There was a time when you couldn’t move for stories about it. Every November, China would announce some absolutely preposterous e-commerce number, and the rest of the world would collectively spill its coffee. Alibaba would break another record. Jack Ma (Google him, why don’t ya) would appear somewhere looking pleased with himself. Analysts would start comparing Chinese shopping habits to the population of Belgium, and somebody would inevitably declare that Western retail was finished.

IN one year, there was a time when ex pats living in London could follow an avatar like fish on their phones guiding them, a la Pokemon, into stores with deals. That is about 8 years ago. Yeah, that’s how far we are behind or maybe the sign of our difference and indifference all at once. Any retail technologist should consider this parable.

Back to regular programming: Then we’d all return to discussing Black Friday, abandoned baskets and whether free shipping was really free.

But something rather interesting happened this year. Singles’ Day 2026 generated an estimated $264.4 billion in gross merchandise value over 36 days, according to Chinese retail data company Syntun.

That’s RMB 1.776 trillion.

For context, that’s approximately the size of Hungary’s entire annual economic output, and considerably more than Ireland spends running all its government departments in a year. Now, before an economist throws a chair at me, GMV is not GDP. One measures the value of transactions, the other the value added to an economy. They’re not interchangeable. It is also about the same as building 6 Childrens Hospitals in every county in Ireland now.

But the comparison gives you some appreciation of the extraordinary scale involved. And yet, strangely, the $264 billion isn’t the most interesting number.

Not even close.

Because underneath the promotional noise, China may be showing us something much more consequential.

E-commerce is slowly becoming less about buying things and more about getting things done.

And I suspect the Western retail industry hasn’t fully appreciated what that means.

From cardboard boxes to completed tasks

For the better part of 30 years, we’ve built e-commerce around a fairly simple proposition. Find a product. Put it in a basket. Pay for it. Wait for somebody to arrive at your door carrying a cardboard box. We’ve spent billions optimising this sequence.

Better search. Better recommendations. Better checkout. Faster delivery. More payment options. More warehouses. More software to manage the software that manages the warehouses. And don’t get me started on the number of platforms promising to deliver a single customer view. Somewhere out there is a customer who’s been viewed so many times they’re probably entitled to royalties.But the underlying transaction hasn’t fundamentally changed. Remember Amazon 1997?

We’re still mostly selling things. Look at what happened at JD.com during this year’s Singles’ Day. The company reported more than 300 million service orders.

Not 300 million parcels.

Service orders.

Home cleaning. Maintenance. Automotive services. Health consultations. The sorts of things that traditionally sat outside the conventional e-commerce transaction. JD reported that transaction value for multi-visit home-cleaning packages increased more than 550% year on year, while automotive maintenance service orders rose 167%. These are selected growth figures, not proof that services have overtaken merchandise. They haven’t. But they point towards an important change in how consumers use commerce platforms.

Imagine buying a washing machine.

Traditionally, the retailer sells you the machine, perhaps offers installation, and considers the transaction complete.

But what if the platform also manages installation, maintenance, repairs, consumables and eventual replacement?

The customer isn’t really buying a washing machine.

They’re buying clean clothes.

That distinction is enormous.

One is a product transaction. The other is an ongoing relationship built around an outcome.

And relationships have rather different economics from transactions.

The great services opportunity

This is where I think Western e-commerce has an enormous amount of unfinished business. We’ve spent decades trying to increase customer lifetime value by encouraging people to buy more products. More emails. More recommendations. More loyalty points. Buy this because you bought that. But what if the next generation of customer lifetime value comes from solving problems that don’t necessarily require another physical product?

Think about the home.

You buy a lawnmower. You need servicing.

You buy a sofa. You might need cleaning.

You buy a television. You need installation.

You buy a bicycle. You need repairs.

You buy a house. You need approximately 400 different services, most of which you’ll discover when something starts leaking.

There are businesses addressing individual pieces of this already. TaskRabbit, Angi and plenty of local specialists.

But the integration between merchandise, services, fulfilment and customer relationships remains remarkably fragmented.

The opportunity isn’t simply to bolt a handyman marketplace onto a retailer’s website.

It’s to understand the customer’s underlying need and orchestrate everything required to meet it. Of course, services are messy. You can’t warehouse a plumber. Quality varies. Scheduling is difficult. Liability matters.And anyone who has waited three weeks for an electrician will appreciate that adding an app doesn’t magically create more electricians.But that’s precisely why the opportunity is interesting. The winners won’t necessarily be the businesses with the biggest catalogues. They will trade on trust. Like Huang.

Healthcare is entering the commerce conversation

Another interesting signal came from JD Health. During Singles’ Day, consultations through its AI doctor service increased by more than 500% year on year. Now, that doesn’t mean AI has suddenly become a substitute for doctors. Nor should it. But it does demonstrate growing consumer willingness to access health-related services through a familiar digital commerce environment.

Consider the distinction.

Traditionally, you might purchase vitamins, a blood-pressure monitor or a fitness tracker online. The commercial relationship ends when the product arrives.But increasingly, the proposition can extend into consultation, monitoring, pharmacy services, follow-up care and preventative health.

The product becomes the doorway to a service.

And the service potentially becomes a continuing relationship. For countries such as Ireland and the UK, where healthcare capacity and waiting times are persistent challenges, this raises fascinating questions. Not least around regulation, clinical accountability, privacy and whether digital convenience actually improves health outcomes. I don’t think the answer is to turn Amazon into your GP.

Quite the opposite.

But I do think we’re going to see an increasingly blurred boundary between retail, wellness, healthcare access and subscription services.The interesting companies will be those that understand where commerce ends and clinical responsibility begins.

AI is changing the job description of shopping

Then there’s AI. JD reported selling more than 50 million AI-related products during the campaign. It also reported substantial growth in purchases of AI computing tokens, while conversational shopping assistants became more prominent across Chinese platforms. For years, we’ve been told that AI will revolutionise e-commerce.Usually by someone trying to sell us an AI-powered product recommendation engine. But I think we’re looking at the wrong part of the transaction.

The most significant change isn’t that AI can recommend a better pair of shoes.

It’s that AI may eventually remove the need for the customer to go shopping in the first place. Think about the traditional customer journey.

We know the new path, I ‘ll spare you.

Now imagine a customer saying:

“I need a new washing machine. Something reliable, energy-efficient, suitable for a family of five. Arrange delivery, installation and removal of the old one. Keep the total under €800.”

The AI agent researches the options, checks compatibility, compares total costs, evaluates service providers and presents a recommendation.

Eventually, with appropriate permissions, it might complete the transaction.Suddenly, the retailer’s beautiful homepage becomes a little less important. We hate to think this. We hate this loss of relevance, me inclusded.

The customer may never see it. The carefully crafted product listing may be read primarily by software.And the €50,000 campaign designed to capture a particular search term may be competing for attention from an algorithm that has no emotional attachment to your brand guidelines.That’s a fairly substantial change.

It also raises a question that I think every e-commerce leader should be asking.

What happens to customer acquisition when the customer is represented by an agent?

Who owns discovery?

Who controls the recommendation?

How do brands establish trust with machines making decisions on behalf of people?

And how do we ensure that the agent is genuinely working for the consumer rather than simply favouring whoever pays the platform the most?

These aren’t hypothetical questions about some distant future.

The commercial architecture is already being assembled.

Although we should be careful: high usage of AI shopping tools doesn’t yet prove that autonomous agents are generating meaningful incremental sales. That remains to be demonstrated.

The curious return of the specialist

One of my favourite figures from Singles’ Day has nothing to do with the biggest platforms.Alibaba reported that 333 brands less than three years old ranked first in specialised Tmall categories during part of the promotional period.

Think about that.

In an environment dominated by enormous platforms, established manufacturers and extraordinary promotional budgets, hundreds of relatively young brands were leading their particular niches.Not necessarily the entire market. Their niches. For years, scale has been the defining ambition of e-commerce. More products. More markets. More customers. More categories.But there’s another way to compete.

Know a particular customer better than anybody else.

Solve a specific problem exceptionally well. Build a product or experience that doesn’t need to appeal to everyone.The internet was supposed to make niche businesses viable at scale. Somewhere along the way, we became so obsessed with marketplaces and acquisition costs that we occasionally forgot that.AI could make this even more interesting.If a shopping agent can identify a specialist product that genuinely matches a customer’s requirements, a smaller brand might compete on relevance rather than simply on advertising expenditure.That’s the optimistic version.The less optimistic version is that the agents become another paid gatekeeper, and we simply replace search advertising with recommendation advertising.

The ageing consumer isn’t going anywhere

Another trend worth watching is the growth of experience-led spending among older consumers. Travel platform Fliggy reported a 25% increase in bookings from travellers aged 50 and above during the campaign . For an industry obsessed with Gen Z, influencers and whatever social platform has emerged since breakfast, we sometimes overlook the purchasing power of older consumers. Many are interested in travel, wellbeing, convenience and experiences rather than accumulating more possessions. Obviously, older consumers aren’t one homogeneous group. Wealth, health and spending power vary enormously. But the opportunity to serve different life stages is substantial. And unlike another pair of trainers, an experience can create a much deeper relationship between customer and provider. Travel, hospitality, leisure, education, health and personal services may become increasingly important components of what we consider the commerce economy.

Which brings us back to the original point.

Perhaps e-commerce’s next great expansion isn’t another category of products. Perhaps it’s the integration of categories that historically sat outside e-commerce altogether.

So what does this mean for the next five years?

I don’t believe we’re about to stop buying physical goods. Nor do I think Western retailers should blindly copy China. The market structures are different. Labour costs are different. Regulation is different. Consumer behaviour is different.nAnd China’s experience comes with its own warning signs. Singles’ Day sales growth slowed to an estimated 4.8% in 2026, compared with 14.2% the previous year, according to Syntun’s figures as reported by Reuters. The festival is also stretching across weeks rather than days, diluting the urgency that once made it such an extraordinary retail event.

So this isn’t a story of endless Chinese growth.

It’s a story about how platforms respond when conventional merchandise growth becomes harder to achieve.

And I think there are five developments worth watching between now and 2031.

1. Retailers will increasingly sell outcomes rather than products.

Installation, repair, maintenance and replenishment will become more integrated into commerce propositions.

2. Services will become a more important source of recurring customer relationships.

Not necessarily higher-margin relationships. That depends on labour costs, fulfilment, service quality and who actually performs the work. But potentially more frequent and valuable ones.

3. AI will begin to reshape customer acquisition.

The battle for visibility will increasingly include machine-readable product information, trust signals, availability, transparent pricing and compatibility with shopping agents.

4. Specialist brands will have new opportunities to compete on relevance.

Provided discovery systems genuinely reward suitability rather than simply replicating today’s advertising auctions.

5. Commerce platforms will increasingly compete to coordinate entire experiences.

Not just the product, but the people, services, information and fulfilment required to deliver the outcome.

None of this is guaranteed.

And it certainly won’t happen at the same speed everywhere.

But the direction is interesting.

The next frontier might be the absence of shopping

Here’s the thought I keep coming back to.

For decades, the ambition of e-commerce has been to make shopping easier.

Fewer clicks. Faster checkout. Better delivery.

What if the next ambition is to make shopping unnecessary?

Not consumption.

Shopping.

The act of searching, comparing, coordinating, booking, paying and following up.

What if much of that becomes an invisible service running in the background of everyday life?

You don’t buy a filter for your water system.

The replacement arrives when it’s needed.

You don’t search for somebody to repair the dishwasher.

The service is arranged when the machine reports a problem.

You don’t spend three evenings comparing travel packages.

You explain what kind of holiday you want and receive a carefully considered itinerary.

Of course, sometimes we actually enjoy shopping. Discovery, browsing and the occasional completely irrational purchase are part of being human.

I wouldn’t want an AI agent preventing me from buying something ridiculous just because it doesn’t meet my stated objectives.

Where’s the fun in that?

But much of what we call shopping is really administrative work disguised as consumer choice.

And that, I suspect, is where some of the greatest opportunities lie.

Singles’ Day started as a celebration of being single.

It became a celebration of buying things.

Now, nearly two decades after Alibaba transformed it into a shopping phenomenon, it may be offering us an early glimpse of something else entirely.

A world where the most successful commerce businesses aren’t necessarily those that sell the most products.

They’re the ones that solve the most problems.

$264 billion is an extraordinary number.

But the next chapter of e-commerce might be defined by something much harder to measure.

How much of our lives can commerce give back to us?

And perhaps that’s a more interesting question than how many parcels we can deliver in a day.

The Struggle Bus, Season 4 — Paul Stafford, EPAM

There is an extraordinary amount of noise in the world of commerce at the moment.

Artificial intelligence. Retail media. Attribution. Automation. New platforms. New acronyms. New ways of explaining things that, occasionally, were perfectly understandable before somebody gave them a three-letter abbreviation.

And somewhere in the middle of all this sits a person trying to figure out what actually matters.

That’s the part that interests me.

For this episode of The Struggle Bus, I was joined by Paul Stafford from EPAM, someone who spends a good deal of his professional life thinking about retail media and the changing relationship between technology, retailers and brands.

We talked about the tools, naturally.

We talked about the growing complexity of the industry, the importance of knowing which signals deserve attention, and the experience required to separate useful information from an impressive-looking collection of numbers.

But I don’t really invite people onto The Struggle Bus to recite their LinkedIn profiles.

I can read those myself. I’ve even been known to understand one occasionally.

The person behind the profession

What I find far more interesting is how people arrive where they are.

The experiences that shape their judgement. The unexpected turns. The things they’ve learned through doing the work rather than talking about doing the work.

Paul’s career and perspective gave us plenty to explore, but so did the conversation beyond retail media.

Life in the UK. Family. Parenthood. The competing demands of work and the things that matter when the laptop is closed.

These aren’t distractions from a professional conversation.

They’re part of it.

We spend so much time discussing how technology can make businesses more efficient that we sometimes forget the people operating those businesses are living entire lives outside them.

And those lives shape the decisions they make.

Experience still counts

One of the interesting tensions in commerce is that our tools are becoming more sophisticated while the fundamental questions remain remarkably familiar.

Who is the customer?

What do they actually want?

What is working?

What is merely making a lot of noise?

Technology can help answer those questions, but judgement still determines what we do with the answers.

That’s why I enjoy speaking with people who’ve spent time working through the messy reality of the industry.

Not everything fits neatly into a dashboard.

Not every career follows a straight line.

And not every worthwhile conversation needs to end with five actionable takeaways and a downloadable white paper.

Sometimes it’s enough to understand another person’s journey a little better.

Come aboard

My thanks to Paul for being generous with his time and conversation.

If you’re interested in retail media, commerce, careers, or simply how people navigate the increasingly strange world of work, I hope you’ll enjoy this one.

Watch or listen to the episode:

The Struggle Bus Season 4 is proudly sponsored by VirtualStock.

If you enjoy these conversations, please subscribe, share the episode and tell me who you’d like to see climb aboard next.

#ecommerce #retail #AI #personalization #digitalcommerce

The first of our new V Spot PSAs with Shopware is here: The Beige Emergency.

From Monday, all businesses must become the same business. Sounds familiar, right?Wholesaler? Fashion brand? Manufacturer?

Irrelevant. You now sell six beige T-shirts.

Your pricing rules have been replaced by vibes.

Developers wishing to build something different must complete Form NO.

Processing time: the remainder of their career.

Any business claiming to have unusual requirements will be referred to the Department of Having Fewer Requirements.

Bring your own chair.

If you hear someone say, “But that is not how our business works,” remain calm.

They are experiencing an independent thought.

This fictional warning was brought to you by Shopware.

Open. Developer-first.

Please continue being your own business.

Note: Thanks to Jason Nyhus for my new logo - he captured a sneaky picture of me in Chicago in 24, I have been waiting for it to resurface.

#TheVSpot #Shopware #Ecommerce

Dante Hicks: Not just Imperials, is what you're getting at...
Randal Graves: Exactly. In order to get it built quickly and quietly they'd hire anybody who could do the job. Do you think the average storm trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing and white uniforms.
Dante Hicks: All right, so even if independent contractors are working on the Death Star, why are you uneasy with its destruction?
Randal Graves: All those innocent contractors hired to do a job were killed - casualties of a war they had nothing to do with.
[notices Dante's confusion]
Randal Graves: All right, look-you're a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia - this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius. You didn't ask for that. You have no personal politics. You're just trying to scrape out a living.

Everything happening around us today happened already. Sometimes art reflects real life sometimes that mirror goes the other way.

Were the rebels ever gone? https://lnkd.in/dYbQQmBP

This conversation goes back to leaving home at seventeen, studying and working in the US, losing a job and learning to survive. We talk about the empathy that came from those experiences, the imposter syndrome that stayed with him, and why he now puts so much energy into helping people understand AI.

There is plenty here for anyone trying to find a way through the noise. There is also a family dispute involving two competing ChatGPT answers, which feels like a very modern problem.

Watch or listen below. The Struggle Bus is a VSpot Media programme, with Season 4 in partnership with VirtualStock.

Because right now is where an awful lot of this season will be decided. We have our plans. We have our forecasts. We have the presentation somebody signed off in July. F*Ckin, July. Now we get to find out what happens when customers become involved. That is the 2026 customer. The distracted one, the less well off one, the resilient one, the one who trades in black friday discounts and knows you could do better. The one that is paying 100% more for home heating oil, who is worried about job security or their kids futures, the tired one, the overwhelmed one the impressionable ones and the ones looking to breathe. Behavioural targeting is easy, right?

Traffic curation is becoming less art and more science. Although, the longer I do this, the more I wonder whether it was ever that different. We have always tried to understand where people were, what they wanted and what might persuade them to buy from us. We’ve just become very attached to particular ways of doing it. Sometimes so attached that when they stop working, we spend more money trying to make them work again. Performance marketing, acquisition, marketing.

Meanwhile, the customer has gone somewhere else. This behaviour is a constant - not a nuance.

They are comparing. They are asking somebody. They are looking on a marketplace, watching a video, checking a price, checking delivery, coming back tomorrow. They are trying to spend wisely. Our job is to make ourselves available across the parts of that journey where we can serve them properly. I’m increasingly convinced that this deserves more attention than squeezing another small improvement out of an increasingly expensive place we already occupy.

As I said, behavioural targeting, is easy, right?

I still want us to obsess over our customer lists. Those people have given us their money, their information and, occasionally, the benefit of the doubt. Look after them. Understand what they need. Don’t treat the relationship as permission to send fourteen versions of the same email because the calendar has turned black. This should not be new to you though, these customers should not surprise you nor should you fail to know what will make them happy. This is your bread and butter. Right?

But the next customer might never enter the journey we have designed for them. Being available to that person matters. If the product, stock, margin and delivery proposition work on a relevant channel, I would rather give them a way to buy than insist they come through the route that makes our reporting look tidiest.

And the headlines are hardly going to settle the argument for us.

In the US, Michigan’s October consumer sentiment reading was 48.0, below 53.6 a year earlier. In the same month, the Conference Board’s confidence index rose 7.5 points to 91.7. Different surveys, different questions, different signals. Even the mood needs a bit of investigation before it earns a place in the briefing. Brian Friel introduced us to Gar private and Gar public in Philadelphia Here I Come - an apt analogy for why the customer doesn’t do what they tell us. Just ask Pollsters next Tuesday across all US states.

Against that backdrop, NRF forecasts $1.013 trillion in November and December retail sales, up 4.2%. Adobe expects a record $275.1 billion in US online spending over those two months. Low sentiment and record spending forecasts, sitting quite happily beside each other. Which one are you meant to take into the meeting?

Then Deloitte forecasts between $316.1 billion and $318.9 billion in ecommerce sales. Except its holiday period runs from November through January. Adobe’s ends in December. NRF’s trillion-dollar number covers broader retail. Before we even debate whether a forecast is right, we have to work out whether we are discussing the same thing.

That doesn’t make the research useless. It makes reading beyond the headline part of the job. It is why I podcast or write - even poorly. A national spending record doesn’t tell you whether your customer has another €40 to spend with you. It certainly doesn’t tell you whether you can afford to acquire them. People can feel under pressure and still buy Christmas presents. They can spend more money and come home with less. The aggregate can look healthy while the business at your trading table has a very different morning.

This is where I find myself thinking about some of the people I’ve been talking to lately. People who have been in commerce twenty years or more. Who have moved sideways, moved companies, done the difficult job, been promised the next one. Some have spent a decade thinking the CEO role was coming. Or that the startup would exit. Or that this DTC brand would be the one that changed everything for them. People generally who have aged better than me but are around the same amount of time.

For some, those things haven’t happened. They may never happen. That’s a hard thing to sit with when you have put years of yourself into it. But something else is happening in those conversations. There’s energy again. They are interested. There is a problem to get their teeth into. Quite a few problems, actually. Commerce has been generous in that respect.

I recognise it because I feel it myself. I think I’ve learned more in the last six months than I did in the previous five years. There is so much moving that you have to pay attention again. You have to ask better questions. You have to be willing to discover that something you were very confident about last month no longer deserves quite so much confidence.

And people who came through commerce in the early 2000s have some useful experience here. They worked with complicated systems. They had to understand the plumbing, or sit beside somebody patient enough to explain it. They knew that changing something in one place could create a fairly spectacular problem somewhere else. They had to think like architects because someone had to understand how the whole thing held together.

These are people who went to the Christmas party with a laptop. Who heard a pingdom alert on their phone halfway through a drink and immediately started calculating how far they were from a socket. (remembering Paul Maxwell here who we lost this year. A good good man- isnt’t that right Ian) They learned by getting things wrong, fixing them and then explaining why it wouldn’t happen again. Usually with a qualification about the bit they still didn’t entirely trust.

I don’t want the laptop back at the Christmas party. I do want that understanding in the room. That resilience. The ability to trace a problem through the business, ask who else needs to know and make a decision before every last piece of information has arrived. When channels multiply and systems become more connected, that experience becomes useful in new ways. Pair it with people who understand the newer channels and you have a team with something to offer each other.

Take AI-assisted shopping. Adobe forecasts a 130% year-on-year increase in traffic from AI services to US retail sites this holiday season. That measures people clicking through; it doesn’t mean AI will account for 130% more of everybody’s business. But it gives us something worth investigating. Can a customer find the right product information? Is the stock accurate? Does the delivery promise survive the journey into the order?

The new route brings you back to the plumbing. It also brings you back to the customer, who is unlikely to be impressed by the sophistication of your discovery experience if the item doesn’t arrive.

Which is why, for me, contingency is the plan.

You need a starting position. You need a commercial objective. You need to know which customers you are serving, what you can sell profitably and what you can deliver. Then you need to prepare the team for the possibility that some of your assumptions will be wrong. Give people permission to bring that information into the room while there is still time to do something with it.

At a trading table, I want freedom and understanding. Freedom to say a campaign isn’t doing what we expected. Understanding of why we chose it, what we were trying to achieve and what would justify changing it. There is very little value in asking a team to be agile if moving a small amount of budget still requires three meetings and somebody’s emotional recovery.

The questions I keep coming back to are fairly simple. What did we learn yesterday? What does that change today? What are we still assuming? A disappointing result should give us something to investigate. If people spend the meeting defending the original decision, we lose another day.

When I say there’s no wrong answer, just a wrong attitude, that’s what I mean. We can make a bad call. We can lose money. We need to acknowledge it and understand it. But people should feel able to bring an honest answer into the room, even when it’s an uncomfortable one. Hiding it, defending it, refusing to learn from it: that’s where we have a bigger problem.

The monthly plan still matters. So does the overall Q4 objective. But the daily and weekly objectives need enough substance to help people choose. If we are trying to acquire customers, what can we afford to pay? If we need to move stock, which stock, and what margin are we prepared to accept? If a new channel shows promise, what would we need to see before putting more behind it? Those decisions are much easier when the team knows the boundaries before the pressure arrives.

And we have tools now that make parts of this easier than they used to be. AI can help assemble the daily briefing, compare what changed, pull together questions for the trading meeting and challenge an explanation we have become a little too fond of. With the right access and checks, we can spend less of the morning collecting information and more of it deciding what to do.

I find that exciting. I can ask for another interpretation. I can ask what evidence would disprove mine. I still need to check the numbers and make the decision, but I have more ways to question myself than I had before. For somebody who has been doing this a long time, that is a fairly good reason to feel energised.

I don’t know which headline will best describe this Black Friday when we look back on it. I do know that I want to sit with people who are curious enough to notice what is happening and comfortable enough with each other to say when something needs to change. People who can look after the customers we have while making room for the ones arriving somewhere we didn’t expect.

We’ll have a plan when we sit down. By the time we get up, I’d like us to have learned enough to improve it.

And tomorrow morning, we’ll ask again.

What did we learn?

This is The V Spot News. Like, subscribe, and tell a friend. We’re looking for a sponsor, so do all three with the confidence of someone who has just approved a marketing budget.

Fanatics has revamped its Shop the Look tool with OpenAI. It recommends coordinated outfits based on the item a shopper is viewing, using team, style and inventory data. A sot launch involving around 30,000 MLB products saw engagement rise 10% for the pilots - when this gets beyond pilots, it will be interesting.

Amazon has added more than 100 shopping actions to Alexa for Shopping. It can help manage grocery lists and registries, change subscriptions, update delivery instructions and answer questions about refunds. My Alexa still hears “play this song on Spotify” and returns something from a different decade.

Did ye hear? eBay reported third-quarter revenue of $3.2 billion, up 14%. Yeah, no one did.

Into the No Shit Sherlock file: US consumer confidence edged up in October as gas prices eased from September.

Cross-border payments are moving faster, but local settlement remains a pain point. That was the message from payments executives at Money20/20 in Las Vegas.Speakers asked why are we here? That’s the story. End of story.

France has suspended sales and imports for a year of condom brands made using a faulty manufacturing process, after defects raised the risk of them bursting or tearing.
For anyone with a complicated weekend itinerary: check the recall. Or go to the cinema. Or try a nice, entirely platonic evening.

And don’t double up. The NHS says use one condom at a time; using more than one can make them split. There are product categories where “buy one, get one free” is not the move.

And finally, Wilko’s owner, CDS Superstores, is investing in marketplace technology from Mirakl to make it easier for third-party sellers to join the site.

We got through the show without mentioning SHopify Editions, Shopify redundancies or the PHO hackathon challenge launched last week.

We’re still looking for a sponsor. Your brand could sit right here, between the global payments infrastructure and my unresolved Spotify issue. Do get in touch.

I’m Vinny O’Brien.

This has been The V Spot News. See you next time.

That is the six minutes you are not getting back.

In this interview I did with Darin for RMW Commerce and Shopware Darin was cognisant of his role in providing clarity, focus and positivity in these ever changing days. Core to his own thinking is not knowing all of the answers but being the trusted partner to help others navigate the way through. For his B2B clients, agentic shopping and challenges change how success should be measured. Many of their orders already come through punch out or the ERP, and some will start happening inside agents. Some visible and many not so much.

I don’t know Darin as well as others but really am trying to bridge that gap. he talks sense.

He talks of community over market share

Commerce over eCommerce

He pulls no punches.

Darin talks about himself as a dinosaur of the industry- grizzzled and wizened. Dinosaurs lived for millions of years, evolved and still live today - we write books about them and movies. We even try to bring them back to life. If this is what he means, then yes, I think for many years we will tell stories of his brilliance in our community. I hope to see more of them.

In Iristh Titan, they’ve been describing Agentic Commerce as a Celtic knot (IYFYK) with three strands; each strand needs its own metric:
1) data enrichment
2) discovery
3) checkout

On October 29, Irish Titan and ElleVet will be at Agentic Island, Shopware‘s virtual summit on agentic commerce, hosted by Rick Watson

Link to our pod and chat are here:

Link to chat with Vinny: https://lnkd.in/gf59F4YZ

Register for Agentic Island (Or not so love island) on October 29: https://lnkd.in/dYbYi_Nm

How are you counting the orders that never touch your commerce platform?

#ecommerce #b2becommerce #agenticcommerce

Note: This broadcast bumped this weeks V Spot - but regular broadcasting will be back next week.

There is a particular kind of ecommerce conversation that makes me nervous.

It usually begins with somebody explaining how AI is going to revolutionise everything, progresses to a slide showing an exponential curve, and ends without anybody explaining how a retailer is supposed to make more money.

I have sat through enough of them to develop a mild allergy.

Which is why my conversation with Gregor Kiddie was such a welcome change.

Gregor is Senior Engineering Manager for Strategic Intelligence at Rithum. He’s been with the business for more than sixteen years, stretching back to the ChannelAdvisor days. Before that, he was a computational neuroscientist, developing mathematical models of how brains grow. Some of his research supported Alzheimer’s work in Amsterdam; some has subsequently been referenced by Neuralink.

That’s quite a journey to end up discussing product descriptions and returns rates with me.

But it makes a peculiar sort of sense.

We used to grow by turning up

Gregor said something early in our conversation that has stuck with me.

Ten years ago, you could practically breathe in the direction of a new ecommerce channel and enjoy double-digit growth.

He’s exaggerating, of course. But not by much.

The expansion of marketplaces created extraordinary opportunities. More channels, more customers, more transactions. For a long time, distribution itself was a meaningful competitive advantage.

That world is changing.

The channels are crowded. The operational costs are substantial. Customers move between platforms with little concern for our carefully constructed channel strategies.

The growth isn’t simply waiting for us to arrive anymore.

So where do we find it?

Gregor’s answer was not a new marketplace, an enormous AI transformation programme or another expensive dashboard.

It was a collection of small improvements.

The one-percent problem

We talked about Dave Brailsford and British Cycling: the famous idea that improvements too small to matter individually can become extraordinarily powerful when combined.

Better sleep. Better hygiene. Better recovery.

Not particularly glamorous.

And rather less exciting than announcing a revolutionary new cycling technology.

Gregor sees a parallel in commerce.

Take returns.

A retailer may have thousands of products across multiple categories, countries and marketplaces. Somewhere in that catalogue are products with confusing descriptions, inadequate sizing information, misleading titles and subtle mismatches between what the customer expects and what arrives.

Each problem may be small enough to escape attention.

Collectively, they’re eating the margin.

A human analyst can investigate the biggest problems. But asking somebody to examine every listing, every return pattern and every market-specific variation is an enormous undertaking.

Machine learning can look for patterns across a much larger body of information and identify opportunities that would otherwise go unnoticed.

A sizing correction here. A better product description there. A recommendation not to list a particular product in a particular market.

Gregor described how these small changes can accumulate into substantial improvements.

And that is a much more interesting proposition than asking a chatbot to write fifty product descriptions before lunch.

Because the objective isn’t more content.

The objective is fewer mistakes, better buying decisions and more profitable orders.

A bikini in France is a surprisingly useful business lesson

One example from the conversation deserves attention.

Gregor described a merchant expanding from Zalando Germany into Zalando France.

The obvious approach would be to take a successful German catalogue, translate it, upload it and start selling.

But Rithum’s analysis could identify products that were commercially attractive in Germany yet potentially unprofitable in France because of expected returns.

That changes the question entirely.

Instead of asking, Can we list this product in France?, the merchant can ask, Should we?

And the important part isn’t simply receiving a yes or no.

It’s receiving the reasoning.

An expected return rate, an estimated financial outcome, an explanation of why one product is worth expanding and another might not be.

I have spent a considerable part of my career helping brands expand into marketplaces and new territories.

The industry has become very good at discussing the mechanics of getting products onto a channel.

We have been considerably less enthusiastic about asking whether those products should be there in the first place.

Perhaps that’s where the next competitive advantage lives.

Your customers aren’t necessarily telling you the truth

This was another fascinating part of the discussion.

Gregor is sceptical of subjective returns data.

When a customer selects a reason for returning a product, that reason may reflect what is easiest to choose, what they think will secure a refund, or what they believe the retailer wants to hear.

It isn’t necessarily a reliable account of what happened.

Consider somebody ordering five sizes of the same garment, trying them all on and returning four.

The return form may say incorrect size.

Technically, perhaps.

But the real commercial problem is more complicated.

Gregor’s argument is that retailers should be careful about relying on those explanations when objective transaction and performance data can reveal different patterns.

This has implications well beyond returns.

We spend fortunes collecting customer feedback, reviews, service interactions and surveys. All of them can be valuable. But we also need to distinguish between what customers say and what their behaviour demonstrates.

The two are not always the same.

AI shopping is going to expose the quality of your product information

Eventually, our conversation moved into agentic commerce.

And here the implications become even more interesting.

For years, brands could get away with relatively basic product information.

A product identifier, a price, an available quantity and a halfway respectable description might have been enough to get a listing moving.

That isn’t going to be sufficient when customers start asking increasingly specific questions of AI shopping services.

What are the best trainers for somebody with wide feet?

Which products suit a particular use case?

What should I wear with a kilt?

That last example is Gregor’s own rather wonderful test prompt.

A conversational shopping system needs enough meaningful information to understand what a product actually is, who it’s suitable for and how it compares with alternatives.

That means accurate identifiers, attributes, dimensions, sizing, materials, descriptions and the context around their use.

In other words, the data work that ecommerce teams have been postponing for years.

Only now the consequences of postponing it may become much more visible.

Gregor described work exploring how AI shopping services select and recommend products, and how merchants might improve the information influencing those results.

He also made an important distinction: systems such as Gemini and ChatGPT do not necessarily behave the same way. The mechanisms change, and the ability to influence recommendations differs.

There is no magic formula here.

Which makes me even more suspicious of anyone already selling one.

The future may arrive in a spreadsheet

Perhaps my favourite observation from Gregor was about how enterprise customers actually want to use AI.

Not through another chatbot.

Not necessarily through an entirely new interface.

Through the processes they already rely on.

Spreadsheets. EDI. Reports. Existing integrations.

Gregor’s point was straightforward: if a retailer already receives useful operational reports through established workflows, adding better intelligence to those reports may create far more value than asking the team to adopt a new tool.

It is a deeply unfashionable idea.

Which probably means it’s worth listening to.

We often confuse innovation with visible change.

But for the person trying to run a retail business, the best innovation might be the one that quietly improves a decision without making Tuesday afternoon any more complicated.

Trust is not a product feature

Gregor also made an important distinction between established machine-learning methods and generative AI.

Predictive models built around defined inputs and repeatable processes are different from systems that can produce varying answers to similar questions.

For businesses making consequential commercial decisions, that difference matters.

Rithum has years of data and established customer relationships behind it. Gregor’s view is that introducing AI capabilities needs to preserve that trust rather than undermine it through change for its own sake.

It’s a useful counterweight to an industry that frequently rewards the loudest announcement.

And it left me with a thought.

Maybe the next phase of ecommerce won’t be defined by who adopts AI first.

Maybe it will be defined by who understands their own business well enough to use it intelligently.

Who knows where the margin is disappearing.

Who understands the relationship between product information and customer expectations.

Who knows which markets are worth entering — and which products should stay at home.

Who can tell the difference between a persuasive customer explanation and a genuine operational pattern.

Those are not new questions.

But we may finally have better ways to answer them.

And for an industry struggling to find profitable growth, that could be rather more valuable than another revolution.

Watch or listen to the conversation

Gregor Kiddie joins me on The Ostrich Report to discuss his journey from computational neuroscience to ecommerce intelligence, the economics of marginal gains, returns, product data, AI shopping recommendations and why enterprises might prefer better spreadsheets to another chatbot.

The Ostrich Report is presented in partnership with Rithum. My thanks to Gregor, Sammy and the Rithum team for supporting conversations that get beyond the headlines and into the mechanics of commerce.

Explore Rithum:

https://www.rithum.com/

Explore The V Spot:

https://www.thevspotnews.com/

Subscribe for more conversations about marketplaces, retail technology and the commercial realities behind the ecommerce headlines.

That is a decent introduction to Steve. He has a way of acknowledging the knock without allowing it to take over the room.

I had enjoyed speaking with him before we recorded. He is deliberate, witty and able to move between the detail of an operation and the motives of the people directing it. In this conversation, I wanted to understand where that manner came from.

His career has crossed categories and countries. There was a business he built with a partner, developing luxury toiletries from the first conversation through fragrances, manufacturing, packaging and branding. They had been trading for roughly three months when they lost their funding and had to wind up.

It is easy to race past that sentence on the way to the next role. We do it all the time in professional biographies. A business becomes a line in a career, and the work of imagining it, building it and then closing it disappears between the commas.

Steve tells the story plainly. When I call it a badge of honour, he says he has a couple of those badges now. The humour lets the fact sit in the conversation. It does not require an inspirational speech to make it respectable.

Later, I ask him about his calmness. He talks about a brief time in the army after university, a career he had wanted, and the value of keeping your head when there is adversity. Maintaining a view of what needs to happen gives you a chance of finding a workable solution.

Then he says something that matters more to me than the career chronology. His calm has sometimes been read as a lack of care or passion. He says that is a mistake. He does care. He takes things home. Performance, team development and the wellbeing of the people around him can tie him in knots.

The quiet person can still be carrying plenty.

That is what I kept hearing as the conversation moved back into ecommerce. Behind his frustration with noise and shiny tools is a concern about what the work is actually for, and about whether people have the space to do it properly.

We talk about teams that feel stretched, with fewer people expected to deliver more. Steve’s hope for AI is practical: take repetitive work off their shoulders so they can spend time on analysis and opportunities. He is enthusiastic about that possibility. He is impatient with a board demanding AI while being unable to explain what it should improve.

There is a similar concern in his account of conversion rates. He tells me about achieving eighteen per cent when the telephone lines in a mail-order business failed and customers came online instead. A spectacular number, produced by an unusual day. A poor foundation for everyone’s future expectations.

His question is what we lose when a transaction becomes the only interaction that counts. Someone can come to a website, enjoy a product story, learn about the brand or find a store. A relationship can be forming before a purchase appears in a report.

I hear a connection between that and how he describes the people around him. Pay attention to what is happening before you decide what it means. Give people room. Understand the reason behind the behaviour.

That is my reading of Steve, rather than a framework he announces. Experience seems to have given him the confidence to ask an ordinary question in a room full of expensive answers: what are we actually trying to do?

We end with a career soundtrack. I’m Shipping Up to Boston by Dropkick Murphys. He says it needs to be something chaotic.

I like that choice. The man can be calm while the journey is anything but.

Listen to or watch the full conversation below.

[Insert Spotify and YouTube embeds after scheduling.]

Steve Webster is Founder and Principal of Barking Cat Advisory. Find him at https://barkingcat.ai and on LinkedIn.

The Struggle Bus with Vinny O’Brien is a VSpot Media programme. Season Four is in partnership with VirtualStock.

2 weeks ago I mentioned that the Irish retailer makes approx 2.50 on every 100, so it tracks. Free cash flow is tight and we are relying on peak trading to get us there. We have added uncertainty - Shopify apps being hacked, Revolut down this morning, banks down, supermarket checkouts down. Google cloud is a core infrastructure element and has been so reliable for so long. The fact this particular outage is hitting consumers means it is in mainstream news services too. Fear and uncertainty, 1 month out from Black Friday.

Change is the only constant. Your BFCM plans for many will be nailed on, but I am inclined to rip it up - not totally. Hear me out. Meta CACs are soaring - CVR is falling off a cliff, not an uncommon BFCM problem, but stresses the Twitterhood something wild.

Brand/Retailer side - make your promo cycle easy. Use your existing customer book to give you control. Merchandise your ass off every day. Respond to weather, Trending topics and deliver messages to beat the daily number. Plans cannot do this. The real certainty around BFCM is that we trained consumers to spread their spend during this time. Your job is day trading. Not monthly or weekly planning. If you are not a high volume seller you need to capitalise on the moment. If you are in the volume game, you need better reasons for me to part with my money, not much more to be honest. Turn inventory into cash.

SaaS provider, I said this before. Upgrade your customers to the top tier today and run it until peak ends. Let your top product do your talking. Demonstrate value and dont talk about it - dont let your volume limits be your volume limits. Your job is hard enough - get your size 14’s out of your own way.

I think the plan will stress you. Work on the basis of group think and accepting things change. Have your trade meeting in the morning, early and be focused. Don’t be surprised and don’t be dismissive. Example, if you are monzo or a Revolut competitor now you should be reaching for the folder named - Eureka - that moment that could happen but probably wont but we go on the offensive. It happens in governments when snap elections are called, banners and manfiestos appear .

Arise BFCM, I dub thee the year of contingency above all.

Welcome to this week’s The V-Spot News. Not for the good of my health or cos Hendrik Laubscher and Gireesh Sahukar love this, no, it is all a capitalist ploy by me to stay relevant. My chins in the video suggest a month or two away from captialist pleasures would be welcome.

We also have second-hand clothing statistics that sound suspiciously convincing, Christmas toys getting more expensive, a rare moment of optimism from Moody’s, Dungeons & Dragons in Montreal and California diesel prices doing their bit for customer experience.

And we’re playing One Truth, Two Lies. Apple. Amazon. Elon Musk. One of them did something remarkable this week.

Possibly. It’s the ecommerce news. Nearly.

🎬 Watch this week’s episode. Also on Youtube, Spotify, Twitter, The Tok and Substack. Yeah, they all forget about editorial standards on Fridays.

We’re also looking for a brand with a sense of humour to sponsor the programme. Apparently that isn’t yet a recognised media-buying category. Here’s the six minutes you’re not getting back again.

#Ecommerce #Retail #RetailNews #TheVSpot

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The Struggle Bus • Season 4, Episode 1 • Wednesday 14 October 2026

There is a question underneath a lot of leadership conversations: where do you g…

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Six minutes of eCommerce Nearly News that you are absolutely not getting back.

This week:

🤖 TikTok discovers agentic commerce

💰 UK retail media sails past £2bn

👕 ASOS gets hacked and my search history becomes a matter of national concern

🛍️ Google learns what we’re actually asking AI when we shop

🐻 Haribo triples its US sal…

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I have been trying to work out why that is. He can move from a robot destined for a space station to the aunties who raised him, from nineteenth-century c…

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Over the last few weeks, I have covered alot of ground, physically, learning wise and role wise. I thought it might be useful to share some.

Approx 27,000 KM covered. Physically. Speaks to itself, but I aged, visibly and added my Christmas blubber along the way. I don’t shed it quite as easily as I us…

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