The Watson Weekly: eCommerce Strategy & News

Rick Watson talks with Alan Gaffney (CEO, Townchest), Nick Boetcher (Avalara), and Justin Samakow (Mirakl) about what breaks when a marketplace scales. Townchest runs a "shopping for good" program where schools partner with manufacturers to fund themselves through retail sales. A regional launch created nationwide Nexus exposure within weeks, because supporters of a school in Ohio live in Texas, C...

Shopify posted its strongest quarter in four years and the stock fell 7%. Rick walks through why Wall Street wasn't impressed, what the LVMH signing actually means for the "Shopify is only for startups" narrative, and the credit-loss line item that's quietly getting bigger. Also this week: Amazon Q1: three numbers Wall Street missed, including a $150B grocery run rate and free cash flow down 95% T...

Three stories on the table this week, and none of them small. Saks Global plans to exit Chapter 11 on June 22nd carrying $1.2 billion in debt, with a reorganization plan targeting $9 billion in GMV by fiscal 2030. That's nearly double where they sit today. Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky walk through the vendor mess (720 brands stopped shipping at the worst of it), the repair work underway, and wh...

Rick Watson sits down with Mike Hogenmiller, who has spent more than forty years inside home improvement retail and watched the consumer reinvent themselves at least three times. Mike was at The Home Depot in 2001 when the company quietly acquired a 4,000-customer wholesale distributor in Baton Rouge, LA called Your Other Warehouse. That distributor was, at the time, Amazon's biggest and most prof...

H&M just listed on a US online marketplace for the first time, and they picked Nordstrom. Rick Watson and Nick Kaplan break down what that signals about both brands, and why marketplaces with no inventory commitment keep working when standalone marketplaces keep dying. Next up, GLP-1 hits the bridal industry. 10% of couples planning weddings this year are on a GLP-1, and more than half started...

What does B2B digital transformation look like when your end user is an HVAC contractor standing on a rooftop in 95-degree heat? In this episode of The Watson Weekly, we sit down with Lindsay Althouse(Johnstone Supply), Bryan House (Elastic Path), and Lee Trotter (Data Realm) for a candid panel discussion on modernizing legacy B2B businesses without breaking what already works. Johnstone Supply—a...

This week on the Watson Weekly, Rick Watson breaks down the biggest stories shaping commerce, technology, and AI infrastructure. Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO after 14 transformative years that took the company from a $300B market cap to $4 trillion. John Turnis takes the helm September 1st. The Watson Weekly is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and comp...

On this weekend edition of The Watson Weekly, Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky break down the biggest stories shaping tech, retail, and AI. Amazon is doubling down on its Anthropic bet — with a new deal that has Anthropic committing $100B to AWS over the next decade, while Amazon pumps in an additional $5B(with up to $20B more on the table) and locks in guaranteed compute capacity. With over 100K c...

When Helen Lo founded Lo & Sons at 65, she was solving her own travel problem. Fifteen years later, her family-run DTC brand is navigating one of the toughest environments in consumer goods: a flood of dupes, shrinking development windows, and a rapidly shifting AI landscape. Rick Watson is joined by Katie Omstead, President at Lo & Sons, and Sonal Gandhi, Chief Content Officer at The Lead...

In this memorial episode of the Watson Weekly , host Rick Watson is joined by Kelly Goetsch , President, Pipe17 Jeff Oh , Growth Leader, Commerce, Publicis Sapient, Jason “Retailgeek” Goldberg , Chief Commerce Strategy Officer, Publicis, Giancarlo Anania , Senior Director, Global Strategic Alliances & GTM — Partner & Ecosystem Strategy, and Octavio Delgado , Digital eCommerce Engineering L...

Today on the Watson Weekly: Google treats compute like a moat, Amazon finally figures out groceries, Vinted runs the Amazon playbook in Europe, Apple shows up late to the glasses party — and finally, The Investor Minute with 5 items this week from the world of venture capital, acquisitions, and IPOs. The Watson Weekly is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and comp...

Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky break down three stories reshaping the consumer and tech landscape. First, why GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro are expected to unlock $13B in new retail spending — and which brands stand to win as 80% of users size down. Then, Nike's latest innovation shake-up: new chief Andy Caine steps in as the stock slides 32%, with Project Amplify, Nike Mind, and...

The Agentic Debate Series Lunch @ Shoptalk Las Vegas 2026, Presented by Logicbroker. Recorded live in Las Vegas on March 24, 2026. Rick Watson hosts an agentic commerce debate with three retail practitioners who aren't selling anything — just calling it like they see it. Chris Silver (CTO, JustFoodforDogs), Gina Lombardo (VP of Digital, Retrofête), and Dave Finnegan (Managing Director, BlackFinn P...

Amazon cuts USPS volume, BNPL shapes where Gen Z gets their teeth cleaned, and why your product data is now an AI infrastructure problem. This Watson Weekly episode covers: The Amazon-USPS tentative deal and what a 20% volume reduction actually signals about Amazon's logistics endgame. The Watson Weekly is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and compliance for lead...

Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky break down three retail stories that challenge conventional wisdom this week. Revolve runs a 60% return rate — triple the online average — and just posted a 60% profit surge. They explain how baking return costs into margins and offering frictionless two-day shipping produces 80% full-price sell-through and a customer base that treats their bedroom like a fitting ro...

Rick Watson breaks down four stories shaping e-commerce and retail this week: Shopify's partner town hall reveals a company that treats API chaos as a brand attribute — and why that's a problem for any hyperscaler ambition. Lowe's bets $99 can put a red vest inside your home twice a year, and why that physical touchpoint is worth more than any app can replicate. The Watson Weekly is sponsored by A...

Apple just turned 50. Amazon quietly acquired two robotics companies. And Allbirds — once valued at $4B— sold for $39M. Rick Watson and Nick Kaplan work through what these three stories have in common: the relentless pressure to find a next act before the first one runs out. The Watson Weekly Weekend edition is sponsored by Avalara — automated tax compliance built for Shopify merchants, from calcu...

Rick Watson is out. Nick Kaplan is in — and he's not giving the mic back. In this special Kaplan Wednesday episode, Nick takes the research prompts Watson built for his agentic commerce analysis and turns them on the very stories they were designed to interrogate. On the docket: Adyen's white paper claiming infrastructure is the constraint on agentic commerce (it isn't — and their own 95% AML fals...

Live from the chaos of Shoptalk 2026 — where every booth promised an AI future and the floor proved retail is still fundamentally a contractual promise to a customer. Retail and e-commerce influencer Rick Watson is out on assignment in Las Vegas. This episode cuts through the agentic commerce noise. We get into what AEO (Agentic Commerce Optimization) actually requires operationally, why Shopify c...

Darren Heaphy has spent his career at the intersection of e-commerce and logistics — AOL, Scurry, and now eDesk, where he leads product. His take on AI-driven support is blunt: brands are holding AI to a standard they never applied to their seasonal hires, and that double standard is costing them. In this episode, Rick Watson interviews and discusses the real shift happening in customer support —...

Rick Watson breaks down four stories worth your attention before Shoptalk. OpenAI's internal "code red" and what a pivot to enterprise and coding revenue actually signals ahead of a potential IPO; Dollar General and Dollar Tree earnings — both beating expectations, but with very different stories underneath the numbers; Apollo's credit chief calling private equity valuations "literally fiction," a...

Dollar stores are quietly winning, Prime Day is jumping the calendar, and the AI arms race just hit its first major reboot. Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky break down what actually moved this week in retail and commerce. Dollar General doubled its operating profit, Dollar Tree shed Family Dollar and beat estimates, and Five Below kept growing — while 99 Cents Only filed for bankruptcy. The value s...

Tom Schmitt is CEO of Radial, North America's largest third-party fulfillment provider — and a company about to become something bigger. As part of the Bpostgroup's rebranding to Paxon, Radial is merging with its sister companies into a single global logistics brand built on decades of e-commerce infrastructure. The Watson Weekly is sponsored by Avalara. For more information on Avalara, visit - ht...

Stripe just released an Agentic Technology Suite and positioned it as the infrastructure layer for the next era of commerce.]So who is Stripe actually building this for? The Watson Weekly Interview is sponsored by Avalara. For more information on Avalara, visit - https://avalara.watsonweekly.com/ Salesforce Marketing Cloud posted -1% growth in Q4 FY2026 — the end of four years of deceleration and...

In this week’s Watson Weekly weekend edition, hosts Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky talk about Dick’s Sporting Goods' viral Move moment, Elliott Hill in the New York Times, and the gap between consumer spending at Amazon and Walmart. Dick's Sporting Goods is number three in the App Store. Nike is running a PR campaign dressed as a turnaround. And the consumer spending data has already picked the w...