Unpacking the Digital Shelf

With 25 years in digital commerce, seasoned by tenures at Estee Lauder and J&J, Jennie Alexander has learned the essential ingredient of commerce - always keeping the customer at the center. Easier said than done, and Jennie is now sharing her data, organizational, and humanistic lessons from her work with others through her work as an ecommerce and digital consultant. She joined the podcast to share the fruits of those hard-fought lessons.

Did you know over 70% of traffic to a detail page is organic? Now that you are aware, do you know what you need to do to win your share of that traffic, and hopefully some of someone else’s? The answers to that question have changed right underneath our feet, and winning has become much more of a science than an art than ever before, driven by the power of AI. Spencer Millerberg, who changed the ecommerce game once before with OneClick Retail, is now at it again as Founding Partner of DetailPage.com. He joins the podcast with the facts and figures around the changing game of Ecomm SEO.

When money was free, the term “profitable growth” used to be an oxymoron in the world of startup DTC brands. But no longer. Profitably attracting and keeping consumers has become essential for today’s DTC challenger brands. And it turns out that achieving that is a deep mix of analytics, media, and creative skills that are constantly in a mix of testing, learning, and scaling modes. And it turns out that achieving that is a deep mix of analytics, media, and creative skills that are constantly in a mix of testing, learning, and scaling modes. AJ Patel had a career at Unilever spanning those skills and modes, and he has now leapt to the startup world at U Beauty. He joined the podcast to share some of those learnings and how he and his team are applying those in a startup context across every shoppable moment.

It was Jeff Bezos who first said “your margin is my opportunity”, and the Andy Jassy regime continues that strategy as Amazon continuously adjusts vendor terms to maximize profitability and win the price war. Amazon consultancy Consulterce and our friends at Stratably recently teamed up on a survey of brands about their Amazon relationship. Martin Heubel from Consulterce returned to the podcast to dig deep into some of the best defensive strategies that brands can use to gain some higher ground with the world’s everything store.

We are definitely in test and learn mode in AI, and many organizations are struggling with how to structure and focus their experiments to move past the hype towards impact. Well, struggle no longer! Or, at least, struggle less, thanks to the learned minds at firstmovr, who have taken the fruits of their AI strategy engagements with their clients and turned them into a framework called the MAITRIX. Chris Perry and Oskar Kaszubski rejoined the pod to offer you the blue pill that will help you make order from chaos and align the organization on a meaningful AI path.

The drive towards a more sustainable future is gaining a lot of momentum under the requirements of the Digital Product Passport regulations passed recently by the EU. The DPP will reshape data transparency across the value chain to allow retailers, distributors, and ultimately consumers to select products that match their environmental values. We hit the compliance deadlines for some categories in 2027, and the journey for every actor in the supply chain will be complicated. Raphael Gutierrez, Director of Global PXM and Product Strategy at Valtech, joined the podcast with a primer on the Digital Product Passport and how to build the foundation for compliance starting now. No surprise, it starts with people, goes to process, and ends up at technology.

The criss-cross journey of today’s omnichannel shopper, from digital to in-store and back again, means that your retail media messages of inspiration, value, and convenience must follow them wherever they go. The IAB recently issued a new playbook for in-store media in this omnichannel world, a guide for testing, measuring, and learning in the messy and constantly evolving local store. Jeffrey Bustos, VP Measurement Addressability Data at IAB and Mike Wessel, Director of In-store Media at Kroger Precision Marketing joined the podcast to walk us through the playbook’s takeaways.

The zig zag shopping journey of the consumer has completely disrupted the organizational silos of brick and mortar vs. digital commerce at many brands. Driving growth requires cross-functional teams to pick omnichannel use cases and devise, launch, measure, and optimize them together. The fuel of that process is data, and Andy Beilke, Sr. Development Manager, eCommerce Strategy & Capabilities at General Mills, focuses his team on delivering the data that enables omnichannel thinking and behaviors across the organization. Andy joined the podcast to walk us through the transformation of processes and data science that are driving growth. Following this episode, you will want to google the word “gonculator”.

Almost 2 months ago to the day, we had Futurist and Author Byron Reese on the podcast to talk about AI and its possibilities and risks. I warned you all then that I would have him back on to talk about his new book, We Are Agora, in which he sets out to scientifically prove that humans together make a superorganism, like bees make a hive, and what that means for our future and how we should spend our day. Nerdy, inspiring, awesome. He joined Rob Gonzalez and me to talk us through it.

Did you know that of the users who have engaged with TikTok Shop, 71.2% of them have bought a product? Smells like social shopping to me! Their advancements, from getting in the fulfillment game to an affiliate program, are driving some really impressive results with Gen Z, with acquisition costs still lower than other channels. Are you playing? Should you be? What’s working? What’s not? Here we are with Ben Rey, Chief Revenue Officer at Teikametrics, to get all the answers for you to refresh or create your TikTok Shop strategy.