeah. (laughs) There's that thing, and there's like, you really know the price until you actually like, configure it, and then like, you know, then you gotta like, then you build it kind of like a custom thing. We don't really have that in traditional consumer e-commerce other than like maybe Dell building a computer, but it's a different beast. Yeah, so it's gonna be really interesting to watch all this stuff. - Yeah, and Travis, I can assure you, I don't know if they're confused or not before they talk to Scott, but they're for sure confused after they talked to Scott. And that's gonna be a perfect place to wrap up 'cause we are running out of time, but Travis, if viewers have watched this episode and they wanna run into it, did you enter a party, like, where's the best way to find you? Is are you on the trade show circuit with Scott and I? - I am, I'm on my space. I've got an amazing song list out there right now streaming. It's very yacht rocky. (laughs) You know, no, I'm on the circuit. I don't know if I'll do the Nashville Shop Talk this year around schedules, but certainly on LinkedIn and like every other show with you guys, it feels like a half high school reunion, half job fair. So always, always fun. If you don't know everyone, you at least recognize them, which is nice. Except for the younger people, there's a lot of younger people in space, which is nice, but different. - Fresh blood. - Fresh blood, exactly. - Yeah, awesome. - Well, hopefully everyone enjoyed our first video podcast. Feel free to leave us feedback. If we need to hire actors to replace two of us, we totally get it. But until next time, happy commersing. - You've been listening to the Jason and Scott show. For all the latest news and trends on e-commerce and shopper marketing, subscribe to us in iTunes or visit jasonandscott.com.