Money Maxing with Jeff Wender of Minty

Jeff Wender, CRO of Minty, on money maxing, the 95% of shoppers who leave without buying, and the 78% who will use AI this holiday season.

Show Notes

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 and put an incentive in front of them.

On AI, Jeff refused to give an opinion and gave data instead. Minty's national holiday shopper survey found 78% of people expect to use AI in some form this holiday season, mostly for discovery rather than purchase. Their answer is Minty Promote, which syndicates a brand's products and incentives across the major LLMs so the brand is in the conversation when the recommendation gets made.

Also covered: the Shopify app and where the instrumentation sits, the Minty Ads retail media layer, and why full funnel matters more than any single tactic.

Chapters

(00:05) Introductions at eTail Boston
(00:14) Money maxing, and what it actually means
(01:12) The 5% who buy and the 95% who do not
(02:55) What Minty is hearing on the exhibit floor
(04:19) The 78% AI holiday number, and Minty Promote
(06:05) Minty App, Minty Ads, and what is next

Recorded live at eTail Boston 2026.

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speaker-0 (00:05.435)
Great to be here at eTail Boston. Could you start by telling us your name, title, and company?

speaker-1 (00:10.976)
Absolutely. I'm Jeff Wender, Chief Revenue Officer for Minty.

speaker-0 (00:14.674)
Great, thanks Jeff. Ufor the show we were talking a little bit and you threw out a term I thought was kinda funny, kinda interesting. Money maxing. What is it? How does Minty play a role? Well

speaker-1 (00:27.916)
Money maxing is no different than what consumers have been doing for decades, which is in environments like this, when you know when costs are high and consumers are really trying to be as cost conscious as they can, they want to stretch their dollar. They want to identify what are the best ways in which they can find what they want to buy at the right time and ultimately do it in a way that allows them to do as much as they possibly can with their dollar. And what Minty does and where we focus is on proactive commerce. We're about helping brands and

advertisers to be able to put the right products in front of customers and then when they do customers have the ability to get the right incentives to get them from the discovery part where they're looking and trying to find the best deal to money max and get to a place where they make that actual purchase.

speaker-0 (01:12.206)
Awesome. From the merchant side, I see you guys have a graphic here that you've helped drive 1.6 million in revenue for your clients since eTail. Tell us a little bit from like the the merchant side, the value of working with Minty and and how that you know why why people should consider you guys.

speaker-1 (01:35.502)
The most important thing that customers look for is that brands look for is new customers. So today, when someone goes to an e-commerce destination, 5% of people effectively make purchases. But what's really critical is that 95% of people go to an e-commerce destination and they don't purchase because usually they're in the discovery phase. They're looking at a variety of different websites, a variety of different products that they're interested in. Where Minty really has an opportunity to step in through Proactive Commerce is that we

can then, because we have a relationship, effectively a database of over 450 million connected devices with permission uses, we have the ability to identify those individuals that a brand doesn't know who they are, and we can proactively reach out to them to make and offer an incentive that would get them from that discovery phase to the conversion phase. So companies like SATPA, companies like AllClad, Noble, these are all companies that recognize that that 5%

and being able to take the existing customers and maximize the value, critically important. But what's even most important is how do you then maximize that 95% of people that you don't know that we can help to create the relationship, provide the right incentive, and ultimately help to complete the purchase and establish that broader lifetime value.

speaker-0 (02:55.086)
Awesome. We're about halfway through the first day of the exhibit hall here at eTail. You guys have been on the floor talking with customers, vendors, all kinds of people coming through. What trends are you hearing the most about?

speaker-1 (03:07.822)
Sure, look, I think it really is focused on all about driving that intent and understanding how.

Yeah, how we can help brands identify the right ways to understand when people really are in the interest and in that position to be able to make a purchase. And that's a big part of what we do, and a lot of other companies are trying to be able to identify. But what makes us unique is that we work with e-commerce brands to put the right instrumentation and to work with them through Shopify capabilities. So we work very closely and have an app in Shopify that Shopify brands can incorporate our technology and to be able to identify when that intention.

takes place so that when it is we then can then reach out and directly engage with the customer so that we can provide the right incentive. So a lot of companies today are really focused on how to either maximize existing customers as well as how do you effectively find those new to file. That's what we really focus on and that's what's frankly been I think one of the biggest trends. When people are out in this market today and they're looking for new customers or looking to engage, how can we then ultimately help them find them and

And yeah, and money maxed with minty.

speaker-0 (04:19.093)
Yeah, great. Well another buzzword that we were chatting about in the pre-show was Skynet and all the ways that AI is changing the industry for customers, for merchants. And I think seems like every company has their own applications or their own takes on AI. any AI tools that Minty offers, any any applications you guys have? Are you AI skeptics? Tell me a little bit about Minty and AI. What

speaker-1 (04:45.568)
It it doesn't matter what we think, it matters what the consumer thinks. And we actually just recently completed a holiday, you know, shoppers survey that we went in and actually looked and tried to understand what people are really doing with AI. And we found in the national study that 78% of individuals are going to be using some form of AI as part of their holiday shopping. Now what that usually means for the most part is is that it's primarily being used for discovery purposes. People are using to identify what are the types of recommendations you would make.

For a pair of running shoes or a particular type of bed that you were looking to purchase. What Minty is doing is we've created a platform that ensures that brands and advertisers can be in that conversation. That starts with a product called Minty Promote. That allows a brand to be able to take their products as well as all the different incentives and to syndicate them across all of the major LLMs. So to the extent that a brand wants to make sure that they're part of the conversation, Minty helps to enable that and surface those opportunities so that we can make them available.

And whether it's through an LLM or whether it's through a Minty app where people can actually go and get incentives to make purchases. Or after the fact, all of those are things that we help to enable. But AI is here to stay. How people are going to be utilizing it is going to be incredibly important. And we as a business have to be ready to support what the customer does in order to drive that behavior.

speaker-0 (06:05.944)
Very cool and yeah I think LLM visibility, like the whole AEO of it all, has been a huge topic, so that's a really neat tool you guys have. My last question is if you guys have anything new on the horizon, new products, new initiatives that you might want to share with our audience and people who are learning, you know, looking to learn more. Yeah.

speaker-1 (06:25.39)
Sure, so from a Minty perspective, you know, we want to make sure that we focus on helping brands and consumers with all areas of that consumer journey. So helping to create the awareness, Minty Promote helps to do that, and that's something that's new. We've launched Minty App, which I hope you download and that helps to kind of surface those different types of opportunities and different incentives for people to be able to make purchases. Within that platform, we also offer a Minty Ads platform, a retail media capability, so that brands that want to have higher prominence and to be able

able to get greater engagement, we offer that, but it's really that full funnel. It's making sure that whether it's you know giving the right level of awareness, whether it's ultimately helping to kind of create that right spark that drives the conversion, that's what we care about the most is that we want to be able to provide brands with the right tools and the platform capabilities so that they can be very effective in finding that next big next big customer. That's the most important thing.

speaker-0 (07:19.65)
Great, well thanks so much for your time. Enjoy the rest of the show.

speaker-1 (07:21.888)
I appreciate it. Thank you.