Talk Commerce
Talk Commerce connects the commerce community through conversation, with host Brent W. Peterson talking to the founders, developers, agency leaders, and merchants who build and run eCommerce businesses on Shopify, Magento, Adobe Commerce, and B2B platforms. Two segments run alongside the full interviews. Agentic Commerce episodes run 10 minutes or less and take on one topic at a time, from AI shopping agents to the product data those agents read. Running Commerce covers the running and athletic industry and the brands, retailers, and race organizers who make it work. Episodes also cover eCommerce marketing, retail, and growing a team, along...
Product Images Get You Chosen in eCommerce with Jehan Hamedi of Vizit
Jehan Hamedi is the founder of Vizit, an AI company working on the analysis and understanding of visual content and imagery for enterprise brands and retailers. He has spent about 15 years in the AI industry building, designing and scaling AI measurement systems.
Detection and classification can tell you what sits inside an image, and Jehan's interest runs past that into a harder question, which is whether an image moves a particular shopper in a particular market and category to choose a product. Vizit trains models on behavioral, product, sales, social and search data to simulate the shopper...
TikTok Shop Belongs in Your Q4 Playbook with Jordan West of Social Commerce Club
Jordan West of Social Commerce Club, a TikTok Shop agency, joins Brent to talk about how a path through dropshipped hoverboards, Shopify, Facebook ads and a string of acquired brands led him to go all in on TikTok Shop.
The conversation covers why creators who only get paid when they make a sale hand brands a steady supply of human made content, how creative that works on TikTok carries over to other channels, and why he sees TikTok as the strongest top of funnel channel brands have had in North America. Jordan also explains how a local...
Connect Marketing to Your P&L with Mohammed Hedadji of Nodus
Mohammed Hedadji is the CEO and one of the co-founders of Nodus, a growth systems agency for retail and high consideration brands. Isaac Morey sat down with him for the final interview of Shoptalk Fall in Nashville, the day after Nodus turned four.
In this conversation, Mohammed traces Nodus back to almost ten years at Red Ventures working with Walmart, Procter and Gamble and Apple, and explains why the middle market needs a partner that grounds marketing in the P&L before adding more tools, since the average brand has double the vendors it had five years...
Does Your Company Show Up in Agentic Search with Mark Sifrit of G10X
Mark Sifrit is the general manager of North America for G10X, a digital and AI solutions company that builds AI and technology solutions at scale for enterprises. Isaac Morey sat down with him on the floor at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville.
In this conversation, shoppers move from traditional search to agentic search, and Mark asks whether a company shows up in the answer at all. He covers what a company keeps private, what it makes public and how agents reach it, why agents learn through their interactions so a company can go back and educate them...
B2B eCommerce Launches Slip on Product Data with Matt Christensen of DDS
Matt Christensen is president and co-founder of DDS, Distributor Data Solutions, out of Salt Lake City. DDS sits between manufacturers and the distributors who sell their products and moves rich product data, images, descriptions, videos and attributes, into the shape each distributor can use. Our Shoptoberfest tape in Nashville did not survive the Bavarian Bierhaus, so Matt came back to the studio for a make-up, a special Shopware edition.
In this conversation, DDS customers run from 10,000 SKUs to close to 15 million and every manufacturer stores and names the data differently. Shopify, BigCommerce, the PIM companies and Shopware...
eCommerce Accounting Where Almost Right Is Not Good Enough with Parag Mamnani of Webgility
Parag Mamnani is the founder and CEO of Webgility, which automates accounting for multi-channel brands and retailers. He built eCommerce stores on osCommerce and X-Cart before Magento, ran Amazon Webstore until Amazon sold it to Shopify, and started Webgility almost two decades ago on three words written on a napkin, integration, automation and insights. Brent and Parag go back to the early Magento Imagine days.
In this episode Brent and Parag cover:
Why the commerce platform is not your system of truth, and why the accounting system is the only place the real...Train Your Team When Not to Use AI with Brandon Urich of SwiftOtter
Brent sat down with Brandon Urich at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Brandon is the president of SwiftOtter, a full-service digital agency that grew out of the Magento developer training business its founder Joseph built, and that now works across Adobe Commerce, Shopify and BigCommerce with headless builds on Next.js.
The conversation covers how the best kept secret in the agency space turned its attention to agency services, the point where an eCommerce platform's content tools cap out and a headless front end takes over, why the failed headless projects of five to ten years ago look...
There Is No Best Platform with Yurii Kuzminov of Axceleris
Brent sat down with Yurii Kuzminov at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Yurii is the CEO and founder of Axceleris, an agency that started in Magento more than sixteen years ago and now partners with both Adobe and Shopify.
The conversation covers why Yurii comes to events for the meetings and watches the sessions later, the hard decision to add Shopify after years of being against it, why a straightforward D2C store often lowers its total cost of ownership by migrating off Magento and why some D2C merchants still belong on Magento, how AI lets his...
Plaid for Retail and Shopper-Owned Data for Agentic Commerce with Allison Reilly of Closai
Isaac Morey sat down with Allison Reilly at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Allison is the founder of Closai, a startup building a consumer purchase intelligence layer for retail, where a shopper opts in to connect their purchase history with the apps, agents, brands and retailers they choose.
The conversation covers what happens to a camera bought at Best Buy once the shopper opts in, why a retailer gets a personalized home page instead of a static one, why Allison compares Closai to Plaid and says a retailer cannot build the neutral layer itself, her layman's definition of...
AI Promises the Output Without the Work with Aaron Sheehan of OroCommerce
Isaac Morey sat down with Aaron Sheehan at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Aaron is the VP of Strategy and Partnerships at OroCommerce, an e-commerce platform made for manufacturers and distributors.
The conversation covers the complexity that comes with B2B sales, what is different about Shoptalk this year with a new B2B focus, why Aaron says AI has solved few problems for B2B companies whose challenges are the same ones they have had for 20 years, why the fax machine is not dead, why B2B companies point AI at their own paperwork and workflows and...
Email Is the Signal Agents Will Weigh with Ose Amiegheme of Intuit Mailchimp
Ose Amiegheme leads email product at Intuit Mailchimp. Before Mailchimp he worked on Adobe Express and spent time at TikTok, and he describes himself as a product manager who is a creative at heart.
Brent and Ose talk about why email keeps outliving the predictions of its death, what Ose sees in Mailchimp's numbers when merchants invest in owned channels (he says those merchants get 10 to 20% more ROI), and how predictive models build segments around who is likely to buy and who responds to a discount. They get into how agents will weigh a brand's engagement with...
Product Data Is the Source the Agents Read with Ben Riggle of Channable
Isaac Morey sat down with Ben Riggle at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Ben is the managing director for Channable in North America, and Channable takes a retailer's product data and optimizes it for each surface the products go out on.
We cover the difference between agentic discovery and agentic checkout, why Ben thinks the word agentic may fade into search and discovery, why product data is the source agents and LLMs rely on, the 30 conversational attributes Google added, why rules fix more than AI does when AI is checking AI, Ben's definition of AI slop, the AI...
The Five-Legged Stool of B2B eCommerce with Ethan Giffin of The B2B eCommerce Agency
Scott Ohsman of Always Off Brand and I recorded our Slightly Off Commerce collaboration at Shoptoberfest in Nashville, and Ethan Giffin waited about four hours for his turn at the table. He runs The B2B eCommerce Agency, formerly Groove Commerce, and the rebrand describes a change that happened to the business before it happened to the name.
We cover how the agency got pulled into manufacturing and distribution, the complicated situations behind his book Closing the Digital Revenue Gap, why the buyer entering the workforce now expects Amazon, Uber and Starbucks in a pocket, what he...
Your New Customer Is Not Human with Adam Fabian and Jacy Davis of Crimson Agility
Scott Ohsman of Always Off Brand and I recorded our Slightly Off Commerce collaboration at Shoptoberfest in Nashville, and the Crimson Agility conversation ran longer than any other at the table. Jacy Davis is their director of sales. Adam Fabian handles the technical download, and by the end Scott had renamed him Example Adam, because he never makes a point without one.
We cover the three kinds of AI, why Adam says your new customer is not human, a hard drive that shows how out of date AI shopping data can be, why context data is becoming...
Regulated B2B eCommerce Starts in the Data Model with Tom Sieger and Timo Weltner of NETFORMIC
Scott Ohsman of Always Off Brand and I recorded our Slightly Off Commerce collaboration at Shoptoberfest in Nashville, and two of our guests came at the same business from opposite sides of the Atlantic. Timo Weltner co-founded NETFORMIC in Germany, where it has been a Shopware partner for years. Tom Sieger runs the United States side.
We cover why regulated industries have to solve complexity in the data model before the storefront, how a pricing engine built on a product information system found two ways a customer was losing money, and what a European engineering mindset changes...
From Magento Agency to ERP Integration Platform with Karthik Chidambaram of DCKAP
A special episode, recorded live at Shoptoberfest in Nashville, Tennessee, and co-hosted with Scott Ohsman of Always Off Brand. Shoptoberfest is presented by Shopware.
Karthik Chidambaram is the founder and CEO of DCKAP, an ERP-first integration platform for distributors and manufacturers.
The conversation covers how DCKAP went from a well known Magento agency to a product company after a Prophet 21 integration for a distributor turned out harder than anyone expected, why Karthik built an ERP-first integration platform instead of a general iPaaS, what a manufacturer rep taught him about why the middle of the channel...
Live from Shoptoberfest with Sebastian Hamann from Shopware
A special episode, recorded live at Shoptoberfest in Nashville, Tennessee, and co-hosted with Scott Ohsman of Always Off Brand. Shoptoberfest is presented by Shopware.
Sebastian Hamann is the co-founder and CEO of Shopware, the company he started with his brother Stefan in the village of Schöppingen, Germany, when the two were teenagers.
The conversation covers how the product got its name after an earlier name, Shop IT, fell flat, the decision to go open source in 2010 and watching the download numbers climb, how he and Stefan split the work between design and engineering, why t...
Agentic Commerce Does Not Have Legs Yet with Darin Lynch of Irish Titan
Darin Lynch has run Irish Titan for twenty two years, and he does the thing almost nobody in this conversation does. He defines the term.
Agentic commerce, to Darin, is three strands, a Celtic knot: data enrichment, discovery and checkout. And he is blunt about how far along it is. It crawled out of the ocean, it is slithering around on the beach, and it does not have legs yet.
His evidence that the hard part is genuinely hard is the company with the most resources walking away from it. If OpenAI can jump into...
Customers Compare You to Every App on Their Phone with Bobby Stephens of Deloitte Digital
Bobby Stephens leads the US retail and CPG practice at Deloitte Digital, and he came on right after his team published their 2026 B2C commerce research, Bridging the commerce divide, which surveyed 550 B2C commerce leaders and 1,000 consumers and found the two groups describing what sounds like two different businesses.
The gap is not in anything exotic. It sits in the table stakes, in finding a product, confirming it is in stock, checking out, getting an order update, and making a return. As Bobby puts it, merchants think they are doing a better job at checkout than...
B2B eCommerce Podcasting for Yourself First with Jason Greenwood of The eCommerce Edge
A special episode, recorded live at Shoptoberfest in Nashville, Tennessee, on September 15, 2026, and co-hosted with Scott Ohsman of Always Off Brand. Shoptoberfest is presented by Shopware.
Jason Greenwood hosts The eCommerce Edge, with more than seven hundred episodes recorded, and he brings more than 25 years in ecommerce to his work with manufacturers and distributors on the biggest challenges in B2B digital commerce.
The conversation covers why Jason does the show for himself first and the audience second, the guests he looks for, like the grandson or granddaughter now running a third generation distribution company...
AI Coding Writes Up to 90 Percent of His Magento Code with Damien Retzinger of Graycore
Damien Retzinger is the founder and software engineer at Graycore, and the BDFL of Daffodil, an open source ecommerce front end framework with about 60 libraries, one per unit of ecommerce, and a driver layer that connects the same storefront to Magento or Shopify, with a Medusa driver in progress.
Daffodil came out of the Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration, when merchants wanted the upgrade and did not want their customers to learn a new website. Damien ripped the front end off, wrote an API for each version, and swapped them underneath, then decided to solve that problem once...
AI Customer Service and the Death of the IVR with Michael Klein of Talkdesk
A special episode, recorded live at The Lead Summit, May 20 and 21, 2026, in New York City.
Michael Klein is the Director of Industry Marketing at Talkdesk, where he owns the messaging and the marketing for the retail, travel, and consumer goods industries. Talkdesk started in contact center software, began building its AI close to ten years ago, and now runs as a customer experience platform covering the work before, during, and after a sale, from product discovery through returns and recalls.
In this conversation: the phrase Michael uses for what natural language processing did to the...
AI-Supported Content and Website Accessibility with Rotimi Kehinde of Kingdom Branding
Rotimi Kehinde is the founder of Kingdom Branding, a full service marketing agency in Chicago doing web development and social media, which they call growth marketing. This is a special content edition, so Isaac Morey, chief editor and co-founder of Content Cucumber, co-hosts.
Rotimi came to the US from Nigeria, spent one year in corporate work he hated, and started out as a graphic designer before taking an unpaid creative director role on a Chicago mayoral campaign. The agency grew out of his living room to a team of seven, doing brand design for the Democratic Party...
The Chair Does Not Exist Until You Click Checkout with Benjamin Spiegel of Polywood
Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.
Benjamin Spiegel is the Chief Digital Officer at Polywood, the outdoor furniture maker that turns recycled plastic into lumber and lumber into furniture on its own floor. The model is just-in-time: a checkout on the website triggers the lumber run in the right color, the build, the box, and the shipment, with no finished inventory in between.
In this conversation: why vertical integration cuts freight as much as it cuts waste, why Spiegel thinks this is the best time to be a creative, the difference between big-C creative...
An Email That Knows It Is 97 Degrees in Atlanta with Aman Advani of Ministry of Supply
Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.
Aman Advani is the co-founder and CEO of Ministry of Supply, the performance-fabric clothing brand he started with two engineers he met in school. Fourteen years in, the company runs direct to consumer on a hub of Shopify, Klaviyo, and a homegrown forecasting and purchasing engine called the Ministry Production System.
In this conversation: why every product starts from a problem statement (sweat stains, stiff fabric, dry cleaning), the email that told him it was 97 degrees in Atlanta and his jacket would arrive Tuesday, why he answers five...
Own What an AI Cannot Copy with Mark Stanley of Shopware
Recorded live at Shopware Partner Day in Austin, Texas on April 22, 2026.
Mark Stanley is Shopware's chief product and technology officer, where he looks after all product development. He walks through what is landing this year. Shopware's own native PaaS has just gone GA, highly opinionated and driven from the command line. An intelligence suite is in progress, bringing AI into bulk editing, CMS content generation and store data insights. And Nexus, an orchestration system for connecting Shopware instances to each other and to third party systems, goes GA at Shopware Community Day in Cologne.
His...
Same Candy in the Box No Matter Where You Buy with Laura Smith of Sweetwater
Sweetwater has a reputation that arrives before the box does. Ask any working musician and you get the same two details without prompting, the candy and the phone call.
Laura Smith is Vice President of Marketplaces at Sweetwater Sound, the nation's largest online musical instrument retailer, and hers is the job where that reputation is easiest to lose, because she is the one selling Sweetwater's products on somebody else's storefront.
She starts somewhere unglamorous. Consistency begins in the product data, and on a catalog as large as Amazon's the real risk is listing a product...
AI as a Teammate Not a Party Trick with John Riewerts of Acoustic
John Riewerts leads product engineering at Acoustic, a marketing engagement company. He joins us on day three of eTail Boston to take apart a phrase every marketer uses and few define, bringing the audience closer to the brand, and to explain why the listening half of marketing is the half that gets underbuilt.
Riewerts frames the discipline as two tools. Marketers send messages, which becomes campaigning. And marketers listen, which means reading behavior, because as he puts it, no consumer ever sends a brand a message saying whether they like it. They answer through their actions instead.<...
Adobe Commerce vs SaaS and Why Business Complexity Does Not Go Away with Mike Heilig of Binary Anvil
Mike Heilig is the general manager at Binary Anvil, a web development agency and systems integrator that has been running for 18 years, built mostly on Adobe Commerce, and has since branched into other platforms and a product of its own.
He takes on the SaaS promise directly. Moving to SaaS genuinely removes the hosting and patching burden, and then relocates the difficulty rather than deleting it, because business complexity does not go away. His fit test is simple. A very simple business may belong on SaaS. B2B requirements, complex catalogs and complex price lists probably do...
CTV Advertising and the 70-30 Media Plan with Leif Welch of Jamloop
Leif Welch named his company after a music startup that failed inside a year, and he kept the name through the rebuild anyway, because the idea sitting underneath it, connecting buyers and sellers with more transparency than either of them was used to, had always been the part worth keeping. The first Jamloop was a marketplace for musicians to find new and used gear, with a social network for local players attached to it.
Jamloop is now a platform for brands and their agencies to advertise on streaming television. Welch describes it as a Facebook or Google...
AI Shopping This Holiday Season and Money Maxing with Jeff Wender of Minty
Jeff Wender is Chief Revenue Officer at Minty. He opened with a term worth stealing: money maxing, which he describes as what shoppers have always done when costs are high and every dollar has to stretch further.
The number underneath his pitch is the one merchants already know and mostly ignore. Roughly 5% of people who land on an ecommerce site buy something. The other 95% are in discovery, moving between sites and comparing, and the brand has no idea who they are. Minty works that 95%, using a permissioned database of over 450 million connected devices to identify those shoppers...
Product Recommendations and Personalization Before the First Click with Sidd Motwani of Malachyte
Sidd Motwani, co-founder and CEO of Malachyte, on real-time personalization that starts before the first click. Malachyte builds a user vector, a numerical representation of each shopper's intent and preference, with no third-party cookies, no purchase history, and no sign-in required. Sidd and his co-founder built the user vector platform at Spotify, where it powers most of the application across music, podcasts, and audiobooks.
In this conversation:
What a user vector is and why it works cold, with no data about the shopper Personalizing from the referrer, device, time of day, and location before a first...Protecting Profitability in the Age of AI Shopping Agents with Jeff Otto of Riskified
Jeff Otto, CMO of Riskified, shares insights on how AI and machine learning are transforming e-commerce fraud prevention, enhancing customer experience, and protecting merchant profitability. Discover the latest innovations in identity verification, fraud detection, and the future of agentic commerce.
key topics
Chapters
00:00
Introduction to Riskified and Jeff Otto
02:01
The Evolution of Fraud Prevention...
CPG Marketing When Health Nutrition Stops Being a Niche with Catherine Hayden of Kate Farms
Catherine Hayden, Chief Marketing Officer of Kate Farms, on why health nutrition is not a niche category.
Six in ten Americans live with a chronic health condition. Catherine explains what that means for how Kate Farms markets, and what changes as the brand expands into 6,800 doors across Walmart and CVS.
In this conversation:
The "Here for the Champions" brand campaign and the insight behind it Why a new high protein shake flavor took 800 variations to get right Staying authentic while scaling into mass retail Where AI helps, and why the origin and the idea...Turning Marketing Into a Profit Control System with Cem Atik
Cem Atik, co-founder of Harucon-Ventures, shares insights on turning marketing into a profit control system, leveraging data and AI in e-commerce, and the importance of human creativity alongside AI. Discover practical strategies for data-driven decision making, optimizing unit economics, and the future of AI in marketing.
key topics
takeaways
Get Your Brand Noticed in AI Search with Danny Kirk of ReddiReach
Danny Kirk, founder of ReddiReach, shares insights on how Reddit and AI search optimization can boost brand visibility and influence search engine rankings. Discover practical strategies for leveraging Reddit data, understanding AI filtering, and preparing your brand for the future of AI-driven search and commerce. https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielpkirk/
key topics
Chapters
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Automating Complex Ecommerce Workflows with Joseph Anderson of Connex Ecommerce
Joe Anderson, CEO of Connex eCommerce, shares insights on automating complex workflows in e-commerce, integrating legacy systems, and leveraging AI for smarter operations. Discover how tailored automation solutions can streamline your business processes and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving market.
Key topics
Chapters
00:00
Introduction to Connex eCommerce
01:56
The Journey of Automation in eCommerce
04:03
Challenges in Workflow Automation
07:17
...
AI Is Rewiring the eCommerce CFO Role with Matt Putra of eightX
Matt Putra, managing partner at 8X, shares insights on leveraging AI in e-commerce, the importance of organizational frameworks like EOS, and strategic financial management for growth and exit readiness.
AI's impact on marketing and product development
Using EOS to organize and prepare for exitFinancial hygiene and data organization for acquisitionStrategic use of AI in ad creation and testingScaling and managing growth in consumer goodsChapters
00:00
Introduction and Guest Introduction
03:44
AI in Product Prototyping and Marketing Acceleration
07:10
Challenges and Limitations of AI in Content Creation<...
Connecting Data and Creative Assets to Drive Modern Marketing Evolution | Amy Crowther
Amy Crowther, President of Incubeta Americas, shares insights on marketing evolution, AI's role in content creation, and strategies for brands to stay relevant in a rapidly changing digital landscape.
Key topics
Chapters
00:00
Introduction to Amy Crowther and Incubeta
02:42
The Role of AI in Marketing
05:34
Navigating AI Content and Brand Identity
08:01<...
Maximizing Agility and Control in B2B Commerce with Shopware | Jason Nyhus
Brent Peterson interviews Jason Nyhus, General Manager at Shopware, about the latest trends in B2B commerce, platform flexibility, and the future of digital experiences. They explore the challenges and opportunities in regulated industries, the importance of adaptable platforms, and innovative features like live shopping.
Key topics
B2B market growth and trends
Platform flexibility and customization
Regulated industry challenges and compliance
Impact of private equity on technology choices
Future of digital customer experiences
Role of AI and agentic systems in commerce
Integration and extension of e-commerce platforms
Ri...
